Abstract
The Relationship between the Tangut Art and Textual Heritage: Some Observations
Highlights
From a historical perspective, the system of Tangut Buddhist imagery supports the traditional division of the Tangut Buddhism into the Sinitic and Tibetan domains, whereas alleged synthetic forms provisionally identified as ‘Sino-Tibetan art’ are supposedly representative of the indigenous Tangut Buddhism
One observation presented in this paper, in a rather ex cathedra fashion, is that the art objects in general do not belong to the official mainstream Tangut Buddhism, represented by the teachings of Huayan, Prajñāpāramitā, Madhyamika (Dbu ma), Vijñānavāda, ‘Hundred dharmas’ and ‘generating the Bodhicitta’ as determined by the famous Tangut Tiansheng Law Code.[2]
This set of teachings is by no means exhaustive, and the actual excavated corpus reveals a greater variety of textual materials and exceeds the legal stipulations, but a clearly identifiable set of texts in both Tangut and Chinese is fully compatible with the above rubrics
Summary
The system of Tangut Buddhist imagery supports the traditional division of the Tangut Buddhism into the Sinitic and Tibetan domains, whereas alleged synthetic forms provisionally identified as ‘Sino-Tibetan art’ are supposedly representative of the indigenous Tangut Buddhism. The attempts to reconcile the Buddhist images and the textual data have a long history from the initial studies of the Tangut art by S.
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