The goma is a sacrificial ritual which forms an integral part of the Japanese Tantric Buddhist tradition of Shingon. This essay examines the goma's history, context and structure. Chapter One introduces the goma, and its importance to the study of ritual, Buddhism and Japanese religion.
The ritual's history begins with the Central Asian fire cult brought to India during the Aryan migrations. From these Vedic beginnings, the practice of sacrificing into a fire entered Tantric Buddhism in medieval India. It was then transmitted to China and Japan. Chapter Two describes the history of Shingon, while Chapter Three examines the history of the goma itself.
The ritual use of fire in Japan, both the variety of Shingon gomas and other Japanese rituals employing fire, is examined in Chapter Four. The goma described in this essay is for protection (a "soku sai" goma), one of five kinds of goma. This particular goma takes Fudo Myoo (Acalanatha Vidyaraja, the Immovable King of Light) as its chief deity.
Another part of the ritual's context is its role in a Shingon Buddhist priest's training. The Fudo Myoo Soku Sai Goma is the fourth and final ritual a priest masters before receiving initiation as a Tantric acarya (ajari). Chapter Five describes the training process and the goma's relation to the other rituals. Chapter Six details the physical context: the ritual's setting, implements and materials.
The goma's structure is examined in Chapter Seven by comparing it to the other rituals of the training sequence, and by a detailed description of the goma itself in Chapter Eight.
Chapter Nine, Conclusions, examines four different theories about ritual in light of the preceding description and analysis. Hubert and Mauss' work on Vedic sacrificial rituals is refined for this Tantric sacrifice. Turner's and Douglas' work on the social function of ritual is applied to the goma as a Japanese ritual, and a method for relating social structure and ritual structure is suggested. Staal's work on ritual syntax is examined and three syntactic structures not previously identified are presented. The goma also supports Fontenrose' and Kirk's rejection of the myth-and-ritual theory.
