113bC4l

eface
imilar to other works of extended scholarship, this work has taken far
too long to write. Like many authors in a similar position, having completed
the manuscript, I cannot understand why such a work has not yet
been attempted, nor can I comprehend why it took me as long as it did. In
writing the work, I sometimes feel like an apprentice illusionist seeing practiced
conjurors seducing the unwary—their manipulations of reality appear so
easy in the practiced hand, and I can only aspire to such apparent felicity.
I have attempted this text with a goal that appears somewhat quaint and
perhaps ill conceived: I wished to honor those Indian Buddhist masters who
have constructed esoteric Buddhism in their own time. The quaintness stems
from my dissent from the modern proclivity of writers to find fault when our
forebears do not measure up to a conceptual architecture erected after their
time. My ill-conception is that I have approached those of saintly aura and
sought humanity where others seek holiness, having looked for the fragile
edges of their personalities while the tradition affirms the impenetrable core of
their personas. My compulsion to extend praise to these gentlemen proceeds
despite our differences, for much that they did I have found disturbing or even,
at times, dishonorable. Yet they produced a form of Buddhist praxis and identity
that sought sanctity in a world unraveling before their eyes. So, perhaps as
an extension of my American heritage, I have searched for the well-tamped
earth of common ground, finding a meeting place on the horizon of history,
one that displaces the sublime hierarchy of their preferred environment. Those
of the Buddhist tradition will fault me for my critical, historical method, while
those on some form of ideological crusade will castigate me for my lack of doctrinal
rigor. I am at peace with either dissatisfaction.
It is normative for authors to thank their professional colleagues first, but I
wish to defer the task, for I have never been able to express sufficiently my
gratitude to my family. Since she first began to work on medieval English