. on esoteric buddhism in china 159
“Primitive” or undeveloped forms of Esoteric Buddhist practice
came first in the form of “esoteric” addenda to various Mahāyāna
sūtras. They were later followed by increasingly complex and mutually
integrated layers of practices that eventually evolved into a full-fledged
meta-system containing all, or at least most, of the earlier strata of
practices organized to form a comprehensive and inclusive whole.
Esoteric Mahāyāna and Esoteric Buddhism in the Light of Textual
History
As the history and dating of much of the early Mahāyāna literature
available to us today is still deeply problematic, we are by necessity
forced to take the Chinese translations, most of which are datable,
as the ante post terminus for the creation of many Indian Buddhist
scriptures. Given that it would have taken any new sūtra some time
to reach China during the late Eastern Han (25–220) and early Three
Kingdoms (220–280) periods, we should allow for a time-lag of no less
than half a century before we can reasonably expect a given sūtra to
have been in circulation there. This means that, on average, the pro-
duction of most of the Buddhist scriptures we have in Chinese trans-
lation is not likely to have taken place much earlier than fifty years
before they arrived in China. There are of course exceptions to this,
but on the whole we may estimate that it took the Indian Buddhist
scriptures considerable time to reach China from the time they were
first written. This is especially the case during the first centuries of
cultural exchange between the Indian subcontinent and China.
Let us begin by briefly reviewing when and how spells and dhāraṇīs,
arguably the most central ritual elements in mature Esoteric Buddhism,
first occurred in the context of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and how, in the
course of history, their use in conjunction with ritual practices became
a mainstream element in the Esoteric Buddhist tradition.^5
I begin with the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, which—in the estimation
of most scholars—constitute the earliest layer in the development of
(^5) A solid discussion of the range of traditional understandings and modes of spells
and dhāraṇīs in the context of Mahāyāna Buddhism can be found in Copp 2005,
113–67.