156 henrik h. sørensen
a result, their views remain confined by the information available to
them in the limited number of surviving Sanskrit manuscripts, and
occasional references to translations of Indian scriptures in much later
Tibetan recensions.^2
Likewise, those working primarily from the side of the Chinese and
East Asian materials, i.e., texts written in Chinese, have too often been
ignorant of the existence of certain Sanskrit texts, and these schol-
ars have often demonstrated limited knowledge of Tantric Buddhist
developments in India, which has hindered them from gaining a suf-
ficiently deep understanding of the context and origins of the Esoteric
Buddhist tradition(s) in its motherland. Many earlier authors writing
on the subject have ascertained that the mature Esoteric Buddhist
tradition as represented by the East Asian Zhenyan or Shingon
Buddhist traditions arose in India sometime during the seventh cen-
tury, and that its origins should be found in the Indian pre-Buddhist
substratum of popular cults in Hinduism as well as in Mahāyāna Bud-
dhism itself.^3
While I certainly do not intend to contest the second half of this
view, I believe that much can be said for the ultimate rejection of
the former. It is quite clear that the kind of institutionalized Esoteric
Buddhism that existed in East Asia between ca. 700–1000 C.E., i.e.,
in China, Korea, and Japan, was in many ways quite different from
that of contemporary India, not to mention early Tantric Buddhism in
Tibet. Most important is the fact that until the advent of the Tanguts
and Mongols during the twelfth–thirteenth centuries, mature Tantric
Buddhism was not very well known in East Asia outside the narrow
confines of a few specialists, with the possible exception of Buddhists
living in the westernmost parts of Gansu and Yunnan.^4
(^2) During the late 1980s and early 1990s there was an attempt by Chinese scholars
from the People’s Republic of China, most notably Wang Yao, to bring attention to
the hitherto unidentified Tantric Buddhist texts in Sanskrit recovered from various
surviving monastic libraries in Tibet. However, to my knowledge none of this suppos-
edly rich Tantric Buddhist material has yet been made available to the scholarly com-
munity. In any case, it is doubtful whether any of the texts in this otherwise promising
material pre-dates the tenth century.
(^3) The chief champion of this view was the late Michel Strickmann. See Strickmann
1996, 17–58.
(^4) I am here thinking of the isolated development that took place in Shazhou dur-
ing the Tibetan occupation from ca. 784–848 C.E., as documented in the Dunhuang
manuscripts, and the forms of Esoteric Buddhism reflecting Indo-Burmese influence