I have recently returned from Yinchuan, which is the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Yinchuan these days might be better known for its rocket-speed development due to the region’s increasingly important wine and tourism industries. Hotels are not necessarily the best way to gauge a city or town’s economic wellbeing. But the fact that there are spick and span, multinational-operated flagships operating alongside boutique accommodation at select wineries is testimony to how fast things are changing in the northwest of China, the heart of Inner Asia.
Yinchuan is unique for many things, among them its mixed ecology of steppe, fertile land nourished by the Yellow River, and the primeval spine of the Helan Mountain Range, which demarcates the border between Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. This fragile ecology, along with the ancient presence of the Helan Mountains and the petroglyphs that remain a mystery to even seasoned scholars, drew in a spiritually attuned people from the west: the Tanguts, Qiangic pastoralists who came from the realm of Dangxiang. Their ancestors had roamed westward of the Helan range for millennia. Their indigenous shamanic traditions would have directly engaged with the sun gods and spirit animals of the Helan petroglyphs. They would have seen the mountains not as territory but as living ancestors.
The famous “Sun God” or Solar Protector of the Helan petroglyphs, which has become a tourism mascot for the local authorities, was glimpsed in the primal visions cooked up around the sparks and firelight of the tribes’ campfires. Its eyes blaze nourishingly but also mercilessly across the entire world. Unbiased and total. For the Tanguts that arrived millennia later, before 1032, Helan’s peaks became physical manifestations of Mount Sumeru—the axis of the Buddhist cosmos. Their cosmic Buddha, Vairocana, also took on the sun’s appearance as the Great Iluminator.
Later empires such as the Mongol Yuan, the Chinese Ming, or the Manchu Qing saw only rock. Tangut Buddhism was plugged into the land’s spiritual nervous system. The Tanguts saw transcendent realms, which was why they built their imperial mausoleum complexes according to a geomantic layout congruent with Chinese feng shui principles (with the great structures’ backs to the mountains and facing the fertile plains nourished by the Yellow River beyond). Yuan, Ming, and Qing armies used Yinchuan as a military choke-point rather than as a divine fortress.
The Tanguts deliberately placed their capital, Old Yinchuan or Xingqing, east of the Helan Mountains, and established their network of necropolises near the world of gods. This nexus of sacred imperial sites was west of the Yellow River, the fertile realm of humans, echoed the template of Luxor’s site at the River Nile. These magnificent mausoleums are formally called the Western Xia Imperial Mausoleums. Long shorn of their exterior architecture and at any rate thoroughly looted, they were this month inscribed on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites, marking China’s 60th such listed site. The Tanguts ritually reconstructed Xingqing as a mandala of cosmic power.
In the museum of the Western Xia Imperial Mausoleums is an array of exquisite artifacts from the tombs: despite the catastrophic, complete holocaust of destruction and wrath that the Mongols visited upon the Tanguts, there was a small percentage of surviving items that are still enough to inspire awe and wonder. One such item is a thangka of the “prime emanator” of East Asian esoteric Buddhism (and early Tibetan Vajrayana), Vairocana. Otherwise known as the Great Sun Buddha, could Vairocana have reflected the Sun God of the Helan petroglyphs, whose eerie, vacant stare looks just as haunting as the faded face of the serene Illuminator?
What was the Dreaming, for the ancient tribespeople that dwelled among the Helan mountain range and engraved their petroglyphs? And how does the dreamtime irrupt into awakening, that is, an enlightened mind forever unburdened of karma and ignorance?
The tribespeople and the Tanguts searched and searched until they disappeared long ago. But we continue the journey.
