. from vedic india to buddhist japan 1045
The second instance is the development of homa within the six-
teenth-century Shintō school of Yuiitsu Shintō. In this case a ritual is
appropriated from the tantric ritual corpus for use in a newly created
religious tradition. While certain adaptations were made, the basic
structure and much of the content of the ritual remained the same.
Feeding Hungry Ghosts
The imagery of hungry ghosts (preta; gaki ) as one of the six
realms of rebirth derives from the cosmology originating in India and
is shared by both Buddhist and Hindu tantric traditions (see Teiser
1988b). The continuity from India through Buddhist China to con-
temporary Japan involved here is not, however, limited to conceptions
of the nature of the cosmos but extends to the ritual practices involved
in the feeding of hungry ghosts (Payne 1999a).
Phalayāna
One of the continuities running through tantric Buddhism and there-
fore (probably) coming from India is the idea of taking the result as
the cause, phalayāna. This is seen in Kūkai’s work as well as Tibetan
explanations. Since there is no reason to believe that there was direct
contact between these two instances, it is reasonable to conclude a
common ancestor.^8 Ritually, this takes the form of identification
between the practitioner and the buddha invoked (ahaṃkara; nyūga
ganyū ), one of the ideas that has been taken as a marker for
tantric Buddhism.
This idea seems to have become pervasive in medieval Japanese
Buddhist thought, what Paul Groner has called the foreshortening
of the path (1992), which is then the common rhetorical structure
of not only the explicitly tantric or esoteric Buddhisms,Taimitsu and
Tōmitsu, but is also Shin and Zen.
(^8) The only alternative is independent creations and convergence.