Buddhism: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies, Volume VI

Volume VI of Buddhism: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies presents a wide-ranging scholarly examination of Buddhist Tantra and Vajrayāna across India, Nepal, Tibet, China, and Japan. The volume demonstrates that Tantric Buddhism cannot adequately be understood merely as a collection of esoteric rituals or unusual iconographic forms. Rather, it constitutes a complex historical development involving mythology, textual authority, initiation, meditation, scholasticism, ritual technologies, sexuality, sacred language, lineage formation, and institutional legitimation. By combining studies of Indian Tantric sources with Tibetan, Newar, Chinese, and Japanese traditions, the collection reveals both the shared structures and regional transformations of Vajrayāna. Particularly important is its attention to the relationship between Mahāyāna and Tantra: several contributors investigate how Tantric systems inherited, reformulated, and at times problematized earlier Mahāyāna understandings of Buddhahood, bodhicitta, soteriology, and religious practice. The volume therefore provides an essential scholarly foundation for advanced research into the historical and doctrinal development of Esoteric Buddhism throughout Asia.