. abhiṣeka 73
to have become part of the corporate-familial or regional divinity
(kuladevatāṃśa/deśadevatāṃśa). The more elaborate performances of
the ritual lasted several days, with festivities involving theater troupes,
musicians, dancers, and other forms of entertainment (Bṛhatsaṃhitā
[Kern 1865, 48]; Kumari, Nīlamatapurāṇa vv. 834–869; Gonda 1957,
44–53). In the process, the emperor released prisoners, gave titles and
deeds, rewarded the loyal, heard complaints from citizens, and gener-
ally exercised his regnal authority (kṣatra) by which he was accorded
legitimacy to govern (kṣatriya) over his domain (kṣetra) and its cir-
cle of vassals (mandala). In the cases of the coronation of a crown
prince (yuvarāja), a vassal (sāmanta), a state counselor (amātya), or a
general (senāpati), the emperor or overlord would employ a reduced
version of the ritual, with fewer elements and with the overlord act-
ing as the patron (yajyamāna), thereby affirming that the authority
of the individual being coronated was derivative from the overlord as
the embodiment or extension of divinity rather than the subordinate
figure becoming divinity himself (Law 1919; Inden 1988; Kane 1946,
73–83).
Although early Buddhist traditions were fixated on the mythic per-
son of the cakravartin, they were surprisingly unconcerned with the
question of coronation, even denying in the legends of Aśoka that
human coronation was necessary for a cakravartin, who was selected
instead by divine fiat (Strong 1983, 209). Buddhist literary acknowl-
edgment of the rite emerged with the Mahāsāṃghika’s identification
of the final lifetime of the bodhisattva (as he becomes Buddha) as the
“stage of coronation” (abhiṣekabhūmi) in the Mahāvastu. Mahāyānist
literature altered the concept by specifying that the stage of coronation
was at the beginning of the tenth stage, wherein a bodhisattva became
recognized as the crown prince (yuvarāja), consecrated through light
coming from all the buddhas in the ten directions. In the locus classi-
cus for this mythology, the Daśabhūmika sūtra, the metaphor of coro-
nation is explicit: the bodhisattva’s throne is his great jeweled lotus
in space, the coronation water is the light from the Buddha’s spot
between their eyes (ūrṇakośa), and so forth.
In a different vein, Mahāyānist meditators in the Tarim Basin (and
probably in Gandhāra and Kaśmīr as well) began to fashion texts that
included meditative visions of buddhas, Brahmās, or others consecrat-
ing meditators with colored light or imagined water, or other visual-
ized substances (Schlingloff 2006, 41–44, Davidson forthcoming[a]).
These visualizations were more often cleansing or apotropaic than