esoteric divinities used in Water and Land or Ten
Kings of Hell rites, among others. In China, Water
Land rituals (shuilu dahui), plenary masses performed
with paintings and ritual altar goods, appear to have
developed after the Tang dynasty as substitutes for es-
oteric food distribution rites (shishi).
Tantric forms of Tibetan Buddhism flourished in the
kingdoms west of China, along the SILKROAD. Evidence
of Vajrayana or Tantric belief is evident at DUNHUANG
as early as the ninth century. Although relatively few
caves are Tantric in the strictest sense, six of them were
created under the Mongols. The Central Asian Tangut
empire of Xixia (1032–1227), positioned at the narrow
Gansu passage where the Chinese Silk Road flows west-
ward, worshiped esoteric forms of the Tantric goddess
Tara. Although it was likely made after the Mongol con-
quest of Xixia in 1227, the style of a Green Taraon an
early thirteenth-century kesitapestry in the Asian Art
Museum of San Francisco that was probably hung in a
monastery is strongly Tibetan in style.
In the Mongol Yuan dynasty, the mchod yon
(choyon) relationship of lama and patron developed at
the Chinese court. The dynasty fell in 1368 but later
dynasties maintained the system. During the Ming dy-
nasty (1368–1644) relations with Tibet were revived,
especially under the Yongle emperor Zhu Di (1403–
1424). During his reign many painted and tapestry
thangkas,robes, and gilt-bronze images made in the
Ming imperial casting and weaving studios were com-
missioned by the Yongle emperor as gifts to Tibetan
and Mongolian monks. Their Tibetan stylistic traits
and symbolism were more than an anticipation of the
recipients’ tastes: The imperial commissions were
modeled after earlier gifts made to the Chinese court
by Tibetan lamas, and the Ming artists may have been
Nepalese or Tibetan as well as Chinese.
The murals created for the Main Hall of Famensi
Monastery, west of Beijing (ca. 1439–1444), show im-
perial taste and Tibetan influence, with esoteric and
nonesoteric Buddhist deities in courtly processions in
a variety of syncretic figural styles with diverse attrib-
utes, such as an elegant eight-armed Sarasvat(Chi-
nese, Bicai tian) with esoteric implements on the north
wall. Representations of the magical northern seven-
star dipper (Ursa Major), stars, planets, or the sun and
moon often symbolize esoteric concepts in Buddhist
and Daoist imagery alike; the origins, however, lie in
Chinese cosmological beliefs.
During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Tibetan and
especially Mongolian lamas were influential at court
and were involved in the production of many esoteric
works of art. The Qianlong emperor (1736–1795),
schooled in Tibetan Buddhism by his parents, had
himself depicted as a transformation of various eso-
teric divinities, such as Mañjus ́r, in paintings that sur-
vive today. The State Hermitage Museum in Saint
Petersburg, Russia, has many fine Ming and Qing brass
statues of esoteric divinities in the Sino-Tibetan style.
From around the ninth century, representations of
esoteric divinities are used in a greater range of (non-
Esoteric) religious contexts across East Asia. Such syn-
cretism reflects the true nature of Buddhism in
practice, where sects or schools are less monolithic
than many discussions allow. This admixture is no-
table in cults that developed around esoteric manifes-
tations of Avalokites ́vara, such as the thousand-armed
thousand-eyed Guanyin. At Dunhuang alone there are
nearly forty depictions of this deity painted on cave
walls and banners, most of which were made during a
period of Tibetan occupation beginning around 778
and ending in 848. Many Avalokites ́vara representa-
tions are based on the Nllakantha-sutra(T. 1060, an
unattested Sanskrit text) and its variants, which stress
the power of the Great Compassion Dharanland gen-
erated numerous commentaries and texts on dharan
recitation as an act of repentance. Repentance rites
were performed before paintings and statues of the
thousand-armed and thousand-eyed Avalokites ́vara.
A late fourteenth-century example is a twenty-seven-
foot-tall gilded work, the central of three colossal clay
statues in the Great Compassion Hall of the vast Ming
monastery of Chongshan, Taiyuan, Shanxi. The re-
pentance ritual became part of Chan praxis in China
and Korea and to modern times continues to incor-
porate esoteric imagery.Imagery in the Esoteric tradition: Doctrine
and practice
The Chinese referred to Buddhism as the “religion of
images” (xiangjiao). In the Esoteric tradition, the main
divinity is understood as both the material form of the
divinity (an icon) and as the pure formless divinity (the
divinity worshiped). The Mahavairocana-sutranames
three forms by which the main divinity (Japanese, hon-
zon; Chinese, bencun; Sanskrit, svayadhidevata) is
made manifest: a verbal “seed syllable”; a symbol (mu-
dra,referring not to the hand gesture but to what is
usually called the symbol form or samaya); or a picto-
rial representation. Each type is divided into two cat-
egories, those with formal qualities and formless main
divinity, which are a higher class. These six cross-ESOTERICART, EASTASIA