. esoteric buddhism under the xixia (–) 471
No doubt after the printing of the Hexi canon, many Tangut and
Chinese texts used to produce it were lost or destroyed in the wars of
the late Yuan. Some of what did survive, mostly Yuan printed editions,
ended up in the collection of the Chinese National Library by the end
of the 1920s. In fact, the production of the Jisha, Puning, and Hexi
canons in the Yuan (late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries) were
closely connected projects, sharing facilities, personnel, and sponsor-
ship, with the involvement of Tangut monks (and Chinese artisans)
throughout (Wang Han 2005). In effect, the translation and publishing
activities begun by the Tanguts in the eleventh century continued into
the thirteenth century and came to fruition in the fourteenth century,
merging with the massive Buddhist printing projects at Hangzhou. Yet
the so-called Hexi canon is not included in lists of Chinese canons
issued over the years, evidently owing to its smaller size, unreadable
script, and fragmentary survival. In all it appears that that almost two
hundred copies of the Hexi canon were printed and distributed in
the former Tangut lands in the fourteenth century (Shi 1988). Hexi
monks also distributed Chinese versions of Buddhist texts in the for-
mer Xia territories, though from which edition—Jisha or Puning—is
not always unclear.
The Xia State Sangha and Monk-Translators
The formation of the Xia sangha went hand in hand with the promul-
gation of the Tangut script between 1032 and 1038, following which
State Preceptor Bai Faxin (a Uighur?) and other monks were
charged with translating sūtras into Tangut, relying mainly on texts
from both Song and Liao sources. The Liang empresses who dom-
inated Xia politics in the latter half of the eleventh century heavily
patronized Buddhist translations. A Yuan blockprint reproduction of
the Sūtra on the Thousand Buddha Names of the Present Bhadra Kalpa
(Xianzai xian jie qian foming jing ) preserves an
earlier illustration of Empress Dowager Liang and her son, Emperor
Huizong (r. 1068–1086) presiding over a session of the sūtra transla-
tion bureau (Dunnell 1996).
The Buddhist bureaucracy expanded in the twelfth century, espe-
cially during the reign of the devout Renzong (1139–1193), who revised
and edited earlier translations and issued new editions of popular texts
in vast quantities, as attested by the imperial vows attached to many