194 henrik h. sørensen
those texts claiming Chinese authorship as well as scriptures said to be
Chinese translations of Indian works. Much of this material has been
published in the four volumes of Esoteric Buddhist texts in the Taishō
Tripitakạ , as well as some texts scattered in the Dainihon zokuzōkyō,
in many cases without having undergone serious scholarly scrutiny
into their authenticity. In short, is impossible to trace many of these
scriptures back to a Chinese cultural context in a convincing man-
ner. Either we have no information on them in the Chinese Buddhist
catalogues (their titles are unknown in China), or they do not occur in
the lists of Buddhist scriptures brought back to Japan by the important
pilgrim-monks of the Heian period. Given that the supposed authors
or translators of many of these unidentified texts are said to be famous
monks active in Tang China or even earlier (including, of course, the
ācāryas Śubhākarasiṃha, Vajrabodhi, and Amoghavajra), we have rea-
son to suspect that many are later fabrications, and some may eventu-
ally turn out to be later Japanese fabrications.
Since both the Taishō and the Zokuzōkyō are standard compilations
of primary material that enjoy a very wide readership, especially now
that all the texts they include have been digitalized, it is extremely
important that we are fully aware of the actual provenance of a given
text and understand its history. The recent scholarship that has devel-
oped from the discovery of the hand-copied Nara-dated Tripitaka from ̣
Nanatsu-dera in Nagoya underscores the relevance of this.^52
The apocryphal Esoteric Buddhist scriptures of Japanese provenance
can often be detected by using the same cultural comparison that we
use to determine Chinese apocrypha from authentic Indian works. If
a given text under scrutiny contains elements that have a distinct ele-
ments of Japanese culture, we may be fairly certain that such a scrip-
ture could not have been produced in China (or India). Such cases
are the easiest to determine. These texts are often clumsily written and
their discourses lack substance. Many ritual texts and minor tracts
belong to this category. Often they were produced to answer immedi-
ate spiritual needs or for a special occasion, just as we have seen with
the Chinese apocrypha.
One example of a dubious Esoteric Buddhist scripture transmit-
ted only in Japan is the Jiupin zhusheng Amituo sanmodi ji tuoluoni
jing mentioned above, the translation of which has been attributed
(^52) See Ochiai 1991.