Making a Mantra

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Jainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, ontology and epistemology, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One way it has been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, is said to be a non-tantric tradition. But in Making a Mantra, Ellen Gough refines our understanding of Tantra by looking at the development over 2, 000 years of something that has never been considered to be "tantric": a Jain incantation (mantra) that evolved from an auspicious invocation in a second-century text to a key component of mendicant initiations and meditations that continue to this day. Studies of South Asian religions characterize Jainism 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 put in opposition to one another, and she does so by showing that Jains perform "tantric" rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and mandalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation"--