The Great State of White and High: Buddhism and State Formation in Eleventh-Century Xia

Preface

ix Preface This book grew out of an appendix to my doctoral dissertation, “Tanguts and the Tangut State of Ta Hsia,” containing a translation of the Chinese text of a stele inscription in both Tangut and Chinese, dated 1094, from a Xia temple in Wuwei, Gansu. The dissertation relied mainly on Chinese sources and Russian translations of Tangut materials to reconstruct the history of the Xia state from its beginnings through the twelfth century. It did not address the topic of Buddhism . After completing the dissertation in 1983, I decided to undertake the study of both the Tangut language and Buddhism so that I could use the extant primary sources in Tangut, which are mostly Buddhist. Both of these undertakings have proved every bit as daunting as I suspected they might be, and my ongoing apprenticeship has not been as systematic and comprehensive as I would wish. This work is a measure of the distance I have come and also of the distance I have yet to travel. Many kind and knowledgeable people have aided and encouraged me over the years. To my colleagues in “Tangut studies” I owe special debts of gratitude. Evgenii Ivanovich Kychanov and Ksenia Borisovna Kepping welcomed me into this enterprise in 1980–1981, in what was then called Leningrad, and have remained loyal pillars of support. Kychanov’s lifelong labors in translating key Tangut documents in the Khara-khoto archive in St. Petersburg and the voluminous publications on Tangut history resulting therefrom have shaped my own work in many ways. Kepping’s meticulous and groundbreaking studies of the Tangut language have refined our understanding of the documents that both of these Russian scholars have brought into the public domain. Support by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) made possible my research x Preface trips to Russia in 1980–1981 and 1993–1994. Kenyon College supported a trip in the summer of 1991. A grant from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China enabled me to spend 1987–1988 in Beijing, working at the Institute of Nationality Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences with Shi Jinbo, Bai Bin, Huang Zhenhua, and Nie Hongyin. My first systematic study of Tangut language began under Shi Jinbo, who, although pressed for time, devoted his Friday mornings for over three months to my education. We discovered a large area of shared interest in Xia Buddhism and history, and his vast corpus of published works forms a critical foundation for my own research. Unfortunately the translation of the twelfth-century Xia law code into Chinese by Shi Jinbo, Huang Zhenhua, and Nie Hongyin was published in 1994 and reached me too late to be used here. Instead I have used the text and Russian translation of E.I. Kychanov (see below). During 1987–1988 and, thanks to the generosity of Kenyon College , in the summers of 1990 and 1992, I traveled to old Tangut territories in Ningxia, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia. There I made many friends at museums, institutes, and universities. Their unfailing kindness in part expressed gratitude and amazement that a foreigner, for apparently unaccountable reasons, should take such an interest in so remote and unprofitable a corner of the world. In equal part it conveyed a sense of urgency about the difficult task of preserving what remains of that distant time and place, both on (or under) the ground as well as in the minds and priorities of policy makers. Among others I wish to thank Wu Fengyun, Li Fanwen, Niu Dasheng, Luo Maokun, Chen Bingying, Li Wei, Liang Xinmin, Liu Yuquan, Lu Sixian , and Li Yiyou. Many of their names can be found in the bibliography . My occasional arguments with the scholars acknowledged here as well as those not so acknowledged in no way diminishes my debt to them. Earlier drafts of various chapters of this book were presented as papers or published as separate articles. In 1990 I presented a version of Chapter 2 at the China Colloquium of the University of Washington , and at the University of Hawai‘i. Parts of chapters 3 and 5 appeared in Central and Inner Asian Studies 7 (1992). A revised and annotated translation of the Chinese text of the 1094 stele inscription was published in the 1988 festschrift to Professor Tatsuo Nishida of the University of Kyoto. A summary of Chapter 4 was given at the 1992 annual meeting of the American Association of Chinese Studies in Novi, Michigan. [3.133.131.168] Project MUSE (2024-04...