366 neil schmid
circulars for lay associations to monastic economic records, many of
which contain colophons and marginalia providing vital information
about a wide array of people and their activities.
All these materials are unrivaled in China in terms of their breadth,
complexity, and, perhaps most important, their immediacy. Textured
by the richness and nuances of daily life, they allow us to situate reli-
gious practices within a complex web of human interaction—sociopo-
litical, ethnic, historical, and aesthetic. As such, the site establishes a
sort of ethnographic collection unparalleled for the study of medieval
esoteric Buddhism.
The preservation of materials no longer extent elsewhere, in con-
junction with extensive information on their contexts of use, make
Dunhuang a point of departure to better assess the conceptualization
of esoteric Buddhism and its role in medieval China. The investiga-
tion of esoteric materials has been slow to develop in comparison to
other Dunhuang materials. Yet the divergent uses of esoteric imagery,
texts, and rituals not only counter the distinction between “pure” and
“mixed” esoteric Buddhism promulgated in later Shingon scholarship,
but also challenge the notion of the tradition as circumscribed by ritu-
alistic magic directed toward enlightenment and worldly success.^3 The
use of esoteric materials for immediate gain and enlightenment is cer-
tainly present at Dunhuang, but a range of materials—texts, rituals,
images, and the caves themselves—also clearly indicates that esoteric
Buddhism was fundamental to mitigating concerns about rebirth and
the postmortem fate of one’s ancestors. In this sense, the tradition
becomes intimately connected with filial duties and Pure Land goals.
The role of esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang and surrounding areas
is perhaps best exemplified in the contrast between, on the one hand,
the rarity of cave-shrines devoted entirely to esoteric pictorial pro-
grams and, on the other, the thorough integration of esoteric materi-
als into everyday religious life. Of the 492 caves at Mogao, only three
contain interiors completely devoted to esoteric iconography, caves
14 from the late Tang, and caves 95 and 465 from the Yuan period.^4
(^3) Orzech 1989 and Sharf 2002a have offered trenchant critiques of the Shingon
tradition’s exertion of prototype effects on the study of esoteric Buddhism.
(^4) The contents of the Mogao caves as well as the Western Caves of a Thousand
Buddhas, the Eastern Caves of a Thousand Buddhas, the Five-Temple Grottoes, and
the Yulin Caves are listed in Dunhuang yanjiuyuan, ed. 1996. The following volumes
provide extensive collections of photographs of the caves’ contents: Dunhuang yan-
jiusuo, ed. 1980–1982, Duan Wenjie , et al., 1999–; Dunhuang yanjiuyuan, ed.