The rise of tantric ritual in the seventh and eighth centuries marked a paradigm shift in Indian religious thinking. Other scholars have enumerated the many ways that Buddhist practice was altered, from the practitioner identifying with the deity, to the rise of new forms of secrecy, mandalas, mudrās, mantras, and more. In his new book, Conjuring the Buddha, Jacob Dalton takes a more literary approach to these events. Focusing on early tantric ritual manuals preserved in Tibetan at Dunhuang, he traces the rise of poetic language within this influential new genre. In this talk, he provides examples of such language and explores how it was used to evoke specific affective experiences in the reader. Close readings that are sensitive to the literary nuances of ritual writings in this way suggest a new perspective on both the rise of tantric Buddhism and the wider aspects of the tantric paradigm shift that reverberated across much of Asia.
Jacob Dalton, Khyentse Foundation Distinguished Professor in Tibetan Buddhism, works on tantric ritual, Nyingma religious history, and the Dunhuang manuscripts. After completing his doctoral thesis on the Tibetan tantra, the Compendium of Intentions, he spent three years at the British Library, cataloguing the Tibetan tantric manuscripts from Dunhuang. He then taught for 3 1/2 years at Yale University before moving to Berkeley in January 2009. He is author of The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (Yale University Press, 2011), Through the Eyes of the Compendium of Intentions: The History of a Tibetan Ritual Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2016), and most recently, Conjuring the Buddha: Ritual Manuals in Early Tantric Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2023).
