3 - Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

practices do not share this concern. If communicative interaction occurs at all, in fact, it
happens between the ascetics and the divinity he/she addresses and with whom he/she
identifies him/herself. In any case, the purely communicative-conversational aspect of
mantras is almost completely uninfluential in their ritual use.
A shingon/mantra can be assimilated to an illocutionary expression endowed with
performative function as it produces something or concurs in transforming reality. This
transformation, however, is not merely incorporeal, but dramatically bodily and
material, since it is believe to concern phenomena such as healing diseases, the
acquisition of worldly benefits, rebirth in paradise or fall into hell, and becoming a
buddha. Kakuban for example wrote:
This five-syllable mantra [a bi ra un ken] is the general spell of all
buddhas of the Ten directions… By chanting it one can be reborn in the
Pure Lands of the Ten directions, in the realm of Maitreya [the future
Buddha] or in the cave of the Asura, according to one’s desire. (Kakuban,
Gorin kujimyø himitsu shaku, in Miyasaka 1989, ed.: 219).
However, there are several problems with a use, even merely heuristic, of the
speech acts theory, mostly caused by the fact that the latter has been conceived to
explain uses of ordinary language that have little in common with the chanting of
mantras. Let us see some of the major difficulties:
(i) whereas for Austin performative expressions are neither true nor false but simply
correct or incorrect, shingon can be pronounced correctly or incorrectly (and, on
the basis of this, they will be efficacious or not), but in any case they are posited to
be always and absolutely true.
(ii) Even though the perlocutionary force of shingon is based, at least in part, on
pragmatic decisions (in general, an investment of faith) of the performing subject
and on cultural and epistemic assumptions, it is believed to function in an
essentially automatic and necessary way because it is directly related to the
shingon’s very nature (their content and their direct relation with reality).
(iii) Not all participants in rituals understand shingon, also because the latter have
an initiatory status: according to Austin’s theory, their utterance would often be
“unfelicitous,” ineffective. However, it is possible to detect within the Shingon
tradition a tendency to reduce the conditions of felicity for mantric acts to the sole
38