Academic literature on the topic 'Abhiṣeka (Buddhist rite)'

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

Abstract Initiation (abhiṣeka) in Indian Buddhism had a long trajectory, beginning as lustration offerings to the bodhi tree and concluding with the sexual practices of tantric Buddhism. Between these two, abhiṣeka rites were developed that first reflected one of the primary values—purification, especially purification for those associated with the maṇḍala worship practices of fifth-century Indian Buddhism. By the seventh century, the purificatory practices were modified and patterned after the coronation rituals association with Indian kingship, now employed as a gateway ritual in which the candidate would be allowed entrance into the maṇḍala and sworn to secrecy. As such, they also reflected the other primary value: vivification or infusion with vitality, as the vivification of a king who is both human and divine. Concomitant with entrance into the maṇḍala was commitment to vows of behavior and permission to recite mantras of specific Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Finally, in the eighth century, Buddhist tantrism was again modified to accept sexual practice, with the creation of “higher” initiations in the Yoga- and Yoginītantras.