Transgressing "Tantra"

Recent developments in the study of religion involve a turn both towards multi-nodal discourse analysis and towards an emphasis on the translocally entwined nature of the discourses under consideration. These developments have thrown into contention approaches and concepts hitherto regarded as settled. Apart from the central category of "religion" itself, which has gone from universal acceptance, via outright rejection, to careful reconstruction, perhaps few other terms have been revealed as involved in their genealogy as the notion of "esoteric" or "tantric" forms of Buddhism. While the study of esoteric or tantric Buddhist traditions has continued to grow over the last ten years, additional scholarship has led to the reformulation of the very categories used to delineate an esoteric or tantric Buddhism, in part by exploring esoteric systems beyond the traditional purview and boundaries commonly assumed to constitute this object of inquiry. This involves not only a shift from Indo-Tibetan Vajrayāna traditions to greater coverage of East and Southeast Asia, but also inquiry into the esoteric/tantric traditions found with Zen, Pure Land, Theravada, and so on. As recent research has shown, the very term "tantrik" that has entered Western discourses on religion from the 19th century onwards is itself a co-production of Indian, Japanese, and Western occult traditions, most notably Theosophy. In the case of "esoteric Buddhism," the importance of global theosophical networks is further highlighted by the fact that the term was first used by the Theosophist Alfred Percy Sinnett in his publication of the same name. Furthermore, early-modern and modernist Japanese Buddhist discourse on Esoteric Buddhism, drawing upon indigenous Japanese sectarian divisions as well as European Protestant views on religion, magic, and superstition, influenced the categorization of Buddhism in East Asia and around the world. "Tantric" and "esoteric," in other words, never were straightforwardly descriptive terms for a variety of Asian Buddhism but rather reveal a global history of production that involved occultists, scholars, and Buddhist practitioners as active and mutually influential interlocutors. If the modern reception of "esoteric" or "tantric" forms of Buddhism is complex, then their historical formation as systems of texts, institutions, and practices is no less so. The difficulty of disentangling this first-order history is likely even more formidable than the second-order meta-categories, as the problem of how to demarcate "esoteric" or "tantric" forms of Buddhism from each other, as well as their mainstream Mahāyāna surroundings by no means lends itself to an obvious solution. For instance, while some scholars may clearly distinguish between spells, mantras, and dhāraṇī, this ambiguity is regularly exploited to great effect within those systems that draw upon and systematize the tantras and related texts. This observation has led some scholars to outright deny the existence of the esoteric or the tantric as an independent Buddhist path or doxographic category, suggesting instead that esoteric-tantric represents a Mahayana sub-discourse, a ritual extension of the Mahayana, or even a medieval Vedic or Śaivite incursion into Buddhism. Modern scholars have proposed a plethora of theories on this vexing problem of whether a coherent notion of the "tantric" or "esoteric" can be articulated vis-a-vis an equally amorphous Mahāyāna mainstream, spanning the gamut from accommodations and gradualist proposals to a restriction of the "tantric" to its most transgressive aspects. More recently, groundbreaking scholarship on the yogavācarin or boran kammatthana traditions of South and South East Asia has made it clear that the hermeneutical complexities, if not necessarily the doctrinal details, involved in establishing esoteric and tantric forms of Buddhism were not restricted to the various Buddhist traditions of Central and East Asia but also played out in what is known today as Theravāda Buddhism. The proposed round table brings together a group of scholars that not only each have recently authored or are authoring a monograph on a particular aspect of the history of esoteric or tantric forms of Buddhism, but have also as intrinsic part of their scholarship wrestled with the very ambiguity of the "tantric" or "esoteric" in the study of Buddhism. During the round table, they will reflect on their work from the point of view of the formation and transformation of the "tantric" or "esoteric" both as an emic doxographical and as an etic historiographical category. They will seek to generate a discussion on the interplay of scholastic and scholarly perspectives in the study of tantric or esoteric Buddhism. Discussants are Jacob Dalton (*Conjuring the Buddha*, 2023) whose recent work on early ritual manuals has helped redefine the initial precursors and contours for the development of the tantras as a genre of ritual texts and esotericism as a discourse related to the tantras. Kate Crosby’s (*Esoteric Theravada*, 2020) groundbreaking contributions on esoteric meditation traditions within South and Southeast Asian Buddhism has challenged both etic representations of Theravada and emic Theravada conceptions of orthodoxy. Geoffrey Goble’s recent work (*Chinese Esoteric Buddhism*, 2019) has demonstrated the central role of Amoghavajra’s career in the formation of a more clearly defined esoteric Buddhist identity and ritual culture that influenced much of East Asian Buddhism. Similarly, Sujung Kim’s (*Korean Magical Medicine*, in preparation) work on magical forms of medicine in Korea explores the boundary lines of esoteric or tantric traditions, thereby enriching our understanding of how these traditions interact with supposedly more mainstream forms of Buddhism. Stephan Kigensan Licha’s work (*Esoteric Zen*, 2023) has revealed the diverse ways that Esoteric Buddhism served as the lens through which early Chan/Zen traditions developed in medieval Japan. Similarly, Aaron Proffitt’s work (*Esoteric Pure Land Buddhism*, 2023) demonstrates that rather than Pure Land Buddhism serving as a rejection of Esoteric Buddhism, Esoteric Buddhism instead served as a foundation from which Japanese Pure Land traditions emerged. While discussants' individual expertise covers tantric and esoteric forms of Buddhism from India to Japan and from their inception into the early modern period, their common investment in making sense of how the "esoteric" or "tantric" has always been a contentious arena for the articulation of religious identities provides a focus for the roundtable discussion.