26. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE
ESOTERIC BUDDHIST CANON
Richard D. McBride IIUntil recently, most scholarly views of the development of the eso-
teric Buddhist canon have followed the late medieval Japanese rhe-
torical classification of pure (seijun mikkyō or junmitsu
) and mixed or diffuse (zōbu mikkyō or zōmitsu )
esotericism, by which scholars sought to both incorporate and distin-
guish between early dhāraṇī material and later sūtras, such as those
translated by the so-called pure esoteric masters Śubhakarasiṃha,
Vajrabodhi, Amoghavajra, and others, into an esoteric canon (see,
for instance, Ōmura 1918; Takai 1955; Takubo 1967). Abé Ryūichi
recently argued against such differentiation because a close reading of
Kūkai’s material demonstrates that he never made such distinctions
(Abé 1999, 165, 152–154), which are evidently the product of Japanese
sectarian discourse from no earlier than the sixteenth century (Sharf
2002b), although at least one cataloguer of the Northern Song period
conceptualized an “esoteric section of the Mahāyāna canon” (Orzech
2006b).
Writing in the early fifth century, Kumārajīva (343–413) referred to
twelve divisions (shierbu jing , also shierfen jing ) of
the canon (T. 1509.25:306c16–20). Later writers alluded variously to a
dhāraṇī piṭaka (tuoluoni zhouzang , zhouzang , chim-
ing zhouzang ) and a mahāvidyā pit ̣aka (daming zhouzang
) (T. 1870.45:554a3–4; T. 901.18:85b2–3, T. 945.19:134c14,
T. 1201.21:16b13–14, T. 2154.55:599a25, T. 2157.55:929b16). The
dhāraṇī pitakạ is typically viewed as one part of a Mahāyāna concep-
tualization of the Buddhist canon in five pitakạ s (wuzang ). The
first three are the usual tripitaka (sūtra, ̣ vinaya, and abhidharma), the
fourth is the dhāraṇī piṭaka, and the fifth is the bodhisattva pitakạ
(T. 2087.51:923a8, T. 1852.45:9c23–24). Several modern writers have
imagined the genealogy of Buddhist esotericism as originating in the
dhāraṇī sūtras and, hence, would include all such spell scriptures—as
well as sūtras on astrology, astronomy, phrenology, and other such
thaumaturgic practices—in a loosely defined proto-esoteric canon