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

This paper nuances the dominant view that the Buddhist kingship of the Dali kingdom drew upon the Sinitic teaching of the _Humane King_. It does so by calling attention to a group of unstudied Esoteric Buddhist ritual manuals for the consecration (Sk. _abhiṣeka_; Ch. _guanding_) of the Dali rulers and by showcasing the ideal of divine rulership embodied in the final part of the ritual. I argue this section is modeled after the enthronement part of the Hindu kingship ritual _pratiṣṭhā_, through which the king reigns as an incarnation of the Buddha. Such a merging of the king and Buddha in one person was never attained in the _Humane King_ model but constitutes a parallel with the Hindu-inspired _buddharāja_ (Buddha-king) ideal in contemporaneous Southeast Asian Buddhist kingdoms. In drawing the parallel, this paper advocates repositioning Dali in a cosmopolitan world consisting of the synchronous pursuit of an Indian-inflected divine kingship.