Becoming the Buddha-King: Abhiṣeka and Buddhist Kingship in the Dali kingdom (937-1254)

The Dali kingdom (937-1254) was centered in present-day Southwest China’s Yunnan province, next to Tibet and Southeast Asia. Despite its location as a cross-cultural hub, existing textual scholarship portrays Dali court Buddhism as having a strong orientation toward Tang-Song Chinese Buddhism. For instance, Megan Bryson has identified the influence of the Chinese apocryphal _Scripture for Humane Kings_ (Ch. _Renwang jing_ 仁王經) on the kingdom based on the presence of extant scripture copies, sub-commentary, ritual text, and images related to this scripture from the Dali kingdom that survive. She argues that Dali rulers adopted the scripture for state-protection and to position themselves above domestic competitors and foreign neighbors. While I fully agree the _Scripture for Humane Kings_ might have served as the scriptural basis of Dali’s state protection rites, my presentation will suggest that at the highest level––that is, the ritual directly applied to the kings, its central idea of uniting the king and Buddha in one person belongs to a cosmopolitan model of divine kingship that was primarily Indian in inspiration. The _abhiṣeka_ ritual appropriate to the kings of the Dali kingdom is a fitting example to demonstrate this point.

The Sanskrit term “abhiṣeka” simply means sprinkling water or fluids upon. The action signifies a penetration or absorption of material forces into oneself. As the essential rite in the coronation ceremony of the kings in classical and medieval India, _abhiṣeka_ takes the meaning of consecration or anointment in this context. Buddhism adopted _abhiṣeka_ from the Indian kingship ritual in the medieval period, but earlier scholars widely believed it was primarily used as an initiation ritual in Buddhist monastic institutions. Although recent scholars such as Charles D. Orzech and Ryūichi Abé have addressed the use of these rites by the rulers in Tang China and Heian Japan, who received _abhiṣeka_ from the Esoteric Buddhist masters, they tend to explain the adoption of Buddhist abhiṣeka as enlisting the ruler as a disciple in the Esoteric school, while rarely considering how the soteriological end of this ritual was built into the rulers’ imagery of power.

As a rare example of the Buddhist ritual manuals for the king’s _abhiṣeka_ (Ch. _guanding_ 灌頂), Dali’s sources provide us with an opportunity to reassess what relevance this ritual has for the kingship-building. Written in Sinitic language with the interpolation of Sanskrit spells, mantras, and liturgical texts, the scattered manuscripts of these ritual manuals were discovered in the Buddhist temple Fazang si in Dali in the 1950s and became available to scholars in the microfilm-reproduced form with the publication of _Dali congshu_ in 2008. The surviving manuscripts are Ming copies, but closer examination reveals that the texts contained date to the Dali-era. My preliminary research suggests these scattered texts are different manuals that serve the same ritual––the Great Vajra consecration of the Dali kings. The ritual consists of a linear progression of five altars, followed by one extra altar at the end. Aside from the ritual elements common to the Esoteric Buddhist traditions, Dali’s _abhiṣeka_ shares affinities with a specific type of Indian _abhiṣeka_ for consecrating or renewing the ruler’s power in macrocosm, which Ronald M. Davidson classifies as the great (_śrauta_) ceremonies, as opposed to the domestic (_gṛhya_) rites. Here I use the ritual procedures in the final altar, presented by the text _Thirteenth of the Ritual Procedure Manual for the Majesty Receiving Great Vajra Consecration in the Five Altars_ (Ch. _Shengshang shou jingang daguanding wu tan yizhu cidi shisan_ 聖上受金剛大灌頂五壇儀註次第十三), as an example: The king ascended to the elevated lotus seat placed in the centrality of the last altar, being encircled with offerings such as flowers and music; The four spell masters held the bell and vajra, standing at the four corners, reciting hymns and visualizing themselves as the Vajra deities; The four attendants held the pitchers and stood on the four sides, visualizing themselves as the four bodhisattvas. After whisking the king’s head, the four masters sprinkled water upon him, conjuring the deities of rivers, seas, and land within it.

I argue the ritual outline of this section is probably modeled after the enthronement part of the Hindu kingship ritual _pratiṣṭhā_, which normally involves setting up a throne, letting the king mount it and sprinkling him with water drawn from the four directions. However, by twisting the king’s throne into a lotus seat that symbolizes the Buddha’s seat, fitting the king into the place, and venerating him as the Buddha, what happens here is a double-mimesis: The king reigned as an incarnation of the Buddha, with the attendant Vajra beings represented by the Buddhist masters, seated on the lotus seat to receive the royal anointment of the cosmic water. Such a merging of the king and the Buddha in one person had never been attained in the scripture of the _Humane King_, in which the king was positioned only as the bodhisattva (Buddha-to-be) or the _cakravartin_ (wheel-turner)—a status distinct from and thus inferior to the Buddha. Instead, the union of secular and sacred power in one embodied in this ritual constitutes a parallel to the ideal of _buddharāja_ (Buddha-king) that S. J. Tambiah found in the contemporaneous Southeast Asian Buddhist kingdoms, specifically Khmer. Adapted from the Hindu-inspired conception of _devarāja_ (God-king), the model of _buddharāja_ involves a deification of the king and proclamation of him as a living Buddha. In calling attention to this parallel, my point is not to ascribe Dali’s kingship ideal to that of Southeast Asia but to advocate repositioning Dali in a cosmopolitan sphere consisting of the synchronous pursuit of universal and divine kingship, in which the embodiment of divinity is inextricable from the performance of power. This broader perspective will liberate the historiography of the Dali kingdom and its Buddhism from a Sinocentric view and illuminate its role in the entangled history of religion and politics in middle period Asia.