Journeys on the Silk Road (14 page)

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.

Whatever the truth, Wang sensed his discovery was significant and tried hard to interest authorities in the cave’s contents. He informed officials in Dunhuang of the find, taking two yellowed scrolls with him, but the local magistrate dismissed the documents as useless scraps of old paper. About three years later, when a new, more learned magistrate arrived, Wang again presented evidence of the great find. This magistrate came to the caves and departed with a few manuscripts, but did nothing. Yet still Wang persisted. He took a donkey with two boxes of manuscripts to Suzhou, yet even there a scholar who inspected them was unimpressed. Finally, in 1904, the provincial government in Lanzhou ordered Dunhuang officials to protect the scrolls. But there was no money to transport up to seven pony loads of manuscripts to another location. Resigned by the years of inaction, a dismayed Wang did what he was told to do: he resealed the cave and consigned the cache of documents back to their dark, dry tomb.

In a place where there is something that can be distinguished by signs, in that place there is deception.

VERSE
5,
THE
DIAMOND
SUTRA

7

Tricks and Trust

For years, Stein dreamed of seeing the sacred caves. He had learned about them from a friend, geographer Lajos Lóczy, who was with the first party of Europeans to reach the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, in May 1879. Lóczy, a fellow Hungarian, had spoken in glowing terms of their magnificent art. To stand inside the caves was one reason why Stein had pressed to travel so far into China. But the rumor of a hidden cache of manuscripts made him even more eager. So his first days in Dunhuang must have seemed like torture. The caves were a mere fifteen miles away, but he was stuck at his desk tending to the necessary but most wearying part of his expedition. He brought his accounts and official correspondence up to date; he farewelled his donkey men with a generous tip; and he sent his camels off to graze.

He could barely contain his excitement when on a cold, bright March morning, four days after he had reached Dunhuang, he rode to the caves with Chiang and the Naik. He soon left behind the ploughed fields of the oasis and crossed a stretch of barren gravel. After nine dusty miles, he turned into a river valley where a cliff rose perpendicular on his right. At the gateway to the valley was a large ceremonial bell. Rusty and cracked, it was covered in Chinese characters from a Buddhist text. But what interested Stein most was that it contained a date, even if not a terribly old one. “It gave me the first assurance that the chronological precision so characteristic of Chinese ways was not ignored by Buddhist piety in these parts,” he wrote. Indeed the Chinese inclination to date everything was a gift for an archaeologist. It removed the guess work—and would ultimately provide certainty about the expedition’s greatest treasure, the Diamond Sutra.

From a distance, the honeycombed grottoes reminded him of troglodyte dwellings. Some of the dark cavities, layered in irregular tiers up the cliff face, seemed accessible only by rope. Others were connected by disintegrating steps or rickety ladders. As he drew closer and crossed the Daquan River in front of the cliff, he could see the painted walls inside the crumbling caves. “‘The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas’ were indeed tenanted, not by Buddhist recluses, however holy, but by images of the Enlightened One himself.”

No one was around to guide or distract him as he wandered in awe from cave to cave. He marveled at Buddhas that looked Indian, Gandharan, Tibetan, Chinese. The changing face of the Buddha, as Buddhism wound its way from India along the Silk Road into China, evolving along the way, was literally on the walls. Many of the beautiful chapels appeared to date from the Tang dynasty, a time of peace and prosperity in Dunhuang and a high point of Chinese civilization from the seventh to the tenth century. The passageways that opened onto the temples were covered in processions of bodhisattvas. Many of the sculptures within the grottoes were damaged, either through decay, by iconoclasts or ham-fisted restorations. The fragile sculptures weren’t made of stone—there was none to be quarried in the surrounding conglomerate cliffs—but of clay stucco over a skeleton of wood or bunches of tamarisk twigs. Some had modern heads and arms, but the original bodies survived and revealed exquisite color and drapery. Stein was relieved to find no many-headed, many-armed “monstrosities,” as he disapprovingly described some Indian and Tibetan depictions. On his first visit he presumably did not see the examples that exist, including a pair of many-armed Tibetan Tantric deities wrapped in an intimate embrace, nor the thousand-eyed bodhisattva, Avalokitesvara.

As Stein walked from cave to cave, absorbed by the beauty of the murals and statues (and no doubt pondering how he might remove them), a young Buddhist monk approached. He appeared to have been left in charge of the small houses and chapels nearby. Stein seized the chance to sound him out about a concealed cave rumored to be full of manuscripts. Under Chiang’s questioning, the young monk proved most forthcoming. Yes, a cave had been discovered. Yes, it was full of manuscripts. Enough to fill several carts. The cave had since been fitted with a locked door and only the temple guardian, Abbot Wang, had the key. But he was off on a begging tour and wouldn’t be back for weeks.

Here was confirmation that the remarkable rumor Stein had heard when he first arrived in Dunhuang was true. But that was not all Stein gleaned from the monk. The young man’s spiritual mentor, a Tibetan monk who lived among a small Buddhist community at the caves, had borrowed one of the manuscripts for his own use. He kept the document at a nearby chapel. The young monk agreed to fetch it. Stein waited anxiously near the locked door of the Library Cave for his first hint of what might be inside. The monk returned carrying a large paper roll. Stein and Chiang carefully unwound the forty-five-foot scroll. It was beautifully preserved, its paper smooth and strong, but there was no way to determine its age. It was written in Chinese and appeared to be Buddhist. But Chiang, unfamiliar with Buddhism, could make no sense of it. The intriguing scroll only increased Stein’s determination to get into the Library Cave.

Stein quietly discussed with Chiang how best to get access to the cave and overcome any priestly objections. “I had told my devoted secretary what Indian experience had taught me of the diplomacy most likely to succeed with local priests usually as ignorant as they were greedy, and his ready comprehension had assured me that the methods suggested might be tried with advantage on Chinese soil too.”

But Stein could see obstacles to his ambitions. Clearly, many caves were still used for worship, despite the neglect of centuries. This was not a problem he had confronted elsewhere in the desert, where he explored long-abandoned sites. Chipping off murals and statues from chapels that continued to attract pilgrims would hardly go unnoticed. “Systematic quarrying,” as he put it to Allen, might even provoke outrage. Could the priest be persuaded to turn a blind eye to the removal of sacred objects? What about the locals? Stein didn’t know.

But he did know the value of a well-placed offering. He was keen to reward the helpful young monk who had not only confirmed the cave’s existence, but also shown a sample of its contents. “I always like to be liberal with those whom I may hope to secure as ‘my own’ local priests,” he commented blithely. Chiang advised caution—too generous a tip would arouse suspicion about ulterior motives. So Stein offered a small piece of silver. “The gleam of satisfaction on the young Ho-shang’s [monk’s] face showed that the people of Tun-huang, whatever else their weaknesses, were not much given to spoiling poor monks,” Stein wrote.

Having at last seen the painted grottoes and evidence the rumored cache of manuscripts did indeed exist, only the gathering dusk compelled him to leave the caves. He rode back to Dunhuang in darkness, his head swimming with the images he had seen and the prospect of realizing a scholar’s dream—uncovering an ancient secret library. But he must wait until Abbot Wang returned.

Stein was not about to sit idle. He was eager to revisit the ruined walls and watchtowers he had glimpsed on his long, cold march to Dunhuang. However, he would need to start immediately if he hoped to complete his investigations before the arrival of summer’s blistering heat made such work impossible. Before he could set out, though, he needed local laborers. Finding them would not be easy. Dunhuang’s population, decimated by a Muslim rebellion forty years earlier, had still not recovered. The few laborers for hire did not relish swapping oasis life for hard, cold work in the feared Gobi. And another debilitating force held the town in its grip, which is why the team he eventually assembled seemed less than promising. They were “the craziest crew I ever led to digging—so torpid and enfeebled by opium were they; but I was glad to have even them.”