by Joyce Morgan
The emperor decided to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi—“the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is hardly a new diplomatic strategy. He dispatched an envoy from the ancient capital of Chang’an on a secret mission about a hundred years before the birth of Christ. The man who volunteered for the dangerous assignment was a court official called Zhang Qian. He was about thirty years old and considered bold and trustworthy. He was given an escort of a hundred men, a yak-hair tail atop a bamboo pole—a symbol of imperial power—and effectively told to “go west, young man” and forge the alliance. That was easier said than done. To travel west meant venturing into unknown lands and crossing enemy territory. There was also a fearsome desert along the way and no known route around or across it.
As a diplomatic mission it was a disaster. All but one of his men perished during the journey. Zhang Qian himself was captured and spent a decade as a prisoner of the Xiongnu. When the envoy eventually escaped, he tracked the Yuezhi to present-day Afghanistan but life had utterly changed for them. The Yuezhi had settled down to a peaceful, prosperous existence and weren’t terribly interested in taking revenge on their one-time foe. The envoy turned around and trekked back to China. Although he returned from his thirteen-year journey without an alliance, he did not return home empty-handed. Aside from his remarkably resilient yak-hair tail, he brought something far more significant: knowledge. He had not only found a way around the Taklamakan Desert, he brought news of mysterious lands and great civilizations, places where dazzling goods and unknown foods such as grapes, carrots, walnuts, and alfalfa were traded. He also brought word of powerful blood-sweating horses from Ferghana, in present-day Uzbekistan, said to be descended from celestial steeds. (The blood is now thought to be the result of a parasite that causes lesions.) The strength of these horses made them ideal for battle, and the appeal of such superior steeds to the emperor was obvious. The Heavenly Horses have long inspired Chinese paintings, poems, and statues.
News of such horses and other desirable goods prompted moves to establish the trade routes that became the Silk Road and fostered exchanges between these distant lands. Over time, missions were sent and garrisons established, including at Dunhuang, to protect the growing commerce. Zhang Qian is pictured in a mural at the Mogao Caves taking leave of Emperor Wudi. His groundbreaking journey helped forge an overland route between China and the West—and laid the path for Buddhism’s arrival from India. The path from the Himalayan foothills through Central Asia and into China was circuitous, but the vast mountain ranges between China and India posed formidable obstacles to a more direct route. As Buddhism meandered into China, a unique form of art developed as the religion bumped up against different cultures along the way. The art was a tangible expression of the Buddhist desire to be freed from the cycle of rebirth and suffering.
Buddhism split into two branches as it traveled. Theravada Buddhism, which emphasizes individual enlightenment, took hold in Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka. Mahayana Buddhism, which asserts everyone can become a Buddha and seeks to free all beings from suffering, became dominant in north Asia, including Tibet, Korea, Japan, and China. The Mahayana practitioner strives over many lifetimes to become first a bodhisattva, a wise, compassionate being who leads others to enlightenment, and ultimately a fully awakened Buddha.
Central to Buddhism is the idea of karma, a cosmic chain of cause and effect whereby everything a person thinks, says or does leaves a “seed” that will ripen in the future. Negative seeds ripen as suffering and virtuous seeds as happiness and, ultimately, enlightenment. Therefore performing virtuous, or meritorious, actions is imperative for a Buddhist. A virtuous act includes the making—or sponsoring the making—of holy images and objects. And the more that are created, the greater the merit. This is a key reason behind the creation of the Silk Road’s numerous painted grottoes, of which the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas are the most splendid example.
For about 400 years, the Buddha’s words were memorized and transmitted orally. They were not written down until the first century AD. But once they were, the Diamond Sutra and other teachings could propagate easily across the great trade routes, in particular the Silk Road. The written scriptures were exactly what a young Chinese monk was after when, in 629, he too embarked on a clandestine journey. His name was Xuanzang (Hsuan Tsang), and he was destined to become one of the world’s greatest travelers. From beyond the grave he would play a pivotal role at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.
Xuanzang was on a quest for spiritual enlightenment rather than a sensitive diplomatic mission when, like the envoy with his yak tail, he traveled west along the Silk Road—by then a well-worn path—from Chang’an. He left behind the capital’s floating pavilions and secluded gardens and slipped through the outer gates of the city’s triple walls to embark on a sixteen-year journey that would take him across the desert and over the jagged Pamir Mountains to India and back to China. He would prove himself an intrepid traveler, a brilliant translator, and a remarkable eyewitness: one part Christopher Columbus, one part St. Jerome, one part Samuel Pepys.
His life has inspired numerous folk tales and legends, such as the classic Chinese novel known in English as Monkey, in which he is overshadowed by his companions, including a greedy pig and a trickster monkey. Japanese cartoons and a 1970s cult television series have also drawn on Xuanzang’s adventures. The tale has even inspired an opera performed at London’s Covent Garden in 2008, composed by Damon Albarn, the songwriter and vocalist for the rock band Gorillaz. Folk tales aside, the monk left a written account of the places he visited which has proved so accurate that geographers and archaeologists still consult it today. Like Stein, Xuanzang was fastidious, whether recording the distances between places and the heights of individual stupas or recording the myths, massacres, and monarchs he encountered along his way. But he reveals little of himself and his own life, leaving that for a devoted disciple, Huili, who wrote his biography. Xuanzang’s account is written with philosophic detachment, his disciple’s filled with vivid anecdotes. Together the two works give a unique account of a vanished world and one of the greatest journeys of all time.
Xuanzang began studying Buddhist scriptures when he was about thirteen and was ordained as a monk at twenty. After years spent immersed in Chinese translations, he found the teachings contradictory and incomplete. Likewise, he found the religion’s various schools conflicting. What was true? He resolved to seek clarity from the great masters in distant India. More importantly, he wanted to bring back the original Buddhist texts for translation. Unfortunately, foreign travel was banned and as the young monk, then about twenty-six years old, did not have imperial permission to leave, he departed the capital in secret, traveling by night and hiding during the day. His journey was nearly a short one. His guide tried to murder him near the Jade Gate, the landmark near Dunhuang that marked the western edge of China, through which many Silk Road caravans passed. Amid the desert’s demons and hot winds, he became lost and almost died of thirst. At Gaochang, near Turfan, the oasis city’s king was so impressed by Xuanzang’s knowledge that he forcibly detained him, prompting the monk to begin a hunger strike. The king relented, provided the monk with an escort, supplies, gold, and letters of introduction, and extracted a promise that Xuanzang would remain in Gaochang for three years on his return from India. The monk’s chances of surviving such a trip may have seemed slim, but the gods were clearly on Xuanzang’s side. He lived through a range of death-defying adventures which saw him attacked by bandits, captured by pirates and almost offered as a human sacrifice to the bloodthirsty Hindu goddess Durga.
Apocryphal as the stories sound, the descriptions of the terrain he covered have attracted the attention of explorers, historians, and archaeologists, not least Aurel Stein, who was the same age as Xuanzang when he, too, first departed for India. (Stein suggested there was some truth and wisdom in one of the odder, seemingly more fanciful stories in which the monk is persuaded to swap his good horse
for a scrawny nag ahead of a hazardous desert crossing because the old horse had made the trip many times before. Stein knew all too well how horses and camels could not only detect water and food in the desert from a great distance but also remember their locations from previous visits.)
Xuanzang crossed the Pamir Mountains and journeyed through the Buddhist kingdom of Gandhara. Along the way he gave one of the first accounts of the then sparkling new Bamiyan Buddhas of central Afghanistan. They glinted in the sun with their gold paint and jeweled ornaments. They had been carved into a cliff about a hundred years before the monk arrived. The figures—one stood 180 feet tall, the other 125 feet—rose above a valley that was home to a flourishing Buddhist community with thousands of monks. And there they remained for 1,600 years—long after the Buddhist culture that created them had vanished from the valley—until the Afghan Taliban blew them to pieces in March 2001. Curiously, Xuanzang describes a third, much larger Bamiyan Buddha, a sleeping figure 900 feet long said to be within a monastery nearby. His description has prompted a search for its elusive remains in recent years, although a smaller reclining Buddha was found in 2008.
Xuanzang made his way along the Himalayan foothills to the Buddhist “holy land” in northeast India. He arrived at the great center of Buddhist learning, Nalanda, one of the world’s first universities. The center had about 10,000 students and was in its heyday when Xuanzang first saw its pointed turrets, sparkling roof tiles, lotus ponds, and flowering groves. It drew scholars from other lands—Japan, China, Persia, and Tibet—to study not just Buddhism but medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. Its three libraries were so extensive that when they were razed by Muslim invaders in the twelfth century—about the time the University of Oxford was established—they were said to have burned for months. The ruins of what was once an architectural masterpiece remain today in Bihar state. A memorial hall to Xuanzang was opened at Nalanda in 2007, with a statue of the pilgrim carrying scrolls on his back.
At Nalanda, the great abbot Silabhadra was expecting him. Years earlier, the abbot had a dream foretelling that a monk would come from China and ensure the survival of Mahayana teachings abroad. Xuanzang became the abbot’s disciple. As well as studying, Xuanzang visited Buddhism’s sacred sites in India and present-day Nepal: Buddha’s birthplace at Lumbini; Bodhgaya, where he attained enlightenment; Sarnath, where he preached his first sermon; and Kushinagar, where he died.
Xuanzang also visited Jetavana Vihara, the place where the Buddha first delivered the Diamond Sutra teaching. A seven-story temple was built and one of the first statues of the Buddha was said to have been created there out of sandalwood. But the park named after Prince Jeta was in ruins, and little remained other than a solitary brick building containing an image of the Buddha. The city of Sravasti, too, lay in ruins, although a stupa marked where the generous merchant who procured the site had lived. Pilgrims still visit the remains northeast of Lucknow today.
After years of study and travel—and having acquired hundreds of sacred texts to translate—the monk planned his return home. But it was a dangerous journey, as he knew all too well. Would he make it? How long would he live? And how would he get his sacred material safely back to China? He put his questions to a fortune teller, a naked Jain, who appeared in Xuanzang’s cell at Nalanda one day. Yes, he would get home safely. He would live another ten years. (He lived another twenty-plus.) As well, the Jain said, Indian kings would help Xuanzang on his way. And indeed one king provided an enormous white elephant, the equivalent of supplying a private Learjet today. No one could remember a monk ever being given an elephant before. The animal could carry Xuanzang’s baggage but his fuel costs were high, requiring forty bundles of hay a day. Thoughtfully, the monk’s regal patron provided plenty of gold and silver to pay for the elephant’s prodigious appetite and Xuanzang’s caravan. The monk’s heavy baggage included more than 200 sutras, six statues of the Buddha, and other relics. His return to China, though, was not without mishap. He lost some of his manuscripts while crossing a treacherous stretch of the Indus River. In the mountains on his way to Kashgar, he was attacked by robbers. In the ensuing panic, his normally placid elephant plunged into a river and drowned. When Stein read of this, he took the pilgrim’s tale at face value. From the topographical description, Stein identified the likely gorge, a narrow spot particularly vulnerable to attack by robbers.
At the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan, Xuanzang awaited the delivery of more manuscripts to replace those lost in the Indus. The monk’s description of Khotan evokes a Paris of the desert, where sophisticated and beautifully dressed inhabitants thrived on art, music, and literature. He also described a local legend about how the closely guarded secret of silk-making spread beyond China. According to his story, the king of Khotan, determined to learn the secret, sought the hand in marriage of a Chinese princess. He sent an envoy to collect the new bride and warn her that her new homeland was without silk. If she wanted robes of the precious material, she would need to bring the means to make the fabric herself. The princess discreetly acquired silkworm eggs and mulberry seeds and hid them in her headdress. She smuggled them across the Chinese frontier knowing the border guards would not dare search the headdress of a princess. Stein recognized the same legend depicted on an ancient painted panel he plucked from the desert.
Having slipped out of China without permission, Xuanzang decided it was prudent to let the Imperial Court know he would soon be returning but was presently stuck without transport across the desert since losing his elephant. The emperor sent officials from Dunhuang to meet him. Xuanzang rested at Dunhuang, where it is assumed he visited the nearby caves, before traveling to Chang’an and a hero’s welcome. He did not return to Gaochang because its king had died during Xuanzang’s long travels, thereby releasing him from his promise. Instead, he spent the rest of his life translating Buddhist scriptures, including the Diamond Sutra, and is still considered among China’s greatest translator monks. He too is commemorated at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in a vivid Tang dynasty image, in which he is shown crossing the Pamir Mountains with his white elephant and caravan. As well as his translations, he wrote the account of his travels, Records of the Western Regions, a work Stein consulted like a seventh-century Lonely Planet guide.
The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas had been left to the mercy of the encroaching sands and largely forgotten when, at the end of the nineteenth century, another wandering monk arrived. What brought Wang Yuanlu, or Abbot Wang as he is also called, no one knows. He came from Macheng in Hubei province. He was born in about 1850, probably into a farming family, and received only a basic education. Famine forced him to leave, and he joined the army as a foot soldier stationed in Suzhou, about 250 miles east of Dunhuang. After leaving the army, he became a Daoist monk in Suzhou. Like the visionary monk Lezun, the envoy Zhang Qian and the intrepid Xuanzang, Wang was a long way from home when he reached Dunhuang in the 1890s.
By then the Silk Road too had been abandoned for more than 500 years. Even before the fourteenth century, sea routes began to replace the dangerous overland route between China and the West. With its fate inextricably tied to the Silk Road, cosmopolitan Dunhuang became a dusty outpost, and the great monastic community that thrived there dispersed. The caves entered a sleep lasting centuries during which many filled with sand; others were destroyed by earthquakes. The wooden entrance pagodas, where temple bells and silk banners once hung, rotted or burned down.
Although Abbot Wang was a Daoist monk, not a Buddhist, what he saw when he arrived at the ruined, deserted caves changed his life. Perhaps the contrast between the desert beyond and the meditative art within the caves resonated with the contemplative monk like a teaching on the aridness of the outer world and the richness of the inner. He abandoned his wandering life, appointed himself guardian of the caves, and dedicated the rest of his life to their preservation and restoration. He planted poplar trees by the river bank and eventually built a guesthouse
for pilgrims. Wang hired laborers to dig out centuries of wind-blown sand from the caves to expose the wonderful images within. He ordered new statues and arranged for the repainting of old ones. He commissioned paintings to depict legendary scenes from the life of his hero, the wandering monk Xuanzang. Wang was no scholar. What appealed to him were the folk tales of the great monk’s daring deeds. Others might consider his statues and paintings gaudy, but not Wang. He was immensely proud of them. He sold Daoist spells and conducted begging tours among the wealthy landowners to pay for the work. The restoration and the fundraising were endless.
One hot summer’s day in 1900, Abbot Wang was supervising restorations in a cave temple at the northern end of the cliff. It had taken more than two years of back-breaking toil to clear the boulders and drift sand that had blocked the cave’s entrance. The pace of work was slow—he could afford to pay for only a few laborers at a time—but at last he was ready to install new statues he had commissioned for the chamber. As the work proceeded, Wang’s laborers drew his attention to a crack in a mural along the narrow passage leading to the chamber. Just across the threshold, where the desert’s dazzling sunlight gave way to flickering lamplight, the crack suggested the outline of an entrance. Plastered over and painted, it had been deliberately concealed. Wang ordered his workmen to break through the plaster. Behind it was a small, dark room. He peered inside. The space was little bigger than a walk-in pantry. Crammed from floor to ceiling were thousands upon thousands of scrolls.
At least, that is what Wang told Stein. But the history of the cave’s discovery is muddied by conflicting versions. When the Frenchman Paul Pelliot subsequently arrived, Wang claimed that knowledge of the cave had arrived in a dream sent by the gods. A smile on the abbot’s face, however, made it clear neither man put much stock in that version. A Chinese account speaks of a pipe-smoking scribe named Yang who set up a desk in the large adjoining cave to copy sutras. While taking a break, he tapped his pipe on the wall to empty it and heard a hollow sound, then noticed a hairline fracture in the plaster. The scribe alerted Wang and that night the pair broke through the hidden doorway to reveal the chamber and its treasure.
