Faculty & Staff
Faculty
Paul Copp , Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in Chinese Religion, East Asian Languages and Civilizations.
Teaching and Research Interests:
Medieval Chinese religious texts and practices; intellectual, material, and visual cultures of medieval Chinese Buddhism; Dunhuang manuscripts and manuscriptology; ritual poetics.
I’m completing a book manuscript, tentatively called The Incantatory Body: Dhāraṇīs and Material Efficacy in Chinese Buddhist Practice, 600-1000, which explores amuletic traditions of Chinese Buddhist incantation practice, their attendant imaginings of linguistic and material forms of efficacy, and the ways their practices drew on longstanding Chinese traditions, Daoist and otherwise. I’m also in the middle of smaller projects on Hongdingshan, a late Northern Dynasties Buddhist site in Shandong; on Buddho-Daoist interplay in Tang and Song Sichuan and Dunhuang; and on the so-called “Pseudo-Śūraṃgama” scripture, the Lengyan jing.
New projects center on a large-scale study of Esoteric Buddhist thought and practice in sixth through tenth centuries China, taken in the context of the older and parallel traditions of Buddhist and Chinese ritual that shaped their Chinese versions and that were in turn shaped by them. The project is the next phase of the study I began in my dissertation, and have deepened in my book project, on inscribed Buddhist incantations as materially efficacious objects such as amulets and incantation pillars. The new project turns to more elaborate ritual practices and to philosophical writings, but it continues to be in part guided by my strong interest in working with non-transmitted sources, such as manuscripts, epigraphy, and visual materials. At the moment, the project has two tracks: the first is strongly manuscriptological. It focuses on a large group of Dunhuang manuscripts that contain what seem to be personal rites of devotion and invocation. These ritual manuscripts, clearly part of very old incantatory traditions, are marked in fascinating and often surprising ways by the newly imported styles of the systematizing Tantric traditions. The scrolls and codices, in fact, constitute rich traces of a profound and complex shift in Chinese religious practice in its incipient stages. In this part of the project I look also to other discovered sources of local Chinese Esoteric practice: to epigraphy and to the paintings and sculptures of closely related traditions, elsewhere along the Gansu corridor and to the south in Sichuan and Yunnan as well.
The second track of the project is more standardly Buddhological: it focuses on scholastic commentaries on dhāraṇī- and Esoteric scriptures and is, as a result, more explicitly concerned with doctrine and with Chinese Buddhist philosophy as forms of writing. As a result, as well, it focuses on what we might characterize as the high, canonical, imperial tradition of Tang Esoteric Buddhism as it was practiced and discussed in the capitals, and in the imperial court itself. These two tracks may never meet within the same volume, of course—but they take me down the two paths that lately most interest me: manuscriptology and ritual culture on the one hand and the dense texts of transmitted doctrinal traditions on the other.
Selected Publications:
“Notes on the Term "Dharani” in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Thought.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 71, 3 (2008), 493–508.
“Dharani Amulets in Chinese Tombs and the Later History of Early Buddhist Incantation Practice,” forthcoming in a Yale University Press volume on Esoteric Buddhism in East Asia, ed. Youngsook Pak and Roderick Whitfield.
Courses:
Esoteric Buddhism in Tang China: Yixing’s Commentary on the Mahavairocana Sutra (Winter 2009)
Sources and Methods in the Study of Daoism (Autumn 2008)
Classics of Chinese Religious Thought (Autumn 2008)
Readings in Chinese Buddhist Texts (Winter 2008)
Sources and Methods in the Study of Chinese Buddhism (Autumn 2007)
