Tangut Patrons’ Embrace of Buddhist Sacred Sites and Cosmopolitan Teachings

Elena Pakhoutova and Jia Weiwei

Buddha statue seated before mural in mint-green featuring tiered architectural structure and deity portrait frame — Yulin Cave 3, East Wall center, Eight Pagodas, Tangut Kingdom (Xixia), (present-day Anxi, Gansu Province, China); ca. late 12th century; image courtesy Dunhuang Research Academy, photograph by Wu Jian

Cave 3 at Yulin Cave Temples

Yulin, Tangut Kingdom (Xixia) (present-day Anxi, Gansu Province, China) ca. late 12th century

Yulin Cave 3, East Wall center, Eight Pagodas, Tangut Kingdom (Xixia), (present-day Anxi, Gansu Province, China); ca. late 12th century; image courtesy Dunhuang Research Academy, photograph by Wu Jian

Summary

The Tangut Xixia state was a thriving Buddhist kingdom on the Silk Roads that embraced Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, and Central Asian cultures. Art historian Elena Pakhoutova and Tibetology researcher Jia Weiwei explore one of the most remarkable decorated caves at Yulin, tracing cultural connections to famous travelers and translators of Chinese and Tibetan traditions in the murals painted with scenes from the Buddha’s life, Mahayana sutra illustrations, and tantric deities and mandalas.

Key Terms

Eight Great Events

The Eight Great Events are eight scenes from the life of Buddha Shakyamuni that became a standard part of his iconography in India and Nepal. The eight events are:

The birth of the Buddha
His awakening (enlightenment)
His first sermon
A monkey offers him honey
He tames a wild elephant
Descending from the Heaven of the Thirty-Gods
Defeating heretical sects by miraculous displays
The Buddha’s death (Skt. parinirvana)

mandala

In Vajrayana Buddhism or Bon, a mandala refers to a cosmic abode of a deity, usually depicted as a diagram of a circle with an inscribed square that represents the deity enthroned in their palace, surrounded by members of their retinue. Mandalas can be painted, three-dimensional models, architectural structures, such as temples or stupas, or composed as arrangements of images within a temple. The instructions for creating and visualizing mandalas are usually found in ritual texts, such as tantras and sadhanas. Mandalas can be used in initiation ceremonies, visualized by a practitioner as part of deity yoga, consecrated and used to represent the divine presence within ritual space, offered to the deities as representations of the entire universe. A similar concept in Hinduism is a yantra.

patronage

A practice of hiring and commissioning artists to create works of art. In religious context patrons were often rulers, religious leaders, as well as ordinary people. (see also donor)

Silk Roads

“Silk Roads” is a term broadly used to describe the long-distance trade routes across Central Asia that connected the Indian Subcontinent with East Asia and the Mediterranean world. These trade routes were highly important in transmitting both art and ideas across the Asian continent, including the Buddhist religion. There were many “silk roads”—some crossed the deserts of Central Asia, other maritime routes also connected Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South, Southeast, and East Asia.

stupa

Stupas are monuments that initially contained cremated remains of Buddha Shakyamuni or important monks, his disciples, and subsequently other material and symbolic relics associated with the Buddha’s body, teaching, and enlightened mind. As representations of the Buddha’s presence in the world, stupas with their contents—texts, relics, tsatsas—continue to be important objects of Buddhist worship in their diverse forms of domed structures, multistoried pagodas, and portable sculptures. The original form of stupas was an earthen dome-shaped mound containing the remains in reliquary vessels or urns deposited within the innermost core. The dome would often be successively enlarged and surrounded by a path for a walk around in a clockwise direction and veneration (circumambulation)

Tanguts

The Tanguts were an ethnic group in medieval East-Central Asia, who called themselves Minyak and spoke a language distantly related to Tibetan. Between 1038 and 1227 CE the Tanguts ruled a state in what is now the Chinese provinces of Ningxia, Gansu, and Qinghai. This state took the Chinese dynastic name of Xia, also called Xixia “Western Xia.” The Tangut-Xixia emperors were major patrons of Buddhism, inviting both Chinese and Tibetan monks to teach in the capital, and instituting major Buddhist translation and printing projects in three languages. The Tangut state was destroyed by the armies of Chinggis Khan, leading to their absorption into the Mongol Empire, where many Tanguts served as officials.

The mural of the of the Life serves as the focal point, or the main image, of Cave 3 at the Yulin cave temples, located near present-day , Gansu Province, in northwestern China, not far from the famous Dunhuang cave temples. This late twelfth-century cave is among the most remarkable of the forty-two decorated caves at Yulin. It is known for its large size, presumed royal patronage, the exceptional quality of its murals, and distinctive combination of Chinese and so-called Himalayan visual conventions.

Like the Dunhuang caves, the Yulin caves were maintained and decorated over centuries, most actively during the time when the Tangut people populated the area, from the mid-eleventh century to 1278. The Tangut Xixia state (1038–1227) was one of the thriving Buddhist empires in Central Asia contemporaneous with the Song dynasty (960–1279), the rise of the Mongols, and the Buddhist revival in Tibetan areas. It had close religious ties with Tibetan Buddhist teachers, who even rose to become imperial preceptors.

The cave’s visual program suggests a strong emphasis on the representation of sacred places, territories, and themes of rebirth and the removal of obstacles. Individual murals, employing iconographic conventions of Buddhist representations during this time in Central Asia and Tibet, articulate this emphasis in their composition and in their spatial arrangement within the cave.

The Buddha at Vajrasana with Scenes of His Life as the Central Image

The mural of the Eight Great Events of the Buddha’s Life is on the east wall that faces the entrance and occupies a central position of the main image, as it would in a temple. The painting is iconographically and compositionally consistent with eastern Indian and Tibetan examples. The panel follows the Indian convention developed during the fifth to the ninth century to represent the main events of life. Eastern Indian stone steles, , and portable objects—as well as illuminated manuscripts, clay and stone plaques found in India, Burma, Tibet, and Central Asia dated to the tenth to thirteenth century, and Tibetan paintings on cloth—all bear compositions and similar to this central panel.

Tibetan hanging scroll paintings () from the late eleventh to the thirteenth century depicting the Eight Great Events of the Buddha’s Life are the closest comparatives. The iconographic and visual organization of the mural and thangka paintings directly reference these events: the Buddha’s enlightenment at Bodhgaya; his birth at Lumbini; his multiplication miracle at Shravasti; his descent from the Heaven of the Thirty-Three Gods at Samkashya; his passing (mahaparinirvana) at Kushinagara; his taming of the mad elephant at Rajgir; his first sermon at Sarnath; and the gift of honey at Vaishali. They also reference the commemorative stupas marking the assumed locations of these events in India.

Fig. 2

Current locations of the places mentioned in the Buddha Shakyamuni’s life

The arrangement of the events around the main image of the enlightenment at is dictated by symmetry, not chronology. Just as in the thangka paintings and sculptural examples, the composition is both a narrative depiction of these episodes and an iconic image structured in a way similar to figural arrangements. The central panel’s composition is comparable to a thirteenth-century Tibetan thangka of the Mandala of () from a private collection. The mandala’s central figure and the six surrounding smaller figures are seated within architectural structures that represent stupa shrines—maintaining the visual convention while emphasizing the mandala’s spatial hierarchy of center and periphery.Thus, the central panel of the Cave 3 east wall represents the place where the Buddha was born, attained enlightenment, taught, performed various miracles, and passed away—that is, India, with Vajrasana in as its central, most important location. Although the panel’s iconography parallels the Indian and Tibetan examples, its painting style displays the Tangut preference for using Chinese pictorial conventions for flowing scarves, the royal attire of the figure at the Buddha’s feet in the scene, and the type of monks’ robes.

Cosmopolitan Visual Program of the Cave: Avalokiteshvara Murals

Two images of Avalokiteshvara, the of compassion, flank the central panel. The White Thousand-Armed Avalokiteshvara is on the left. The arrangement of his eleven heads follows Tibetan conventions, but his hundreds of attributes follow traditional Chinese depictions, with the Sun and Moon disks held aloft near Avalokiteshivara’s main head as the key distinction.

The dark Avalokiteshvara with fifty-one heads to the right of the central panel is the only recorded image of this form. Neither textual nor visual materials refer to this specific deity; he was likely envisioned by this cave’s patrons, inspired by interpretations of the deity’s protective or redemptive powers and the emergence of culturally adapted, irregular forms in the Song empire.

Mandala Murals

The cave integrates both esoteric, or tantric, iconography and imagery derived from (fig. 3). Two mandalas of deities Ushnishavijaya and Marichi at the east ends of the south and north walls match the iconographic structure of Tibetan mandalas. The Chinese and Tibetan translations of the Ushnishavijayadharani vitarka texts are almost identical except for the Indian god attribute: a bow in the Chinese version and a parasol in the Tibetan one. The inner circle of the mandala includes thirteen deities. Indra, shown as a man with a parasol in front of a stupa, is a clue to this mandala’s Tibetan textual source.

Schematic diagram of mural program; circles, ovals, and rectangles labeled to denote subject and location — Fig. 3. Plan of Yulin Cave 3 showing the layout of the murals; drawing by the authors

In the Marichi mandala (fig. 4), eight-armed Marichi is three-faced with a blue sow face on the proper left. She stands in a stupa, and her four retinue figures occupy the four quadrants. Two wheels flanking the lotus pedestal represent her chariot drawn by seven sows. In this region, beginning in the tenth century, this image replaced a royal woman with two attendants, Marichi’s iconography described in a Chinese sutra.

Central deity and four smaller deities positioned within square enclosures, depicted in green, blue, and black — Fig. 4. Yulin Cave, Cave 3, Main Chamber, Northern Wall, Marichi Mandala; image produced by the Institute of Culture Relics Digitization

Two mandalas at the west ends of the south and north walls also face each other. One is a mandala centered on Buddha , and the other is a mandala centered on Buddha Shakyamuni described in the Durgatiparishodhana Tantra. Numerous Tibetan dharani texts, initiation rituals, practice manuals, and mandalas found at nearby Dunhuang are directly related to these mandalas. In Xixia society of the time, believed that rituals focused on these mandalas could liberate all beings from hells and lead to their rebirths in a Pure Land.

Translator Bari Lotsawa

Most of the esoteric images in this cave link to Bari Lotsawa Rinchen Drak (1040–1111), a Tangut monk of Tibetan ordination who was a prominent translator and master of the Tibetan tradition. He received many tantric empowerments and teachings in India. His best-known work, “One Hundred Sadhanas of Bari” (Bari gyatsa), compiled texts on deity () drawn from all types of known at the time. Images of the Ushnishavijaya and mandalas in Yulin Cave 3 follow Bari Lotsawa’s textual descriptions. It seems that the Indian Buddhist traditions he introduced had a direct, significant impact on Tangut Buddhist iconography.

Mahayana Sutra Depictions

Two panels of the Pure Land of Buddha represented in Chinese painting conventions—scenes of sixteen contemplations and the story of Prince Ajatashatru—occupy the central panels of the north and south walls (fig. 3).

A small panel illustrating the lay scholar Vimalakirti meeting , a popular theme in , sits above the cave’s entrance. Two panels of Manjushri and flank the entrance. Within the Samantabhadra mural the famous scene of the Chinese monk Xuanzang returning from his travels in India depicts the luminous bag on the back of his white horse, indicating he brought with him Buddhist texts. Eight images below this panel depict scenes of the Chinese monk Tanyi contemplating Samantabhadra appearing as a female. The murals are rendered in a purely Chinese stylistic mode related to Chinese Buddhist tradition.

The inclusion of Xuanzang with his companions is a common element of the Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara depictions in eleventh- to thirteenth-century China, but the connection with Samantabhadra is rare and relates to the miracles in which Samantabhadra imparts sutras to monk-translators. Although Xuanzang’s story originated in much earlier Chinese historical texts, images of Xuanzang with his monkey-headed protector and a horse depicted in Song (960–1035) and Tangut period (1036–1278) caves acquired a symbolic meaning beyond the original context (fig. 5). As historical figures in Chinese Buddhism gradually transformed into protagonists of miraculous stories, monks were worshiped as saints. With the Buddhist renewal in the late tenth century, Xuanzang, a famous scholar, traveler, and translator, gained a new, venerated status among Chinese Buddhists.

Abraded mural depicting seated figure on right facing smaller figure within fireball on left — Fig. 5.
Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara, with Xuanzang, a Monkey-Headed Protector, and a White Horse; Cave 2 of East Thousand-Buddha Grottoes; Tangut Kingdom (Xixia) (present-day Guazhou, Gansu Province, China); ca. 12th–13th century; image courtesy Institute of Cultural Heritage Research, Zhejiang University

Overall, the patrons of the cave purposefully unified iconographic forms and Buddhist belief systems of Indian, Tibetan, Tangut, and Chinese Buddhist traditions of the time.

Footnotes

The cave was dated on stylistic and historical considerations. See Rob Linrothe, “Usnīsavijaya and the Tangut Cult of the Stūpa at Yu-Lin Cave 3,” National Palace Museum Bulletin 31, no. 4–5 (1996): 1–24 and Rob Linrothe, “Xia Renzong and the Patronage of Tangut Buddhist Art: The Stūpa and Ushnīsavijayā Cult,” Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies 28 (1998): 91–121. Other sources attribute it to the Tangut period rule, from the early eleventh to the late thirteenth century. Sculptures in the cave are later additions and are not discussed here.

Fan Jinshi樊锦诗, ed., Anxi: Yulin ku 安西: 榆林窟 [The Anxi Yulin Grottoes] (Lanzhou: Gansu minzu chubanshe, 1999); Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter, ed., “Dung Dkhar/Phyi Dbang, West Tibet, and the Influence of Tangut Buddhist Art,” East and West 51, no. 3–4 (2001): 323–48.

The dates of the Tangut conquest of the area vary from 1036 to a later 1072/1073, when the Gansu corridor, including the Yulin caves, fully came under Tangut domain. It is accepted that the Tanguts remained in the area and their habitation did not end when the Mongols conquered the Xixia state in 1227.

Shi Jinbo, The Economy of Western Xia: A Study of 11th to 13th Century Tangut Records (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 8–23.

Elliot Sperling, “Further Remarks Apropos of the ’Ba’-Rom-Pa and the Tanguts,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungary 57, no. 1 (2004): 1–26, 7; Per K. Sørensen and Guntram Hazod, Rulers on the Celestial Plain: Ecclesiastic and Secular Hegemony in Medieval Tibet: A Study of Tshal Gung-thang (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2007), 2: app. 1, 370–74.

Another example is Cave 76 at Dunhuang, but the murals’ placement, composition, and style are quite different. See Ursula Toyka-Fuong, “The Influence of Pāla Art on 11th-Century Wall-Paintings of Grotto 76 in Dunhuang,” in The Inner Asian International Style 12th–14th Centuries, ed. Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter and Eva Allinger (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1998), 67–95.

See Elena Pakhoutova, “Reproducing Sacred Places: The Eight Great Events of the Buddha’s Life and Their Commemorative Stūpas in the Medieval Art of Tibet (10th–13th Century)” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2009), figs. 1.10, 1.11; 2.8–2.10, 2.16, 2.17; Claudine Bautze-Picron and J. Bautze, The Buddhist Murals of Pagan: Timeless Vistas of the Cosmos (Trumbull, CT: Weatherhill Inc, 2003).

Elena Pakhoutova, “Reproducing Sacred Places: The Eight Great Events of the Buddha’s Life and Their Commemorative Stūpas in the Medieval Art of Tibet (10th–13th Century)” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2009), 88–112.

Steven M. Kossak and Jane Casey Singer, Sacred Visions: Early Paintings from Central Tibet, Exhibition catalog (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), fig. 29; Pratapaditya Pal, ed., Himalayas: An Aesthetic Adventure, Exhibition catalog (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago in association with University of California Press and Mapin Publications, 2003), pl. 133.

See Jia Weiwei 贾维维, Yulin Ku: Di San Ku Tuxiang Yu Wenben Yanjiu 榆林窟: 第三窟图像与文本研究 [Yulin Grottoes and Related Textual Research of Cave 3 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2020), 180–83.

“lha rnams kyi dbang po brgya byin lag na gdugs thogs pa dang.” See Si tu chos kyi ʼbyung gnas, ed., “De bzhin gshegs pa thams cad kyi gtsug tor rnam par rgyal ba zhes bya baʼi gzungs rtog pa dang bcas pa,” in bKaʼ ʼgyur (sde dgeʼi mtshal par spus legs), vol. 90 (sDe dge, Derge: sDe dge par khang chen mo, 1985), 474–83, http://purl.bdrc.io/resource/MW3CN20612_0595.

After Compendium of Principles (Tattvasamgraha) Tantra and Purification of All Bad Rebirths (Sarvadurgatiparishodana) Tantra. See also Elena Pakhoutova, “Buddhist Practices and Rituals Centered on Buddha Vairocana in Tibet,” in The All-Knowing Buddha: A Secret Guide, ed. Elena Pakhoutova and Jan Van Alphen, Exhibition Catalog (New York: Rubin Museum of Art, 2013), 39–45, https://issuu.com/rmanyc/docs/all_knowing_buddha_online, 39–40.

See Zhang Shubin 张书彬, “Zhonggu Fahua Xinyang Xin Tuxiang Leixing Zhi Kaoshi - Yi Yulin Shiku 3 Ku ‘Tanyi Gan Puxian Pusa Huaxian Nü Shen Tu’ (Ni Ti) Wei Zhongxin” 中古法华信仰新图像类型之考释–以榆林窟第3窟《昙翼感普贤菩萨化现女身图》 (拟题) 为中心 [Textual Research on New Types of Images Related to Veneration of the Lotus Sutra in the Middle Ages, Centered on the Image ‘Tanyi Contemplates Samantabhadra Manifesting a Female Form’],” Xin Meishu 新美术 [New Art] 40, no. 12 (2019): 22–30, 22–30.

Daci’ensi Sanzang Fashi Zhuan 大慈恩寺三藏法师传 [A Biography of Master Sanzang of the Daci’en Temple], Taishō Tripiṭaka, T.2053, n.d.

Dorothy C. Wong, “The Making of a Saint: Images of Xuanzang in East Asia,” Early Medieval China 8 (2002): 43–98; Jia Weiwei 贾维维, Yulin Ku: Di San Ku Tuxiang Yu Wenben Yanjiu 榆林窟: 第三窟图像与文本研究 [Yulin Grottoes and Related Textual Research of Cave 3 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2020), 145–51.