. tibetan buddhism in mongol-yuan china (–) 545
supreme bliss together with his ten ainak. He wore a hat with the golden
character of the Buddha on it and held a rosary in his hand. Again there
were a hundred beautiful women. They wore rosaries, played instru-
ments, and lined up to sing the song of the Golden Letter Sūtra and
perform the wild goose dance. Among them the Sixteen Heavenly Devils
were selected.^15Eminent scholars have often attempted to decipher such Chinese terms
as yan die er fa and the secret teaching of supreme bliss. Recently Toh
Hoongteik has convincingly suggested that yan die er might stand
for yantïr, the Uighur form of the Sanskrit term yantra, and that the
practice of yantïr refers to the yogic practice of inner heat (gtum mo’i
me), which is one of six doctrines of Narōpa of the bKa’ brgyud pa
tradition.^16 In the Dacheng yaodao miji there are several texts of actual
instruction of the yogic practice of inner heat that are possibly from
the Sa skya pa tradition. It is therefore very likely that this practice was
popular among Mongol followers of Tibetan Buddhism.
According to the Yuan Shi, the official history of the Yuan, “supreme
bliss” in Chinese stands for Hevajra or its Tibetan transliteration, he
badzra ,.^17 The Hevajra Tantra was often trans-
lated into Chinese as Daxile benxu , the Root Tantra of
Supreme Bliss, during the Yuan. Thus, the practice of the so-called
secret teaching of supreme bliss can be attributed to the Hevajra Tan-
tra and the practice of the path and fruit teaching (lam ’bras) of the
Sa skya pa, which takes the Hevajra Tantra as its principal canoni-
cal foundation. In Tibetan historiography we repeatedly encounter
the story that Kubiai Khan and his wife took the initiation of Hevajra
three times from ’Phags pa bla ma. In the past, the political applica-
tion of the story was often overemphasized, while its religious meaning
has been neglected. Indeed, the Mongol Khans must have begun the
practice of the Hevajra Tantra quite early.
The recent discovery and ensuing studies of Chinese texts of Tibetan
tantric Buddhism translated during the Tangut Xia, Mongol Yuan, and
also in the Ming period reveal that the path and fruit teaching of the Sa
skya pa was widespread during these periods. At least ten volumes of
the texts on the path and fruit teaching transmitted by the great Indian
(^15) “Jianchen zhuan , Hama ,” in Yuanshi (YS): juan 205, 4582–4583.
(^16) Toh 2007.
(^17) Shilaochuan (Biographies of Buddhists and Daoists), YS, juan 221,
4523.