Tantric Subjects 17

Chapter 1 Tantric Subjects: Liturgy and Vision in Chinese Esoteric Ritual Manuals

Charles D. Orzech

“I see in my heart a shape like a lunar disc” 我見自心形如月輪 T. 865.207c21 … “Religion … shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of indi- vidual men in their solitude.” William James, Varieties of Religious Experience ⸪

The Discourse of Tantric Exceptionalism

Few would argue with the proposition that tantric practice is designed to shape subjectivity. Less apparent, perhaps, are the social dimensions of tant- ric subjectivity. Studies of esoteric and the privilege interior ‘experience’ over exterior performance and tend to sever interior “deity ” from the full social continuum of ritual and liturgy.1 Typological hermeneu- tics such as the often-invoked four-fold classification of tantras are based on a teleological progression from outer to inner performance and texts such as the Mahāvairocana- are structured around an outer versus inner dichoto- my.2 This easy fit between traditional hermeneutics and much contemporary

1 For what has become one of the most influential discussions of the tantric distinction and ‘deity yoga’ see Tsong-ka-pa et al, 1987. The concept is designated by in Tibetan but iṣṭadevatā apparently does not appear in Buddhist sources and there is no corre- sponding term in Chinese. Eric Greene’s recent dissertation (2012) traces the surprisingly re- cent and curious history of the English term ‘visualization.’ See especially 139–166. 2 For an appraisal of such taxonomic schemes, see Dalton 2005, 115–81. The distinction between inner and outer is a leitmotif of the Mahāvairocana-tantra, “Next is inner homa, which eradi-

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/9789004340503_003 18 Orzech discourse on religious experience can divert our gaze from the social produc- tion of subjectivity or self.3 Such an approach replicates rather than analyzing sectarian pronouncements on the priority of interior states over the ritual and social dimensions of religious practice, and it reifies practice into a binary opposition of meditation and devotion. I would like to suggest that these emphases have conditioned how we see early Chinese ritual manuals and, as an alternative, I will emphasize the fol- lowing points: • Tantric manuals from the seventh and eighth centuries preserve a record of the early development of the tantras • Early tantric liturgies represent the social construction of subjects • Early tantric liturgies should be approached as wholes to avoid severing vision from its matrix of confession, ordination, the consecration of images, and from non-tantric uses of vision • Visualization may be understood as a virtual extension of liturgical practice

Early Tantric Manuals

We do not have access to early tantric or esoteric performance. We do have access to a wide range of texts. Seventh- and eighth-century is remarkable for the proliferation of manuals detailing the performance of ritual. Many early ritual manuals have long since disappeared in India, but they have been preserved in Chinese translations. Others appear to be indige- nous re-workings of Indic texts and yet others are Chinese products. Although which texts we should include under the rubrics esoteric or tantric is disputed, the list ranges from simple texts describing the use of a or dhāraṇī, to texts for the laying out of altars, to texts for the evocation and propitiation of individual deities, to texts describing elaborate maṇḍala rites, to more encyclo- pedic ritual reference works.4 Scholarly debate over how to classify them (dhāraṇī-sūtras, proto-tantric texts, esoteric texts, tantras, etc.) reflects their

cates karma and ” (T. 848.18:44a1 fuzi nei humo miequ yu ye sheng, 復次內護摩 滅除 於業生). 3 For a critique of the notion of experience, see Sharf 1998, 94–116. His essay “Thinking through Shingon Ritual (2003: 51–96), questions both traditional and recent interpretations of inner visionary experience. 4 One can get an overall picture of the vast range of manuals by looking at the essays of Giebel (2011) and Sørenesen (2011).