540 shen weirong
more systematic surveys of the history of the dissemination of Tibetan
tantric Buddhism in the Mongol-Yuan dynasty. The Khara Khoto
texts are invaluable sources for reconstructing the Buddhist history of
Central Eurasia from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries.^3
Old sites of stūpas and temples in Ningxia, Gansu, and Southern
Inner Mongolia continue to yield texts, images, and ritual parapher-
nalia dated to the Tangut Xia and Mongol Yuan era that supplement
the Khara Khoto discoveries.^4 All these sources reveal that Tibetan
tantric Buddhism was the dominant religious faith of various peo-
ples in the Central Eurasian region during this period. Tibetan eso-
teric Buddhism was widespread in all three regimes that successively
dominated the region, the Uighur Gaochang kingdom (460–640), the
Tangut Xia kingdom (1038–1227), and the Mongol-Yuan dynasty. The
Mongol adoption of Tibetan tantric Buddhism had a strong Uighur
and Tangut background.^5
Other sources for reconstructing the Buddhist history of the Mongol-
Yuan dynasty include works transmitted and/or translated during
both the Tangut Xia and Mongol Yuan periods, and compiled and
block-printed in later periods. There is also a group of Tibetan tantric
Buddhist texts in Chinese that were compiled and handwritten during
the Ming period. Of the former, the Dacheng yaodao miji
(Secret Collection of Works on the Essential Path of Mahāyāna),
a collection of eighty-three tantric texts mostly affiliated with Sa skya
lam ’bras (path and fruit) teachings, contains works that were trans-
lated in the Tangut Xia, Mongol Yuan, and early Ming periods, and
these were disseminated among Tibetan Buddhist followers of various
ethnic origins in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1636–1911) peri-
ods, and in the Republic of China (1912–1949).^6
Other texts similar to those included in the Dacheng yaodao miji
have been recently discovered in the National Palace Museum in Tai-
bei and in the Palace Museum and Chinese National Library in Beijing.
The discovery of these texts leads to the following conclusions: First,
the actual number of Chinese texts of Tibetan tantric Buddhism trans-
mitted/translated during the Mongol Yuan period was much greater
than the number extant today. For instance, the Collection of Works
(^3) Shen forthcoming.
(^4) The Institute of Archaeology and Cultural Relics of Ningxia Hui Autonomous
Region ed., 2005. 5
Shen 2008.
(^6) Shen 2007b.