Roger R. Jackson evaluates Buddhist Magic: Divination, Recovery, and Magic Through the Ages by Sam van Schaik.
Rangjung Neljorma, state oracle of Tsering Chenga, the goddess protector of Tibet.
Strolling by Kandy Lake on our very first check out to Sri Lanka in 1981, my better half and I fulfilled a young male declaring to be the nephew of the abbot of a close-by Buddhist abbey. We expected him to provide a short discourse on impermanence or encourage us to observe the 5 precepts, or perhaps advise us in mindfulness meditation, however instead, he spent the entire time talking about the value of astrology and amulets and provided each of us with a talisman for our onward journey.
A couple of days later on, we spoke to a monk at a bhikkhu training center near Colombo, and, without being specific, asked him, “What would you think if you satisfied a Buddhist monk who only spoke about astrology and amulets?” His reply was emphatic: “That is not Buddhism!”
These encounters represent the cultural and intellectual tension at the heart of Sam van Schaik’s wonderfully understandable and eye-opening new book, Buddhist Magic. As van Schaik notes at the outset, wonderful practices in Buddhism “are still one of the least studied elements of the religion,” mostly since of “the idealized picture of Buddhism as a logical religion, basically devoid of superstition and ritual.”
Magic is our shared heritage.”– Sam van Schaik
When presented with evidence of such practices in contemporary Asia, modern-day Buddhist specialists and scholars frequently take them as proof that through its mixing over the centuries with popular traditions and ideas, Buddhism deteriorated from the rational, philosophical, ethical, and contemplative faith taught by Gautama to the compromised and made complex cultural system we see in location today.
Van Schaik’s aim, then, is to counter the common modernist view that the different “wonderful” practices of Asian Buddhists are merely “a great deal of cultural baggage that is not truly Buddhist.” He approaches his task as a textual and intellectual historian, plumbing a choice of written sources from premodern Asian societies to demonstrate the universality of magic throughout the history of Buddhism– indeed, “as far back as we can go.”
Before starting his trip of the Buddhist magical world, van Schaik steps back to ask the obvious concern: what is magic? He readily confesses that “there is no word that precisely represents magic in Asian Buddhist cultures,” but argues that the term has been “a vibrant and productive principle in the study of different routines discovered throughout the world,” and hence it can be beneficial for comprehending Buddhism, too. He refuses to theorize or offer an “essentialist” definition of the term (” magic is constantly and precisely x”), choosing rather to search for “household resemblances” amongst various instances of magical practices discovered in a range of premodern and modern cultures. Along the way, he surveys the appeals, spells, prayers, things, and rituals described in the Indian Atharva Veda, the Chinese Shuihudi bamboo strips, the Mesopotamian library of Ashurbanipal, the Greek magical papyri, the Jewish Cairo Genizah, and European books of magic.SIGN UP FOR LION’S HOLLER NEWSLETTERS
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At the end of his study, van Schaik offers a working meaning of magic, which, he states, uses to Buddhist contexts as certainly regarding others: “[Magical] practices … are focused on worldly ends, consisting of recovery, defense, prophecy, adjustment of feelings, and sometimes eliminating. The impacts of these methods are either immediate or enter impact in a defined, short-term duration. The techniques themselves are typically brief, with clear guidelines that do not require much analysis, and are congregated in books of spells.” Wonderful practices might be practiced by laypeople, they frequently need a professional: a shaman, seer, priest, proficient, or monk.
For his account of premodern Buddhist magic, which takes up the remaining chapters of the book, van Schaik defines he will focus on texts “entirely performed for ‘this-worldly’ ends.” In this method, normative Buddhist perfects, such as liberation from samsara, the excellent role of arhats and bodhisattvas, and the cosmological system of karma and merit fade into the background in the face of more pragmatic concerns: illness, infertility, severe weather, danger from opponents, and common stress and anxieties and conditions. Wonderful practices don’t typically cause enlightenment, however with the best professional or the correct ritual, they are thought to provide some kind of power over the forces that disturb one’s life and make the pursuit of greater spiritual ideals tough, if not impossible.
Van Schaik briefly evaluates the mindset toward magic at early Buddhist monastic websites in India, where statues of protective deities at entry points imply the magical invocation of magnificent forces to protect the integrity of the sacred precincts. Turning to early Buddhist texts, he keeps in mind that on the proof of the Pali canon, we can not be particular what the Buddha idea of magic.
Magic and medication were not easily separable in the ancient world, and bhikshus were renowned throughout Asia for their medical knowledge. Thus, magic was as much a part of the spread of Buddhism as its approach, psychology, or ethics– nevertheless sublime.
Next, the author surveys the role of magic in a number of Mahayana sources, evaluating the function of protective spells and routines discovered in such major texts as the Golden Light, Great Cloud, and Lotus sutras. He then focuses specific attention on the Dharani sutras, a collection of spells and routines that “were most likely the most copied, recited, and well flowed Buddhist texts” of the first millennium.
Van Schaik thinks about the variety of practitioners who have actually employed magic across the Buddhist world. Numerous are monks, however laypeople, like the wizards (weizza) of Myanmar or tantrikas (ngakpa) of Tibet, might also be considered spe
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