Goryū Shintō Goma

Abstract The study of Tantra necessarily involves the study of its rituals, and correlatively, the study of the history of Tantra necessarily involves the study of ritual change. Ritual changes take place over three dimensions: borrowing into a different religious praxis, change over time within a religious culture, and change as rituals are transported across cultural boundaries. The Goryū Shintō goma (fire ritual, Skt. homa) and the tantric Buddhist goma of the Shingon tradition provide an instance of the first kind of ritual change, the borrowing of a ritual from one tradition into another. As a method for studying this kind of change, this chapter adapts theory developed within the field of contact linguistics. Two aspects of ritual can be analyzed as distinct from one another. One is ritual semantics, that is, the meaningful units or elements of ritual activity; the other is ritual syntax, that is, the structuring of ritual activity. The thesis motivating this study is that when a ritual is adapted into a different praxis, ritual semantics changes more readily than does ritual syntax, which remains relatively stable. While this chapter focuses on one kind of ritual borrowed from one tradition into another, the thesis that ritual semantics changes more freely than does ritual syntax is relevant to all three contexts of change.