ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to accomplish three goals. First to exemplify some syntactic patterns in addition to those which Staal has already identified. Second, to call attention to the Shingon ritual corpus which, being large, elaborate and well-documented, is comparable to the Vedic ritual corpus as an important resource for the study of ritual.s Third, to assert that syntactic analysis needs to be as common in the study of ritual as it is in the study of language. For example, it can provide a common reference point for evaluating competing interpretations of ritual which narrative descriptions cannot.
