Sam Van Schaik - Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages

The first thing a student of magic learns is that there are books about magic and books of magic.

And the second thing he learns is that a perfectly respectable example of the former may be had for two or three guineas at a good bookseller, and that the value of the latter is beyond rubies.

J ONATHAN S TRANGE AND M R N ORRELL

Taking my cue from Suzanna Clarkes novel about professional magicians, I want to point out that this is a book about magic and definitely not a book of magic. Or to be more precise, its a book about a book of magic. That book is a Tibetan book of spells, written over a thousand years ago. I first came across it while cataloguing the Tibetan tantric manuscripts with Jacob Dalton, in a project that ran from 2003 to 2005, and owed much to Burkhard Quessel and Susan Whitfield at the British Library, as well as Cathy Cantwell, Robert Mayer, and Ulrich Pagel. In 2009, I wrote a couple of posts on my blog (https://earlytibet.com) exploring this manuscript, which started some interesting discussions and helpful responses, in particular from Dan Martin and Pter-Dniel Sznt.

The next time I returned to this Tibetan book of spells was under the aegis of a new research project, Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State, funded by the European Research Council in 2014. One of the themes of this project, which I developed alongside Michael Willis at the British Museum and Nathan Hill at the School of Oriental and African Studies, was the way that Buddhist monks brought aspects of Indic culture along the silk routes toward East Asia. In the course of the project I began to see how the Tibetan book of spells could offer a way in to an aspect of Buddhist history that has been neglected: the role of magical practices in the spread of Buddhism beyond India. Among the many researchers who contributed to the project, I worked most closely with Gergely Hidas, whose writingsalong with many conversations at the Fitzrovia Tavernabout pragmatic rituals in Buddhism have deeply informed this book.

Another forum for discussing the rituals in the book of spells was the series of workshops organized by Agnieszka Helman-Wany at the University of Hamburg on Bonpo manuscript cultures. Id like to thank her as well as Daniel Berounsky, Marc Desjardins, and Bryan Cuevas for sharing their work on Tibetan magical literature. Jens Braarvig and Birgit Kellner also invited me to talk on the books of spells at events in Oslo and Vienna that resulted in lots of useful feedback. At the latter, Jonathan Samuels and Toni Huber gave some very good advice on approaches to using the word magic. Ulrike Roesler invited me to give a lecture at Oxford, which provided an opportunity to think in more detail about the interaction between Buddhist magic and Buddhist ethics.

During the course of writing this book, I worked at the British Library alongside researchers on the Beyond Boundaries project, Gethin Rees and Matt Kimberley, and had many productive discussions about Buddhist archaeology and medicine with them. Curatorial colleagues at the library were generous with their knowledge of relevant literature, especially Mlodie Doumy, who pointed out interesting sources and issues in the Chinese Dunhuang manuscripts, and Eyob Derillo, who shared his work on magic in Ethiopian manuscripts

As with everything I have written about Buddhism, I owe a debt of gratitude to Lama Jampa Thaye for sharing his profound understanding of the tradition. In this case, I also must thank him specifically for our discussions about the use of and attitudes toward magical rituals in contemporary Tibetan Buddhism. Finally, I want to thank Shambhala Publications, and Nikko Odiseos in particular, for accepting this slightly unusual work for publication, and Matt Zepelin for his spot-on editorial comments and reflections on the place of magic in contemporary Buddhism, which have truly improved the book.

As a final note, I would like to emphasize that the spells in this book are offered for information only. There is no longer a living lineage of transmission and instruction for these particular spells, which in the Buddhist context means that they are no longer alive as a practice. And in the absence of such a lineage of instruction, my own translation will always be provisional. It is perfectly adequate to help us understand the tradition of Buddhist magic, but entirely unsuited to instruction in the practice of magic. So I would not recommend that anybody actually try these spells, and if they did, I would not expect them to work as they were originally intended. This is, after all, a book about magic.