466 ruth dunnell
North China and the Liao/Jin empires. According to Kirill Solonin’s
(2003) research on the Chinese sources of Tangut Buddhism, the
Huayan (Avataṃsaka) tradition of Zongmi (780–841) survived in the
north and flourished among the Khitans and Tanguts. Early sources
of esoteric Buddhism in Xia included Indian and Central Asian monks
traveling through Gansu on the way to Kaifeng in the late tenth and
eleventh centuries to present texts to the Song court or to work in the
Bureau for Canonical Translations established there by Song Taizong
in 980 (Dunnell 1996; Sen 2002). Many of these translations made
their way to Xia in the Kaibao canons that the Tanguts received from
Song in the eleventh century. Perhaps those early Chinese transla-
tions were deemed of inferior quality, compared to work being done
in Tibet itself, in large part owing to indifference on the part of Song
Buddhists. Xia Buddhists interested in new doctrinal developments
from India and Tibet increasingly turned to Tibet for their religious
needs, with Tibetan communities in Xia (especially in the Liangzhou
and Ganzhou regions) providing natural channels of communication.
In sum, the Indo-Tibetan innovations of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries were grafted onto a bedrock formed by the Tang Buddhist
legacy to North China, comprising already established modes of popu-
lar esoteric Buddhism and shared by Tanguts, Khitans, and Jurchens
(Solonin 2007). The importance of late Tangut activity for the Mongol
appropriation of Buddhism is now well documented (Sperling 1987,
1994, 2004a; Dunnell 1992; Shen 2007c). Of the many questions that
Tangut sources give rise to, one is the relationship between the promi-
nent Huayan-Chan stream in Xia Buddhism and the esoteric or tantric
stream, and how Tanguts themselves framed the issues that occupied
their involvement with these Buddhist traditions (Solonin 2007).
A second caveat thus concerns the compass of “esoteric” itself. Con-
ventionally scholars of Xia have labeled as esoteric anything translated
from Tibetan, whereas the Chinese component of Tangut Buddhism,
comprised of “the Huayan-Chan synthetic doctrine,” as Solonin calls
it, is exoteric. Analysis or description of Xia Buddhist thought and
practice, and the place of tantra in it, is slowly moving beyond this
misleading characterization, which reflects longstanding bias in both
western and Chinese scholarship.
To be sure, the Tanguts themselves used terms to distinguish exo-
teric and esoteric teachings. For example, in one text we are told that
Xianmi (Exoteric and Esoteric) Dharma Preceptor, Deputy Director