by Sun Shuyun
Looking up at these heavenly creatures, I thought of the object that to me expresses most vividly the ancient Kucheans’ love of music: a reliquary box which I had seen in the National Museum in Tokyo. On the lid are four angels with wings, ready to take off; on the side musicians are playing all sorts of instruments: a harp, a drum, a flute, a horn and a lute, while other masked figures are dancing energetically. Only the Kucheans and their monks loved music so much that they wanted it to accompany them to their next life. No wonder Xuanzang singled out the Kucheans for their musical talents, of all the peoples he travelled among.
When we came out of Cave 69, Salim was humming. He seemed happier than in the morning. ‘I’ve heard so much about Kizil. I don’t know why I didn’t come here earlier. They are amazing,’ he enthused. ‘You know the people of Kucha today are still the best singers and dancers. Their voices are beautiful like larks singing; their whirlwind dances make you feel dizzy just watching them. Every Uighur can sing and dance at the drop of a hat, but no one does it as well as the men and women of Kucha. It must be in their genes.’
I was glad Salim was enjoying Kizil as much as I was, even though many caves were stripped of their beautiful murals or spattered with mud thrown by devout Muslims long ago. What were preserved best were animals, which we found in almost every cave we had visited: swans, geese, tigers, elephants, lions, monkeys, dogs, bears, pigeons and many more creatures. Jia said Xuanzang would not have seen so many animals in any other cave site. It was unique to Kizil because the Kucheans followed Hinayana Buddhism, as Xuanzang noted in his Record.
A Kuchean monk sought individual salvation through his own efforts, as people still do in Burma, Sri Lanka and Thailand; his ideal was an Arhat, which means a worthy or passionless being. For him, the Buddha and an Arhat were human and if he followed their example, he could hope for enlightenment. It is difficult – many people find it impossible – but it is not beyond reach, if not in this life, perhaps in future lives. The Buddha said he became enlightened in this world because he had been preparing for it in his many previous lives, even when he was incarnate as an animal. The animal stories that tell of the Buddha’s previous lives are called the Jatakas. They are really moral tales – many taken from Indian folklore – of generosity, discipline, renunciation, wisdom, perseverance, forbearance, truthfulness, determination, loving-kindness and equanimity: the ten transcendental virtues of an enlightened being. The animals on the walls of the Kizil Caves are not just beautiful images; they are objects of contemplation for monks who tried to cultivate those qualities, and of instruction for lay followers who could not read.
Xuanzang was very familiar with the Jataka stories – his Record is full of them. But unlike a Kuchean monk, he was a Mahayana Buddhist. For him, the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas are both human and divine, which was why he prayed fervently to the Bodhisattva Guanyin for help when he was in danger. He believed in universal salvation through the Bodhisattvas, the enlightened ones whose mission is to help others achieve enlightenment, because it is too difficult for many to achieve on their own. The Buddha is selfless, Xuanzang would have argued, and Buddhists cannot be concerned only with their own salvation and neglect the suffering masses. How can the enlightened beings not help those who are still groping in the dark? When he set out on his journey, he did not think merely of his own spiritual quest, otherwise he would not have needed to bring back all the sutras from India and devote the rest of his life to translating them into Chinese. The Bodhisattva is the Chinese Buddhist ideal; it was what Xuanzang strove for.
Despite his compassion and tolerance, Xuanzang had little patience for his fellow-Kuchean monks. He told them he was going to India to study the Mahayana texts, such as the Yogasastra. Mokshagupta, the most revered monk of Kucha, gave the Chinese master a piece of his mind on the Mahayana doctrine: ‘What is the use of inquiring into these books which contain only erroneous opinions? These are works which the true disciples of the Buddha do not study.’
Xuanzang could not believe what he was hearing. ‘The Yogasastra,’ he cried, ‘is the revelation of the Buddha Maitreya, and to call such a book heretical, do you not fear to be hurled into a bottomless abyss?’ For once, Xuanzang lost his temper. The Buddha said there were 84,000 ways to learn his teaching, depending on the individual, but Xuanzang could not tolerate this Kuchean dissenter.
I know very little about Hinayana Buddhism, or Theravada as it is commonly known. It is not often mentioned in China, and when you do hear about it, it invariably has a pejorative meaning – as indicated by its name, the Smaller Vehicle, whereas Mahayana means the Greater Vehicle. I wanted to find out more about it. But Salim was not interested in doctrinal differences. He said I could read about them later on; he wanted to see more of the real people like the king and queen. ‘Perhaps people who would even have met your monk or heard his preaching.’
We climbed up and down the hill, and many flights of stairs, and found ourselves face to face with a few gallant knights and elegant ladies. They were the portraits of those who paid for the caves to be carved out and painted. I was fascinated by the ladies. How splendid and harmonious the colours of their costumes were. The harsh desert wind and the ageing of thirteen hundred years had scarcely toned them down. Tight blue bodices with gilt borders, milky white jackets fitted tightly to the waist with large triangular lapels, soft olive-green tunics, long, billowing blue skirts striped with yellow trimmings. No wonder the women of Xuanzang’s time followed their Kuchean sisters with acute attention: they were the vision of beauty whose tastes dictated the fashions of the day. Jia had been smitten with them, too. ‘If they could step down from the wall, I would marry one of them right now,’ he laughed. As a second best, he had a jacket made for his girlfriend exactly in the Kuchean fashion. ‘She is so elegant and sexy in it. All her friends ask her where she bought it. Perhaps I should start a business,’ he said proudly.
But Salim was more interested in the Kuchean men. He was particularly struck by a well-preserved portrait of a man standing with legs apart, balancing himself on the tips of his toes, and wearing a long coat drawn in at the waist by a metal belt from which his swords hang. His face is a perfect oval, with a long, straight nose and arched eyebrows; his hair is parted into two neat locks in the middle of the forehead, while the rest is brushed back to the nape of the neck and tied with a ribbon. He could have been a knight from medieval Europe – suitably humble, sincere and serene, holding a lamp as an offering to the Buddha.
‘This is just the sort of man who would have come to hear Xuanzang preaching,’ Jia said. ‘He was a rich and fervent believer so he could afford to pay for a cave like this as a shrine hall for his family. They would pray or perform ceremonies here on big occasions.’
Salim walked up to the wall and stared long and hard at the face, as if pondering how to start a conversation. Then he turned around, positioned himself next to the portrait, with his legs apart just like the Kuchean knight.
‘Don’t we look alike?’ he asked.
I had to confess that they looked like brothers, tall, and with big eyes and straight noses.
‘Not really,’ Jia said without hesitation. ‘Look at his hair. It is red. Yours is black.’
‘I could dye my hair red. Many people do nowadays,’ Salim said. ‘Hey, it is over a thousand years ago. Naturally some things change.’
‘They spoke Tocharian, an Indo-European language; you speak Turkish,’ he reminded Salim.
‘Our ancestors spoke Tocharian, then Turkish. Now I can speak Chinese. Perhaps my children and grandchildren will only speak Chinese. Things change with time but I am still a Uighur.’
‘Come on.’ Jia was getting slightly impatient. ‘You’re different peoples. As we say, a bull cannot fuck a mare even if they are in love. Anyway, we came to Xinjiang long before you Uighurs did. How could these people be your ancestors?’ He was indignant.
‘Why not? You Chinese stuck to yourselves as you do now and these people married us, the newco
mers.’ Salim was equally adamant. He turned to me. ‘Do you know the Loulan Beauty?’
It was discovered in 1980 in Loulan, an ancient oasis kingdom on the southern edge of the Taklamakan, now totally buried by sand. She really was a beauty, with big eyes and auburn hair underneath a hat decorated with a single feather. She has on a cape and a pair of leather boots, as if she is just about to embark on a hunting trip.
‘The newspapers called her the “mother of our nation” and many people wrote songs about her,’ Salim said. ‘What did Xuanzang say about the Kucheans?’
‘Xuanzang didn’t write about their ethnic origins,’ I said. Salim looked disappointed. Xuanzang probably thought it unimportant. The Western Region was so cosmopolitan: Kucha was a melting-pot where civilizations converged. Just as the Kucheans welcomed weary travellers from the desert, they embraced their ideas, cultures and faiths. Xuanzang would have met people of many nationalities, speaking different languages and practising many faiths. Now we are all too conscious of national identity, especially in Xinjiang, where there are tensions between the Uighurs and the Han Chinese. Still, I had been shocked by the mummies in Turfan Museum, and in Urumqi, including the Loulan Beauty, whom I had seen on an earlier visit. I could not believe for a moment they were discovered on Chinese territory: tall, blond or red-haired, some wearing woven fabrics that looked like Scottish tartans. I had always thought only nomads, the Huns, the Uighurs and the Han Chinese had occupied this harsh area.
Archaeologists and linguists, foreign and Chinese, have confirmed the mummies’ Caucasian identity using the most comprehensive methods – skull and textile analysis, comparative studies of their languages and burial cultures, blood sampling, genetic fingerprinting and DNA. In fact, the greatest appeal of the Kuchean frescoes for Albert von Le Coq and other Western explorers was their European looks. It was as if they had come upon their own forebears from a long-lost time. René Grousset, the great French orientalist, went so far as to claim that ‘no spectacle in history is more moving when we reflect that we have here, before our very eyes, the last representatives of that Indo-European population of the Gobi, so curiously like us in race and aspect.’
Why did these Caucasians leave their homes and live in this inhospitable place? We are not sure how they disappeared in the tenth century either. The Kucheans in the murals are believed to be their descendants, speaking a common language, Tocharian. But Salim’s ancestors did not arrive on the scene until the ninth century AD. Salim was perhaps right about the Uighurs absorbing the earlier inhabitants of the Taklamakan – I had seen quite a few of his fellow-people with golden hair and blue eyes. But the truth is that these elegant Kuchean knights and ladies, who impressed Xuanzang so much with their love of Buddhism, music and the good life, are an enigma.
Salim remained pensive on the way to Kumutura, the other famous but much less visited grotto twenty-five kilometres away. ‘You’re not still thinking of your white ancestors?’ I prodded him gently.
He stubbed his cigarette out and threw it out of the window. ‘I suppose it was a story I wanted to believe,’ he said with a wry smile. I could understand. We would all like to choose our ancestors; but for him it was really important, part of a self-identity that suited the Uighurs’ assertion of their difference within China. ‘Let’s forget the whole thing for now,’ Salim said.
We parked our car next to the road, on the bank of the Weigan River. There was a dam and a reservoir there, with a building for the control works. A Han Chinese man emerged from it and we asked him the way. ‘Why bother?’ he said. ‘There is nothing to see. You know, we even had to shut down the reservoir just for those empty caves. It’s so stupid.’
Early Muslim converts, foreign explorers, the river and the reservoir – all have done irrevocable damage to the frescoes. Most of the hundred and ten caves are empty except for some figures on the ceilings. A caretaker, a stout old Uighur man, was busy moving sand out of the caves with a spade and a broom. ‘It is not half as bad as flooding,’ he said wearily, pointing his broom to a watermark almost a metre high. ‘If they don’t control the water from the dam, it will finish off all the pictures. It may be too late already.’ We waited till he finished sweeping and then asked him if he could take us to the caves up in the mountains. ‘You mean those rich guys who live in Cave 22?’ he joked. ‘I’m afraid it’s not safe. The ceiling has been propped up with makeshift scaffolding.’
I had been looking forward to seeing this cave more than any other; the fresco on the ceiling of the cave is the jewel of Buddhist art in Kucha. Its reproductions are in every book on the subject. Thirteen Bodhisattvas stand in a circle on the petals of a giant lotus flower. The crowned Bodhisattvas are relaxed, with their upper bodies bare of clothes but richly adorned with rosaries, tassels, jewels and bracelets. I can never forget their little moustaches, like the Chinese character for ‘eight’, their dreamy, half-closed eyes and expressions of reflective contentment. The Kizil Caves have strong Indian influences: Bodhisattvas who look like Indian princes, and dancers who could have come straight from Indian temple carvings. But nothing could surpass this cave in its authenticity. It looks as if it was created by Indian craftsmen for a rich Indian patron who might have intended it for his family or for monks to pray and meditate in. If Xuanzang saw it, it would have filled him with yearning for India.
I was really disappointed not to see the cave. That evening Salim kindly took me to the old town to make a better end to my day. It was only a street away from the new part of Kucha, but it was as different as the lute from the drum, as Salim said. Here, houses were built of mud bricks, the same colour as the desert. The trees were drooping under a thick layer of dust. We passed a market where the last few stalls open were dispensing their remaining slices of melon, wilted vegetables and fly-infested slabs of mutton. Old men in white caps and long padded coats stood idly in clusters in the evening light. There was no traffic, except for one or two donkey carts and a few bicycles. It was a somnolent place whose best days were long past. But as we neared the night-stall area, we passed a courtyard and heard the sounds of music and shouting coming from inside.
‘It’s a wedding!’ Salim said, a smile spreading on his face. ‘Let’s join them. You want to see the music-making talent of the Kucheans, don’t you?’
‘Is it OK?’
‘Of course it’s OK. We are a very hospitable people. You’re with me.’
We entered an old courtyard big enough to hold several stately trees and still leave a lot of room. As usual in a Uighur dwelling, there was a trellis stretching from the rooftops to the trees, supporting fat bunches of grapes. Underneath this green canopy was a square, and around it carpets were spread where people sat, the bridal couple in the middle, women with children running about, men drinking and carousing, and great trays of nan bread, plates of mutton, melons, sweets and dried fruits. There was music playing, and dancers came on to the square. We were invited to come forward and join them. Salim made no effort to explain who I was, the only Han Chinese in the crowd. People stared at first, but then they smiled, piled loads of food in front of me, and gestured for me to eat and enjoy.
The dance was soon in full swing, and the music rose in crescendo. The dancers wore long voluminous red dresses with black embroidered vests. As the speed of the drum and zither picked up, they twirled faster and faster; their skirts flew out and so, in an accompanying parabola, did the plaited hair under their small caps. I worried they were going to hurt their ankles – they were dancing on swept earth in high-heels. But on they went. The Kizil painters must have seen dancing like this: not just the instruments, which looked very similar to the ones depicted in the caves, but the swirling movements and poses of the dancers. And the man who played the zither had a face just like those in the murals, chubby, compact and handsome. It was as if the musicians on the walls of Kizil had stepped off into the wedding party. Salim was chatting with the men, laughing and gulping down bottles of beer.
For me, the day was clo
sing with an extraordinary contrast: the Western Region as Xuanzang records it and the Kucha I had seen, and the Xinjiang I had grown up thinking of as the land of desolation and exile. I had not expected to find so rich a civilization bearing the influences of so many cultures. The caves were full of sensual apsaras, like those on the walls of Indian temples, dancing alluringly and trying in vain to seduce the Buddha. Knights on horseback in the armour of Sassanid Persia fought over the relics of the Buddha. Birds perching on tree branches, as you see in many Chinese paintings, decorated the borders of the frescoes. In one cave the Greek sun god and moon goddess hovered over us from the ceiling: Apollo sitting on a chariot with his legs crossed, his body circled by a huge white halo and his cloak billowing in the wind; and opposite him galloping away, Artemis, on a chariot, shrouded by a dark halo, symbolizing the night. The portraits of the donors, so vivid, so whole, so individual – they look out at us, silent witnesses of a lost civilization, unable to tell us how they left their homes and came to this harsh environment to make a sort of paradise here – a place of generous respect for different people and their values. A paradise we have lost.
