THE DUNHUANG PHUR PA CORPUS: A SURVEY CATHY CANTWELL and ROBERT MAYER (Oxford) 1 1. Introductory Remarks A reasonable corpus of phur pa texts exist among the Dunhuang discoveries, several of which are fragmentary. 2 Most of the subject matter is ritual in focus, k k k k 1 Funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council made possible the research on which this article was based, and its presentation at the IATS Seminar in Bonn. 2 In the received tradition, the words, phur pa, phur bu, kīla and īlaya may be used to describe the ritual implement and/or the deity. The names and terms may currently be used with slightly different connotations from those in Dunhuang texts and are not always used consistently today. The term phur bu (sometimes interpreted as equivalent to īlaka) in more modern usage is sometimes restricted to the implement, while phur pa (sometimes interpreted as equivalent to kīla) can equally refer to the deity or the implement. The restriction of the word phur bu to the implement is by no means universal, and in practice, either phur bu or phur pa may be applied to the implement or the deity. Indeed, in some cases in the past and the present, the use of the term may be deliberately ambiguous and evocative, as in so much ritual language. In some of the Dunhuang materials, such as in PT 349, phur pa takes the form phur ba. This does not generally occur nowadays at all except as an error, but in the A mdo area, the grammatical particle pa is sometimes written as ba, so in this context, it may be considered acceptable by regional conventions. The term īlaya or vajra īlaya is ubiquitously used in Tibetan tradition to refer to the yi dam form of the deity or to its Tantric texts (the deified implements in the main deity’s retinue, often associated with the Buddha families, are sometimes called the kīlayas and sometimes the kīlas; hence, Buddha Kīlaya/Kīla, Ratna Kīlaya/Kīla etc.). In some Dunhuang and old texts—where it may not be clear that the yi dam deity form as it came to be recognised by the