The Taming of Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism takes up the provocative issue of violence in Tibetan Buddhist ritual and mythology. Grounding his study in Dunhuang manuscripts, Jacob Dalton illuminates tantric developments during the little-understood “age of fragmentation,” following the dissolution of the Tibetan empire in the mid-ninth century, and their enduring legacy in the Tibetan Buddhist imaginaire. The many shades of ritual violence discussed in this book include demon subjugation in temple building and stūpa construction, “tantric war magic” used against invading Mongol armies (p. 132), and the notorious “liberation rite” (sgrol ba) that claims to deliver an “object of compassion” to a Buddhist pure realm, taking its life in the process (p. 77, 84). The liberation rite becomes a focal point for Dalton to explore the limits of ritual violence in Buddhist tantra and chart out the pervasive but ambivalent role it plays in Tibetan religious history.

The first chapters set the stage for his study by tracing the emergence of ritual violence in Buddhist tantra in India with the rise of the Yoga and Mahāyoga tantras in the seventh to eighth centuries and by asking how this informed the emergence of tantric practice in Tibet. Chapter 1 uses the foundational tantric myth of the subjugation of Rudra (a version of which Dalton translates in an appendix) as a launching-off point to discuss the taming of demons, pivotal to the mythology that consolidated around the Tibetan assimilation of Buddhism during the imperial period (seventh to ninth centuries). Building on the work of Samten Karmay, chapter 2 argues for the reassessment of the age of fragmentation that followed as a period when tantric practice flourished, unfettered by royal oversight. In this chapter and the next, Dalton makes extensive use of Dunhuang materials to establish the significance of violence in tantric developments of this period, and he is well positioned to do so, having spent three years studying the Stein Collection at the British Library under the auspices of the International Dunhuang Project.

The most provocative chapter is undoubtedly chapter 3, which treats the question of whether human sacrifice was ever practiced in Tibet in the context of a liberation rite. Dalton tantalizingly suggests this possibility and then equivocates, since the evidence proves to be insufficient. The suggestion of a literal sacrifice, as opposed to the symbolic taming of demons, rests on two passages from a manual on the liberation rite from Dunhuang. Whereas most manuals for the rite specify the use of an effigy, the passages examined by Dalton are ambiguous on the matter and even at one point suggest tossing the head of the “object of compassion” into a maṇḍala to determine the success of the rite. Deriving social history from ritual manuals is especially precarious given the overarching problem of coded language in tantric texts, and Dalton smartly refuses to conclude one way or another. Instead he finds the Dunhuang passages to be “suggestive” but “by no means conclusive” (p. 78), reflecting “a possible strategy by which the Buddhists of early medieval India may have domesticated the kinds of human sacrifice practiced by tāntrikas of other religious sects” (p. 93).

The liberation rite was deemed a perversion of tantra by the eleventh century in critiques that characterized the age of fragmentation as a “dark age” of chaos and corruption. Chapter 4 investigates the establishment of a new Buddhist orthodoxy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as Tibetans emerged from the period of political fragmentation under new royal authority. Dalton deftly argues that critiques of tantric excess and corruptions, such as the widely known ordinance of Yeshe Ö (Ye shes ’od), constituted part of an overarching strategy to assert legal control over newly formed kingdoms in western Tibet, including renewed royal supervision over Buddhist institutions, teachings, and practices. The fact that orthodoxy was constructed against the specter of violence also means that we have to treat sources that decry the degeneration of tantric practice judiciously, careful not to derive the historical existence of “corrupted” practices from rhetorical exhortations against them.

The remaining chapters trace out the later deployment of the Rudra myth as a model for demon taming as well as recurrent admonitions against degenerate ritual practice that demonstrate a notable ambivalence toward violence. Chapter 5 examines the myths that proliferated in the later propagation of Buddhism in Tibet, starting from the eleventh century, which made demon taming central to temple construction. Dalton takes a fresh look at the emergence of revealed texts, such as The Pillar Testament (Bka’ chems ka khol ma) and Zanglingma (Zangs gling ma), that reworked events of the imperial period into a conversion narrative in which Buddhism acted as a civilizing force to tame the demon-laden Tibetan landscape. Chapter 6 then considers the rise of ritual violence in the context of war during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, discussing the activities and writings of Sokdokpa (Sog bzlog pa), the so-called “Mongol Repeller” credited with ritually driving back invading Mongol armies (p. 133), and the Fifth Dalai Lama, who employed similar types of rituals to assist the Mongol conquests that secured his sovereignty over central Tibet. In both cases, the enemy is demonized and ritual violence is enacted in the name of protecting Buddhism. Chapter 7 concludes this study by offering a reformist voice in a nineteenth-century critique of “blood sacrifice” (dmar mchod) directed at animal sacrifice practiced along Tibetan borderlands.

Dalton’s work of sweeping historical breadth and depth comes at a moment when violence in Buddhism has surfaced as a significant topic of scholarly interest and media attention. Note the recent anthologies Buddhist Warfare, edited by Michael Jerryson and Mark Juergensmeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), and Buddhism and Violence: Militarism and Buddhism in Modern Asia, edited by Vladimir Tikhonov and Torkel Brekke (New York: Routledge, 2012), as well as the controversial Time Magazine cover story, featuring the Burmese monk U Wirathu with the caption “The Face of Buddhist Terror” (July 1, 2013). With this surge in interest within and beyond academia, it is crucial to have well-researched monographs like The Taming of Demons that can help specialists and nonspecialists alike to navigate the relatively uncharted terrain beyond normative depictions of Buddhism as pacifist, not to mention romantic notions of premodern Tibet as a peaceful Shangri-La.

Overall, The Taming of Demons succeeds as a study of violence in the Tibetan Buddhist imaginaire and will be of interest to scholars and students of Buddhist tantra, Tibetan history, and the broader field of religion and violence. Dalton is to be applauded for making this book accessible to those outside of Tibetan studies, casting his exploration of violence across the broad contours of Tibetan religious history. This book has already generated considerable scholarly interest and accolades, including the 2013 E. Gene Smith Book Prize for Inner Asia and the 2013 Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize for South Asia from the Association for Asian Studies.