Download Buddhist Tantric Networks Along the Maritime Silk Roads, ca 8 th

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’.