558 shen weirong
Monks and Nuns in a Sea of Sin (Seng ni nie hai ), said to be
the work of the mid-Ming Jiangnan literatus Tang Yin (1470–
1523), provides a good example of Ming literati’s ignorance about
“the secret teaching.” One chapter of this novel, “Western Monks and
Tibetan Monks,” embellished the debauchery story of Mongol Khan
and his ministers in the late Yuan who practiced the secret teaching
of supreme bliss taught by Tibetan monks. Ironically, the sexual tech-
niques described in the story as “the secret teaching” in fact had noth-
ing to do with the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. The nine gestures of
picking, filling, drawing and replenishing (cai bu chou tian ,
i.e. dragon plying, tiger walking, monkey fighting, cicada resting, turtle
flipping, phoenix gliding, rabbit sucking, fish swimming, and dragon
copulating were in fact taken from the Classic of the Plain Women (Su
nu jing ) and other Chinese classics of sexual practice.^25
Despite the ignorance of Ming literati, the popularity of Tibetan
tantric Buddhist teaching and practice in Ming China is well attested.
Recently a larger corpus of Ming Chinese translations of Tibetan tantric
Buddhist texts was discovered in the National Palace Museum of Tai-
wan and the National Library of Beijing. Two lengthy texts preserved
in the National Palace Museum of Taiwan were beautifully scribed
with liquid gold (jin ni ) in the fourth year of the Zhengtong
reign (1449) of the Ming dynasty. Both texts were supposedly written
by the first Yuan Imperial Preceptor ’Phags pa bla ma (1239–1280)
and rendered into Chinese by Shanan jianzang i.e. bSod
nams grags pa in Tibetan. Obviously, they are texts related to the Path
and Fruit (lam ’bras) teaching of the Sa skya pa tradition. The first
one Jixiang xijin’gang jilun ganlu quan ( The
Nectar Spring of the Feast Offerings of the Auspicious Hevajra) is an
extensive sādhana text of the tantric deity Hevajra, while the other, the
Rulai dingji zunsheng fomu xianzheng yi ( The
Ritual of Clear Realization of the Buddha Mother Uṣṇīsavijayạ̄ ) is a
ritual text of the Buddha Mother Usṇ̣īsavijayā. Indeed, both texts are ̣
compendia of the same kind as those written by ’Phags pa bla ma and
other previous patriarchs of the Sa skya pa school. bSod nams grags’s
role in the formation of these two texts was not simply that of a trans-
(^25) Tang, 1987. Cf. Shen and Wang 2008, 267–300.