Conjuring the Buddha: Ritual Manuals in Early Tantric Buddhism

Finalist, 2024 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Textual Studies, American Academy of Religion Ritual manuals are among the most common and most personal forms of Buddhist literature. Since at least the late fifth century, individual practitioners—including monks, nuns, teachers, disciples, and laypeople—have kept texts describing how to perform the daily rites. These manuals represent an intimate counterpart to the canonical sutras and the tantras, speaking to the lived experience of Buddhist practice. Conjuring the Buddha offers a history of early tantric Buddhist ritual through the lens of the Tibetan manuscripts discovered near Dunhuang on the ancient Silk Road. Jacob P. Dalton argues that the spread of ritual manuals offered Buddhists an extracanonical literary form through which to engage with their tradition in new and locally specific ways. He suggests that ritual manuals were the literary precursors to the tantras, crucial to the emergence of esoteric Buddhism. Examining a series of ninth- and tenth-century tantric manuals from Dunhuang, Dalton uncovers lost moments in the development of rituals such as consecration, possession, sexual yoga, the Great Perfection, and the subtle body practices of the winds and channels. He also traces the use of poetic language in ritual manuals, showing how at pivotal moments, metaphor, simile, rhythm, and rhyme were deployed to evoke carefully sculpted affective experiences. Offering an unprecedented glimpse into the personal practice of early tantric Buddhists, Conjuring the Buddha provides new insight into the origins and development of the tantric tradition.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction 1. Ritual Manuals and the Spread of the Local 2. From Dhāraṇī to Tantra: The Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Appendix: A Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Initiation Manual 3. Evoking Possession: The Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaṃgraha Appendix: Tattvasaṃgraha-sādhanopāyika 4. Secretory Secrets: Sexual Yoga in Early Mahāyoga Appendix: The Generation of Fortune Sādhana 5. Circles of Blazing Breaths: A Manual for Mantra Recitation Appendix: Samādhi Sādhana with Commentary Conclusions Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Jacob P. Dalton is Khyentse Foundation Distinguished Professor in Tibetan Buddhism at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (2011) and The Gathering of Intentions: A History of a Tibetan Tantra (Columbia, 2016), as well as coauthor of Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library (2006).

Review :
When we read the tantras, they often strike us as merely magic. How did these strange texts, filled with demonic deities, become the foundation for the empowering rituals and sophisticated meditations so widely practiced across the Buddhist world? This book, with its profound analyses and precise translations, finally answers that question. Based on a somewhat random cache of largely tenth-century Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang, Jacob Dalton delivers to us a masterful new narrative of much of the history of Indo-Tibetan tantric Buddhism. This innovative history rests on the plastic and more human genre of local ritual manuals, rather than the formalized tantric scriptures. Dalton's lens of analysis allows us to see the creative shifts in ritual practice that unfolded over the centuries, from the chanting of spells to self-visualization, the inner experiences of sexual yoga, and beyond. Replete with full translations of key works, this book is highly recommended for university courses on Buddhist ritual and tantrism, not to mention lay students of Asian religion and yogic practitioners alike. This unique, approachable and well-organized book not only mines an extraordinary number of Dunhuang manuscripts, of which Dalton is one of the acknowledged experts, but also offers excellent examinations of the practices and controversies in the development of forms of Buddhist tantra in the eighth century. Dalton’s argument is supported by rigorous textual scholarship and keen attention to detail...I could see this book being assigned in a graduate seminar on research methods in manuscript studies or ritual studies beyond the context of tantric Buddhism, or in an advanced Tibetan language class where portions of this book could prove highly instructive. A major contribution to our understanding of Tibetan tantric Buddhist ritual texts as well as the history of the tradition in which they play an essential but still little-understood role.