With the advent of the tantras came an unprecedented interest in the imagination, aesthetic experience, and poetic expression. At key moments in tantric ritual practice, poetic language began to be used to evoke a taste of awakening. The shift is seen most clearly in early tantric ritual manuals, the documents of lived Buddhist practice, examples of which will be drawn from the Dunhuang archive and analyzed for the kinds of literary moves they make.

Jacob Dalton, Khyentse Foundation Distinguished Professor in Tibetan Buddhism, University of California, Berkeley, holds joint appointments in the departments of East Asian Languages and Culture and South and Southeast Asian Studies, for which he currently serves as chair. After working for three years (2002-05) as a researcher with the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library, he taught at Yale University (2005-2008) before moving to Berkeley. He works on tantric ritual, Nyingma Religious history, paleography, and the Dunhuang manuscripts. He is the author of "The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Tantra" (Columbia University Press, 2016), and co-author of "Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library" (Brill, 2006). He is currently working on a study of tantric ritual in the Dunhuang Manuscripts.