Vol 9, No 1S (2023)

This article is a case study of the engraving in the Tangut Buddhist text Xibi State Preceptor's Compendium of Admonitions to the World 推旃随鬱翩饒毒 written by the Buddhist monk of high rank, State Preceptor Xibi Baoyuan. For a long period of time left and right parts of this illustration existed separately in two editions of this book. For this reason, this text’s author in the illustration was identified incorrectly. The study of this engraving’s fragments allowed to join two engraving parts in their original form and helped to identify the genuine portrait of Xibi.

The Tanguts who established Western Xia (982–1227) were active and devoted Buddhist pilgrims. They visited the Buddhist cave complexes of Mogao and Yulin in the Greater Dunhuang area and left several hundred lines of wall inscriptions. The paper examines various types of the remaining Tangut pilgrimage inscriptions and formulates their common textual formula. The comparative study of the resemblant Chinese, Tangut, and Uyghur inscriptions reveals their structural and vocabulary similarities and suggests the existence of the multilingual “inscriptional discourse” in the greater Dunhuang area in the 10th–14th cc. Finally, the content analysis of the inscriptions illuminates the features of the Buddhist pilgrimage as a local social and religious phenomenon and provides a precious primary textual source for the study of Western Xia.

The newly discovered Tangut xylograph Essential Selection of Mixed Homonyms Often-Transmitted is a primer designed to teach beginners over 2000 Tangut characters commonly used in Buddhist scriptures. Referring to various dictionaries and primers, the compilation approach of the booklet is modeled after the Chinese traditional primer entitled Mixed Characters, which was widely circulated at that time, but its notes focus on the interchangeability of homonymic characters in various manuscripts, rather than on providing phonetic or semantic explanations. The two prefaces of the book prove to be a unique material for showing how the Tanguts treated their own script, and how a Tangut teacher taught beginners to read and write such complex characters. Unfamiliar with the Chinese concept of radicals, the Tanguts regarded their characters as combinations of various components formed by simplest strokes and glyphs. They believed that it would be easier for students to learn Tangut characters by piecing the components together than trying to write full characters directly. Complete translations of the two prefaces to the book are presented for the first time in this paper.

Some important documents, such as the Tangut legal texts “Revised and Newly Approved Code of the Heavenly Prosperity Reign (1149–1168)” (Tiansheng lüling) and “New Laws of the Pig Year” (Hainian xinfa), are not fully clarified. One reason is that some Tangut words cannot be understood correctly. The main key to finding exact meanings of Tangut words are translations of Chinese classics. In this paper it is shown how using the Tangut translation of a Chinese leishu, “Forest of Categories” (Lei lin), and finding correct interpretations of nine words results in reasonable translations of legal provisions.

The main text of the Tangut version of the Scripture on the Ten Kings was based on the Tibetan version, but its preface, translated from Chinese, contains a folk legend about a child who returns alive from Hell after Yama admires his respect for deities and sages. A similar legend is recorded in Chinese Buddhist canon no earlier than the Ming Dynasty, therefore the Tangut preface proves to be the earliest sample of the same work. With the help of Chinese texts, it may be possible to decipher the Tangut version of the cursive handwritten preface in inv. № 819 kept at the IOM, RAS and the version in a xylograph that recently appeared on the Chinese relic market.

The plate of the fragment Инв.No.7887 was published in the Heishuicheng Manuscripts Collected in Russia Volume 9 and again in Volume 14. This led to a misunderstanding. The current academic study of Инв. No.7887 was, in fact, limited to Инв.No.7887–2. Translation and study of the fragment Инв.No.7887–1 made it clear that its content was about the provisions on how to deal with children born by women who committed adultery, on inactivity of women who pay a reward with labor, on widows not to be supervised by 矙皽谬縦 (大小侄母) and on women who are forced to divorce by parents-in-law and so on. Comparison with the relevant provisions of Tiansheng lüling 天盛律令 showed that the contents of Инв.No.7887–1 are supplements and revisions to Tiansheng lüling. Based on this preliminary analysis, the contents of Инв.No.7887–1 are thought to be temporary legal provisions formulated in the late Xixia 西夏 period to solve some new litigation cases in the society. Such legal documents, supplementary to the basic code of Xixia, are expected to attract attention of the academic community.

E.I. Kychanov was well known in Chinese academic circles since 1980s, and his translations of ancient Tangut manuscripts into Russian are often used by Chinese scholars as reference material. This article focuses on the scholar’s translation of the Tangut “Revised and Newly Approved Code of the Heavenly Prosperity Reign (1149–1168)” and analyzes some features of his translation work, his chosen strategies and methods, and also comments on the Chinese specialists’ attitude to E.I. Kychanov’s translation of the Tangut legal text.