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

Notes

181 Notes 1. Introduction 1 This is Ksenia B. Kepping’s translation of the Tangut; see “The Name of the Tangut Empire,” T’oung Pao vol. 80, pt. 4–5 (1994): 357–376. 2 For an overview, see Dunnell, “Hsi Hsia,” in The Cambridge History of China, volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, ed. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 154–214. 3 Peter K. Kozlov, a Russian officer on a reconnaissance mission to the Sino-Mongolian frontier in 1908–1910, uncovered a library and numerous paintings and statues in the sand-buried ruins of Khara-khoto, formerly the Tangut frontier outpost of Edzina, and conveyed its contents back to St. Petersburg. A preliminary catalogue of the Tangut manuscripts and blockprints in the Khara-khoto collection was published in 1963: Z. I. Gorbacheva and E. I. Kychanov, Tangutskie rukopisi i ksilografy (Moscow, 1963; hereafter TRK). A second volume of TRK, devoted to the huge Buddhist portion of the archive, has been prepared by Kychanov and will be forthcoming (hereafter Buddiiskie sochineniia). The Chinese documents were catalogued and described in L. N. Men’shikov, Opisanie kitaiskoi chasti kollektsii iz Khara-khoto (fond P. K. Kozlova) (Moscow, 1984). The art treasures housed in the Hermitage can now be studied in the beautiful catalogue Lost Empire of the Silk Road: Buddhist Art from Khara Khoto (X–XIIIth century), ed. Mikhail Piotrovsky (Milan: Electa and ThyssenBornemisza Foundation, 1993). The exhibition at Lugano, Switzerland, 25 June to 31 October 1993, was the first time these artifacts had traveled en masse outside of St. Petersburg. The excellent catalogue essays introduce the reader to the Kozlov expedition, Xia history, and preliminary interpretations of Xia iconography. 4 Eric Grinstead (see bibliography for one example), working in England and Denmark, has made invaluable contributions to the enterprise. A good 182 Notes to Pages 4–8 introduction to the history of the field is Nie Hongyin, “Tangutology during the Past Decades,” Monumenta Serica 41 (1993): 329–347. 5 Stanley Weinstein makes a similar argument regarding the rise of the Tiantai, Faxiang, and Huayan Buddhist schools in the Tang: “That each of these schools came to the forefront among the Buddhist elite at the time that it did was attributable not so much to the momentum of its own inner doctrinal development as to the close connection that existed between the de facto founder of the school and the imperial family.” See “Imperial Patronage in T’ang Buddhism,” in Perspectives on the T’ang, ed. Arthur Wright and Denis Twitchett (New Haven: Yale, 1973), 305. 6 Dunnell, “The Hsia Origins of the Yüan Institution of Imperial Preceptor ,” Asia Major 5, no. 1 (1992): 85–111, and Elliot Sperling, “Lama to the King of Hsia,” The Journal of the Tibet Society 7 (1987): 31–50, address the role of Tangut Buddhism in Inner Asian political and cultural history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 7 Art historian Rob Linrothe and I are engaged in a long-term cooperative study of Tangut Buddhist cults and iconography of the later Xia period. See his forthcoming article in Marg, “Renzong and the Patronage of Tangut Buddhist Art: The Stûpa and the Ushnîshavijayâ Cult.” 8 I will say more about the law code below. A brief English description by E. I. Kychanov, its translator, is “Monuments of Tangut Legislation (12– 13th centuries),” in Études Tibétaines, Actes du XXIXe congrès international des Orientalistes, July 1973 (Paris: Asiathèque, 1976), 29–42. For the published Russian translation with facsimile of text, see Kychanov, Izmenennyi i zanovo utverzhdennyi kodeks deviza tsarstvovaniia nebesnoe protsvetanie (1149–1169) (Moscow, 1987–1989; hereafter Kodeks). 9 An abundance of material in Song sources on Kokonor makes this an ideal dissertation topic. See, for example, the multivolume anthologies of Tang and Liu, 1896; Liu and Tang, 1989; and Chen and Chen, 1990. 10 A stimulating recent contribution to world-system theory is Barry K. Gills and Andre Gunder Frank, “The Cumulation of Accumulation: Theses and Research Agenda for 5000 Years of World System History,” Dialectical Anthropology 15 (1990): 19–42. 11 Representative recent works include Sechin Jagchid and Van Jay Symons, Peace, War, and Trade along the Great Wall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 12 For an overview of the non-Chinese dynasties of the tenth through...