In the family history scroll were the names of the eight rulers, beginning with Ts’ao I-chin, and going through Yüan-te, Yüan-shen, Yüan-chung, Yen-ching, Yen-lu, Tsung-shou to Hsien-shun, with their birth dates and their individual achievements given in great detail. At the end it said that the last ruler, Hsien-shun, had lost the battle with the Hsi-hsia and had perished on the front on the thirteenth day of the twelfth month in the second year of Ching-yu (1036). In addition to the section on the rulers was a note at the end concerning the accomplishments of Hsien-shun’s younger brother, Yen-hui. “A devout Buddhist, he gallantly refused to flee from the Hsi-hsia invasion, chose voluntarily to remain alone in Sha-chou, and took his own life by throwing himself into the flames.
“Within my narrow monks’ cell
The Buddha’s grace extends in all directions.
Within the cave the Three Worlds exist.
As a firm believer in Buddha’s teachings
I will greet all suffering
Just as I would the wind
That enters through the door.
Such were the words in the scroll. The date of his death, like that of his brother, was also the thirteenth day of the twelfth month in the second year of Ching-yu.
The Ts’ao family history scroll was honored in the grotto for only a single day, then it was immediately stored away with other scrolls and for years thereafter lay in darkness with them.
In the following centuries, the Sha-chou area changed hands and names several times. Under the Sung dynasty, it was absorbed into Hsi-hsia and lost its provincial name; in the Yüan era it was known again as Sha-chou. During the Ming dynasty it became Sha-chou Garrison, and then was known as the Tun-huang District during the Ch’ing dynasty. Tun-huang means large and vigorous, and the name had been used in ancient times during the Former and Later Han dynasties and the Sui dynasty, when the area served as the corridor through which western culture entered the east. After two thousand years, the name had been revived.
With the change in district name, the Thousand Buddha Caves in the Ming-sha mountains came to be called the Tun-huang Caves after the Ch’ien-lung era (1736-96). Despite the name, the Tun-huang Caves did not expand, nor did they evince any intellectual vitality. For a long period, the grottoes were known only in the immediate vicinity.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a pilgrim named Wang Yüan-lu came to the area, discovered the sand-covered stone grottoes, took up residence in one cave and began to clear out the others. Eight hundred and fifty years had elapsed since Hsi-hsia had invaded this territory.
Pilgrim Wang was a short, unimposing man who seemed uneducated. One day as he was sweeping out sand and dust from a cave, he noticed a bump on the north wall near the entrance which looked about to crumble. He thought he would try to scrape off the bulging portion, but as he tapped with a stick he noticed that this section sounded a little different from the rest of the wall. There was something there. He fetched a stake and pushed it against the bulge on the wall with all his strength. The first few attempts brought no results, but after many tries the mud wall gave way and revealed a hollow within. He peered inside but it was too dark to see anything. Since the mud wall had fallen to the other side, it was clear that there was another cave.
Wang brought a hoe and worked laboriously enlarging the hole in the wall. He had no idea what the interior of the cave was like. He returned to his own cave for a candle and inspected the interior. It was completely filled with stacks of scrolls and documents.
He reported his find to the district office of the Tun-huang District immediately. However, there was no reply from that office, although he kept waiting for word. Overcome with worry, he set forth again to the district office. The officials merely told him to take appropriate care of the scrolls.
Whenever tourists came to visit the Thousand Buddha Caves, Wang showed them the secret cache and the enormous pile of scrolls he had discovered; he gave an account of their origin, embellishing the truth here and there to add color to his tale. He was able to live comfortably on the tourists’ contributions.
In March 1907, a British expedition under Sir Aurel Stein arrived at Tun-huang and visited Wang in his cave. Stein personally brought out a number of scrolls. Wang was astounded to see the Englishman make his way so calmly through the hole that he himself was too frightened to enter.
Stein handled the documents with the utmost care, unrolled each scroll and examined it. Thus, it took many days for him to take out almost one-third of the scrolls. Wang and the Englishman discussed the price, and in exchange for the scrolls Wang was given a sum of money he had never before possessed. Wang was surprised to discover that the old scraps of paper could be exchanged for money.
The English scholar wanted to take all the scrolls, but Wang adamantly refused to sell any more, afraid that some day there might be an investigation by the district office. The six thousand scrolls that Stein purchased were packed in wooden crates and carted from the Thousand Buddha Caves on forty camels.
In March the following year (1908), the Frenchman Paul Pelliot came to the stone caves to see Wang. Pelliot also asked Wang to sell him the rest of the scrolls in the cave. Wang reasoned that it did not matter what he did with the scrolls since there had been no word from the district office. Yet he felt some obligation to his country’s government and therefore would not allow Pelliot to take all of them.
In May, after Pelliot had packed the five thousand scrolls, which constituted half of the remainder, he loaded them on ten trucks and left.
For some time after Pelliot’s departure Wang did not go near the cave. There wasn’t much sense in showing the remaining scrolls to the tourists and his conscience also troubled him somewhat.
In the following years, expeditions from Japan and Russia also came. Each time Wang received a small sum of money, and grudgingly parted with some of the diminishing treasure. He wondered why men competed for such things.
About a year after the Russian scholars had left Tun-huang, a military unit came from Peking. They took all the remaining scrolls from the secret cache, loaded them on horses and left. When the troops arrived, Wang hid so they would not find him. He went back into the cave after he was sure that all the soldiers had left. Not a single scrap of paper was left. He entered the cave with a light. The murals painted on the north wall were completely exposed. Wang was wide-eyed with astonishment when he beheld the crimson in the nuns’ garments and the blue-hemmed gowns of the women attendants.
After coming out from the cave, Wang sat on a rock at the entrance. He was aware of movement among the dense trees growing in front of the Thousand Buddha Caves and of the wind. The scattered sunlight was peaceful. As he stared vacantly at the scenery, he mused that perhaps the pile of papers from the cave had been a priceless treasure. If this were not the case, he could not understand why so many foreigners had come one after the other to seek possession of them. Just as Wang had not realized the value of the scrolls, the officials at the district offices whom he notified also had no idea of their worth. After all the others had carted off most of the scrolls, troops from Peking had rushed over belatedly at the end, and Wang wondered whether he had made a grave error. Perhaps he had made a very unfavorable exchange. Reflecting that he might have let the chance of a lifetime slip through his fingers, he sat for some time in the same position.
But the treasures from the cave were of vastly greater importance than Wang had ever dreamed possible. Even Stein and Pelliot who brought them back and introduced them to the academic world did not realize their true value at the time.
There were all types of scrolls—over forty thousand in total. There were Sanskrit Buddhist books from about the third or fourth century and Buddhist scriptures in archaic Turkish, Tibetan, and Hsi-hsia. There were the oldest copies of sutras as well as Buddhist scriptures not yet included in the Buddhist Tripitika. Invaluable research material for the Zen “History of the Transmission of the Lamp” was discovered, as was rare data concerni
ng topography. There were histories of the transmission of the teachings of Manicheanism and Nestorianism, and documents in Sanskrit and Tibetan. Priceless material that shed new light on the study of ancient languages was uncovered. Besides these, much historical evidence that has greatly changed the course of Far Eastern studies was found.
After many years it became clear that the discovery was of significance not only to Asian studies—there were invaluable records which affected all aspects of the cultural history of the world.
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1959, 1978 by Yasushi Inoue
Translation copyright © 1978 by Jean Oda Moy
Preface copyright © 2010 by Damion Searls
All rights reserved.
Cover photograph, Werner Forman, outside the Mogao Caves, Western Gansu Province, China; Werner Forman / Art Resource, NY
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Inoue, Yasushi, 1907–1991.
[Tonko. English]
Tun-huang / by Yasushi Inoue ; translated by Jean Oda Moy; preface by
Damion Searls.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 978-1-59017-362-6 (alk. paper)
1. Dunhuang (China)—History—Fiction. I. Moy, Jean Oda. II. Title.
PL830.N63T6513 2010
895.6’35—dc22
2010022569
eISBN 978-1-59017-425-8
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
TUN-HUANG Page 20
