. esoteric buddhist art 493
had strong tantric Buddhist connotations. As such it would have rep-
resented the worship of the female sex as the holder of transcendent
wisdom. Cave no. 8 features multi-armed images in shallow relief of
Usṇ̣īsavijayā, clearly cast as a female divinity in an early and rare form ̣
carrying a small figure of the Buddha above her head (figure 2).^16
Mt. Liang is another significant Nanzhao site located near
Boshiwahe in what is now southern Sichuan province. This
area was originally part of the Nanzhao kingdom and constituted its
frontier with Tang China to the immediate north. The site is unique for
its extensive and monumental Buddhist petroglyphs featuring mainly
Esoteric Buddhist images.^17 Although depictions of royal processions
and general Buddhist images are prominent, the site holds many Eso-
teric Buddhist images, most notably carvings of a series of vidyārājas
(figure 3),^18 including that of Brahma-Mahākāla, the tutelary deity of
the Dali kingdom (see Yang 2002).
Pagodas and Buddhist Relic
The Chongsheng Temple in the town of Dali has three tall pagodas
built in the special slender style characteristic of the Bai. The temple
itself dates from the Nanzhao period, but the pagodas as they stand
today evidently represent the architecture of the Dali kingdom with
repairs and reconstructions from later periods. When undergoing
reconstruction during the 1980s all three yielded a massive amount of
relics, with an impressive number hidden in the tiangong cham-
ber of the central Qianxun Pagoda.^19
From the perspective of Esoteric Buddhism the most significant
material from these pagodas are a number of high-quality gilt-bronze
sculptures depicting such divinities as Vairocana and the other dhyāni
buddhas, Acala, Vajrapāṇi, the eight-armed Mahākāla, the four-armed
Brahma-Mahākāla, and Vajrayakṣa, many of which also occur in the
(^16) See Li 1999, 102, pl. 99.
(^17) For the report on the first survey on this site, see Liang Shan Boshiwahe Shike
Huaxiang Diaochazu 1982. For photos, see Li 1999, 150–163.
(^18) Briefly discussed in Howard 1999. Howard’s view that groups of eight vidyārajas
are “unique” to southwestern China, i.e., Sichuan and Yunnan, is no longer tenable as
such groups have been documented elsewhere in China and earlier than the examples
she discusses. Cf. Sørensen, “Esoteric Buddhist Art under the Tang,” in this volume.
(^19) For this material, see Jiang, Qiu, and Yunnan sheng wenhua ting wenwu chu
Zhongguo wenwu yanjiu 1998 and Lutz and Howard 1991. Additional photos can be
found in Li 1999, 245–281.