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

Conventions

xiii Conventions Use of the Words “Tangut” and “Xia” The ethnonym “Tangut” first appeared in the Orkhon Turkic runic inscriptions of 735 (see Dunnell, “Who Are the Tanguts?” for details). It remained the North Asian term of reference to a people called Dangxiang in the Chinese histories from the seventh century on. Various forms of the name “Tangut” appear in Chinese histories of the Liao, Jin, and Yuan dynasties; in Ming and Qing writings it refers to people living in the Kokonor and Gansu border areas. Western explorers and writers passed on the term, and it has become the standard referent in Russian, Euro-American, and Japanese scholarship. The Tibetans referred to these same people, or at least an important segment of them, as Mi-nyag, a term close to one of the Tanguts’ own ethnonyms, Mi-niah (or Mi). Mi is the most common self-appellation used in Tangut writings; Xia authors generally render Mi into Chinese as Fan. As far as we know, the Xia Tanguts never referred to themselves as Tanguts, yet that term has become standard in Western (especially Russian) scholarship, reflecting the persistence of Northern Asian elements in the ethnolinguistic complexion of the SinoTibetan borderland. I use the words “Tangut” and “Xia” in a fashion analogous to the terms Mongol/Mongolian and Yuan. Tangut, like Khitan, may be used as a noun or as an adjective. It narrowly refers to a specific ethnic group or federation, its culture, and its language. More broadly it points to the people who lived and the things they produced under the Xia state (1038–1227) ruled by the Tangut royal clan. Finally, it may also designate their descendants after the Mongolian conquest of 1226–1227, whose origins in postconquest literature are most often described as “Hexi” (“west of the [Yellow] River”). When I refer to Tangut or Chinese sources of Xia, I mean documents written xiv Conventions either in Tangut or in Chinese, as both languages and scripts were in common use in the Xia state; Tangut continued to be used after the conquest as well. Xia is temporally and spatially specific; it denotes the period from roughly the early eleventh century (or from 982) up to 1227 and the territories ruled over by the dynasty. The date 1038 marks the formal commencement of the Xia state and Tangut imperial history. Xia (or Great Xia) is analogous to Yuan (Great Yuan) in the sense that it is the formal Chinese name of the Tangut state. The founders also gave it a Tangut name, the Great State of White and High (as K. B. Kepping reads it; translated into Chinese as Gao Bai Da [Xia] Guo, or in Chinese word order, Bai Gao Da Xia Guo), which is the only form used in Tangut-language sources of the Xia period. Xia sources in Chinese refer to the state by both names, as do Tangut sources written after 1227, in the Mongol period. Xi Xia, or “Western Xia,” is an informal name used mainly by Chinese scholars of the Song and later periods up to the present day. In fact, Song and Jin writers most often referred to the Tangut state as simply Xia (Xia guo). “Xi Xia” seems to have gained currency from Ming times onward and is standard in contemporary Chinese scholarship. Translating to and from Tangut Translating from Tangut requires several stages. For better or for worse, in the first stage I find it natural to produce a literal Chinese rendering of the Tangut passage. Many Tangut words have Chinese equivalents, especially if they are loanwords or calques; many do not. This intermediate stage is not yet a translation, properly speaking; it is a tool for identifying and establishing any relationship between the Tangut text and a hypothetical or real Chinese analog. In the second stage I try to establish the meaning of the passage through an English translation. If, to cite a simple example, a Tangut text is a translation of a Buddhist sûtra from a known Chinese version, then the latter will help immensely in arriving at a meaningful translation. The 1094 stele inscription, in contrast, presents bilingual texts that are not translations of each other or of a hypothetical original. In this book, I often give a literal Chinese rendering of a Tangut term rather than romanize it. Tangut romanization would be meaningless to 99 percent of my readers, whereas many of them will recognize the Chinese. If I say that Tangut term X...