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Ancient Buddhist Scrolls at the Dunhuang Cave
From: The British Library
| By:
Susan Whitfield |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
During the first millennium, the predominance of Buddhism in the East encouraged a love of manuscripts and a fast-growing publishing industry. In 1900, a monk accidentally discovered the only extant Buddhist library in a cave at Dunhuang, an important commercial town strategically placed where the Silk Road west from China branched to bypass the Taklamakan Desert. Thousands of ancient documents of all descriptions were uncovered--by far the most significant discovery of this kind to date--and these manuscripts have become the basis for the International Dunhuang Project, which endeavours to digitise and analyse the material. Susan Whitfield of the British Library shares this discovery with us. |
 his finely printed frontispiece to a Buddhist scripture predates Gutenberg by six centuries and represents the mature printing industry of imperial China.
 As the earliest printed dated document in the world, it is of unique historical worth, yet it is just one of a cache of 40,000 manuscripts and documents dating from the first millennium whose discovery has changed our understanding of ancient Central Asia and China. |
There must have once been hundreds of thousands of religious and secular documents in the many cities along the busy trading routes now known as the Silk Road, yet all but a few have inevitably been lost over the past millennium. For some reason--we do not know why--a large number of such documents were placed carefully inside a Buddhist cave near the town of Dunhuang (now in Gansu Province in West China). The cave was discovered by accident in 1900 with its precious cache intact, preserved by the dry desert air. |
The cave complex was man-made, with Buddhist monks and lay believers from the mid-fourth century on excavating caves in the friable cliff for meditation, living and as chapels. The plastered walls and ceilings of the chapel caves were completely covered with Buddhist murals and decorated with stucco statues, also painted. In its heyday in the latter part of the first millennium there were more than 1,000 caves in three and sometimes four layers along half a mile of cliff face. |
This was not the only Buddhist institution in the vicinity. The documents name more than a dozen monasteries and nunneries in Dunhuang and all would have had libraries of sacred texts. Some of the documents contain monastery library stamps. There was also a library associated with the secular administration of the town and, when control switched from the Chinese to the Tibetans in the mid-eighth century and supplies of paper from Central China dried up, scribes used the backs of obsolete Chinese secular documents to write their Buddhist texts. |
The Chinese regained control a century later and the local Buddhist bishop commissioned a large cave at the foot of the cliffs. After his death, a small side cave was hewn from this and dedicated as his memorial chapel. We do not know the reasons for subsequent events, but, sometime afterward, the statue of the bishop was removed from the memorial chapel and the cave was filled floor to ceiling with document scrolls, perhaps ex-library copies, along with fine paintings on silk and hemp. At the beginning of the second millennium, the chapel entrance was plastered and painted over. |
 Activity at the cave site continued for another couple of centuries, but the library cave was not disturbed. The Mongols took control of the region in the thirteenth century and emperors of the succeeding Chinese Ming Dynasty in 1372 decided to withdraw their garrisons from the western regions. The cave site fell into disrepair and the Silk Road, along which the traffic was not only of trade goods but also of people and, with them, ideas--cultures, religions, technologies and arts--lost its role as the main artery of a thriving world economic order. |
The cave was accidentally discovered by a monk who had settled at Dunhuang in the 1890s. He was determined to restore the murals, and in June 1900, in the course of this work, he uncovered the hidden door. He soon distributed several of the finest paintings and manuscripts to local officials, hoping thereby to secure government funds for his work. These were not forthcoming, and when a series of foreign archaeologists arrived he handed over great quantities of the documents in return for restoration funds. |
By this time the Silk Road was dominated by Islamic Culture; one Chinese scholar has hypothesised that it was the Muslim armies' advance to Khotan, the kingdom neighbouring Dunhuang to the west, that prompted local Buddhists to hide their sacred texts in the cave. But while the second millennium has been Islamic, the first millennium was the heyday of Buddhism in this region, and this is reflected in the documents, the vast majority of which are Buddhist texts. |
Of course, Buddhism was only one of the religions of the Silk Road. Judaism, Nestorian Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Manicheanism all came with travellers from Persia, while local religions included forms of shamanism. But Buddhism was dominant, permeating all levels of society and impinging on the everyday life of the populace of Dunhuang and other Silk Road cities. It brought the idea of hell into Chinese consciousness, and the death of a loved one, not unnaturally, was inevitably an occasion for turning to Buddhism. A popular Buddhist text tells of how, when a person dies, he has interviews with 10 kings of the underworld to review his behaviour during his life. The kings judge whether he should be sent to hell or at what level of being he should be reborn. Several of the Dunhuang texts are copies of this scripture and are dedicated by the bereaved to their deceased relative in the hope that the merit accumulated from copying the text would help to smooth the relative's path through the underworld. |
One of the most popular figures in Chinese Buddhism was the bodhisattva Guanyin--"he who hears the cries of the world." A bodhisattva is a person who has reached the brink of Buddhist salvation, or nirvana, but delays entering this state to help other suffering beings reach the same stage. As his name suggests, Guanyin was noted for helping those in danger or need who call out his name. The Guanyin Sutra--of which there are several hundred copies in the Dunhuang collection--recounts such dangers and was often illustrated, as shown here. |
The Dunhuang manuscripts also provide evidence of the imperial support of Buddhism. Among the texts are some that have been copied by scribes in the capital of China. They contain long notes at the end giving the names and ranks of the original scribe, the dyer (Buddhist manuscripts were usually coloured yellow with a dye extracted from the Amur cork tree--Phellodendron amurense--which had both water- and insect-repellent properties), the various editors of the text and the overall editor. These are made on fine yellow hemp paper, scrolled around wooden rollers inlaid with mother-of-pearl and tied with coloured silk ribbon. They remain beautiful objects and are usually in excellent condition. |
As the only extant Buddhist library of this period, the manuscripts are a unique scholarly source. Yet they have never been studied as a whole--as a library. Their dispersal to several different countries within 15 years of their discovery is the main impediment to research. In 1907, the British archaeologist Sir M. Aurel Stein transported several cartloads to the British Museum. When the British Library was established as an independent institution in 1972, the Stein Dunhuang materials were divided, the paintings staying with the museum and the textual material going to the library. A French scholar, Paul Pelliot, arrived less than a year after Stein and the manuscripts he acquired are now in the Bibliothhque Nationale de France in Paris (with painted items in the Musie Guimet). Many more documents were transported under official envoy to the Chinese capital in 1909-10 and they now form the basis of the collection in the National Library of China in Beijing. Russian and Japanese archaeologists were also drawn to Dunhuang and acquired yet more material. The Institute of Oriental Studies in St. Petersburg is the repository for the Russian collections, while the Japanese collections have been dispersed among several public and private collections. There are smaller collections in several other countries. |
And it is not only the collection that is dispersed among continents. Different fragments of the same text are also found in different collections. Although there are catalogues and facsimiles in the form of microfilms, none are complete. And the microfilms are black and white and not always of sufficient quality for all the text to be legible. This most valuable primary source remains under exploited. |
The International Dunhuang Project was founded at the British Library in late 1993 to address this issue. It followed a conference which, for the first time, brought together curators and conservators from all the major Dunhuang collections. The dilemma was how to increase access for scholars while ensuring the preservation of the manuscripts for future generations. Digitisation is expensive, but in this case it was the only and obvious solution. Making available colour images of all the documents from the library cave at a quality which makes them at least as legible as the originals (and in some cases, more so) was, in early 1994, possible because of the acceleration of the capacity of computers then taking place. After four years of development and data input, the International Dunhuang Project Interactive Database went live on the Internet in October 1998, providing scholars with free access to entries on more than 20,000 manuscripts and more than 2,000 images in the British Library's Stein Collection. Developments continue to be made and data added, and in June 2000 a new map interface went live, enabling users to navigate down through maps to search for manuscripts and photographs. |
The British Library has supported the International Dunhuang Project since its inception by providing it with a home, equipment, funds for travel and printing of the newsletter, and some conservation and photographic support. However, the project remains largely externally self-funded and has received support from many sources. |
The study of the Dunhuang Buddhist corpus is still in its infancy, despite the predominance of these materials, and the work of IDP will help to remedy this. However, there is already a thriving tradition of scholarship on the Dunhuang secular materials, most especially in China, Japan and France. |
Dunhuang was important strategically, since it was where the Silk Road west from China branched to bypass the Taklamakan Desert. One branch hugged the foothills of the snowcapped Heavenly Mountains (Tianshan), which separated the desert from the steppes of what is now Mongolia. The southern branch followed the massive Kunlun Mountains and passed though the famous jade-producing kingdom of Khotan. The two branches rejoined at Kashgar, still an international market for traders from Pakistan and the Central Asian regions to the east and west. For travellers coming from India or Persia, the west, Dunhuang was a welcome site--the start of the last leg of their journey to the Chinese capital, Chang'an. |
The manuscripts reflect the diversity of the peoples that passed through Dunhuang, with documents in many languages and scripts. But they also reflect the dominance of Chinese culture in Dunhuang for most of its heyday. The majority of the documents are in Chinese and some have been carried to Dunhuang from the Chinese heartland, 1,000 miles east. These include some texts which were referred to in the Chinese histories but which, before the Dunhuang discovery, were thought to be lost forever. Perhaps the most famous is a vivid narrative poem, "The Lady of Qin," which tells the story of a woman caught up in the sacking of the Chinese capital by rebels in the 880s. |
In the kuei-mao year of Chung-ho, in the third month of spring,
Outside the city walls of Lo-yang, the blossom was like snow.
East and west, north and south, wayfarers were at rest;
The green willows were still, their fragrant scent was departed.
Suddenly, by the wayside I saw a flower-like lady
Reclining in solitude beneath the shade of the green willows. |
Perhaps this poem was taken to Dunhuang by someone fleeing the rebels, or by a military or secular officer posted there. The Chinese had local administrative offices at Dunhuang, including an Etiquette Bureau and a department responsible for calculating the calendar. Several of the documents drafted by the Etiquette Bureau have survived in the Dunhuang Library, including several examples of model letters--form letters for various situations, such as how to write to a superior asking about promotion, how to write to the local Buddhist abbot, appropriate phrases to add about the weather depending on the season. One letter is an apology written to one's host after getting drunk and disgracing oneself at his dinner party the night before. |
Yesterday, having drunk too much, I was intoxicated as to pass all bounds; but none of the rude and coarse language I used was uttered in a conscious state. The next morning, after hearing others speak on the subject, I realised what had happened, whereupon I was overwhelmed with confusion and ready to sink into the earth with shame. |
Calendar calculation was considered to be an important function of the imperial state. The calendar "fixed the time" based on a combination of solar days and lunar years, determined when the year of an individual ruler would commence, showed cyclical dates and predicted cosmic events. The traditional date for the first publication of a Chinese imperial calendar is 2265 BCE, and the earliest extant example dates from the fifth to third centuries BCE (although parts of it may date from the ninth century BCE). |
The government produced the official calendar as a sign of its right to rule. The emperor's actions affected the balance of yin and yang and, if he did not act virtuously, could therefore lead to cosmic imbalance, displayed as unusual cosmic events such as eclipses or comets. The concept of "Heaven's Mandate" (Tianming), propounded by the classical Chinese philosopher Mencius, gave people the right to rebel if the current ruler showed insufficient virtue to retain the mandate. Heavenly signs, if not predicted and appropriately interpreted by the ruler's diviners, could legitimately be taken as an indication of the decline of a regime. Diviners were therefore vital to the ruler's legitimacy, but, if not under his control, they could also pose a threat to his power by making unwelcome predictions. |
In the Chinese Han dynasty, calendrical works predicting the end of the dynasty and the characters of the founder of the succeeding dynasty started to be secretly produced. This school, in which the teachings were handed down from diviner to pupil in secrecy, had a part in the Yellow Turban rebellion which brought down the Han dynasty the early third century. Not surprisingly, therefore, works of divination were the subject of the 267 censorship ordinance--the first in China since the infamous book burning of the First Emperor, 500 years earlier. |
Similar ordinances were promulgated by succeeding dynasties, and the official decree of 835, which stipulated that the private printing and possession of almanacs was forbidden by law, follows this tradition. By itself, the decree, almost certainly the oldest publication ordinance in the world, suggests that almanacs were subject to strict censorship. But while several of the Dunhuang manuscript calendars were official copies prepared locally, there are also tantalising fragments of printed almanacs. These include one produced in present-day Sichuan, to the southwest of China and well out of the way of the central authorities. Another, however, bears the information "Printed in the Eastern Market of the Capital by the Dali Family Printers." |
There were two large markets in the then capital, Chang'an (present-day Xian). The Western Market was the hub of Silk Road goods and traders. The Eastern Market was more local, and was adjacent to a residential area where many of the local officials and aristocrats lived. In other words, this almanac, despite the ban, was printed right under the noses of the administration. Its existence suggests, therefore, that the ban was not strictly enforced. |
This is just one example of how a single fragment can revise the picture presented by the traditional Chinese histories - the main source for scholarship to date. Moreover, the Chinese histories are centred on official business in the capital and heartland of China; they offer scant information on everyday life in China's vast western garrisons. China and the Silk Roads were among the most influential areas of the world in the first millennium, and the Dunhuang cache of documents is therefore primary source material not only for study of China but also for world history. The documents deserve much more recognition and scholarly attention than they have hitherto received. It is hoped that the work of the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library will help achieve this. |
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