* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Download Buddhist Tantric Networks Along the Maritime Silk Roads, ca 8 th
Enlightenment in Buddhism wikipedia , lookup
Buddhist texts wikipedia , lookup
Buddhist philosophy wikipedia , lookup
Yiqiejing yinyi (Xuanying) wikipedia , lookup
Buddhist influences on print technology wikipedia , lookup
Buddhism and violence wikipedia , lookup
Buddhist ethics wikipedia , lookup
Buddhism and psychology wikipedia , lookup
Buddhism in the United States wikipedia , lookup
Pre-sectarian Buddhism wikipedia , lookup
Buddhism in Thailand wikipedia , lookup
Dalit Buddhist movement wikipedia , lookup
Women in Buddhism wikipedia , lookup
Persecution of Buddhists wikipedia , lookup
Greco-Buddhism wikipedia , lookup
Buddhism in Japan wikipedia , lookup
Buddhist art wikipedia , lookup
Buddhism and sexual orientation wikipedia , lookup
History of Buddhism wikipedia , lookup
Buddhism in Vietnam wikipedia , lookup
Early Buddhist schools wikipedia , lookup
History of Buddhism in India wikipedia , lookup
Decline of Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent wikipedia , lookup
Buddhism and Western philosophy wikipedia , lookup
Andrea Acri, Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore): "Buddhist Tantric Networks Along the Maritime Silk Roads, ca 8th – 12th century AD” As suggested by textual, epigraphic, and art historical materials, since the early 8th century disparate South- and Eastern- Asian locales witnessed the rise, and prominence, of Tantric Buddhist cults and ideologies, which were granted strong support by the respective political powers. A consistent number of studies have focused on aspects of such ideologies in their localized dimension, and have also highlighted the links existing between certain polities and/or monastic institutions—all influenced by ‘maritime dynamics’—such as, for example, Sri Laṅka and Central Java, Nāgapaṭṭiṇam and Central Java, Sri Laṅka and Pagan, Nālandā and Śrīvijaya, Java/Sumatra and T'ang China. Yet, a single overview aiming at linking together the most recent findings of scholars working on specific geographical and cultural contexts, and integrate them to highlight the developed system of trans-regional and intra-regional Buddhist networks in existence by the early 8thth Century AD, is still a desideratum. The proposed paper investigates from a comparative perspective the ‘strange parallels’ in the domain of Tantric (Mahāyāna and/or Vajrayāna) Buddhism that are detectable in texts and artifacts recovered from the above-mentioned locales. In particular, I suggest that the common Tantric features characterizing Buddhism in Sumatra, Central Java, certain areas of mainland Southeast Asia, and T'ang China, may be traced to traditions developed in institutionalized, as well as ‘wilderness’, Buddhist milieux in South Asia—think about, e.g., Alampur in Andhra, Ratnagiri in Orissa, The Pāllava port-cities of Andhra and Tamil Nadu, Abhayagiri in Sri Laṅka, and Nālandā in North-Eastern India. These locales, set in strategic locations close to nodal commercial routes, were major centres of Buddhist learning and worship, which played a major role in the development of Tantric forms of Buddhism since at least the 8th century AD. The quick transmission of such traditions to Southeast Asia and beyond, i.e. to Tibet and China, occurred not only via the travels of monks and renowned Tantric masters plying the routes of the land and maritime Silk Roads, but also via the diplomatic contacts entertained between South and Southeast Asian polities. The paper, thus, aims at highlighting the remarkable integration, established through religious and diplomatic networks, existing between South-, Southeast-, and East Asian polities before AD 1000. A ‘case study' will be the investigation of the links between central Java under the Śailendras and China (port cities as well as the royal capital) under the T'angs, around the 8th-9th century. As testified to by the Chinese biographies of Amoghavajra, etc., the survival of an Esoteric Buddhist text on royal initiation in Chinese apparently written by Bianhong (the Javanese pupil of Hui-guo), and the odd-looking 'Chinese sages’ sculpted on multiple lintels of the Buddhist complex of Candi Sewu in Java, it may be argued that 1) contacts between the two locales flourished, and 2) they received their forms of Esoteric Buddhism through the same network of ‘key players’.