In “I Sing the Body Electric” (1855), Walt Whitman underscores how corporeality defines metaphysical experience. Paul Copp's The Body Incantatory promotes the parent notion that materiality has rich and typically overlooked religious ramifications. Copp's argument can be summed up as follows: in medieval Chinese Buddhism the adept's physical interactions with ritual objects such as dhāraṇī “spells” are just as significant in framing religious experience, if not more so, than reading or reciting texts. As a corollary, material culture is emphasized as an untapped source of data for our understanding of Buddhism. In the broader context of Chinese history, this may not appear as a particularly novel idea; scholars of early China, for instance, routinely combine textual study (of both received and excavated sources), archaeological analysis, and art historical perspectives in their work. But for Buddhist studies, in which early-modern biases toward philology and the primacy of “scripture” inexplicably persist, Copp's...
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