Journeys on the Silk Road

by Joyce Morgan

  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 illustrated 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 Wang 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 Wang Jie’s act, which harnessed the technology of printing to spread the Buddha’s teaching, could accumulate merit for his parents at a rate previously inconceivable.

  A clue to why Wang 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 antithesis 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 hell.) 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 circumstances 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 illustration 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 illustration in the world. The illustration 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 associated 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 illustration 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 manuscripts, 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 Wang 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 documents 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 documents 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 manuscripts. 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 stitched 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 Wang 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. Documents found at Dunhuang and elsewhere recount supernatural tales, such as one about a recently deceased woman who found herself in hell 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 worshipped 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 documents 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 pricked 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 pass 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 pricking of bodily parts continued for centuries across China. Devotees found a scriptural basis for the bloody practice, but it did not meet universal approval. Some frowned on it as superstitious 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 document 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 pagoda 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 pagoda was repaired, a relic casket was found containing the scroll, twenty feet long by two and a half inches high, printed with a passage 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 Japanese empress commissioned a project known as the One Million Pagoda Charms. In gratitude 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 pagodas. 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 pagodas, which resemble wooden chess pieces, are also in the collections of the British Library, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Kyoto National Museum in Japan. Two of the pagodas 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 pagodas 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 compass. 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 t
o 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 astonishing to Abbot Wang and convenient for Stein. However, the printed Diamond Sutra was not the work of Xuanzang but of an even earlier monk named Kumarajiva, who translated the sutra from Sanskrit into Chinese around 402. Although Xuanzang is revered for his sixteen-year trek to India and back, Kumarajiva 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 passed before the words of the Diamond Sutra became known in the West. The first significant English translation, penned by a German scholar named Max Müller, 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).