A debt to Godai’in Annen: Taimitsu and the yogin consecration.

Annen 安然（841―889/915?）is a towering figure in the history of Tantric Buddhism in Japan. A prolific writer, he is often presented as the systematiser of Tantric Thought, but his interpretations were also fundamental for the development of Tantric practice, beyond the lineage and the Buddhist school he belonged to. That Annen had a great interest in ritual practice is clear from a glance at the list of his writings: the bulk of his production concerned the interpretation and systematisation of rituals. The reach of this work has not received much attention, perhaps because of the difficulty of grasping performative details of practices, some no longer executed, and certainly because of the modern divide between doctrine and ritual and the prominence given to the first. Yet it is also through ritual exegesis that new doctrinal interpretations were often presented, particularly in Tantric Buddhism. In this article, I consider the impact of Annen’s exegesis on the conceptualisation of one type of advanced consecration, which would be known as yogin abhiṣeka. I first revisit Annen’s Yugikyōshō, often hailed as the first “commentary” of the canonical source of the yogin abhiṣeka. I then analyse one early medieval Taimitsu work, titled Jinen jōdō shiki 自然成道私記, which documents a detailed protocol as it was performed in the Taimitsu Renge lineage.