Place · Silk Road Buddhist centre · China

Dunhuang, China

Function

Religious institution & practice

Tradition

Silk Road and Buddhist art history

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

40.142, 94.662

Connections (6)

• Silk Road Buddhist corridorTakshashilā / Taxila

  Taxila stands at the Indian end of the corridor and Dunhuang at the Chinese end, and what moved along it was not only doctrine but form: the Gandharan Buddha image, the cave-monastery plan, the narrative relief. The relationship is corridor-level rather than a single route — nobody walked from one to the other in a straight line — but the sculpture at Dunhuang's earliest caves is recognisably descended from what was being carved around Taxila five centuries earlier.

• TransmissionNālandā mahāvihāra

  Dunhuang's sealed library held Sanskrit and Khotanese manuscripts beside Chinese and Tibetan ones, including texts whose Indian originals are lost entirely. What Nālandā taught survives in some cases only because somebody carried it to a desert oasis and somebody else walled it up. The cave held some fifty thousand manuscripts in seventeen languages and was sealed about 1000, then opened in 1900 and largely dispersed to European and Japanese collections within a decade.

• Teaching lineageDharmarakṣa

  Dharmaraksha was born at Dunhuang to a Yuezhi family, learned Sanskrit and the Central Asian languages, travelled west collecting texts and translated well over a hundred works into Chinese — including the first Chinese Lotus Sutra, in 286. They called him the Bodhisattva of Dunhuang. His versions held the field for over a century until Kumarajiva's replaced them, and between the two of them they shaped almost everything East Asian Mahayana became.

• TransmissionAmarasiṃha

  Fragments of the Amarakosha — the Sanskrit thesaurus arranged by subject and versified for memorisation — were found among the manuscripts sealed in the Mogao caves at Dunhuang. A working Indian dictionary was in use at the edge of the Gobi, which is what a translation bureau on a trade route actually needs. The Amarakosha remained the standard reference of Indian learning for well over a thousand years and was among the first Sanskrit texts printed in Europe.

• Trade routeSamarkand

  The Sogdian Ancient Letters, abandoned in a watchtower west of Dunhuang about 313 CE and found by Aurel Stein in 1907, are letters from Sogdian merchants at the Chinese end back to Samarkand — one of them from a woman abandoned by her husband, complaining bitterly. They are the oldest surviving documents of the route and they show what it actually was: a relay run by a single diaspora, in its own language, with its own credit arrangements.

• Site adjacencyTurfan & Gaochang

  Turfan and Dunhuang are the two great manuscript finds of the Tarim, about a thousand kilometres apart, and between them they preserved the documents of a whole multilingual Buddhist world — Sanskrit, Tokharian, Sogdian, Uyghur, Chinese, Syriac and Middle Persian at Turfan, and the sealed library cave at Dunhuang with its fifty thousand rolls. Both were carried off in quantity by European expeditions between 1900 and 1914.

On these journeys

• The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India
• Faxian — overland to India, home by sea (399–414)
• Xuanzang — sixteen years overland (629–645)
• India–China: Buddhist & knowledge exchange

Sources

Metropolitan Museum of Art — Chinese Buddhist Sculpture; Dunhuang/Silk Road scholarship

• Wikipedia