CSS Noon Lecture Series - Seals and the Sources of Chinese Buddhism

Paul Copp, Associate Professor of Chinese Religion and Thought, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Stamp seals, both as physical objects and especially as metaphors, are nearly everywhere in Buddhism. This is easy to understand: seals had long been central to the practices of the civilizations, Indian and Chinese most prominently, in which Buddhism took on its most powerfully influential cultural forms. In this talk I will explore the broad history of religious seal practice in which ninth and tenth century Chinese Buddhist ritualists compiled versions of a manual for the making and use of Buddhist talismanic seals found among the Dunhuang manuscripts.

Paul Copp received his Ph.D. from the Religion Department at Princeton University in 2005. He has taught at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo, and been a postdoctoral researcher at the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Heidelberg, Germany, working on fifth and sixth century Buddhist stone inscriptions in Shandong, China. He is currently associate professor in Chinese religion and thought at the University of Chicago. His first book, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism, is due out this spring from Columbia University Press. His presentation today is part of a new book project, a paleographical and material-historical study of the worlds of anonymous ninth and tenth century Chinese Buddhists whose practices, ritual and scribal, are evidenced by manuscript handbooks and liturgies discovered among the cache of materials from Dunhuang. It is tentatively titled "Seal, Talisman, and Scroll: Vernacular Buddhism and Manuscript Culture in Late Medieval Dunhuang."