718 ian astley
the religious and political situations in which they were written, and
glean information about the material basis of the culture that they
reflect. Buddhist scriptures were a kind of religio-political currency,
since they were the material evidence of the non-material power that
Buddhism afforded rulers in their quest for righteous government,
prosperity, and stability. They were the visible and manipulable signs
of a network that, starting from the realms of the Buddha’s enlighten-
ment itself, permeated the social and political mores of the Sinicized
world of ancient East Asia.
The acquisition and distribution of these texts also necessitated a
substantial commitment of a nation’s resources. Such commitment
stretched from the basic need to produce the materials for copying the
scriptures through the training, employment, and upkeep of scribes to
dispatching monks abroad to acquire further documents and mate-
rials suitable for the expansion and consolidation of rule, as well as
for national security and prosperity. The building and maintenance
of suitable repositories and the ritual activity pertinent to these docu-
ments, not to mention the monumental loci^30 of the rituals (temples
and shrines), were further essential elements of this nexus.
Hence, cataloguing was of paramount importance, as was the need
on the part of the catalogues’ composers to reflect in their records the
appropriate religio-political sentiments. Indeed, Kūkai’s Catalogue was
composed in response to the imperial order under which he had been
sent to the Tang in the first place, and quite clearly was composed
against a specific religio-political background rather than from the
need for a simple accounting. In this respect, it differs clearly from the
Nara-period records and the embassies sent to the Tang before him.
A full analysis of these inventories, even if restricted to the impor-
tant initial phase of esoteric Buddhism’s development in East Asia,
is beyond the scope of this contribution. Our purpose will have been
served, however, if this discussion has illuminated at least some of the
reasons these catalogues should be regarded as an integral adjunct to
the Buddhist canon.
(^30) I use the term “monumental” here in its literal sense, meaning actual struc-
tures.