44. ESOTERIC BUDDHISM UNDER THE XIXIA 10381227
Ruth DunnellDiscussion of esoteric Buddhism under the Xia must begin with a
caveat about sources. The extant body of Xia-era evidence, consist-
ing primarily of texts and artifacts from sites that were closely con-
nected to the royal court or its agents, allows generalizations about
court-sponsored and elite religious activity, but the political context of
that activity as well as what forms esoteric Buddhism may have taken
in popular practice are less accessible to us. Though the bulk of that
extant material comes from one site, Edzina or Khara Khoto, a mili-
tary garrison on the northern Xia frontier, temples in Ningxia, Gansu,
and southern Inner Mongolia continue to yield other texts, images,
and ritual paraphernalia dated to the Xia era that supplement the
Khara Khoto discoveries (Men’shikov 1984, Kychanov 1999, Samo-
siuk 2006). In addition, the Chinese National Library houses a collec-
tion of Xixia materials, mostly found in Ningxia in the early twentieth
century, containing about 122 Buddhist items (Shi, Wang, Quan, and
Lin 2002). Smaller collections in other repositories in north and west
China supplement this body of material, analysis of which remains an
ongoing and demanding enterprise, given the paucity of secure knowl-
edge about its context.
Other sources for reconstructing Xia Buddhism include works com-
piled during the Yuan and published later, and Ming editions of Bud-
dhist texts in Chinese. Of the former, the Dacheng yaodao miji
, a fourteenth-century collection of tantric texts affiliated with
Sa skya teachings, contains works that were compiled and/or trans-
lated in Xia monasteries in the late twelfth and early thirteenth cen-
turies (Chen 2000, Shen 2007b, Dunnell 2009ab). A 1641 edition of a
Huayan text published in Lijiang, Yunnan, has a colophon listing the
names of five Xia state preceptors and two imperial preceptors (Nie
2005); this text and others compiled by Xia monks were preserved in
the seventeenth century Jiaxing canon, though not without undergo-
ing change.
What survives reveals two main currents shaping Xia Buddhism:
one from north India, Tibet, and Central Asia, and another from