. sources and inspirations 21
fortress identities, and over time they became de facto feudal hold-
ings, in which the largest of the newly-formed institutions—Nālandā,
Odantapurī, Somapura, Vikramaśīla, etc.—administered domains in
the surrounding countryside. Their abbots exercised police powers,
collected taxes, engaged other feudal lords in discussions, received their
gifts, and otherwise assumed many of the trappings of sāmanta local
lords by investing their dominion over a sphere of territory (mandala).
Concomitant to, and perhaps a consequence of, the Buddhist institu-
tional negotiation with non-Buddhist values, women’s participation in
Buddhist activities dramatically declined throughout the period. This
resulted in the complete eclipse of the nun’s ordination in North India
sometime around the end of the first millennium C.E. (Schopen 1996),
an eclipse coupled with the precipitous decline in laywomen’s involve-
ment, as revealed through dedicatory inscriptions.
While institutions began to assume feudal dimensions, abbots, how-
ever, did not provide three important services that acted as much of
the glue of the Indian feudal system: they did not engage in marital
exchanges (being ostensibly celibate renunciates), they did not swear
fealty to provide troops in time of war, and they did not provide the
Brahmanical ceremonies needed by the king—marriage, postmortem,
coronation, renewal, sacrifice, agricultural, and military rites among
them. Buddhists had been aware of coronation ceremonies right from
the early days of the order, but the earlier traditions had erected a
strong ideological buttress between the law of the land (rājadaṇḍa)
and the Buddhist administration (dharmavinaya). Both the Madhya-
maka/Prajñāpāramitā ideology of the identity of samsara and nir-
vana and the feudalization of real Buddhist institutions eroded these
ideological walls, so that earlier flirting that Buddhists had done with
the Brahmanical practices of homa, coronation, image consecration
(pratiṣṭhā), mantra recitation, and so on were now engaged in a much
more sustained manner.
All of these items were brought together under the metaphor of
the Buddhist ritualist becoming an emperor (rājādhirāja or cakra-
vartin), either of the triple world or of the mythic spell holders, the
vidyādharas. In fashioning a Buddhist response to the medieval world,
Buddhists took material from their earlier ritual lives and appropriated
rites from Brahmanical, Śaiva, Pañcarātra, Saurya, Gāruḍa, Jaina, tribal,
village, and other sources. The characterization of tantric Buddhism as
Śaivized Buddhism, as has been argued by many (most recently Sand-
erson 2009), places excessive weight on the obvious Śaiva influences