Richard K. Payne
THIS COLLECTION OF essays is intended to place the study of the homa—a votive ritual employing fire, which is found throughout the tantric world—within a framework that is both cross-cultural and historically longitudinal. This placement thus expands the study of ritual change across two axes—temporal and cultural. The temporal dimension that we seek to establish for the study of ritual change is the longue durée. For the most part, work on ritual change has had a relatively narrow temporal dimension, which severely limits the possibility of drawing conclusions regarding patterns or types of change that may be regular or consistent. Changes noted over narrow historical spans are subject to being produced by idiosyncrasies of their particular situation.1 Second, the essays included make it possible to examine the effects of translocating rituals from one religious culture to another. Thus, the changes that this collection as a whole seeks to examine are ones that extend over time and across the boundaries between religious cultures. This collection addresses two audiences that appear to be largely disjunct from one another—scholars of ritual studies and scholars of Asian religions. For scholars of ritual studies we will first briefly introduce the homa, the ritual that provides the unifying theme for this collection. For scholars of Asian religions, we will then introduce the key theoretical issue of ritual change that informs the construction of this collection as a whole.