264 martin lehnertwho protects the empire by means of his access to divine empower-
ment. In the year 771, on the occasion of emperor Daizong’s birthday,
he wrote a memorial, outlining his career in humble yet self-con dent
words:
I followed and attended the late Master of Tripi aka [i.e., Vajrabodhi]
for fourteen years ever since my childhood, and was instructed in the
doctrine of Yoga. I also visited India where I sought for [the doctrine]
that I had not been taught and I found s tras and commentaries which
amounted to ve hundred odd works. In the fth year of T’ien-pao [746
A.D.] I returned to the capital. Emperor [Hsüan-tsung] ordered me to
go to the palace and erect an altar for abhieka. The Sanskrit s tras
which I brought back were all permitted to be translated. Emperor Su-
tsung performed the homa sacri ce and abhieka in the palace. The two
emperors repeatedly ordered me to collect the Sanskrit texts [brought
back] in the previous periods, to repair those [pattra leaves] of which
the [binding] strings were lost, and to translate those [texts] which had
not yet been translated. Your Majesty followed reverently your deceased
father’s intent in ordering me to continue translating and promulgating
for the bene t of [the people of ] all classes. From the T’ien-pao-period
up to the present, the sixth year of Ta-li, in all [I have translated] one
hundred and twenty odd chapters, seventy-seven works.^65Amoghavajra, never con ning himself to textual transmission, took
advantage of his duties in the eld of state liturgy. During his stay
in India (741–746), he had experienced the Buddhist displacement,
perceived its reasons, and understood the potential of the Buddhist
appropriation of Tantric pragmatics as well as the suitability of its ritual
and doctrinal features for political ends. Back in China, by skilfully
applying the Tantric policy according to the special circumstances he
encountered at the Tang-court, Amoghavajra was able to accomplish
what Buddhist monks in India attempted less successfully: to improve
the status of the dharma in polity by sacralising the emperor as the
universal ruler, a vidydhara-cakravartin (“universal overlord of the sorcer-
ers”). Amoghavajra’s remarkable career illuminates the way he under-
stood to transform the Tang-court into a burning-mirror of Tantric
pragmatics, thus securing a prominent status for Buddhism at the court
without becoming entangled in the increasingly suspicious and hostile
Confucian administration.
This ambivalent and implicitly prepotent placement of the “secret
teachings” in relation to the state—to serve as a guarantee of state(^65) Chou 1945, pp. 297–298.
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