GENEROUS SUPPORT FOR the conference was provided by Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai (BDK), who have also provided support for the production of this collection, including copyediting by Marianne Dresser. Particular thanks go to Rev. Dr. Toshihide Numata, Chairman of Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai, for his continuing support of this and other projects of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, Rev. Brian Nagata of the Moraga office of BDK America, and to Rev. Naoyuki Ogi of the Tokyo office of BDK for their support and encouragement.
My thanks also go to Michael Witzel for organizing the activities. Michael first expressed interest in my work at the 2005 meeting of the International Association of the History of Religions in Tokyo. I knew his name from my own teacher, Frits Staal, who had spoken of him with high regard. Over the course of this project he has been supportive and has validated the importance of studying the homa. Thanks also go to Harvard University’s Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, now renamed the Department of South Asian Studies, which provided both the venue for the conference meetings and more importantly the student assistants, who worked on the website that allowed for preconference communications with participants, prepared a bound copy of the abstracts for the participants’ use, and provided the requisite logistic support during the conference itself. The Department also assisted with making arrangements for travel and lodging, and for refreshments during the course of the conference.
I am humbled by the interest the scholarly community has shown in this project. For myself, it fulfills one part of the research plan that I conceived while writing my dissertation. Inspired by Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, I imagined a three-dimensional approach to the study of the homa. The first was my own dissertation, published as The Tantric Ritual of Japan, that located the homa along the axis of the four Shingon training rituals. The second, still underway after all this time, is an examination of the variety of homas found in the Shingon ritual corpus. The third axis, as represented here, is the homa found across a variety of religio-cultural settings. Having long ago been faced by the fact that this third dimension would be far beyond my own limited abilities, I am grateful that others have assisted in its realization.
R.K.P.