Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions

Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism challenges the notion that Buddhist Tantras were "marginal" or primitive and situates them instead—both ideologically and institutionally—within larger trends in mainstream Buddhist and Indian culture. Through close analysis of primary sources, Christian K. Wedemeyer reveals the lived world of Tantric Buddhism as largely continuous with the Indian religious mainstream and deploys contemporary methods of semiotic and structural analysis to make sense of its seemingly repellent and immoral injunctions. Innovative readings of the Guhyasamaja Tantra underscore the text's overriding concern with purity, pollution, and transcendent insight and a large-scale, quantitative study of Tantric literature shows its radical antinomianism to be a highly managed ritual observance restricted to a sacerdotal elite. These insights illustrate how these "radical" communities were integrated into the intellectual, institutional, and social structures of South Asian Buddhism.