. esoteric buddhism under the xixia (–) 469
The Mahākāla cult may have been introduced to the Xia court and
clerical circles through the teaching and translation activity of the
Rtsa-mi lo-tsā-ba Sangs-rgyas grags-pa (early twelfth century), reput-
edly of Tangut royal descent, who traveled and studied in India and
Tibet (Sperling 1994). Works associated with the Mahāmudrā or Great
Seal tradition of early bKa’ rgyud pa teachers, who transmitted the “six
doctrines of Nāropā” (yogic practices), dominate the many transla-
tions from Tibetan in the Khara Khoto archive. BKa’ rgyud pa adepts
actively spread their teachings to their Sino-Tangut disciples, although
Nāropā’s teachings were also embraced by the Sa skya pa (Shen 2005a).
Solonin’s analysis of a Tangut Mahāmudrā texts reveals a sharing (or
appropriation) of vocabulary and concepts among Xia esoteric and
Huayan-Chan texts (Solonin forthcoming).
Tantric teachings disseminated by Sa skya adepts also made their
way into the Tangut corpus. The Khara Khoto archive includes Tangut
translations of texts found in the Chinese compilation Dacheng yaodao
miji , as well as other works in the lam ‘bras ( dao guo
fa , “path with result”) tradition formulated by the early Sa
skya master Grags pa rgyal mtshan (Stearns 2001; Davidson 2005). In
Ningxia in the 1990s, scholars recovered from a dynamited pagoda
the first known text produced with moveable type, a translation into
Tangut from the Tibetan; its title in Chinese is rendered as Jixiang
bianzhi kou he benxu (Tib. dPal kun tu kha sbyor
zhes bya ba’I rgyud kyi rgyal po, or Jixiang bianzhi kou he benxu wang
). A colophon attributes the text (perhaps falsely)
to Indian guru Gāyadara and his Tibetan translator ‘Gos Khug pa lhas
btsas. This title is not found in the Tibetan canon, although another
version translated by ’Brog mi shākya ye shes (Drokmi, eleventh cen-
tury) is, possibly the Samputi-nāma-mahātantra (Shen 2007a).
The Tangut version of the Samputata tantra from the Square
Pagoda can be dated to the mid- or late twelfth century. This text is
associated with the Hevajra cycle at the heart of the Sa skya pa lam
‘bras teachings (Shen 2007c). From the same site come other ritual
texts (sādhana) in Chinese on the visualization of the tantric deities
Cakrasaṃvara, Vajravārāhī, and Heruka, as well as a Huayan con-
fessional text (Ningxia wenwu kaogu yanjiu suo 2005; Shen 2006).
How far beyond the confines of monastic centers the knowledge and
practices conveyed in these texts spread remains unknown. But the
oft-repeated tale conveyed in Peng Daya and Xu Ting’s Heida shilue