1 - Introduction: Esoteric Buddhist Networks along the Maritime Silk Routes, 7th–13th Century AD

Summary

IN THEIR INTRODUCTION to a recent special issue of History of Religions devoted to (Esoteric) ‘Buddhist Visual Culture’, Jinah Kim and Rob Linrothe (2014) encouraged ‘a geographically wide framing of almost every question that can be asked about Esoteric Buddhism’. They argued:

Yunnan, Java, Japan, and the Tibetan regions of the Indian Himalayas can be as important as Bodh Gaya, Chang'an, or Lhasa, and an overly narrow focus limits the prospects for fruitful comparison. The Ekādaśamukhadhāraṇī, for example, seems to have found purchase from Gandhāra to Nara, Gilgit to Palembang. It is the deprovincializing and simultaneous decentering of any particular locale and any particular type of evidence (texts, epigraphical records, or visual art) that must occur in order for the study of Esoteric Buddhism to generate greater insights. (p. 2)

Espousing an analogous wide-ranging perspective, this volume studies the genesis, development and circulation of Esoteric (or Tantric) Buddhism throughout the vast geoenvironmental area that may be defined as ‘Maritime Asia’, from the 7th to the 13th centuries ad. In doing so, it upholds a trans-regional approach laying emphasis on the mobile networks of human agents (‘Masters’), textual corpora (‘Texts’), and visual/architectural models and artefacts (‘Icons’) through which Esoteric Buddhist discourses and practices spread far and wide across Asia. This extensive Introduction proposes several issues for consideration in surveying recent scholarly literature and in contextualizing the religious, historical, and socio-political dynamics—intervening on a local/regional as well as cosmopolitan/supralocal scale—that shaped these networks as they moved across different geographical and cultural contexts.

Maritime Asia, encompassing ‘Monsoon Asia’ as its core, spans the eastern littorals of the Indian SubContinent (and their hinterlands) in the west to the South China Sea littorals (and their hinterlands), the Philippine islands, Korea and Japan in the east; its geographical fulcrums are the littorals of peninsular and mainland Southeast Asia, and the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago. Spreading across the superimposed geopolitical boundaries of modern nation states, and transcending such equally arbitrary and historically constructed geographical divisions as South/Southeast/East Asia, this largely maritime expanse was influenced by similar environmental and climatic factors, such as the seasonal monsoons. Being the theatre of circulation of people, goods, languages and ideas through sea routes since time immemorial, Maritime Asia may be theorized as forming—just like Eurasia—one interconnected network, and arguably even an integral cultural ecumene with a shared background of human, intellectual, and environmental history.