Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud

by Sun Shuyun

  Like river torrents,

  We flooded their cities;

  We destroyed their monasteries,

  And shat on the statues of the Buddha.

  Some monasteries were turned into mosques; but most were burnt to the ground, leaving blackened walls and charred beams still visible today. The gold and precious gems that decorated numerous Buddhist statues in the monasteries became the spoils of the crusaders. Monks who dared resist the sword of Islam with their bare fists were killed or buried alive; others fled up the ancient paths into the Karakoram Mountains and found refuge in Tibet – today, the most complete and systematic source of the history of Khotan in the first millennium is in Tibetan. The destruction was complete: a thousand years of Buddhist civilization were gone, and with them the language, the culture and the very people of Caucasian and Indo-Iranian origins. It was true: the Khotan I was visiting was not what Xuanzang saw.

  On top of the barren mountain where the Buddha was supposed to have preached is now the tomb of Maheb Khwoja in a plain white house. In front of it is a courtyard filled with high poles hung with lambskins, which seemed to come alive in the strong wind. In the distance, the oasis of Khotan was just discernible, caressed by the Black Jade River, which shimmered like a mirage. It seems the end of Buddhist Khotan was inevitable. Buddhism was in retreat even in the land of the Buddha. The rise of Islam was so rapid, unstoppable. How could the precarious oasis kingdom stand against the tide? The oases to the west fell one by one; Kashgar surrendered, and did not suffer so much. The Khotanese could have done the same, but they wanted to defend their faith, however slender their chances. Sutras were composed to praise them and boost their courage. A sutra in Tibetan spells out in detail the Buddha’s instruction on the Gosringa Mountain. ‘This kingdom has received my blessing, which makes it special. In times of war and destruction to come, Sum-pas and its army, the nomads of the north, the Uighurs and other non-believers will come here, bent on destroying this kingdom. The propitious images of the Buddha will descend here, protecting its frontier, and through their miraculous power, Khotan will be saved. The Bodhisattvas, the myriads of heavenly beings and the invincible dragon kings will all follow, and they will drive away the evildoers and save the people from their enemies’ harm.’ Such passages gave the Khotanese confidence and hope, but it was in vain. Nothing could survive the huge attacking armies. It was remarkable that they held out as long as they did.

  I wondered how Xuanzang would have looked at the death of Khotan, the Buddhist kingdom of which he was clearly very fond. Perhaps it would have put him in mind of the destruction of the Sakya people, ruled by the Buddha’s own father. The Buddha sat in the middle of the road under the scorching sun. The king who led the attack stopped and asked him why he did not seek shade under a leafy tree nearby. The Buddha replied: ‘My clan is like the leaves. Now you are going to cut them off, I have no shade.’ Three times he managed to persuade the king to turn back. But the fourth time, the king swept past him. He killed all the men, buried all the women and burned down the capital of Kapilavastu. For all his power, the Buddha was powerless to prevent it. Nothing is permanent, he would say. A thousand years of Buddhism, a thousand years of Islam. The only inevitability is change.

  But Xuanzang was fortunate to have known nothing of Khotan’s tragic end. After nine months’ wait in the Khotan he cherished, his servant came back from Chang’an, bearing the reply from Emperor Taizong:

  When I heard that the Master who had gone to far-off countries to search for religious books had now come back, I was filled with boundless joy. I pray you come quickly that we may see each other … I have ordered the bureaus of Khotan and other places to send with you the best guides they can procure, and conveyances as many as you require. I have commanded the magistrates of Dunhuang to conduct you through the desert of shifting sands and I have desired the government to meet you in Chang’an.

  It was the answer he was waiting for. He set off at once.

  ELEVEN

  Lost Treasures, Lost Souls

  THE JOURNEY FROM KHOTAN to Dunhuang, the old Chinese frontier town, was hard. It was the southern route of the Silk Road, and one of its most arduous and perilous stretches. Apart from a few small oases and ruined cities it was one big ocean of shifting sand. The sun beat down on the caravans mercilessly; the winds that blew across the desert felt as if they were coming straight out of a blast furnace, hot and fierce; even the camels groaned their distress. Xuanzang wrote: ‘There is absolutely nothing in sight, no water, no vegetation. There is not even a track. Often you hear howling or crying but have no idea where it comes from – many are led astray by it.’ The heaps of bones must have reminded him of his narrow escape in the desert on his outward journey. Silently, he raised his hands and pressed them together, murmuring a short prayer. He was relieved to have the imperial escort to accompany him across the Taklamakan, the ‘sea of death’.

  They reached Dunhuang in two months. One can only imagine how Xuanzang felt when he set foot in the oasis: he had come home after eighteen years, alive and in one piece. Any of the numberless piles of bones in the desert he had seen could have been his own. At last he must have felt the ease of being among his own people, speaking his own language, no longer a foreigner. Most importantly, he had achieved everything he had set out to do, and more. He attributed the success of his journey to the protection of the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas. Like all the Silk Road merchants and travellers arriving here, he would have decided to visit the Mogao Caves, a great Buddhist centre, and give thanks for his safe passage and the fulfilment of his vow.

  I arrived in Dunhuang in the early morning. The so-called city consists of just four streets radiating from a crossroads, with a large concrete statue of an apsara in the middle, modelled from a Mogao painting. A few men were cycling around it on their way to work. Dunhuang was no longer the bustling oasis that Xuanzang knew. I headed straight for the Mogao Caves, twenty-five kilometres outside.

  There is plenty of transport to choose from: tourism is the lifeblood of Dunhuang today. The bus followed the same route that Xuanzang would have taken. On the roadside, lush green vegetable fields and fruit orchards ran for several kilometres, with farmhouses dotted here and there. Abruptly the oasis ended and the desert began, with nothing but grit and pebbles and a low mountain range. Just when I was starting to get tired of the monotony of the scenery, we turned right and in the distance I saw trees and a flying rooftop, and then I caught sight of the caves, honeycombing a steep cliff face. They stretch for almost two kilometres, long enough to accommodate a thousand years of spiritual and artistic activity, from the fourth to the fourteenth century. It was said that a wandering monk arrived here at dusk in the year of 366, and rested his weary body on the slope of the Singing Sand Hills. Suddenly he found the whole place bathed in the golden rays of the setting sun, as if a thousand Buddhas had descended from Heaven. He decided then and there to make a cave in the cliff of the mountain to meditate in. This was the first of more than a thousand caves that were hewn from this mountainside in the next thousand years. Four hundred and ninety-two of them have survived, decorated with over 45,000 square metres of wonderful images of the Buddha and his followers and sculptures. If you put all the paintings side by side, they would stretch for thirty kilometres, making Mogao, the Peerless Caves, indeed peerless in the history of Buddhist art.

  But at the ticket window I was informed that I could visit only ten caves with a guided tour. The rest were not open to the public. If I were really keen, I could see them for thirty or forty pounds a cave, depending on their state of preservation. I had planned to see at least a dozen particular ones, either directly from Xuanzang’s time or with murals illustrating his journey. I told the ticket lady my problem, and also of Xuanzang. She barely heard me out before waving her hand impatiently. ‘Xuanzang? Even Bodhisattva Guanyin wouldn’t get you a free entry.’

  I did not expect free entry but the sum she mentioned was forbidding. I stood aside and po
ndered for a while. I decided to buy the standard entrance now and worry about the special caves later. I could not help, however, thinking of how Aurel Stein opened the door to the hidden treasures of Dunhuang, all due to Xuanzang.

  Stein arrived in Dunhuang in March 1907 on his second expedition to western China, never thinking for a second that this would be the scene of his greatest discovery. He wanted to see the caves, of which he had heard glowing descriptions from an earlier Hungarian explorer. He needed to replenish his supplies of food and water, and then he was to return to the desert for further excavations of the watchtowers of the Great Wall.

  But soon he heard vague rumours about the vast hoard of ancient manuscripts discovered in one of the caves by Wang Yuanlu, the self-appointed caretaker of the Mogao Caves. Not much was known about Wang except that he was born in Hubei Province, central China. A severe famine caused him to flee his village to northern China and join the army. But he found life as a soldier equally cruel so he quit and became a Daoist priest. In his wandering, he chanced upon the Mogao Caves and was so enchanted with them, even though they were Buddhist, that he decided to devote the rest of his life to restoring them. He settled down in a dilapidated monastery, and then began work on his life’s goal. He collected donations and used them to hire labourers to clear away the sand and repair the caves, many of which had collapsed after being abandoned for more than five hundred years. When they had emptied Cave 16 of sand, one man found the wall of the passage was hollow. Wang opened it up, and was stunned to find a small chamber with a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly three metres. These were the hidden treasures of Dunhuang that Stein had heard about.

  On their first meeting, Stein instantly sized Wang up as a difficult person – shy, nervous but extremely pious and determined. ‘To rely on the temptation of money alone as a means of overcoming his scruples was manifestly useless,’ wrote Stein in Desert Cathay, the record of his second expedition. He thought of Xuanzang, whose name had always won him sympathy and help from the Chinese. He was not sure if it would work on a Daoist priest, but he would give it a try. At once he noticed that ‘a gleam of lively interest appeared in the priest’s eyes’. He knew instantly what he had to do now to win the priest’s confidence, and his way into the cave. He began to elaborate on his devotion to Xuanzang, and explained how he had followed the footsteps of the Chinese monk from India across inhospitable mountains and deserts, and how in the course of this pilgrimage he had come to Dunhuang and the cave. The effect was instant. Wang, bursting with pride, led Stein to a newly-built veranda outside Cave 16 and showed his guest a series of murals he had commissioned depicting the adventures of the famous monk. ‘Gladly I let my delightfully credulous cicerone expound in voluble talk the wonderful stories of travel which each fresco panel depicted,’ Stein wrote gleefully. When he left the priest, Stein knew he was over the most difficult hurdle.

  Late that night, Jiang Xiaowan, Stein’s eager and capable Chinese secretary and translator, came to his tent with a bundle of rolls which Wang had brought hidden beneath his cloak. To Stein’s amazement, the first roll he opened was the Chinese version of a sutra which, according to the inscriptions at the end of the scroll, had been brought back and translated by none other than Xuanzang himself. He rushed to break the news to Wang. The omen was not lost on the pious priest. Within hours, the door to the secret chamber was opened.

  This would be Stein’s greatest coup – one of the richest finds in the history of archaeology. Of the fifty thousand items, the majority are Buddhist scriptures written in Chinese, Uighur, Tibetan, Sogdian and Sanskrit, including a printed copy of the Diamond Sutra, the earliest known printed book. Equally important are the thousands of pieces of secular documents glued to the back of the sutras to strengthen them, from classic texts, popular ballads, lyric poems, contracts, accounts and private letters, to fragments of Xuanzang’s Record of the Western Regions, the oldest copy of the book from the eighth century. They present a panoramic picture of Chinese society, spanning almost a millennium. Birth, marriage, love, the delights of sex, the pain of infidelity and divorce, anxiety about old age and death, the comfort of religions, court cases of land disputes and inheritance – just about every aspect of Chinese life is covered in strong and vivid language. For example, in a school of etiquette, a man learned to write a letter of apology to his host for having got drunk at her soiree the night before:

  The next morning, after hearing others speak on the subject, I realized what had happened, whereupon I was overwhelmed with confusion and ready to sink into the earth with shame. It was due to the vessel of my small capacity, on that occasion, being filled too full. I humbly trust that you in your wise benevolence will not condemn me for my transgression. Soon I will come to apologize in person, but meanwhile I beg to send this written communication for your kind inspection. Leaving much unsaid, I am yours respectfully.

  Despite Stein’s ignorance of Chinese, he was instantly aware of the value of the manuscripts. For the next ten days, he worked his way day and night through the collection with the help of his secretary Jiang, hardly leaving the cave except to eat. Pressed though he was for time, he never forgot the all-important immediate task – to keep the priest in a pliable mood. He engaged the priest, with the help of his secretary, in long talks about their common hero and patron saint, and liberally displayed his affection to the memory of Xuanzang. Time and again, he asked Wang to show him the cherished frescoes on his veranda walls, in particular the panel depicting Xuanzang returning with his elephant heavily laden with sacred manuscripts from India. To Stein it seemed the most plausible reason he could use for his eager interest in the relics that Wang had discovered.

  Stein was ambitious: he wanted to carry away all the manuscripts. His secretary did his best to plead his case with the priest in that ‘the removal of the collection to a temple of learning in England would in truth be an act which Buddha and his Arhat might approve as pious’. But the prospect of losing all the sacred texts seriously frightened Wang: he had made Mogao his home and its restoration his mission. He felt certain that his patrons would notice any deficiency in the piles of manuscripts, and consequently stop their donations. Then the position he had built up for himself after years of pious labour would be lost for ever. He had been willing to let Stein select a few rolls in exchange for a donation to fund the restoration. But to part with the entire contents of the secret chamber? It was a risk he would not contemplate.

  Stein raised his offer of a ‘donation’ to a sum which he thought the poor priest could not possibly refuse. He reasoned that the money would enable Wang to return to a life of peace and comfort in his home village if he lost his hard-earned position in Dunhuang. Alternatively the priest could allay any scruples by using the money for the benefit of the temple. But Wang refused. Stein then blackmailed him: he had already taken hold of ‘loads of valuable manuscripts and antiques’ – Stein’s own words – and he could threaten to divulge how he had acquired them. The prospect of losing face and forgoing the promised donation finally made Wang give in and yield up to 20,000 manuscripts, paintings and other artefacts. All this, as Stein was proud to record, cost him only a hundred and thirty pounds. He even had the effrontery to say that the priest ‘was almost ready to recognize that it was a pious act on my part to rescue for Western scholarship all those relics of ancient Buddhist literature and art which were otherwise bound to get lost sooner or later through local indifference’.

  Stein had indeed brought Dunhuang to the attention of the world. Hot on his heels came the young French sinologist Paul Pelliot, whose mastery of Chinese helped him choose six thousand of the most important documents of Dunhuang. He even showed some of them to Chinese officials in Beijing before he shipped them to Paris in 1909. Outraged, the Chinese central government ordered the removal of all the remaining manuscripts to Beijing, but Wang did not relinquish everything. In 1911 he had enough left over to sell to Japanese and Russian expedition teams; three ye
ars later when Stein returned to Dunhuang, he bought five more cases of material. When Langdon Warner arrived in the 1920s, there were no documents to be acquired so he simply cut off twelve of the best murals, and shipped them and two beautiful Bodhisattva statues to America. Today the Dunhuang manuscripts are among the treasures of seventy-seven museums and libraries in England, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, Japan, Korea, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Turkey and China.

  The way Stein and the other ‘foreign devils’ acquired the manuscripts is deeply resented by the Chinese. Even Xuanzang, with all his compassion, could hardly have approved of how Stein used, or abused, his name. Maybe it is for this reason that Stein, knighted by the British government at the time, is now largely ignored by the very institution which funded most of his expeditions – the British Museum. Unlike its other archaeological heroes whose contributions are proudly acknowledged, the British Museum seems keen almost to erase his memory. In the Asia gallery, only a tiny selection of his finds are on display – the rest are in storage. A Buddhist would say this is his bad karma.

  Times have changed. Mogao is no longer the dilapidated place where the glory of the Silk Road was totally forgotten, where shepherds sought shelter in the rain, where soldiers stayed during military drills, and where foreign adventurers pillaged the unprotected treasures to their hearts’ content. Today it is a World Heritage site, attracting visitors from all over the world to see, to admire and to remember the triumph of faith in the barren desert, the extraordinary beauty that burst out of this lonely frontier post. It is not neglect but overcrowding that now threatens the fragile murals. That is why entrance is strictly controlled and the most precious caves are accessible only to scholars and experts on Dunhuang.