Journeys on the Silk Road (20 page)

Around the same time, a Japanese empress commissioned a project known as the One Million Pagoda Charms. In gratitude for the end of a civil war, she ordered that a million charms be printed with Buddhist verses, which were rolled and inserted into miniature wooden pagodas. These were distributed to monasteries in the old capital of Nara, including the Horyuji Temple, the only temple that still possesses a collection of them. Examples of the pagodas, which resemble wooden chess pieces, are also in the collections of the British Library, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Kyoto National Museum in Japan. Two of the pagodas sold at a Christie’s auction in New York in September 2009, one for US$7,500 and the other for US$18,750.

The fact that the charms were inserted in mini pagodas suggests the text was never meant to be read or recited. The act of copying was itself beneficial. This is a longstanding and widespread Buddhist practice. Xuanzang witnessed it in India and described how verses from sutras were inserted into little paste stupas. The practice of creating text that will never be read continues today, where even a humble hand-held Tibetan Buddhist prayer wheel picked up from a tourist stall in Kathmandu contains a tiny rolled paper prayer.

In the West, the development of printing has been hailed as a great turning point for mankind, ushering in the modern age, contributing to the Renaissance, the spread of literacy and helping transform the role of the church and state. Philosopher Francis Bacon famously regarded printing as one of the three discoveries that changed the world, along with gunpowder and the compass. All three are Chinese inventions. Although much of the credit for the printing revolution has been attributed to Johannes Gutenberg and the development of moveable type, even that technology was known in China as early as the eleventh century, using characters made of baked clay. Pieces of moveable type, made of wood, were even found in the Mogao Caves in 1989. They were in an ancient Uyghur alphabet and dated between 960 and 1127. Four pieces are on display in the museum in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. But moveable type proved impractical for Chinese script with its tens of thousands of characters.

As it had in China, religion helped drive printing in the West. Gutenberg printed his first Bible in Germany in the 1450s. Fifty years later, about twenty million books had been printed, consisting of up to 15,000 different texts. These were mostly sacred works. It is a remarkable figure, considering Europe’s population was far smaller then and few people could read. Printing meant that, for the first time, ideas and information could be shared widely and cheaply. For that reason it was a dangerous technology with the potential for political and social upheaval. Theologian Martin Luther was quick to use the medium to spread dissent. He opposed the Roman Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences, the little paper certificates that remitted the punishment of sins. His printed objections soon spread around Europe and helped trigger the Reformation. The age of the book had arrived.

The key that unlocked the Library Cave for Stein was the translator monk Xuanzang. His versions of Buddhist texts were among the first batch of scrolls allowed (albeit furtively) out of the caves, a discovery that proved astonishing to Abbot Wang and convenient for Stein. However, the printed Diamond Sutra was not the work of Xuanzang but of an even earlier monk named Kumarajiva, who translated the sutra from Sanskrit into Chinese around 402. Although Xuanzang is revered for his sixteen-year trek to India and back, Kumarajiva is the most highly regarded of China’s four great translator monks. His free-flowing translations remain the most popular even today, partly because they go beyond Xuanzang’s literal versions.

The Diamond Sutra, usually divided into thirty-two verses, has been translated many times into many languages. Six Chinese translations alone made between 402 and 703 survive. There were also early translations into Tibetan, Khotanese and Mongolian. But centuries passed before the words of the Diamond Sutra became known in the West. The first significant English translation, penned by a German scholar named Max Müller, appeared only in the 1890s, little more than a decade before Stein arrived in Dunhuang. It took more than half a century for the next major translation to appear when scholar Edward Conze, a Marxist turned Buddhist, published his translation in 1957. In recent years, translations of the Diamond Sutra have gathered pace, including versions by prominent Vietnamese author and monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Western Tibetan Buddhist monk George Churinoff and American writer Red Pine (Bill Porter).

The Diamond Sutra is one of the most revered texts in Buddhism. It was among the most popular sutras in China during the Tang dynasty, the era when Wang Jie commissioned his scroll. Its enduring popularity is in part because of its brevity—it can be recited in forty minutes. It is shorter than the Lotus Sutra but longer than the Heart Sutra, two other popular and influential texts. Some sutras can take hours, or even days, to recite. The Diamond Sutra has a special place among Zen Buddhists (known as Chan Buddhists in China) whose founding father, Huineng, is said to have achieved enlightenment when as a poor, illiterate youth he overheard a man reciting it.

In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha acknowledges that those who study the text can expect to be disparaged and held in contempt. The Buddha encourages forbearance and persistence with the promise that such persecution will be beneficial. Perhaps devotees took heart in such words; the oldest known printed book was created against a backdrop of suppression of Buddhism in China. Just two decades before Wang Jie commissioned his sutra, attempts to eradicate Buddhism saw monasteries destroyed, bronze statues melted down for coins, land confiscated, monks and nuns defrocked, and foreign monks sent packing. Not until the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s would Buddhism experience a crackdown so extensive. The persecution reached its peak in 845 under the Emperor Wuzong, a Daoist who issued an imperial decree attacking the Buddhist faith. He condemned it as foreign and idolatrous. It had seduced people’s hearts, corrupted their morals and robbed them of their gold and their strength to work. When men stopped farming and women stopped weaving, people went hungry and cold, yet the lavishly endowed monasteries rivaled palaces in their grandeur, according to the decree. In short, Buddhism was an evil that needed to be eradicated. Buddhists were not the only ones who felt the imperial wrath. Nestorians, Manicheans and Zoroastrians were also targeted as pernicious foreign imports, unlike home-grown Daoists and Confucians.

The emperor’s actions were driven as much by economics as ideology. The monasteries were wealthy but paid no taxes. And the emperor needed money, especially after a war against the Uyghurs two years earlier had further emptied already depleted imperial coffers. The suppression of Buddhism was short. The emperor died in 846, possibly—and ironically—because of the long-life potions he consumed. But during his six-year rule many of China’s estimated 4,600 temples and 40,000 shrines were destroyed, and more than a quarter of a million monks and nuns returned to lay and taxpaying life. Gold, silver, and jade were confiscated, and sacred images made of iron were turned into agricultural tools. Only images made of less valuable materials—clay, wood, and stone—were left alone.

Von Le Coq suspected he had found evidence of the suppression when he made a grisly find near Turfan in the winter of 1904–05. In a ruined Buddhist temple he uncovered the piled corpses of more than a hundred murdered monks. The dry desert air had preserved their robes, desiccated skin, hair, and signs of the fatal wounds. One skull had been slashed with a saber that split the victim’s head down to the teeth.

Although the next emperor was more favorably disposed to the faith, Buddhism never fully recovered in China. Its golden age was over and its long decline began. Dunhuang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas escaped the extensive destruction. This was largely because the oasis was effectively cut off from China, having fallen under Tibetan control. Tibet, which had conquered a number of Silk Road towns, seized Dunhuang around 781. The caves thrived under Tibetan control. The Tibetans had only recently become Buddhist and brought the zeal of the newly converted and their own art forms, creating nearly fifty caves. Tibet continued to control the oasis for the next seventy years—providentially this coincided with the worst of the persecution. The locals resisted the Tibetans, but the invaders were not ousted from Dunhuang until 848, three years after the persecution ended. As a result, much of the Buddhist art destroyed throughout China survived intact at the caves. No one knows when the printed Diamond Sutra arrived at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, but it found refuge in a place that escaped the religious crackdown elsewhere.

10

The Thieves’ Road

Storing his precious cargo was Stein’s prime concern as the caravan of heavily laden camels left the caves. He intended further travels east and surveying over summer, but to do that he needed to leave behind all surplus baggage. The easiest option was to deposit his treasures at the
yamen
in Dunhuang. There the goods would be under the watchful eye of his learned friend and supporter, the magistrate Wang Ta-lao-ye.

But Stein changed his mind and decided to store everything at Anxi instead, seventy miles east of Dunhuang. Although a forlorn hamlet, it was a convenient crossroads. Anxi was little more than one rundown main street and had such an air of neglect that Dunhuang appeared a thriving city in comparison. Nonetheless, storing his haul in Anxi would prove a fortuitous decision.

The cases of manuscripts and textiles were hauled into the
yamen
of the Anxi magistrate, who gave Stein the use of a storeroom off his private courtyard. The room was well ventilated and could be easily watched. The cases were raised off the ground on timber beams laid over brick pillars. Although rain was rare, it fell while Stein was in Anxi—the first downpour he had seen in nearly a year. Ibrahim Beg remained behind to keep watch and ensure the cases were carried into the sun for a weekly airing. Ostensibly to prevent damp, the regular removal allowed him to discreetly check that the sealed cases remained intact.

Confident his cargo was secure, Stein again escaped the desert’s summer heat and headed southeast to survey in the Nan Shan Mountains. As he did, civil unrest over taxation that had been simmering in Dunhuang finally boiled over. The town was gripped by riots during which more than a dozen people were killed. Amid the violence, the Dunhuang
yamen
of magistrate Wang Ta-lao-ye was looted and burned. The manuscripts that had been so perfectly preserved for a millennium narrowly escaped being reduced to ash within weeks of being released from the safety of the sealed cave.

Stein learned of the unrest during a week-long halt in Suzhou, where he was entertained by Chinese officials. On the eve of his departure, he wanted to repay their hospitality. But his Ladakhi servant, Aziz, whose enthusiasm outweighed his experience in such matters, insisted on serving the meal Chinese-style. In the resulting culinary confusion, the guests were expected to eat their custard with chopsticks. Many times Stein must have regretted that the expedition’s sole capable cook, Jasvant Singh, could prepare food only for Stein’s two Indian assistants, the handyman and the surveyor. For caste reasons, he could not cook for Stein.

The mountain trip was notable for one other bizarre event. At the eastern edge of Gansu province, the furthest they traveled, handyman Naik Ram Singh searched for a quiet camping area just outside a town. He ushered the party into the grounds of what he believed was an old temple. Although a local official tried to dissuade him from using the site, the Naik was insistent. These were just the kind of peaceful quarters his leader favored, he explained through an interpreter. Perhaps something got lost in translation.