A Dunhuang Phurpa consecration rite : IOL Tib J 331. III's consecrations section - Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer -- - The limits of transgression : the Samaya vows of Mahayoga - Sam van Schaik -- - Ritual and philosophical speculation in the Rdo rje sems dpa'i zhus lan - Kammie Morrison Takahashi -- - The bad do thos grol, or 'the Tibetan book of the dead' : Tibetan conversion to Buddhism or Tibetanisation of Buddhism? - Yoshiro Imaeda -- - Between ne rak and a hard place : evil rebirth and the violation of vows in early rnying ma pa sources and their Dunhuang antecedents - Matthew T. Kapstein -- - Buddhist printed images and texts of the eighth-tenth centuries : typologies of replication and representation - Katherine R. Tsiang
Esoteric Buddhism in late first millennium Tibet and China is nowhere in evidence so clearly as in materials from Dunhuang. In the original contributions presented here, Robert Mayer and Cathy Cantwell examine the consecrations of the wrathful divinity VajrakAlaya, while Sam van Schaik considers approaches to the vows of tantric adepts. Philosophical interpretations of MahAyoga inform Kammie Takahashia (TM)s study of the a ~Questions of Vajrasattvaa (TM). The background for later Tibetan tantric mortuary rites are examined in chapters by Yoshiro Imaeda and Matthew Kapstein. In the closing chap
