218 wilkens
10th century at the very latest. Several Chinese sources record a legation of the
Uyghurs in the year 965.108 One of the precious items was a tooth relic of
the Buddha. It is likely that this mission came from the West Uyghur Kingdom.109
This would mean that Buddhism already had a strong impact on the ruling
house of the West Uyghur Kingdom in the middle of the 10th century. Already
the Qu (麴) family, who founded the Gaochang Kingdom (502–640), patron-
ised Buddhism.110 Before the arrival of the Uyghurs from the East Uyghur
Empire, Buddhism surely was the dominating religion in the region. As
Manichaeism was hardly more than a court religion in the East Uyghur Empire,
supported only by the ruling elite and by Uyghur and Sogdian merchants, it was
kind of ‘superimposed’ on the predominantly Buddhist population of Turfan.
The considerable amount of various Uyghur Buddhist texts in the Library
Cave no. 17 in Dunhuang, which was probably sealed at the beginning of
the 11th century,111 points to the fact that Buddhism had struck roots among
108 Pinks, Uiguren von Kan-chou, 26.
109 Pinks, Uiguren von Kan-chou, 123–124.
110 Shen Weirong, “Tibetan Buddhism in Mongol-Yuan China (1206–1368),” in Esoteric
Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia, ed. Charles D. Orzech, Henrik H. Sørensen and
Richard K. Payne (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2011), 540, confuses this kingdom with the West
Uyghur Kingdom and erroneously states that “Tibetan esoteric Buddhism was widespread
in all three regimes that successively dominated the region, the Uighur Gaochang
Kingdom (460–640), the Tangut Xia Kingdom (1038–1227), and the Mongol-Yuan dynasty.”
111 Some later manuscripts were moved to this cave by the monk Wang. But it is certainly
true that, as James Hamilton has stated, over 99% of the manuscripts found in this
cave date to the period prior to 1035. Cf. Hamilton, James, “On the Dating of the Old
Turkish Manuscripts from Tunhuang,” in Turfan, Khotan und Dunhuang. Vorträge der
Tagung „Annemarie v. Gabain und die Turfanforschung“, veranstaltet von der Berlin-
Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin (9.-12. 12. 1994), ed. Ronald E.
Emmerick et al. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 138. Hamilton refutes several arguments
of Doerfer’s unbalanced view, which he stated in an article and in a book, that several
texts edited in Hamilton, Manuscrits Ouïgours, are to be dated to Yuan times. Cf. Doerfer,
Gerhard, “Bemerkungen zur chronologischen Klassifikation des älteren Türkischen,”
Altorientalische Forschungen 18 (1991): 170–186 and Doerfer, Gerhard, Versuch einer
linguistischen Datierung älterer osttürkischer Texte (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993).
Several different explanations were given regarding the reasons for sealing the library
cave in Dunhuang and the date of this event. Rong Xinjiang has proposed that the cave
was sealed after the fall of Khotan to the Islamic Karakhanids in 1006. See Rong, Xinjiang,
“The Nature of the Dunhuang Library Cave and the Reasons for its Sealing,” in The Silk
Road: Key Papers, Part I: The Preislamic Period, Volume 2, ed. Valerie Hansen (Leiden,
Boston: Global Oriental, 2012), 645–666.