XSL Transformations and the Study of Mantra

For the following section, a set of texts and online tools are available for you to replicate the examples and begin making your own stylesheets by making small changes to the working scripts.¹⁸ In this section the tone of presentation will present more balance between actual discussion of the Vedic mantra sources from which the examples are drawn and the technology applied to them. The unmistakable syntactic similarities between X-nology and the functional role of mantra in Tantra suggested above is revisited to provide a more resonant context in which to move from rote learning of the technology to the understanding of it in context.

The first point about which the reader may have been wondering concerns the name of XSLT itself: Extensible Stylesheet Language for Transformations. The use of the term "transformation" is specifically ironic in the context of mantra and its role in effecting ritual transformations. I have mentioned vidhaana above as a word signifying distribution or variously apportioning. It's formal role of designating the mantras to be employed in a ritual (e.g., F. Smith--vidhi-1987:23-24, 27, etc.; Gonda, 1980:4, 213f.; Bhat, 1998; Staal, 1989:48f.; etc.) is an optimal analogue of XSLT's functional role with XML. Naturally, this is a different sense of transformation that is commonly associated with the role of mantra (cf. Wheelock, 1989:101f.; Gonda, 1980:345; Beyer, 1978; Santidev, 1999- Vol. 2:113).

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