| Abstract |
"The rise of the tantras-the esoteric traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism-changed the face of religious practice across Asia, bringing elaborate new rites that revolved around ritual, a highly creative system brimming with imaginary worlds. Scholars now largely agree that the first tantras, Buddhist and Hindu alike, were composed in India in the seventh century. From there they spread forth, reshaping religious traditions from Sri Lanka to Japan, Afghanistan to Indonesia. The tantras introduced ritual technologies including new myths, cosmologies, deities, and rhetorical strategies of rulership, secrecy, and transgression, but all of these elements were grounded in the complex rituals that formed the core of tantric religiosity. The Buddhist tantras were thus cast as the ritual counterparts to the generally earlier canonical sutras, the scriptures said to record S akyamuni Buddha's own doctrinal teachings. Like the sutras, the tantras claimed the high status of being "the word of the Buddha," but they did not travel alone; they were accompanied by an ever-shifting collection of ritual manuals-s adhanas for accomplishing personal ritual transformation, liturgical works, kalpas for constructing ritual spaces, and vidhis for making offerings. It was this genre of locally produced manuals that served as the primary point of contact between tantric subjects and their ritual tradition. And it was this genre that enabled externally focused image worship to give way to unprecedented involvements in ritual subjectivity, the imagination, the poetic engendering of affective states, and the mapping of the body's interior. To this day, ritual manuals are one of the most commonly read forms of Buddhist literature. Every Tibetan monk, nun, or layperson with a regular meditation practice will have their own well-worn texts, personalized with handwritten notes, interlinear additions, and favorite prayers, reflections of their owners' idiosyncratic lives, their travels, teachers, and individual tastes-ephemeral evidence of the changing nature of religious practice, the literature of lived Buddhism. Despite their evanescent nature, ritual manuals constitute a remarkably innovative form of tantric literature. Dalton argues that their extraordinary mutability and their extracanonical status are precisely what make them so creative: the ritual manuals that burgeoned across India (and all of Asia) in the sixth to eleventh centuries were crucial to the development of tantric Buddhism, and they remain our best hope for tracing that evolution. They reveal, in this sense, the invisible hands behind the tantras. Fortunately, a number of early tantric ritual manuals have been preserved among the ancient manuscripts found near Dunhuang on the old Silk Road. Discovered by a solitary monk 100 years ago, the Tibetan manuscripts unearthed that day, dating from the ninth and tenth centuries, have revolutionized the study of Buddhist history. It is this localized and intimate literature that Conjuring the Buddha examines; its importance to the early development of tantric Buddhism cannot be overestimated"-- Provided by publisher. |
