tuis.
(Tuis.)
#1
Introduction 13
organise themselves, e.g. in worship clubs, which fulfilled both religious as well
as secular functions. At the same time, inter-node exchanges were triggered on
the regional level when monks were sent for religious as well as for economic
purposes, maybe even as diplomatic envoys, between Dunhuang and Uyghur
Turfan. This case study shows very well how changing political rules triggered
new opportunities in the religious field on the local level as well.
The next section dedicated to textual transfers opens with chapter two by
Sam van Schaik who—on the basis of manuscripts—like Taenzer, also argues
that the distinction between the religious and political realms had been blurred
by the middle of the 10th century in the former Tibetan periphery in Central
Asia. The model of state-sponsored Buddhism during Tibetan rule moved to
a dispersed model in which Buddhist practice and ideology was adopted in
various ways by local actors. Tibetan as a lingua franca continued to be used
for around two centuries after the demise of the Tibetan Empire; and with it
Tantric Buddhism as evidenced in Dunhuang manuscripts became a flexible
system for group formation cutting across boundaries of class, clan and ethnic-
ity and reached out to various locations in the Central Asian Buddhist network.
In fact, the sociolinguistic prestige of the Tibetan language—so regarded even
among different ethno-linguistic backgrounds—might have very well been a
consequence of the success of Tantric teachers propagating the latest ritual
techniques only in Tibetan.
The next contribution in the section on textual transfer, by Kazuo Kano, is a
meticulous investigation of how a collection of Sanskrit texts was said to have
actually travelled through human agency throughout the Buddhist network in
Central Asia and have reached various nodes. They were supposedly brought
to Tibet by the famous Indian scholar and translator Atiśa in the middle of
the 11th century. This collection of texts, comprising those from the Indian
centre of Buddhist knowledge, Vikramaśīla, as well as texts collected en route,
included the Sarvadurgatipariśodhanamaṇḍalavidhi, part of a Tantric system
which was important in various other nodes of the Central Asian Buddhist
network as well (as witnessed in Tibetan and Chinese translations). The arti-
cle by Linda Lojda, Deborah Klimburg-Salter and Monica Strinu mentions the
related Sarvadurgatipariśodhanatantra in their case study on Tabo monastery
in Western Tibet; furthermore, Henrik H. Sørensen in his chapter on Esoteric
Buddhism in Dunhuang proves the importance of the same title in the Central
Asian oasis of Dunhuang as well. Moreover, while this case study investigates
the transmission of a rich collection of manuscripts, it allows a more accurate
picture of the actual transfer process of Buddhist knowledge to be revealed,
which is often not clear when only one text or even one passage of a manu-
script is investigated. Here texts are well integrated within contexts.
