The editors of and contributors to Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang have sought to establish meaningful patterns and themes among a seeming morass of multilingual texts produced over several hundred years and stored in the caves of Dunhuang. While the collected essays vary in methodology and focus, they all demonstrate the particular significance of Dunhuang materials to the history and canon formation of the Tibetan Nyingma tradition, as well as for Chinese esoteric Buddhist traditions.
The first essay by Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer is an archaeo-philological analysis of a phur pa consecration text from Dunhuang, comparing it with a similar text from the canonical Rnying ma'i rgyud 'bum. Their rigorous philological approach reveals a shared style between these texts of vastly different eras, suggesting that the Nyingma tantras were likely constructed through a bricolage of older texts, such as those we find at Dunhuang.
Sam van Schaik's essay traces the history of the principle of tantric ethics: samaya. By comparing what some dozen Dunhuang texts say about samaya, van Schaik reveals the great variety of views that existed during Tibet's “age of fragmentation” (sil bu'i dus). He confirms the long-held view that such variety was the result of a lack of central authority or strong institutions. With the rise of powerful monastic centers in the late thirteenth century, standardization of conflicting ethical norms became necessary for social cohesion, and the views of the Dunhuang texts were quickly marginalized. Significantly, Van Schaik observes that some of the tenth-century Dunhuang texts already showed subtle metaphorical interpretations of transgressive tantric language. This goes against revisionist claims that the tantric practitioners of that time were unenlightened literalists and “supports a characterization of Rong zom's statements in this area as a continuation of earlier traditions, rather than a reaction to polemical statements from the emerging ‘new’ traditions” (p. 70).
In chapter 3, Kammie Takahashi analyzes a zhus lan (question-and-answer) text that illustrates an early mélange of technical, ritual language and the pseudo-philosophical style of the Dzogchen tradition. The text's interlocutor poses a series of questions to a Dzogchen master, Dpal dbyangs. These questions are about proper ritual technique, and Takahashi identifies them, using Davidson's taxonomy of tantras, as representative of early tantric attitudes focused on propitiation and the appropriation and deployment of power. Dpal dbyangs's answers undermine the questions' dogmatic presuppositions about such things as meditative effort and the expectation of results from practice. The mix of styles shows an important stage of development in Tibetan tantrism, but the characterization of Dpal dbyangs's views as “philosophical assertions of primordial spontaneity and release” (p. 97; emphasis added) is somewhat misleading. They are, of course, grounded in mādhyamaka, but the views in the zhus lan are a different level of gnostic, meditation-based discourse, not to be conflated with the exoteric philosophy of the something like the Mādhyamakālam˙kar a.
Yoshiro Imaeda contributes a short essay comparing the famous fourteenth-century Bar do thos grol to a number of older funerary texts preserved in Dunhuang. The older texts, he observes, are clear examples of early Tibetan Buddhist syncretism with Tibetan autochthonous traditions: they appropriate the indigenous concepts rather than reject them. The much later Thos grol maintains the non-Buddhist elements, only showing a more developed Buddhist identity and terminology. In agreement with a hypothesis of Bacot, Imaeda concludes that “Buddhism has been ‘Tibetanised,’ … by contrast with the more typical assertion that it was Tibet that was ‘Buddhicised’” (p. 156).
Matthew T. Kapstein's piece analyzes Dunhuang's iconographic holdings. He looks at the genesis of a particular mandala image from the well-known Nyingma canonical text Na rag dong sprugs, which seems to be related to images and descriptions in Dunhuang materials. Accompanied by meticulous and copious annotations, Kapstein concludes that the Na rag and other Nyingma canonical texts were not created and passed down in a neat linear movement, “but from a process of on-going bricolage and refinement, drawing upon a wide range of available texts, fragments, and oral traditions” (p. 175).
The final essay looks at Dunhuang Chinese materials, especially early printed material such as stamped images and Sanskrit dhārani sheets. Providing detailed physical descriptions, she shows how early, nonliterary printed material—often because of its talismanic value and so forth—was just as important to the diffusion of Buddhist concepts and imagery as literary material.
The essays' ambitions are modest; they each look at a relatively minor historical presupposition and use the Dunhuang materials to complicate and clarify the picture, but the cumulative effect of the contributions is greater than the sum of its parts. Dunhuang material illuminates Tibet's pre-Buddhist culture, early Nyingma origins, and the genesis of the “new traditions”; it shows that the intellectual conditions in each of those eras was richer and more varied than previously assumed; and it suggests how religious canons in general may arise from a more complicated and gradual process than previously assumed.
