Kuladatta's Kriyasamgrahapanjika.

• Author: Tomabechi, Toru
• Position: Book review

Kuladatta's Kriyasamgrahapanjika. By RYUGEN TANEMURA. Groningen Oriental Studies, vol. 19. Groningen: EGBERT FORSTEN, 2004. Pp. x + 373.

Most scholars working on Buddhist and Hindu Tantrism will agree that Oxford is one of the world's best centers in their field of research. With the book under review Ryugen Tanemura now adds to Oxford's Tantric Studies list of excellent publications. The author has been working on Kuladatta's Kriyasamgrahapanjika (hereafter KrSaPa), a compendium of Buddhist Tantric ritual, since the early 1990s and submitted his doctoral thesis to the University of Oxford in 2002, on which the book under review is based.

The main body of Tanemura's book consists of three major parts: Introduction (pp. 1-116). Critical Edition (pp. 117-210) of the KrSaPa in Sanskrit, and Annotated Translation (pp. 211-306). Then follows an appendix (pp. 307-27) in which the author analyzes the problems of the Tibetan translation of the KrSaPa. The author chose to deal with four specific sections of the KrSaPa pertaining to consecration rites (pratistha). The choice to limit the scope of his investigation is not only justified from the practical point of view, considering the length of the text, but also laudable because of the very nature of the KrSaPa. Richness in detail being what literature of this genre is all about, each minute piece of information should be made available to the reader. Rather than summarizing the entire contents of the text as was done by the author of another recent work on the KrSaPa, Tanemura concentrates on the fine points of relatively small portions. Still, the philological task the author undertook was certainly enormous.

The introduction is divided into three chapters. In the first, "General Remarks on the Kriyasamgrahapanjika" (pp. 3-42), Tanemura discusses the following topics: problems surrounding the word panjika in the title of the text; the author of the KrSaPa and his dates; the KrSaPa's position in the Buddhism of Kathmandu Valley; and characteristics of the KrSaPa. Then the subjects dealt with in the eight chapters of the KrSaPa are neatly summarized, providing a succinct and useful overview of the text.

The second chapter. "Remarks on pratistha" (pp. 43-97), presents a detailed analysis of consecration rites. After introducing the corpus of pratistha literature and discussing the definition and the meaning of the word pratistha as well as the general features of the ritual, the author examines...