At that moment, I was sitting in the Black Gobi. I let go of my consciousness, and melted into the profound azure sky. I could feel myself dissolved by the air. Not a sound, except the wind, a crisp fresh wind, without any dregs of dust or mundaneness. Gradually, it dissolved me.
I saw Snow Feather walking out of a sturdy gate, herding a flock of sheep. One could discern a slight limp in her legs. The sheep’s bleating wafted in the wind. That sound was best for curing souls’ wounds. I don’t know if Snow Feather had ever felt suffering—I couldn’t tell from her calm and transcendent face. She brandished a whip that sounded like water, which resonated with my heart. . . . She might have forgotten many things. You wanted to ask her if she still remembered the man named Jasper. But then you decided to leave her alone. Her smile, after all, was as rare as the appearance of the Northern Dipper stars in broad daylight! (Xue Mo 2023)
I remember the first time I encountered a fictional depiction of the Inner Asian Buddhist empire of the Tanguts, which is also known as the Western Xia or Xixia. In 2010, I had picked up an obscure Hong Kong comic series called Painting Warriors (2009) by Suen Wai-kwan, where the villain pulling the strings from the shadows was a Latin-fluent Tangut prince. Fifteen years on, Tangutologist Alla Sizova kindly alerted me to one other fictional work where Xixia is referenced in a major way—mangaka Yu Ito’s Shut Hell (2008–17)—in which the female protagonist is the sole, vengeance-seeking survivor of a Tangut unit wiped out by Mongol enemies.
Although the paucity of contemporary, Xixia-themed fiction should caution us from making sweeping statements about how we understand the Tangut Empire today, I do want to suggest that there remains an aura of ethereal mystery about them, from the saga of deciphering their esoteric, intricate script to the dramatic tale of their demise at the hands of history’s most notorious conqueror, Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227). The tale of the Tanguts is one of might, magic, and mysticism.
The most recent book to explore this fantastical setting is Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia (2023), which was on sale during the very first Tangut-themed panel of the Association of Asian Studies’ (AAS) annual conference in Columbus, Ohio from 13–16 March. Sizova was one of the panelists who presented a paper on Tibetan rituals at the Tangut imperial court.
Curses is a completely unique book because it is the first fictional volume from a Chinese author, translated into quality English for a native Anglophone readership. The writer is Xue Mo, the pen name of Chen Kaihong, who was born in the district of Liangzhou in Gansu. Liangzhou is the old heartland of the White and Lofty State on High and serves as the main setting of Xue Mo’s story. What is clear is that Xue Mo’s Liangzhou is not “our” Liangzhou in the “real” world. It is a setting of protean shapeshifting characters, tricksters, gods, and brutal warlords and warriors. In Xue Mo’s Liangzhou is a legendary and ancient Diamond Maiden Cave, indwelt by dakinis and rich with rituals performed over millennia since Wu Zetian’s time. Here, Xue Mo discovered a collection of eight manuscripts that form the corpus of the novel. These texts speak of a village called Diamond Clan, with two protagonists in the form of the “mad monk” Jasper and the dakini incarnation of Snow Feather.
Snow Feather is particularly alluring as a female character—a thief and warrior in the tradition of Chinese martial arts novels and serials. But she is actually a dakini and appears in multiple forms throughout Xue Mo’s story, an avatar of the Wisdom Dakini Goddess Niguma. Not all the Tanguts are the protagonists, however: Li Yuanhao (1003–48), the founding monarch of the Xixia, is a terrifying force of nature, while the elite cavalry of the Tangut armies, the Iron Hawks, carry out the dread will of the Tangut emperor with an inexorable brutality, trampling and skewering any in their path. Their lives are as much meditations on the nature of impermanence in the same way that Genghis Khan, despite being called by the Russians, “God’s whip to punish humanity,” simply died like everyone else.
Xue Mo does not address the idea that the Tangut court’s Tibetan preceptors used tantric war magic, invoking Mahakala, Cakrasamvara, and others to effect Genghis’ death. After all, the fate shared by all mortals also befell the great Li Yuanhao centuries earlier, whose person is elevated into something of a sinister, mythic figure, with the “gait of dragons and tigers,” possessing wolf eyes and an eagle hooked nose. When that very nose was lopped off, the rest of the man also disintegrated.
The settings of Curses are undoubtedly beautiful, but also blood-soaked. There are massacres, wastelands, dark thoughts. Xue Mo manifests these scenes without apology or guilt, as the truest of Vajrayana masters would demand. There is profanity, coarse and sexual language, and an illicit affair in which Jasper, the monk who loves Snow Feather, violates his vows and descends into madness. But Xue Mo himself writes, “The Buddha said everything was created by the mind. A person creates their own Hell.” This is not necessarily a religious statement, and even the truth of this line is ambiguous. What is certain is that just as good and evil are but categories that can blur and merge, the characters in this novel have real life prototypes like in Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber. Is this a compilation of insane ramblings or the recordings of the truest life experiences of another people? For Xue Mo, two things can be true at the same time.
When contemplating what the author himself calls the “absurd world” of Curses, I think of the heady, trippy, frenzied television series Britannia. Despite being set in a historical period—Roman emperor Claudius’ invasion of the British Isles and the druidic resistance—the show is consciously a genre and mind-bending experience in which we are very much absorbing the story as an audience of the present day, thrown back in time while being completely self-aware of our modern, contemporary horizon of what we understand (or don’t understand) about the Romans’ and ancient Britons’ past. The result with Curses is, similarly, a psychedelic experience where the actual characters are experienced through multiple layers and different eras: the medieval Xixia, the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) or the Republican periods, the Cultural Revolution—who knows?
Perhaps what feels truly timeless is that these people, Jasper and Snow Feather, are almost like Platonic beings that “fall” through time, perhaps beginning from that portal of Diamond Maiden Cave. They are not just bygone people, but the living tale of Xixia reenacting their enchanted story in this age and beyond. It is like life itself: unreal, dreamlike, yet possessing an undeniably manifest existence that we must seize, treasure, and cling on to for dear life (pun not intended). Letting go is a spiritual virtue for the wise, but doing it too soon can seem like cowardice, while to embrace the struggle can either be admirable, or seem like obstinacy or even overstaying one’s welcome. Everything has its season.
Curses is not for the faint of heart. It is full of dramatic, explicit imagery and difficult subjects about the nature of good and evil, death and loss. It does not seem like the Tanguts will be getting a children’s storybook anytime soon—but they would fit perfectly in a Horrible Histories volume. Nevertheless, Curses is also romantic, darkly funny, ironic, and in its own way full of love for the mess that is humanity.
It is the Tangut world, this universe of Mahakala, the Lord of Time and the body of Vajravahari the Diamond Maiden, brought to life in all its voluptuousness and violence.
References
Xue Mo. 2023. Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Related features from BDG
Tangut Tango: Exploring the Wuwei Xixia Museum in Gansu, China
Tangut Twilight: Living Buddhism in the City of Ghosts
Secrets of the Esoteric Empire: The Tangut Script
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The Caves of the Blazing Sword: Gansu Province’s Manjushri Mountain Grottoes
On The Hunt for the Water Moon Guanyin in “Pre-Genghis Esoteric North Asia”
