12 Meinert
appropriated by the Uyghurs, some of the ethnic Uyghurs become part of
the multiethnic Tantric Buddhism community, which eventually dominates
Central Asia during the 11th to 13th centuries.22
Human agency, finally, is as important as macro-scale political re-
organisation in the interregional interactions in the Buddhist network pre-
sented here. After all, ideas, ritual systems, or material objects such as images,
styles or manuscripts usually do not simply fly from one node to the other
by themselves; they travel along the routes in the luggage or in the minds of
humans. In the chapters of this volume human agents may occur in history as
artists hired in a distant location in the Transhimalayan region, Indian trans-
lators invited to Tibet, or diplomatic envoys sent between the West Uyghur
Kingdom and the local rulers of Dunhuang.23 All such agents contributed to
the high degree of local, interregional and intercultural exchange, which con-
stituted this Central Asian Buddhist network.
3 The Arrangement of this Volume
All chapters in this volume address micro- as well as macro-scale religious and
socio-political formations that contribute to processes of Buddhist change in
premodern Central Asia. They circumscribe historical settings that allowed the
growth, during a time of reorganisation of large parts of Central Asia, of reli-
gious knowledge through local interactions as well as through interregional
and intercultural contacts. The first chapter by Gertraud Taenzer highlights a
micro-historical analysis of the oasis of Dunhuang during the time of political
transition from Tibetan to local rule in the 8th to the 10th centuries. It is a time
of social, political and economic transformation that immediately affected
the religious community in Dunhuang. Whereas Tibetans had introduced a
clear administrative structure in their Central Asian periphery that actively
involved the Buddhist clergy and their institutions as well, the ensuing local
rulers of Dunhuang, the Zhang clan, neither maintained the Tibetan admin-
istrative structures with the same vigour nor immediately introduced new
ones, with the result of less governmental control of the people and religious
institutions. A new intra-site dynamic allowed more freedom for the laity to
22 Sam van Schaik in his chapter in this volume demonstrates how Tibetan Tantric
Buddhism became a major religious force in Central Asia that cut across cultural and
linguistic boundaries.
23 For the examples mentioned here see respectively the contributions by Rob Linrothe,
Kano Kazuo and Gertraud Taenzer in this volume.