Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions

by Christian Wedemeyer

Overview

Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism challenges the notion that Buddhist Tantras were "marginal" or primitive and situates them instead—both ideologically and institutionally—within larger trends in mainstream Buddhist and Indian culture. Through close analysis of primary sources, Christian K. Wedemeyer reveals the lived world of Tantric Buddhism as largely continuous with the Indian religious mainstream and deploys contemporary methods of semiotic and structural analysis to make sense of its seemingly repellent and immoral injunctions. Innovative readings of the Guhyasamaja Tantra underscore the text's overriding concern with purity, pollution, and transcendent insight and a large-scale, quantitative study of Tantric literature shows its radical antinomianism to be a highly managed ritual observance restricted to a sacerdotal elite. These insights illustrate how these "radical" communities were integrated into the intellectual, institutional, and social structures of South Asian Buddhism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231162418
Publisher:	Perseus Distribution
Publication date:	01/28/2013
Series:	South Asia Across the Disciplines
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	313
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Christian K. Wedemeyer is associate professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School and in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations. He is the translator and editor of Aryadeva's Lamp That Integrates the Practices: The Gradual Path of Vajrayana Buddhism According to the Esoteric Community Noble Tradition, and his research concerns the history and literature of Buddhism in Southern Asia and Tibet.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables
Preface and Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Making Sense in and of the Human Sciences
Part 1: Historiography
1. Origins
Understanding Tantric Buddhism through its Origins
The Quest for Origins as Method in the History of Religions
2. Narrating Tantric Buddhism
The Poetics of Historiography
The Tropology of Esoteric Buddhism
Historical Narrative and Ideological Implication
3. Going Native: Traditional Historiography of Esoteric Buddhism
Historiography and Cosmology in Exoteric Buddhism
Historiography and Cosmology in Esoteric Buddhism
Observations on Structure
Part 2: Interpretation
4. The Semiology of Transgression
The Literal and the Figurative in Tantric Hermeneutics
Connotative Semiotics as Exegetical Method
Connotative Semiotics in Tantric Ritual
Connotative Semiotics in Tantric Scripture
5. "The Practice" of Indian Esoteric Buddhism
Terms of Art as an Interpretative Problem
Interpreting the Practice Observance I: Irony and Inversion
Interpreting the Practice Observance II: Prerequisites and Temporal Frame
Interpreting the Practice Observance III: Saiva Parallels
6. Tantric Buddhist Transgression in Context
The Social Location of Tantric Buddhism as an Interpretative Problem
Contriving Marginality
The Common Repertoire of Buddhist Professionals
"Carnivalesque" or "Rituals of Rebellion"?
But...Did They Really Do It?!
Conclusion: No Two "Ways" About It
Appendix I: The Indrabhuti Story According to Pad ma dkar po (ca. 1575)
Appendix II: Chapter Nine of the Buddhakapala Tantra, "The Practice" (Caryapatala)
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Janet Gyatso

A milestone in the field, this masterful semiological analysis puts it all together: who was practicing Tantric Buddhism, what they were doing, and why; how it all relates to the larger history of South Asian religion; and, most of all, how to understand Tantra's challenging transgressive language. Christian K. Wedemeyer's methodological precision sheds light on traditional and modern historiography alike and makes a critical intervention in the scholarship that will have a major impact for generations to come.

Editorial Reviews

An important new work in Buddhology

Choice

Highly Recommended.

South Asia - David Templeman

Wedemeyer not only provides an advanced introduction, but also makes the reader question the assumptions (and almost everyone has assumptions about Tantra!) they bring to and expect of the study of Tantric Buddhism.

Religious Studies Review - Justin Thomas McDaniel

A clear work that engages a fresh methodology in order to articulate a new theory of Buddhist antinomianism, offering thereby a novel way to 'make sense' of tantric Buddhism.

Journal of Religion

Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism is a major contribution to our understanding of Indian esoteric (or Tantric) Buddhism. Christian K. Wedemeyer writes with verve, humor, and—most crucially—remarkable clarity, managing to explain difficult texts and ideas with great lucidity.

Roger R. Jackson

[An] important and useful contribution to the study of Tantric Buddhism in India.

H-Asia - Sumit Guha