<p>[missing page V]</p> / <p>Japanese Esoteric Buddhism is characterized as a tradition with extensive use of complex rituals including elaborate rites of incantations, physical hand gestures, and sophisticated meditation techniques. Central to the performance of Esoteric rites is the invocation of a particular deity (or group of deities) accomplished in part through the use in ritual of an iconographic representation of the diety. One such ritual that epitomizes the Esoteric dynamic of art and ritual is the jūkyūkan, the "Nineteen Visualizations," part of ancient meditation rites performed in order to invoke and manipulate the powers of Fudō Myōō and accomplish the goals of the Esoteric practitioner.</p> <p>Fudō Myōō is one of the most important deities in the Esoteric pantheon whose presence permeated the religious culture of ancient and medieval Japan. In the ancient Heian and medieval Kamakura Periods (794-1185, 1185-1333), Fudō imagery saw great changes. These changes, pointing to a source beyond artistic or local variance, were not only modifications of existing features, but also included additional elements never seen before.</p> <p>The purpose of this thesis is to examine in detail the Nineteen Visualizations as they relate to both the art and ritual of Fudō. The objectives of this study are two: first, this study seeks to illustrate that the changes in Fudō's iconography were a direct result of the emergence of the Nineteen Visualizations in the Heian Period (the thesis of Part One); and second, it attempts to determine how, as a ritual performance, the Nineteen Visualizations provided the basis for these changes in the iconography that persist even today (the thesis of Part Two).</p> <p>This thesis will not only highlight the strong relationship between art and ritual in Esoteric Buddhism, but will also redress the Western treatment of Fudō as primarily an artistic icon. Studies of Fudō in the West have been predominately art historical, largely ignoring Fudo's vast scriptural and ritual dimensions, without which the iconography can never be fully understood.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

abstract: This is a comparative study of two advanced ordination rituals, Daoist chuanshou (conferral of ordination rank) and Buddhist abhiṣeka (guanding) in the mid-late Tang and Five Dynasties (763-979). I analyzed a number of not-well-studied Daoist ritual protocols in the early medieval period, and revealed that rituals recast gender and fostered monastic relations. On the other hand, relying on both canonical materials and a manuscript preserved in Japan that recorded an abhiṣeka performed during the Tang dynasty in 839 C.E., I demonstrated how the canonical prescriptions of Indian origin, with modified actions and reinterpreted meaning, were transformed to respond to the Chinese religious and social environment. Having examined the language of the texts and the step of the rituals, I interpreted how these rituals were made sense in their own religious context, and compared their frame, structure, modality, symbol, and meaning. Ordination rite concerns the transmission of religious knowledge and authority, and the establishment of religious identity. It is in the relationship between the individual body and the community that Daoists and Buddhists found the form of apprenticeship that led to the embodiment of the community. The mastery of religious knowledge within the community––scriptures, register, mantras, and precepts, etc., was known only through the actual ritual practice. In other words, the ritual body became the locus for coordination of all levels of bodily, social, and cosmological experience via the dialectic of objectification and embodiment in the ordination rites. As the ritualized bodies, those who were ordained coherently comprised the community, which in turn remolded them with dynamically and diversely shaped identities. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2019

This dissertation looks at an attempt in Buddhist history to theorize the role and status of the body as the prime focus of soteriological discourse. It studies a text titled Explanation of the Hidden Vajra Body (Rdo rje lus kyi sbas bshad), composed by Yang dgon pa Rgyal mtshan dpal (1213-1258). This work, drawing on a wide range of canonical tantric Buddhist scriptures and Indic and Tibetan commentaries, lays out in detail a Buddhist theory of embodiment that brings together the worldly realities of the body with their enlightened transformation. This dissertation analyzes the ways Yang dgon pa theorizes the body as the essential ground of the salvific path, and endeavors to provide a thematic guide to his rich and complex discussion of what the body is and does, from a tantric perspective. The thesis parses a key term, dngos po'i gnas lugs, that Yang dgon pa uses as an organizing principle in Explanation of the Hidden. If taken literally, the term means something like "the nature of things" or "the nature of material substance," but Yang dgon pa deployed the term specifically to refer to the nature of the human psychophysical organism, in its ordinary state. By way of this term, Yang dgon pa argues that the body itself makes enlightenment possible. In the course of this thesis, I consider the prior history of this category as it was gradually developed by a series of Bka' brgyud writers until it reached Yang dgon pa. Then, in light of this category, I explore Yang dgon pa's own vision of embodiment. This vision, I argue, reflects an attempt to refocus soteriological attention on the power of the body, over and above the mind, as the salient basis for non-dual knowing. Finally, I reflect upon the lasting contributions of Yang dgon pa's conception of the body to the ongoing exploration of such topics in the history of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist soteriology, as well as upon why some of the more radical elements of his thinking seem to have been eliminated in subsequent generations of his lineage.