Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation (Class 200: New Studies in Religion) - Softcover

Gough, Ellen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022676706X ISBN 13: 9780226767062

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2021

Synopsis

Jainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One important way it has often been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the highly contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, does not contain a tantric path to liberation. But in Making a Mantra, historian of religions Ellen Gough refines and challenges our understanding of Tantra by looking at the development over two millennia of a Jain incantation, or mantra, that evolved from an auspicious invocation in a second-century text into a key component of mendicant initiations and meditations that continue to this day.

Typically, Jainism is characterized as a celibate, ascetic path to liberation in which one destroys karma through austerities, while the tantric path to liberation is characterized as embracing the pleasures of the material world, requiring the ritual use of mantras to destroy karma. Gough, however, argues that asceticism and Tantra should not be viewed in opposition to one another. She does so by showing that Jains perform “tantric” rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and maṇḍalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation.

About this title

About the Author

Ellen Gough is assistant professor of religion at Emory University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022676706X
• ISBN 13: 9780226767062
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 331