The Secret Library of Dunhuang, Where “Printing Was a Form of Prayer”

At the New Yorker, a piece by Jacob Mikanowski that leads off strong:

Just over a thousand years ago, someone sealed up a chamber in a cave outside the oasis town of Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi Desert in western China. The chamber was filled with more than five hundred cubic feet of bundled manuscripts. They sat there, hidden, for the next nine hundred years. When the room, which came to be known as the Dunhuang Library, was finally opened in 1900, it was hailed as one of the great archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, on par with Tutankhamun’s tomb and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The library was discovered by an “itinerant Taoist monk” who had appointed himself the unofficial caretaker of a bunch of these caves; one day, he noticed his cigarette smoke drifting in a weird direction, and found the library. He was then swindled by a Hungarian explorer, who bought 10,000 documents for 130 pounds, an event that set off a “manuscript race” among French, Russian and Japanese scholars. This whole piece is particularly fascinating for anyone interested in archives or preservation, but I loved this part at the end:

The Diamond Sutra, one of the most famous documents recovered from Dunhuang, was commissioned in 868 A.D., “for free distribution,” by a man named Wang Jie, who wanted to commemorate his parents. In the well-known sermon that it contains, the Buddha declares that the merit accrued from reading and reciting the sutra was worth more than a galaxy filled with jewels. In other words, reproducing scriptures, whether orally or on paper, was good for karma. Printing began as a form of prayer, the equivalent of turning a prayer wheel or slipping a note into the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but on an industrial scale.

This might be the most enduring lesson of Dunhuang: the whole “Gutenberg galaxy” of paper and print didn’t begin in Europe. Print was a Buddhist invention, and its aim was salvation, not profit.

Photo via Al Billings/flickr

[TNY]