Journeys on the Silk Road (18 page)

A week later, Stein’s heart sank when he arrived early one morning at his reading room. The scrolls had vanished. Just when he had finally convinced Wang to empty the Library Cave, the rolls, which had been carefully piled outside the cave, had disappeared overnight. Chiang had not carried them away in the night, so what had happened? The answer, he soon learned, was that Wang had shifted them back into their “gloomy prison of centuries.”

Perhaps Stein should not have been surprised. Wang had appeared increasingly nervous during the previous couple of days, not least over the possible loss of the Chinese sutras. Relations had become strained, even as the tricky question of the size of the “donation” to the temple became more pressing. Wang had been allowed little opportunity to think as he had emptied the cave over the past week. “He had already been gradually led from one concession to another, and we took care not to leave him much time for reflection,” Stein wrote.

To the explorer, it seemed Wang had been overcome by scruples and baulked. Stein described the abbot’s mood as “sullen” when he encountered him that morning. All of this may well be true, but only Stein’s version of the events survives. Given the timing of the priest’s behavior, he might not have been as naive and credulous as Stein portrays him. Wang’s action came at a crucial stage. A couple of days earlier, the priest had raised the issue of money and seemed keen to resolve the matter. But then Stein deliberately strung out the negotiations so he could see the entire contents of the emptied cave. It may be that Wang recognized Stein’s delay for what it was and opted to force a resolution. If so, Wang was far more adept at negotiating than Stein realized. With the glittering prize seemingly within the explorer’s grasp, he found it snatched away. It is easy to imagine the effect of such a move: it would increase the treasure’s desirability, elevate anxiety about losing it forever and possibly raise the price. They are tactics familiar to any experienced negotiator. The natural response would be to close the deal as soon as possible.

Which appears to be exactly what happened. Within hours of Stein discovering the scrolls had been locked away, he and Wang agreed on a price and on what Stein could take. Wang felt sufficiently satisfied with the deal that he not only let Stein take all the material previously removed to his camp, but also agreed to part with further bundles of Chinese and Tibetan rolls. “Transaction settled by 11:30 a.m. to mutual satisfaction,” Stein noted in his diary on May 29, 1907.

He would not give Wang time to change his mind. The extra rolls needed to be moved quickly and the job was too big for Chiang alone. Stein conscripted two of his most trusted men, Ibrahim Beg and pony man Tila Bai, to undertake the nightly trip to the caves. They transferred scrolls and silks by the sackful from the temple to Stein’s camp.

The deal done, Wang was eager to resume the begging tour he had delayed when Stein arrived at the caves. Nervous, but relieved to have completed the difficult negotiation, Wang left for Dunhuang. He may have wanted to ensure that no word of their transaction had spread among his patrons in the oasis. He returned to the caves a week later sufficiently confident that their secret was safe, and sold Stein additional manuscripts.

For four horseshoes of silver, Stein acquired treasures beyond his dreams. He knew they were a bargain: “I secured as much as he possibly dared to give,—& for a sum which will make our friends at the [British Museum] chuckle,” he wrote candidly to his friend Fred Andrews, whom he also urged to secrecy. “It would be a mistake to let the news get about, & I must ask you & all other friends who may see this, for discretion.” A pittance it may have been to Stein, but perhaps Wang chuckled too. He had obtained money to restore his beloved caves and he now knew he had a valuable resource, one he would tap as other foreigners arrived in the months and years that followed.

Much as Stein might have wished to empty the Library Cave of all its scrolls and silks, he knew if he left Dunhuang with such a vast amount of material, it would not go undetected. Questions were being asked about what he was up to during his long visit at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. It is one reason why Stein commissioned a clay statue of Xuanzang for a cave temple. A Dunhuang sculptor produced what Stein regarded as an “artistic eyesore,” but the statue helped allay suspicions. Wang, who saw the statue as evidence of a shared reverence for their mutual patron saint, was at pains to spread word of this commission during his trip into Dunhuang.

There were other reasons that would hasten Stein’s departure. A diphtheria epidemic was rife in Dunhuang, and it came close enough to Stein and his men that a young local boy who kept a watch on his camp died of the illness. In addition, civil unrest over taxation was brewing in the oasis.

But his haul needed to be packed with great care and spirited away from Dunhuang without attracting attention. Stein knew that suddenly placing a large order for packing cases would cause alarm. Once again, he had thought ahead. Anticipating such a problem, he had bought some empty cases early on and secured others in discreet installments. He filled seven cases with manuscripts and a further five with paintings, embroideries, and other material. His camels were brought back from their grazing and five carts drawn by three horses each arrived from Dunhuang. On the morning of June 14 the caravan left the caves and he said farewell to Wang. “We parted in fullest amity,” Stein wrote. It would not be his last dealing with the pious Abbot Wang.

You should know that all of the teachings I give to you are a raft.

V
ERSE 6,
T
HE
D
IAMOND
S
UTRA

9

The Hidden Gem

Beneath a jeweled canopy in a leafy garden, the Buddha sits cross-legged on his lotus throne. Monks and bodhisattvas surround him. At his feet kneels an elderly barefoot disciple named Subhuti, his black slippers neatly beside him on a prayer mat. Subhuti’s palms are together in supplication and he directs a reverential gaze toward the Enlightened One in a quest for answers to life’s greatest questions. That image forms the frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra discovered in the Library Cave. At the opposite end of the scroll is the answer to a different question: how do we know the age of this singular document? There, a brief note reveals the answer: on the thirteenth day of the fourth moon of the ninth year of the Xiantong era. On the Chinese calendar, this corresponds to May 11, 868. It is this colophon which has established the Diamond Sutra’s unique claim: that this complete scroll is the oldest dated printed book in the world. It was created 600 years before Gutenberg got ink on his fingers. And it was made of a material—paper—that in 868 was unknown in the West.

The scroll is sixteen feet five inches long and eleven inches high, and explicitly says it was produced to be given away for free. It is woodblock printed, so it is possible hundreds of copies were made, although this is the only one known to have survived. As well as the date, the colophon tells who commissioned the sutra and why. It reads: “Reverently made for universal distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents.” Who this devoted son was, no one knows. He was probably wealthy to have commissioned the creation of a scroll with such an intricate frontispiece. But we do know he had it made as an act of merit, a good deed.

Between the ends of the famous scroll is one of Buddhism’s most popular and revered teachings. It begins, as sutras typically do, with the phrase “thus I have heard.” These are the words of the disciple Ananda, who is said to have memorized the Buddha’s every teaching. The sutra then tells the circumstances in which the sermon was delivered. It relates how one morning, before noon, the Buddha put on his monk’s robe, picked up his bowl and went into the nearby city of Sravasti to beg from house to house for his food.

The Buddha returned to the Jetavana Vihara where he lived with 1,250 monks. The Buddha ate the food he had been given, put away his bowl, washed his feet and sat down. A number of monks approached him and sat at his side. Among them was the Venerable Subhuti, and the sutra unfolds as a dialogue between the two. Subhuti is said to have been the nephew of Sudatta, the wealthy layman who covered Prince Jeta’s park with gold to create the garden in which they sat. Although an intelligent young man, Subhuti had a temper so furious he was shunned by those who knew him. He cursed humans and animals alike. Even the Buddha is said to have told him that his short temper was written on his face. After hearing the Buddha’s teachings, Subhuti was transformed; he developed a calm mind and became a prominent disciple.

In the sutra, Subhuti asks the Buddha questions about the practice of generosity, about enlightenment, and about how to be rid of attachment, the cause of all suffering. Subhuti wants to know whether, 500 years on, anyone will understand and practice the Buddha’s teachings and is reassured they will. On contemplating the answers the Buddha gives him, Subhuti is moved to tears. Subhuti also asks what this teaching should be called. This is often translated as the Diamond Cutter or the Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion. The Buddha, too, asks questions of Subhuti that test how well his disciple has understood their conversation.

The Buddha is said to have first taught the Diamond Sutra toward the end of his life, and it is considered a distillation of earlier teachings. At its core, the sutra is about the nature of reality, how things actually exist. Nothing is what it seems, he says. When stripped of our illusions, we realize everything, including ourselves, is constantly changing and that nothing exists independently. When we look at a book, for example, we typically think it has never been anything else. But a book, even one as enduring as Stein’s copy of the Diamond Sutra, was once just blank paper. Before then, it was a tree, a sapling, and a tiny seed that fell from another tree and so on. The implications of seeing the world in this way are far-reaching. The failure to do so leads ultimately to suffering.

The sutra concludes with a poetic verse that summarizes this.

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:

A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,

A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,

A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

It seems ironic that a work which deals with impermanence and life’s fleeting illusions is the world’s oldest known printed book. The Diamond Sutra is a puzzling and often paradoxical teaching. Nonetheless, it is one of the most reproduced in the Buddhist canon. The illustrated scroll was not the only copy of the Diamond Sutra in the Library Cave. Aurel Stein removed more than 500. Of these, only twenty-one were complete and just thirteen were dated.

Devoted son Wang Jie commissioned his Diamond Sutra as a good deed, or act of merit, on behalf of his mother and father. Acts of merit were, and still are, central to Buddhism and help explain why the religion played such a vital role in the development of printing. The more merit one creates, the better one’s rebirth and the swifter one’s path to enlightenment. So Wang Jie’s act, which harnessed the technology of printing to spread the Buddha’s teaching, could accumulate merit for his parents at a rate previously inconceivable.

A clue to why Wang Jie may have chosen the Diamond Sutra from the thousands of possible scriptures lies in the text itself. The sutra says one of the best ways to create merit is by copying it. The spiritual reward for doing so, it advises, is far greater even than countless acts of self-sacrifice.

The Diamond Sutra, known in Sanskrit as the
Vajracchedika Prajnaparamita,
is not the only sutra to advocate its own reproduction. The Diamond Sutra belongs to the Perfection of Wisdom, or
Prajnaparamita,
genre of sutras. These are the cornerstone of Mahayana Buddhism. According to legend, these sutras were entrusted from the time of the Buddha to fearsome water snakes, the Nagas. They delivered them to Nagarjuna, the great Indian teacher and one-time abbot of Nalanda. All of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras advocate propagating Buddhist teachings and the books that contain them. (This is the antithesis of India’s earlier sacred tradition, Hinduism. Long after the introduction of writing, it was forbidden to write down its ancient scriptures, the Vedas, and anyone who did so would be condemned to hell.) As one of the shortest Buddhist sutras, copying the Diamond Sutra had great appeal—as the number of copies in the Library Cave attests.

The creation of merit is a motivating force in Buddhism. Merit can be created in many ways, such as by not killing, stealing or lying. It can be generated through propagating the Buddha’s image (as in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas). It can also be generated by the transmission of the Buddha’s words. Moreover, the Diamond Sutra promises that memorizing even just four lines of its text will produce “incalculable” benefit. But, most importantly for printing, it can also be achieved through copying a sutra.