Journeys On The Silk Road Part 3

Before one scene in particular Stein displayed great interest-and not just because it was one that did have a basis in truth. It was an image Stein realized might help advance his own case. The painting showed Xuanzang on the bank of a raging river, his horse loaded with bundles of ma.n.u.scripts. A large turtle swam toward the pilgrim to help carry the precious load across. It was a reference to the twenty pony-loads of books and relics Xuanzang brought back from India to China. "Would the pious guardian read this obvious lesson aright, and be willing to acquire spiritual merit by letting me take back to the old home of Buddhism some of the ancient ma.n.u.scripts which chance had placed in his keeping?" Stein decided not to press the point just yet. Rather, he was content that a bond had been established between himself and the abbot.

He left Chiang behind with w.a.n.g to raise again the tricky question of borrowing some of the ma.n.u.scripts the abbot had promised earlier in the day. But w.a.n.g would not commit to producing them. "There was nothing for me but to wait," Stein wrote.

8.

Key to the Cave Under cover of darkness, a figure quietly crept from the caves to Stein's tent beneath the fruit trees later that night. It was Chiang, and he was carrying a bundle of ma.n.u.scripts. w.a.n.g, he whispered gleefully to Stein, had just paid him a secret visit. Hidden under the priest's flowing black robe had been the first of the promised scrolls. What they were, Chiang wasn't sure. But Stein could see that the paper they were made of was old, at least as old as the roll the helpful young monk had shown him on his first visit to the caves weeks earlier. The writing was Chinese and Chiang thought the doc.u.ments might be Buddhist scriptures, but he needed time to study them. He returned to his quarters at the feet of the big Buddha and spent the night poring over them.

At daybreak, he was back at Stein's tent, barely able to contain his excitement. Colophons, or inscriptions, on the rolls showed they were Chinese versions of Buddhist texts brought from India. Moreover, they were copies from translations by the great Xuanzang himself. It was an astonis.h.i.+ng coincidence. Even the usually skeptical Chiang suggested that this was a most auspicious omen. Auspicious and convenient. Chiang hastened to w.a.n.g to plant the seeds of this "quasi-divine" event. Had not the spirit of Xuanzang revealed the ma.n.u.script h.o.a.rd to w.a.n.g ahead of the arrival from distant India of the pilgrim's devoted "disciple"-Stein? The untutored w.a.n.g could not possibly have known the connection these ma.n.u.scripts had with Xuanzang when he selected them from among the thousands of scrolls and delivered them to Chiang the previous night. Surely this was proof that opening the cave would have Xuanzang's blessing.

All morning, Stein kept away from w.a.n.g and the Library Cave, busying himself with photographing elsewhere. But when Chiang returned a few hours later with news that w.a.n.g had unbricked the cave's door, Stein could wait no longer. No one was about on that hot cloudless day. Even the soldiers who had tailed him all morning had disappeared for an opium-induced siesta as Stein made his way to the cave. There he found a nervous w.a.n.g. With Stein beside him, w.a.n.g opened the rough door that lay behind the dismantled wall. Stein looked on in wonder: "The sight of the small room disclosed was one to make my eyes open wide. Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest's little lamp a solid ma.s.s of ma.n.u.script bundles rising to a height of nearly ten feet."

He was looking at one of the great archaeological finds of all time.

There was barely room for two people to stand in the tiny room, about nine feet by nine feet, and certainly no s.p.a.ce to unroll or examine the stacked bundles. Much as Stein wanted to remove every scroll from the cramped niche to a large painted temple where he could readily study them, he knew w.a.n.g would not agree. w.a.n.g feared the consequences if a foreigner was spied examining the contents of the cave he had been ordered to keep sealed. He could lose his position and patrons if rumors spread around the oasis. He was not going to jeopardize all he had worked for. Even in the quietest times, pilgrims occasionally visited the caves to light incense, ring a bell, and pay homage before the Buddha. But the abbot did agree to remove one or two bundles at a time and allow Stein a quick look. He also agreed to let Stein use a small restored cave chapel nearby that had been fitted with a door and paper windows. Screened from prying eyes, Stein set up what he called his "reading room."

As w.a.n.g busied himself inside the Library Cave, Stein looked for any hint of when it had been sealed and a clue therefore to the age of the ma.n.u.scripts hidden within. Two features drew his attention: a slab of black marble and a mural of bodhisattvas. The three-foot-wide block was originally inside the cave, but w.a.n.g had moved it to the pa.s.sageway outside. It was inscribed to the memory of a monk named Hong Bian with a date corresponding to the middle of the ninth century. This suggested the cave could not have been sealed before then. On the pa.s.sageway wall were the remains of the mural-a row of saintly bodhisattvas carrying offerings of divine food-that helped conceal the entrance to the Library Cave. Fortunately w.a.n.g's restorations had not extended to these figures. To Stein, hungry for clues, they provided more earthly nourishment. Their style suggested they were painted no later than the thirteenth century. So somewhere between the ninth century and the thirteenth, the cave had been filled, then sealed. If his deduction was right, whatever was inside the cave would be very old indeed.

Stein at first believed the cave had been filled in great confusion, and from this he formed a theory about why it was concealed. "There can be little doubt that the fear of some destructive invasion had prompted the act," he wrote. But he also found evidence for a conflicting theory: that the cave was no more than a storehouse for sacred material. He noted bags carefully packed with fragments of sacred writings and paintings. "Such insignificant relics would certainly not have been collected and sewn up systematically in the commotion of a sudden emergency."

Scholars agree the cave was plastered shut around the beginning of the eleventh century, but the reasons why remain unclear. The cave's guardians may have feared Islamic invaders from the west. The sword of Islam had already conquered Dunhuang's ally, Khotan, in 1006. Invaders did come from the north, but these were Tanguts who, as Buddhists themselves, seem an unlikely threat to Buddhist scriptures.

But there is also support for Stein's other thesis, that the cave was a storeroom or tomb for material no longer needed by local monasteries. The printed Diamond Sutra, for example, showed signs of damage and repeated repair and may simply have been judged to have reached the end of its useful life. Buddhists did not simply throw away sacred material. They buried it reverentially. Even today Buddhism has rites surrounding the disposal of spiritual writings.

The cave does not appear to have been sealed ahead of an unrecorded exodus from the sacred complex. Nearby Dunhuang was still a bustling oasis when the cave was hidden. The area had a population of about 20,000, including about 1,000 monks and nuns in more than a dozen monasteries. The caves too were thriving, with some of their most beautiful chapels still to be created. Indeed the caves continued to thrive after the arrival of Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. Although the Mongol chief ransacked Dunhuang, he not only left the caves undamaged, his rule saw new ones commissioned. The caves were still flouris.h.i.+ng 300 years after the Library Cave was sealed. The last cave is believed to have been painted in 1357, just before the start of the Ming dynasty. Soon after, the Silk Road was abandoned, and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas sank into a long decline.

Whatever the reason for its sealing, the Library Cave-or Cave 17 as it is prosaically known today-wasn't always used to house ma.n.u.scripts. It was initially a memorial chapel for the monk whose name was on the marble slab, Hong Bian, who died around the time the Diamond Sutra was being printed. He was an important monk-so important he had the right to wear the highly prestigious color purple. A statue of him, seated in meditation posture, was initially installed in the cave. It was placed against a wall behind which was painted a decorative scene including two attendants-one holding a staff, the other holding a fan-and a pair of trees from which hang his pilgrim's bag and water bottle. The statue was removed when the cave was filled with scrolls and has since been found to contain traces of purple silk. When and why the cave changed from being a memorial chapel to housing the scrolls remains a mystery.

As w.a.n.g brought the first of the bundles to Stein's "reading room," the explorer's excitement mounted. They were Chinese sutras, neatly rolled, about a foot high and some more than thirty feet long. The thick paper rolls, enclosed in protective cotton wrappers, even retained their yellow dye despite signs of having been much handled. The strong paper was astonis.h.i.+ngly well preserved. Other scrolls had lost their wrappers and were fastened with rough cords, but even these were undamaged. The dry desert air, the darkness within the cave and even the insulating sand had all combined to provide a perfect tomb in which they had lain undisturbed for centuries.

"No place could have been better adapted for preserving such relics than a chamber carved in the live rock of these absolutely barren hills and completely shut off from any moisture that the atmosphere of this desert valley ever contained," Stein wrote. "Enclosed by thick rock everywhere, except for the narrow walled-up entrance, and that, too, covered up by drift-sand for centuries, the air within the small chapel could have undergone but slight changes of temperature. Not in the driest soil could the relics of a ruined site have been so completely protected from injury as they had been here."

With the doc.u.ments finally in their hands, exactly what they were looking at was hard to say. Chiang had no understanding of Buddhist literature and Stein, to his immense frustration and regret, could not read Chinese. Not that they had time for more than a cursory look. Chiang's attempt to make a rough list of the findings was soon abandoned as w.a.n.g, having overcome his initial reluctance, began dragging out bundle after bundle from the cave. "It would have required a whole staff of learned scribes to deal properly with such a deluge," Stein wrote. As w.a.n.g clambered across the cave's mountain of doc.u.ments to remove bundles, Stein feared the priest would be buried under an avalanche of tumbling ma.n.u.scripts.

Each bundle contained about ten rolls, mostly Chinese scrolls. But there were also doc.u.ments in Tibetan, Sanskrit, Uyghur, and Sogdian. Soon w.a.n.g began hauling not just paper scrolls but delicate paintings on silk and linen. He brought huge silk banners of graceful Buddhas and bodhisattvas that appeared to have once hung from temple entrances. To Stein's surprise, w.a.n.g apparently attached little value to the exquisite silks. The abbot had even used some of them as padding to level the floor of the cave. w.a.n.g kept bringing more and more bundles of the painted silks and other written material. Stein suspected they were a smokescreen to divert his attention from the sacred Chinese sutras.

By the end of the first day, Stein set aside the most promising ma.n.u.scripts and paintings for what he euphemistically called "further study." These were the rolls he desperately wanted to acquire. w.a.n.g had already given away some ma.n.u.scripts to curry favor with local officials. Stein feared the rest of the precious h.o.a.rd would similarly dribble away and be lost to scholars.h.i.+p forever.

It was almost dark when Stein and Chiang emerged from the makes.h.i.+ft reading room with w.a.n.g. The three tired men stood on the loggia with its image of Xuanzang bringing sacred ma.n.u.scripts from India. This was not the time to raise directly the question of selling the h.o.a.rd, but there could be no more ideal backdrop for Stein to drop hints that would subtly reinforce the omens. He again invoked Xuanzang, whose guidance had surely led him to this magnificent hidden store of sacred relics-some of which may even have been the result of the ancient pilgrim's journey-within a temple tended by so devoted an admirer.

Chiang remained behind with w.a.n.g to press the point. Surely continued confinement in a sealed cave was not the reason the great Xuanzang had led the abbot-and Stein-to this precious Buddhist lore, Chiang argued. And given that w.a.n.g could not study the works himself, it would be an act of great religious merit to allow Stein, Xuanzang's great devotee, to make them available for the benefit of Buddhist scholars in that great "temple of learning in Ta-Ying-kuo"-England. And, Chiang hinted, it would be an act of merit that would be supported by a generous donation of silver to a.s.sist his restorations.

Chiang's powers of persuasion worked more quickly than he or Stein had dared hope. Around midnight, when Stein was about to retire to bed, he again heard footsteps outside his tent. Again it was Chiang, who had come to ensure the coast was clear. He returned a short time later carrying all the bundles Stein had set aside earlier in the day. w.a.n.g had agreed to allow the removal of the material-provided no one other than the three men knew. While Stein was on Chinese soil, he must not breathe a word about their dealings. This was hardly an onerous condition for a man such as Stein, who by nature kept his own counsel. And it was in his own interest; he might want to acquire more ma.n.u.scripts.

The abbot could not risk being seen outside his quarters at night, so Chiang offered to fetch the material. For the next seven nights, Chiang's slight figure crept along the river bank to Stein's camp. He struggled under the weight of increasingly heavy loads made up of the most promising bundles set aside each day in the reading room. The days were spent hastily examining scrolls and silks. Stein was elated and oppressed by the volume of material that kept emerging from what he termed the "black hole," constantly anxious that w.a.n.g might change his mind.

Should we have time to eat our way through this mountain of ancient paper with any thoroughness? Would not the timorous priest, swayed by his worldly fears and possible spiritual scruples, be moved to close down his sh.e.l.l before I had been able to extract any of the pearls? There were reasons urging us to work with all possible energy and speed, and others rendering it advisable to display studied insouciance and calm a.s.surance.

He could rarely do more than glimpse at what he called this "embarras des richesses." But somewhere among the cave's vast contents was a well-preserved scroll, fully intact with an elaborate image of a disciple kneeling before the Buddha. Unlike most of the other doc.u.ments, this wasn't handwritten but had been printed with a block of wood. Unfurled, it spanned nearly sixteen and a half feet and contained a Chinese date equating to 868. It was the Diamond Sutra, the world's earliest dated printed book.

Strolls at dusk up the valley with Dash trotting alongside were Stein's only relief from full days in the reading room that segued into long evenings writing up notes, letters, reports-and awaiting the late-night arrival of Chiang and the ma.n.u.scripts. On his return from one such evening walk Stein was overjoyed to discover t.u.r.di, the dak runner, had arrived with two huge bags of mail, having made another epic journey: 1,400 miles from Khotan in thirty-nine days. It was the first mail Stein had received since February. Although some of the letters from Europe were already five months old, he sat up until after midnight poring over 170 letters. He was quick to write back to Allen to tell him of his "harvest, rich beyond expectations," but urged him to keep the news to Stein's inner circle. Even amid what would be the greatest success of his life, he had pragmatic worries and was mindful that he lacked the money to ensure his continued explorations. Like w.a.n.g, he would have to continue to rattle the begging bowl. "Independence, the only protection against needless struggles & bureaucratic wisdom, is still far off; for I cannot claim a pension until 8 years hence (even allowing for furlough) and not until about the same date can I hope for my savings to increase sufficiently to a.s.sure to me that freedom for travel etc, which I am eager to enjoy still while life lasts."

Thrilling as the days were, the work was exhausting. The long hours, his anxieties about Abbot w.a.n.g and a recurrent bout of malaria were taking their toll. He confided to his diary: "Very tired with low fever."

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 w.a.n.g 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 w.a.n.g had s.h.i.+fted them back into their "gloomy prison of centuries."

Perhaps Stein should not have been surprised. w.a.n.g 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. w.a.n.g 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 w.a.n.g 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. w.a.n.g'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 w.a.n.g recognized Stein's delay for what it was and opted to force a resolution. If so, w.a.n.g was far more adept at negotiating than Stein realized. With the glittering prize seemingly within the explorer's grasp, he found it s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 w.a.n.g agreed on a price and on what Stein could take. w.a.n.g 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 w.a.n.g 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, w.a.n.g 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, w.a.n.g 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 ma.n.u.scripts.

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 w.a.n.g 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. w.a.n.g, 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. Antic.i.p.ating such a problem, he had bought some empty cases early on and secured others in discreet installments. He filled seven cases with ma.n.u.scripts 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 w.a.n.g. "We parted in fullest amity," Stein wrote. It would not be his last dealing with the pious Abbot w.a.n.g.

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

Verse 6, The Diamond Sutra

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 doc.u.ment? 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 w.a.n.g 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 circ.u.mstances 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 rea.s.sured 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 w.a.n.g 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 w.a.n.g Jie's act, which harnessed the technology of printing to spread the Buddha's teaching, could acc.u.mulate merit for his parents at a rate previously inconceivable.

A clue to why w.a.n.g 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 ant.i.thesis 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 h.e.l.l.) 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.

The woodblock-printed Diamond Sutra may have belonged to one of more than a dozen monasteries in Dunhuang where it could be unrolled for study or recited by chanting monks. But it is unlikely to have been made in the oasis. Although Dunhuang was a place of spiritual knowledge and learning, it was not a center for printing. It is more probable that the scroll was made in faraway Sichuan, a cradle of the woodblock printing industry. But if this was the case, the circ.u.mstances of its 1,200-mile journey northwest to the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas remain unknown, although monasteries often acquired important scriptures for their libraries.

Skilled artists, calligraphers, and woodblock cutters, probably lay artisans rather than monks, created the scroll. It was made in seven sections, each sheet eleven inches tall by thirty inches wide (except for the narrower frontispiece). First, the text and ill.u.s.tration of the Buddha were painted with ink on pieces of thin paper. These were pasted face down on blocks of wood, then rubbed to transfer the image. The wood carver carefully cut away the uninked parts, leaving a mirror image in relief. The finished blocks were inked and sheets of paper were pressed against them. Finally, the sheets were pasted together to make a handscroll. The scroll was printed on strong paper made from the bark of the paper mulberry tree. The paper was dyed yellow, a color sacred to Buddhism, but its purpose was more than simply auspicious or decorative; it contained an insecticide.

The Diamond Sutra's frontispiece is also the earliest known woodcut ill.u.s.tration in the world. The ill.u.s.tration is rich in detail and symbolism. The faces of the shaven-headed monks who surround the Buddha are drawn with such skill as to create individual portraits, some stern and mature with wrinkled brows, others youthful and open-faced. Two lions near the Buddha's feet look rather more benevolent than the two wrathful protectors who flank him. Above his head are two apsaras, or angels, carrying offerings of food. On the Buddha's chest is carved a swastika, a symbol which, long before it was appropriated by the Third Reich, was a.s.sociated with good fortune. The lotus on which he sits is a Buddhist symbol of enlightenment-a plant that grows in mud but flowers into a magnificent blossom.

Aside from the benefits of merit, the printed book had practical advantages over hand copying. It was faster and cheaper to reproduce. A short handwritten scroll might take a scribe two days to complete. Woodblocks took longer to carve but, once completed, more than a thousand pages a day could be printed. They also avoided the errors a copyist might make, which was particularly important with sacred texts; great effort was made to ensure that texts were accurately copied. The blocks were carved from the close-grained hard wood of fruit trees, such as pear or apple.

The raw material was cheap. Blocks, which sometimes lasted hundreds of years, could be reused and woodblock carvers needed just a few simple tools. As printing advanced, color was introduced using multiple woodblocks. And here too a copy of the Diamond Sutra plays a starring role as the oldest surviving example of two-color paper printing. It was printed in black and red-with an ill.u.s.tration of a scribe at his desk-in the year 1341 at the Zifu Temple in Hubei province.

The Diamond Sutra of 868 was the product of a mature, sophisticated printing industry. Nothing like it existed in Europe. When the scroll was printed, the Vikings were raiding England, King Alfred was burning his mythical cakes and Emperor Charlemagne's reign had just ended. Although Celtic monks had by then created the magnificent Book of Kells, a high point of Western illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, no one was printing from woodblocks. The technique did not develop in Europe until more than five centuries later. The earliest woodblock-printed European work is an image of St. Christopher dated 1423, now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England.

A century after w.a.n.g Jie commissioned his meritorious book, one of the most ambitious printing projects ever attempted was underway in China: the printing of the entire canon of Buddhist scriptures. The task took more than a decade, and while the Dunhuang Diamond Sutra required the carving of just seven woodblocks, this project required 130,000 blocks and a vast storehouse in which to keep them. By then, printing was widespread in China.

Although some of the doc.u.ments Stein found at Dunhuang were written on palm leaves brought from India, most were on paper. China's invention of paper has been attributed to a court eunuch named Cai Lun in AD 105. All the paper doc.u.ments in the cave were made when the material was still unknown in the West. Paper-making belatedly made its way to Europe a thousand years later, arriving in the twelfth century via Arabs who had learned the craft from the Chinese. Before then, European scribes used parchment and vellum.

In China, paper was in demand for the production of Buddhist ma.n.u.scripts. Paper scrolls soon proved an advance on earlier forms of written communication. Until the third or fourth century, "books" were written on wooden and bamboo strips which were st.i.tched together and rolled up. Paper was cheaper to make and easier to manipulate than bundles of wooden strips. By the year 500, paper scrolls were widely used in Central Asia. But they were not the only form of books found in the Library Cave. Concertina or accordion-shaped books were discovered too. These had advantages over scrolls which, though they looked beautiful, could be unwieldy to unroll. And in Dunhuang, the longest scroll was ninety-nine feet. There were also pothis, oblong sheets held together by a loose thread and sandwiched between protective wooden slats. The form originated in India. The presence of pothis in the cave suggests once again just how ideas, including about how to make books, spread and evolved.

Although the colophon on the block-printed Diamond Sutra reveals little about w.a.n.g Jie, other handwritten copies of this sutra found in the Library Cave are more forthcoming about who created them and why. They reveal details that are at times intriguing, amusing, and poignant. Merit resulting from the good deed of copying a sutra could be transferred to others-and not only to other humans. One of the most touching copies tells how a farmer commissioned a Diamond Sutra on behalf of his late, lamented plowing ox. In doing so, the farmer prays that "this ox may personally receive the merit therefrom, and be reborn in the Pure Land, never again come to life in the body of a domestic animal. May this be clearly ordained by the officers dispensing justice in the underworld, so that there may be no further enmity or quarrel [between the ox and its owner]." Exactly what caused such ill-feeling between the remorseful farmer and his ox is not revealed.

Some who commissioned copies of the Diamond Sutra did so not just for benefit in future lives but also for aid with pressing problems in this one. An official with an eye on career advancement vowed to have a sutra copied each month if he received a promotion and two a month if he was further upgraded. He had been unable to keep his promise for some time because war had meant paper and ink were unavailable, but at last the materials were at hand.

One woman, homesick and fed up with living in far-flung provincial Dunhuang in the seventh century, made a copy of the Diamond Sutra in the hope that she could soon leave the desert frontier region and return to the imperial capital. Perhaps she missed its floating pavilions and secluded gardens.

But miracles could happen, especially, it seemed, when the Diamond Sutra was involved. Doc.u.ments found at Dunhuang and elsewhere recount supernatural tales, such as one about a recently deceased woman who found herself in h.e.l.l because she ate meat in a monastery and killed a clam. For her sins, her body was pierced with seven knives. From beyond the grave, she instructed her sister to commission copies of the Diamond Sutra, and as each copy was completed, a knife was withdrawn until all her suffering ceased.

Such tales are rooted in a belief that the Diamond Sutra and other Buddhist texts have sacred, even magical powers. Buddhist sutras came to be wors.h.i.+pped as sacred objects, rather like relics. Respect for the written word existed in China long before Buddhism arrived-it was an element of Confucian teaching. China has long respected books not just for their content but for their calligraphy too. But the Buddhist veneration of the book as a religious object-what today is termed the cult of the book-was a new development. Offerings of flowers and incense were at times made before sutras. Over time, the veneration extended to places containing the words of the Buddha, a behavior explained by the Diamond Sutra, which says that wherever it is kept is a sacred place.

Overwhelmingly doc.u.ments in the Library Cave were handwritten in ink-Stein found only twenty examples of woodblock printing. But among the 500 Diamond Sutras he removed were two in which the Buddha's words were inscribed with an unusual additive. To demonstrate their dedication and self-sacrifice, and perhaps to increase their merit, devotees supplemented the ink with their own blood. Both copies were written by the same elderly man. The colophon of one explains how in 906 the eighty-three-year-old p.r.i.c.ked the middle finger of his left hand. He mixed his blood with "fragrant" ink and copied the Diamond Sutra for people with a "believing heart." A few months later he made another, adding a simple prayer asking only that if he died while copying the sutra he would pa.s.s quickly from this world. The old man wasn't the only copyist using blood. One prominent Dunhuang monk was said to have drawn enough blood during his fifty-nine years to write 283 scrolls.

Blood writing wasn't confined to Dunhuang or the Diamond Sutra. Nor was it just elderly men or monks who engaged in the practice. Women, laymen, farmers and even a prince undertook this extreme form of merit-making. The pious p.r.i.c.king of bodily parts continued for centuries across China. Devotees found a scriptural basis for the b.l.o.o.d.y practice, but it did not meet universal approval. Some frowned on it as superst.i.tious nonsense. In the case of the elderly man, his blood writing may well have been a token gesture. The amount of his blood mixed with the ink has so far proved too small for tests to detect.

Unlike the eighty-three-year-old man, not everyone who copied a sutra did so as an act of piety. Some did so for a living. A Dunhuang doc.u.ment relates how one grumpy scribe simultaneously used his hand to copy scriptures and his mouth to issue a stream of profanities directed at grandmothers and grandfathers.

Although the woodblock-printed Diamond Sutra is recognized as the oldest printed dated book, two earlier examples of printing are known. Both are from Asia and, significantly, given the nexus between Buddhism and printing, both are Buddhist texts. One is a scroll found in a Korean monastery in 1966 which is believed to date from the turn of the eighth century. It came to light by accident when thieves dynamited a twenty-seven-foot stone paG.o.da within the Bulguksa Temple in South Korea. The blast woke the sleeping monks before the thieves could make off with the treasures encased inside. As the paG.o.da was repaired, a relic casket was found containing the scroll, twenty feet long by two and a half inches high, printed with a pa.s.sage from a Buddhist text. The undated scroll, believed to have been printed between 704 and 751, is now in the National Museum of Korea.

Around the same time, a j.a.panese empress commissioned a project known as the One Million PaG.o.da Charms. In grat.i.tude 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 paG.o.das. 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 paG.o.das, which resemble wooden chess pieces, are also in the collections of the British Library, the Library of Congress in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and the Kyoto National Museum in j.a.pan. Two of the paG.o.das 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 paG.o.das 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 compa.s.s. 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 astonis.h.i.+ng to Abbot w.a.n.g and convenient for Stein. However, the printed Diamond Sutra was not the work of Xuanzang but of an even earlier monk named k.u.marajiva, who translated the sutra from Sanskrit into Chinese around 402. Although Xuanzang is revered for his sixteen-year trek to India and back, k.u.marajiva 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 pa.s.sed before the words of the Diamond Sutra became known in the West. The first significant English translation, penned by a German scholar named Max Mller, 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 w.a.n.g 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 w.a.n.g 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 190405. 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 w.a.n.g 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 w.a.n.g Ta-lao-ye was looted and burned. The ma.n.u.scripts 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 a.s.sistants, 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.

The site was certainly as quiet as the grave. In daylight, Stein learned why. His tent had been pitched with a coffin tucked under the fly. The ramshackle building was not a temple but a mortuary, and it was filled with coffins, all occupied. The morgue was used by traders from distant provinces to store their deceased comrades until they could be returned to ancestral homes for burial.

Little wonder Stein was relieved to return to Anxi and his antiquities as autumn set in. He wrote a confidential report to his masters about the Library Cave. He told of his difficulty in getting access to the cave, the wealth of material it contained and how he had overcome the reservations of its guardian priest to obtain scrolls, silks, and other material. What he had acquired so far was potentially more significant than the murals in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas themselves, he told them. As he had with his friends, Stein impressed on them the need to keep quiet about his finds.