206 henrik h. sørensen
includes mainly those rites believed to cause harm or those which
involve some form of control over others. However, the distinction
between so-called “white” and “black” magic” is essentially something
that belongs to religious traditions upholding decidedly dualistic
worldviews, such as Christianity or Islam, where notions of good and
bad are set up as the two extremes of a distinct and absolute value
system. While the distinction between wholesome and unwholesome
activities (karma) are of course evident on the relative level in Esoteric
Buddhism, as it is in most schools of Mahāyāna, it is not done so on
the absolute level. Moreover, the distinction between good and bad
can be seen to be entirely relative to the religious context in which the
distinction is being defined. In other words, what was conceived of
as good or bad karma depended entirely on the performer of a given
activity. A good example of this ambivalence in regard to ethical val-
ues in Esoteric Buddhism, something that is normally understood as
rather fixed, can be seen in the attacks leveled at the late Heian monk
Ninkan (1057–1123) and his Tachikawa sect by members of the
Shingon school during thirteenth century in Japan (cf. Faure 1998,
126–129).^21 Ninkan and his followers were accused of spreading her-
esy through antinomian practices, although the Shingon school itself
upheld similar and equally problematic forms of yoga. The main differ-
ence between the two groups was that one was considered orthodox,
both in terms of its own hermeneutics as well as from the perspective
of the government. Hence, antinomianism in the Shingon context was
acceptable, whereas it was not so for the Tachikawa sect. As we have
seen above, the officially supported Yoga (or Zhenyan) tradition of
Tang China also taught the use of spells and mantras that enabled a
practitioner to sneak into a woman’s bedroom undetected or to cause
enemies to die, practices that would normally cause alarm to any fol-
lower of mainstream Mahāyāna. However, in the context of Zhenyan
Esotericism, such practices were considered perfectly normal and in
compliance with the Buddha’s teachings as laid down in a number of
the most important Esoteric Buddhist scriptures. The use of violent
magic is discussed in the later tantric Buddhist literature in India and
Tibet, where it is clearly considered an orthodox and accepted practice
for a siddha to engage himself or herself in.^22
(^21) See Iyanaga, “Tachikawa-ryū,” in this volume.
(^22) For a discussion of this issue, see Davidson 2002a, 236–292.