LO AND BEHOLD! Limits and Uses of Linguistic Perspectives on Mantra use in Tantric Sādhana Deity Meditations

This project aims to examine mantra use in Tibetan sādhana deity meditation. This is accomplished by historicizing mantra’s ontological status throughout different religious traditions, examining different academic approaches to modeling mantra use, and finally analyzing two short form deity meditations– in doing so exemplifying the use and limits of speech act theory. By going through these steps, it will become obvious that although there is a strong trend amongst academics to view mantra as either a linguistic or non-linguistic phenomenon, this framing is reductive and exclusionary of bija– generative seed syllables. In an analysis of sādhana using speech act theory, mantra is not either-or, but both; mantra functions in linguistic/descriptive and nonlinguistic/pragmatic capacities. Furthermore, bija transcends this dualistic understanding as there is no cause-and-effect, it merely exists. The analysis exemplifies how the use of western analytical theories as “universal” often fails to capture the nuance of the primary sources written by authors who do not share the same base assumptions on what language is and can do. Concluding this project, is an understanding of theories and models as an application of skillful means; useful for understanding mantra but never able to fully encapsulate its nature or reality