A fabulous archeological treasure-house

The Silk Route

Multiculturalism, globalism and globalization are not a new phenomenon. History shows that religions, arts, cultures and people themselves have interacted to create remarkable blends that distinguish each country from the other. The historical Silk Road which is an example of "thin globalization," provided an economic and cultural link between ancient Europe and Asia. The Chinese silk trade increased the arrival of foreign traders to the “Middle Kingdom” or the “Centre of the world”. During the time of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE), 5000-mile stretch of Silk trade route linked Asia to Europe and Africa exposing both the Chinese and visitors to their country to different cultures and religions. Because of trade along the Silk Route, Buddhism spread from India to China by the Han Dynasty, Islam, Nestorian Christianity and Zoroastrianism. and by the Tang Dynasty.

Buddhism

Buddhism is the fourth largest religion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. Buddhism in India began with the life of Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563-483 B.C.), a prince from the small Shakya Kingdom located in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal. Lived in opulence and splendor, one day he came to know the sorrows of the real world and abandoned his home and his family, wandered forth searching for the meaning of existence. Eventually, under the Bodhi tree in the forests of Gaya (in modern Bihar), he solved the mystery of existence and found the Four Noble Truths. By the third century B.C., through the effort of the Mauryan Empire the religion based on the Buddha's teachings was being spread throughout South Asia and by the seventh century A.D., had been spread throughout East and Southeast Asia. For centuries Indian kings and merchants patronized Buddhist monasteries and raised stone structures called stupas over the relics of the Buddha in reverence to his memory.

Buddhism in China

During Emperor Ming of HAN’s reign Buddhism began to spread into China. The Emperor then sent a delegation to India for Buddhist texts. Back home along with the two Indian Bodhisattvas, Kashyapa Matanga and Dharmaratna they brought a picture of Sakayamuni Buddha and some sutras, on a white horse. There they started to translate the sutra in a temple, later called White Horse Temple. They translated 5 sutras, but only one still exists, i.e. "Sutra in 42 sections". In fact, that time China had three main streams of thought: Confucianism, Taoism, and folk religion. These various thoughts sometimes competed with each other and with Buddhism. The Mahayana of India became the Mahayana of China and, later, of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

Dunhuang : a city on the old silk route

Dunhuang means to flourish and prosper, was founded by Emperor Wudi of the Han dynasty in 111 BC is a city in Jiuguan, Gansu province in China. It has a special place in history because of its location close to the parting of the northern and southern silk routes. Many priests who traveled from China seeking Buddhist teachings and monks from India and Central Asia stopped in Dunhuang en route to India and Central Asia. In Dunhuang stands the "White Horse Pagoda," which, according to legend, commemorates the horse that accompanied the important monastic translator Kumarajiva. The best known of these travelers who passed through Dunhuang was Xuanzang in the seventh century. He returned from India with hundreds of manuscripts and he devoted his last years translating them at Chang’an the capital of Tang dynasty (present-day Xi’an). In the late seventh century a pagoda was erected in his honor. The monk Dharmaraksha, was called the Bodhisattva of Dunhuang lived in the third and fourth centuries and translated the Lotus and other sutras into Chinese, came from this area. In the fifth century, the Indian monks Dharmamitra (356-442) came to this area and stayed for some time to preach.

Dunhuang: Outstanding achievement of world art

In Dunhuang there are more than 500 caves, 492 of which shelter a total of 45,000 square meters of wall paintings and 2,415 colour statues of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. They had been created from the 4th to 14th century and preserved for about seventeen centuries in fairly good condition. It is an extravaganza of Buddhist art with an unrivalled magnitude and historiography. This nonpareil temple propagating a religion of Indian origin away from it’s own land. Mogao caves is one of the historical names of Dunhuang. It’s another world famous historical name is Qian Fo Dong - the "Thousand Buddha caves". In addition, a few other sites of Buddhist caves are located in the Dunhuang region, including the Yulin (42 caves), Eastern Thousand Buddhas (23 caves ), and Shuixiakou (8 caves) in Anxi county, the Western Thousand Buddhas (22 caves) and the Five-temple (6 caves) and One-temple Cave (2 caves) in Subei county.

Discovery of the Sutra Cave

The “Cave for Preserving Scriptures” was discovered by a Taoist monk Wang Yuanlu in 1900. A large number of ancient manuscripts and documents as well as paintings and other pieces of artwork were found in the caves. Among them were numerous manuscripts of Buddhist scriptures, dating from the fifth to the eleventh century. Other items included Taoist, Confucian, Manichaean, and Nestorian scriptures. The scriptures and documents were written in Chinese, Brahmi script, Tibetan, Khotanese, Kuchean, Sogdian, Turkish, Uighur, and the writing system of the kingdom of Hsi-hsia.
In 1906, Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1942), a Hungarian-born Jewish employee of the British Government in India, came to China and was finally allowed into the cave, There he found the ancient sutra scrolls heaped up in piles several meters high. His expeditions, published in full in the 1920s, made him a celebrity. The manuscripts from the cave are now largely housed in four major institutions: the National Library of China, the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Institute of Oriental Studies, St Petersburg, with smaller holdings elsewhere. At present there is no complete catalogue and none of these institutions can offer full access to its collection. Although microfilms and other facsimile forms of the manuscripts exist, these are still incomplete and often of poor quality.

The International Dunhuang Project, IDP, was founded in 1994 to create a virtual library of all the cave documents in high-quality digital format. It is an international collaborative effort based at the British Library in London, to catalogue, conserve, and encourage research of Silk Road artifacts. For more information click the following link: http://idp.bl.uk/. which currently displays around 20,000 digitized images of these artifacts, is one product of this larger effort.