Sam van Schaik is head of the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) at the British Library. He participated in a panel at February’s conference on “Unlocking Buddhist Written Heritage” at the British Library. This year he is publishing a new book with Shambhala Publications, titled Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment Through the Ages (2020).

Buddhistdoor Global: Can you elaborate on what you spoke about at the British Library conference?

Sam van Schaik: I spoke about my recent work on the role of magic in Buddhism, from a thousand-year-old book of spells from Dunhuang to the collections on modern practitioners documented under the Endangered Archives Programme. The book of spells is a small manuscript that contains a vast number of spells. I gave a few examples, including an exorcism involving an effigy of a cat, love magic for breaking up lovers or getting them to make up after a quarrel, and a divination practice involving gazing into a mirror. This last one is especially interesting to me. It actually requires the monk to have a young child gaze into the mirror, and then question the child about what he or she sees there. Similar rituals are found in other Buddhist cultures, but also way beyond the Buddhist world, as far away as medieval Europe and northern Africa.

Lest people think this is something specific to Tibet or to tantric Buddhism, I then talked about how magical practices like this go back to earlier Buddhist manuscripts and scriptures. For example, there is a protective practice invoking the nagas (dragons or serpent spirits) found among the earliest surviving Buddhist manuscripts from the Gandhara region. Then there’s the Bower manuscript found in the Taklamakan desert that seems to have belonged to a monk practicing medicine, divination, and protection through mantras. I also pointed out that the use of recitations to invoke the help of supernatural beings for protection goes back as early as we can tell in Buddhism, and certainly pre-dates the emergence of the Mahayana.

I also talked about the manuscripts found in Gilgit, Kashmir. These are Sanskrit manuscripts dating from the sixth and seventh centuries that were found in the ruins of an ancient monks’ residence. The manuscripts contain many spells and scriptures offering protection. As the scholar Oskar von Hinüber has shown, some of these contain the names of local people, and others have gaps where the names could be filled in later. So, as von Hinüber has said, the monks here seem to have provided magico-medical services to the local community. There are good reasons to think this was common in Buddhist communities.

In the second part of my talk I looked at three projects sponsored by the Endangered Archives Programme. The first was carried out by the Nepalese scholar Shanker Thapa, and documented the manuscripts of the Buddhist practitioners known as Vajracharyas in the Kathmandu Valley. The Vajracharyas are not monks but married tantric teachers who pass their lineage down through the family. They practice Vajrayana empowerment and meditation, and offer other services such as protection and rainmaking. Some of their practices have been described as “Hindu,” but if one understands the history of Buddhist magic, one can see that these are usually quite mainstream Buddhist practices. Another EAP project, carried out by Valentina Punzi, looks at Tibetan ngakpas, or mantra practitioners, in Amdo [Qinghai, China]. The manuscript collections of these ngakpas show how they combine Buddhist teaching and practice with offering services such as exorcism.

So I ended my talk by saying that “magic” is a useful category to understand an often neglected aspect of Buddhism, but it has almost always been thoroughly integrated with other aspects of Buddhist practice.

BDG: Let’s get into the book itself. If there is a certain discomfort with discussing “magic” in modern Buddhist communities, how would you describe magic’s “legitimate” role in Buddhist traditions?

SVS: Whether we consider them legitimate or not, the practices I discuss in the book under the heading “magic” have been there in Buddhism from very early on. I think the discomfort comes from how we have tried to repackage Buddhism for the modern world, as more of a philosophy than a religion, as rational rather than superstitious. This is a process that got underway in the 19th century, as Europeans appropriated Buddhist ideas, and as some Asian Buddhists, particularly in the Theravada and Zen traditions, created new forms of Buddhism that better suited the modern, scientific world view.

Yet what could be more legitimate than practices that are taught in Buddhist scriptures, in the words attributed to the Buddha himself? Practices for harnessing the power of supernatural beings for curing snakebite, protecting a pregnant woman, and the like, are right there in the sutras. One of the most popular of them all, the Lotus Sutra, has a dharani chapter where spells are taught. So I think as modern Buddhists we need to look our own tradition in the face and get to know it a bit better.