Conjuring the Buddha: Ritual Manuals in Early Tantric Buddhism, by Jacob Paul Dalton
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jacob P. Dalton's Conjuring the Buddha offers a meticulous study of Buddhist Tantric ritual manuals that were discovered in Cave 17 in Dunhuang, a significant transborder region and a centre for Buddhist training and translation during the Tibetan imperial period from the eighth and ninth centuries.1 Dalton's study sheds light on the origin, development, innovation, and localization of Tantric Buddhist practices in Tibet in the ninth to tenth century CE, which is recognized as a formative period for Buddhism in Tibet.The ritual manuals in his study deal with some key Buddhist tantric (esoteric) elements: mantras, visualization, sexual yoga, and initiation rites.The latter two themes are important for contemporary Tibetan Buddhism as it grapples with the real-life power dynamics between teachers and students which sometimes causes social and sexual conflict.Besides providing well-researched historical content throughout, this book is also a treasure for those studying ancient 2 Tibetan manuscripts.The manuscripts themselves were recovered from the Dunhuang caves in the nineteenth century and later codified as IOL Tib (India Office Library Tibetan).There are two major contemporary sources for IOL Tib.Manuscripts: one is preserved in the British Library in London, England, while the other is in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, France.Dalton examines both manuscripts alongside other relevant 1. Sam Van Schaik, "Oral Teachings and Written Texts: Transmission and Transformation in Dunhuang," in Contributions to the Cultural History of Early Tibet, ed.Matthew Kapstein and Brandon Dotson (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 184. 2. Ancient here refers to the pre-xylographic printing era in Tibet (From 700 to 1300 century CE).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".