| Mogao
Caves |
|
| Gansu,
China |
| Earth's Natural Wonders in
Asia |
| UNESCO World Heritage Site |
| Coordinates:
40°
2' 14" N, 94° 48' 15"
E |
| |
| The
Mogao Caves are a collection of
various cave temples in China.
They are a UNESCO World Heritage
Site, and have been since 1987.
The Mogao Caves range over a period
of more than 1,000 years, and
contain literally thousands of
examples of Buddhist religious
art. The various paintings and
murals within the Mogao Caves
served a number of different purposes.[2]
|
| |
The Mogao Caves, or
Mogao Grottoes (also known as the
Caves of the Thousand Buddhas and
Dunhuang Caves) form a system of 492
temples 25 km (15.5 miles) southeast
of the center of Dunhuang, an oasis
strategically located at a religious
and cultural crossroads on the Silk
Road, in Gansu province, China. The
caves contain some of the finest examples
of Buddhist art spanning a period
of 1,000 years. Construction of the
Buddhist cave shrines began in 366
AD as places to store scriptures and
art. The Mogao Caves are the best
known of the Chinese Buddhist grottoes
and, along with Longmen Grottoes and
Yungang Grottoes, are one of the three
famous ancient sculptural sites of
China.
Construction
According to local legend, in 366
AD a Buddhist monk, Lè Zun
(??), had a vision of a thousand Buddhas
and inspired the excavation of the
caves he envisioned. The number of
temples eventually grew to more than
a thousand.[3] As Buddhist monks valued
austerity in life, they sought retreat
in remote caves to further their quest
for enlightenment. From the 4th until
the 14th century, Buddhist monks at
Dunhuang collected scriptures from
the west while many pilgrims passing
through the area painted murals inside
the caves. The cave paintings and
architecture served as aids to meditation,
as visual representations of the quest
for enlightenment, as mnemonic devices,
and as teaching tools to inform illiterate
Chinese about Buddhist beliefs and
stories.
The murals cover 450,000
square feet (42,000 m²). The
caves were walled off sometime after
the 11th century after they had become
a repository for venerable, damaged
and used manuscripts and hallowed
paraphernalia. The following has been
suggested:
“ The most probable
reason for such a huge accumulation
of waste is that, when the printing
of books became widespread in the
tenth century, the handwritten manuscripts
of the Tripitaka at the monastic libraries
must have been replaced by books of
a new type — the printed Tripitaka.
Consequently, the discarded manuscripts
found their way to the sacred waste-pile,
where torn scrolls from old times
as well as the bulk of manuscripts
in Tibetan had been stored. All we
can say for certain is that he came
from the Wu family, because the compound
of the three-storied cave temples,
Nos. 16-18 and 365-6, is known to
have been built and kept by the Wu
family, of which the mid-ninth century
Bishop of Tun-Huan, Hung-pien, was
a member. ”
— Fujieda Akira, "The Tun-Huan
Manuscripts"
In the early 1900s,
a Chinese Taoist named Wang Yuanlu
appointed himself guardian of some
of these temples. Wang discovered
a walled up area behind one side of
a corridor leading to a main cave.
Behind the wall was a small cave stuffed
with an enormous hoard of manuscripts
dating from 406 to 1002 AD. These
included old hemp paper scrolls in
Chinese and many other languages,
paintings on hemp, silk or paper,
numerous damaged figurines of Buddhas,
and other Buddhist paraphernalia.
The subject matter in the scrolls
covers diverse material. Along with
the expected Buddhist canonical works
are original commentaries, apocryphal
works, workbooks, books of prayers,
Confucian works, Taoist works, Nestorian
Christian works, works from the Chinese
government, administrative documents,
anthologies, glossaries, dictionaries,
and calligraphic exercises. Wang sold
the majority of them to Aurel Stein
for the paltry sum of 220 pounds,
a deed which made him notorious to
this day in the minds of many Chinese.
The travel of Zhang Qian to the West,
Mogao caves, 618-712 AD.Rumors of
this discovery brought several European
expeditions to the area by 1910. These
included a joint British/Indian group
led by Aurel Stein (who took hundreds
of copies of the Diamond Sutra because
he was unable to read Chinese), a
French expedition under Paul Pelliot,
a Japanese expedition under Otani
Kozui which arrived after the Chinese
government's forces[clarification
needed] and a Russian expedition under
Sergei F. Oldenburg which found the
least. Pelloit was interested in the
more unusual and exotic of Wang's
manuscripts such as those dealing
with the administration and financing
of the monastery and associated lay
men's groups. These manuscripts survived
only because they formed a type of
palimpsest in which the Buddhist texts
(the target of the preservation effort)
were written on the opposite side
of the paper. The remaining Chinese
manuscripts were sent to Peking (Beijing)
at the order of the Chinese government.
Wang embarked on an ambitious refurbishment
of the temples, funded in part by
solicited donations from neighboring
towns and in part by donations from
Stein and Pelliot. The image of the
Chinese astronomy Dunhuang map is
one of the many important artifact
found on the scrolls.
Today, the site is the
subject of an ongoing archaeological
project. The Mogao Caves became one
of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites
in 1987.
