Transregional Encounters in Yunnan: Connecting East Asian, Himalayan, and Southeast Asian Buddhism

Yunnan Province, located in southwest China, has long been a hub in transregional networks connecting Chinese regions to South and Southeast Asia. However, it has received less scholarly attention for its role in Buddhist transmission than Silk Road sites like Dunhuang and maritime routes. This panel’s four papers together demonstrate Yunnan’s significance as a place for encounters between different forms of Buddhism and Buddhists of different backgrounds. They share a temporal orientation in and around the late imperial period (1368–1911), which was a dynamic, transitional time for the region, and which left behind more abundant documentation of such encounters. The papers also cohere around the theme of political power, specifically how Buddhist encounters in Yunnan offer opportunities for different actors to augment, invoke, or challenge temporal authority. Each paper foregrounds a different encounter zone that connects Yunnan to Tibet, the Ming (1368–1644) court, middle-period South and Southeast Asia, or Theravāda Southeast Asia. As such, the papers draw on diverse sources in a variety of languages, including Sinitic, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Pali, and Dai.

A key site that became a Buddhist center in the late imperial period was Jizu shan (Chicken-foot Mountain; Sk. Kukkuṭapāda), a pilgrimage destination close to the Dali plain, which had been the region’s political center from the seventh century until the Mongol conquest of 1253. Panelist 1 explores Buddhist encounters at Jizu shan through the lens of Xitan Temple, founded by the regional Naxi ruler Mu Zeng in the early seventeenth century, which became a shared space for Chan Buddhists and Tibetan Buddhists. This paper focuses on the pilgrimage and travel records of two contemporary figures who spent time at the temple, the Tibetan Sixth Zhwa dmar Chos kyi dbang phyug (1584–1630) and the Han literatus Xu Xiake (1587–1646). Xitan Temple thus facilitated material, human, and ritual encounters between Tibetan and Chinese Buddhists in a way that supported Mu Zeng’s regional authority.

Xitan Temple was among the Buddhist institutions on Jizu shan that received a copy of the Yongle Northern Canon from the Ming court. The bestowal of this canon on temples in Yunnan is the focus of Panelist 2’s paper, which considers how and why Ming emperors, starting with the Wanli Emperor (r. 1573–1619) and his mother, Empress Dowager Li (1545–1614), singled out Jizu shan temples for their imperial favor. Of the five copies of this canon bestowed in Yunnan, four were granted to temples on Jizu shan. Panelist 2 draws on temple and regional gazetteers, inscriptions, and other records to argue that the Ming court bestowed the Yongle Northern Canon on Jizu shan temples to consolidate the border region and protect the empire.

Imperial power remains the focus of Panelist 3’s paper, which investigates the specific form of Buddhist rulership articulated in a Ming copy of a Dali-kingdom (937–1254) ritual text written in Sinitic script with Sanskrit interpolations for key terms and _dhāraṇī_s. This text centers around the consecration ritual (Sk. _abhiṣeka_; Ch. _guanding_) used to crown kings and initiate practitioners into esoteric teachings. Panelist 3 shows that one section of the text presents the Dali ruler as a buddha-king, or _buddharāja_, in a way that overlaps with the Hindu-inspired god-king (Sk. _devarāja_) ideal found in contemporaneous Khmer society. As Panelist 3 argues, this shows how Dali rulers did not just embrace the Sinitic ideal of the “humane king” (Ch. _renwang_), but also participated in Buddhist kingship practices with ties to South and Southeast Asia. Moreover, the Ming copy of this ritual text indicates the continued relevance of this form of Buddhist kingship, though in this case it may have been the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–1424) who sought ritual technologies from Dali.

The connections between Yunnan and Southeast Asia suggested in the third paper become even more evident in the fourth paper, which examines the localization of the Buddhist monastic rule in a bitextual version of the Pātimokkha (the core rules of the Vinaya) from southern Yunnan’s Sipsongpanna (Ch. Xishuangbanna) region, situated at the border with Laos and Myanmar. The text’s two languages are Pali, the religious language of Theravada Buddhism, and Dai Le (Tai Lue), a Tai dialect related to those spoken in neighboring regions of mainland Southeast Asia. Panelist 4 compares this manuscript, titled _Săpº kammavācā_, to similar Pali-vernacular bitexts based on the Pātimokkha composed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries by Dai, Khün, Lao, Lanna, and Siamese authors. This paper shows how Dai intellectuals worked within the constraints of the bitextual genre to produce a locally relevant version of a key Vinaya treatise in a borderland region. Panelist 4 also attends to how Qing-era Dai redactors of the _Săpº kammavācā_, as well as contemporary Dai scholars who translated it into Chinese, were informed by their dual marginalization at the edges of both the Theravada world and the Chinese state.

These four papers on Xitan Temple, the Yongle Buddhist Canon, a Dali-kingdom _abhiṣeka_ text, and the _Săpº kammavācā_ each reveal a different facet of Buddhist encounters in Yunnan in and around the late imperial period. These papers highlight the challenges of studying Buddhism in Yunnan, especially the difficulty of navigating such a diverse linguistic and cultural landscape. However, they also show the benefits of treating Yunnan as a whole, rather than separately addressing Sinitic, Tibetan, or Pali forms of Buddhism. The response promises to draw out shared themes about how encounters between different forms of Buddhism generated distinctive local traditions in Yunnan.

As more scholars turn their attention toward Buddhism in Yunnan, it becomes increasingly important to communicate across linguistic, sectarian, and regional specializations to develop holistic understandings of this fascinating but understudied frontier zone. This panel takes an important step in bringing together a diverse range of scholarly perspectives on Yunnan’s diverse Buddhist traditions. The panelists include two PhD candidates, one assistant professor, and one emeritus professor; the respondent is a full professor, and the presider is an associate professor; three of the six participants are scholars of color, and three are women.