470 ruth dunnell
(ca. 1237) of the ritual deflowering of girls before marriage
by a Xia state preceptor suggests that at least some high-ranking cler-
ics were practicing the sexual yoga of the Hevajra tradition, though
which girls from what kinds or ranks of families are just a few of the
questions the story raises.
A Xixia Canon or a Hexi Canon?
Scholars have asserted that Xia had produced a Buddhist canon in
Tangut translation by the end of the twelfth century. A vow accom-
panying a 1312 printing of a Tangut sūtra states that by the end of
the eleventh century 3,579 “rolls” ( juan ) of Buddhist texts had
been translated into Tangut (Shi 1988). Its complete printing, how-
ever, had to await Mongol sponsorship (Nishida 1966, Li Jining 2000).
Shen Weirong hypothesizes that Xia Buddhists were not necessarily
intent upon producing their own version of the Tripitakạ (as did Song,
Liao, and Koryŏ), but rather focused their interests on certain kinds
of texts, especially on the new tantric materials transmitted by Indian
and Tibetan teacher-translators (Shen 2006). Thus, many items in the
Tripiṭakas acquired from Song did not get translated, for neither the
originals nor any translations into Tangut made from them survive.
Numerous translations from Tibetan into Tangut and Chinese sur-
vived instead (a few of which entered the later Tibetan canon).
Although an integral publication of a Tangut version of the canon
occurred only in the early fourteenth century with the completion
of the so-called Hexi canon in Hangzhou, Xia rulers probably did
envision the production of their own Tripitakạ , whether for rea-
sons of religious merit or political legitimation, even if that ambition
remained unrealized (Shi 1988; Shi, Wang, Quan, and Lin 2002). The
Hexi canon counted some 3,620 rolls of texts, close to the figure cited
above as having been translated by the end of the eleventh century.
This number is about half that for other Chinese canons of that time:
6,362 for the Jisha canon and 6,010 for the Puning canon, for example.
Presumably the forty or fifty rolls added to the Hexi canon included
works translated from Tibetan tantric texts that had come to the atten-
tion of Tangut Buddhists from the mid-twelfth century on. Most of the
Xia-era Tangut works translated from Tibetan are in manuscript form.
The degree of overlap between the Hexi canon and Xia-era texts from
Khara Khoto and Ningxia still awaits elucidation.