Dunhuang manuscripts refer to a wide variety of religious and secular documents (mostly manuscripts, but also including some woodblock-printed texts) in Chinese and other languages that were discovered at the

Mogao Caves The Mogao Caves, also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes or Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, form a system of 500 temples southeast of the center of Dunhuang, an oasis located at a religious and cultural crossroads on the Silk Road, in Gansu p ...

of Dunhuang, China, during the 20th century. The majority of the surviving texts come from a large cache of documents produced between the late 4th and early 11th centuries which had been sealed in the so-called ' Library Cave' (Cave 17) at some point in the early 11th century. The Library Cave was discovered by a Daoist monk called Wang Yuanlu in 1900, and much of the contents of the cave were subsequently sold to European explorers such as

Aurel Stein Sir Marc Aurel Stein, ( hu, Stein Márk Aurél; 26 November 1862 – 26 October 1943) was a Hungarian-born British archaeologist, primarily known for his explorations and archaeological discoveries in Central Asia. He was also a professor at ...

and

Paul Pelliot Paul Eugène Pelliot (28 May 187826 October 1945) was a French Sinologist and Orientalist best known for his explorations of Central Asia and his discovery of many important Chinese texts such as the Dunhuang manuscripts. Early life and career ...

. In addition to the Library Cave, manuscripts and printed texts have also been discovered in several other caves at the site. Notably, Pelliot retrieved a large number of documents from Caves 464 and 465 in the northern section of the Mogao Caves. These documents mostly date to the

Yuan dynasty The Yuan dynasty (), officially the Great Yuan (; xng, , , literally "Great Yuan State"), was a Mongol-led imperial dynasty of China and a successor state to the Mongol Empire after its division. It was established by Kublai, the fift ...

(1271–1368), several hundred years after the Library Cave was sealed, and are written in various languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uyghur, and Tangut. The Dunhuang documents include works ranging from history and mathematics to folk songs and dance. There are also many religious documents, most of which are

Buddhist Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and ...

, but other religions including

Daoism Taoism (, ) or Daoism () refers to either a school of philosophical thought (道家; ''daojia'') or to a religion (道教; ''daojiao''), both of which share ideas and concepts of Chinese origin and emphasize living in harmony with the ''Tao'' ...

Nestorian Christianity The Church of the East ( syc, ܥܕܬܐ ܕܡܕܢܚܐ, ''ʿĒḏtā d-Maḏenḥā'') or the East Syriac Church, also called the Church of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the Persian Church, the Assyrian Church, the Babylonian Church or the Nestorian C ...

and

Manichaeism Manichaeism (; in New Persian ; ) is a former major religionR. van den Broek, Wouter J. Hanegraaff ''Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times''SUNY Press, 1998 p. 37 founded in the 3rd century AD by the Parthian Empire, Parthian ...

are also represented. The majority of the manuscripts are in Chinese. Other languages represented are Khotanese, Kuchean,

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

, Sogdian, Tangut, Tibetan,

Old Uyghur language Old Uyghur () was a Turkic language which was spoken in Qocho from the 9th–14th centuries and in Gansu. History The Old Uyghur language evolved from Old Turkic after the Uyghur Khaganate broke up and remnants of it migrated to Turfan, Q ...

Prakrit The Prakrits (; sa, prākṛta; psu, 𑀧𑀸𑀉𑀤, ; pka, ) are a group of vernacular Middle Indo-Aryan languages that were used in the Indian subcontinent from around the 3rd century BCE to the 8th century CE. The term Prakrit is usu ...

and

Old Turkic Old Turkic (also East Old Turkic, Orkhon Turkic language, Old Uyghur) is the earliest attested form of the Turkic languages, found in Göktürk and Uyghur Khaganate inscriptions dating from about the eighth to the 13th century. It is the old ...

. The manuscripts are a major resource for academic studies in a wide variety of fields including history, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies.

History

The majority of surviving Dunhuang manuscripts were kept in a cave, the so-called Library Cave (Cave 17), which had been walled off sometime early in the 11th century. The documents in the cave were discovered by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu, who was interested in restoring the Mogao Caves, on June 25, 1900. In the next few years, Wang took some manuscripts to show to various officials who expressed varying level of interest, but in 1904 Wang re-sealed the cave following an order by the governor of Gansu concerned about the cost of transporting these documents. From 1907 onwards, Wang began to sell them to Western explorers, notably

and

. According to Stein who was the first to describe the cave in its original state: Dunhuang Cave 16

Stein had the first pick and he was able to collect around 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments for which he paid £130, although these include many duplicate copies of the Diamond and

Lotus Sutra The ''Lotus Sūtra'' ( zh, 妙法蓮華經; sa, सद्धर्मपुण्डरीकसूत्रम्, translit=Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtram, lit=Sūtra on the White Lotus of the True Dharma, italic=) is one of the most influ ...

s. Pelliot took almost 10,000 documents for the equivalent of £90, but, unlike Stein, Pelliot was a trained sinologist literate in Chinese, and he was allowed to examine the manuscripts freely, so he was able to pick a better selection of documents than Stein. Pelliot was interested in the more unusual and exotic of the Dunhuang manuscripts, such as those dealing with the administration and financing of the monastery and associated lay men's groups. Many of these manuscripts survived only because they formed a type of

palimpsest In textual studies, a palimpsest () is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document. Parchment was made of lamb, calf, or kid skin an ...

whereby papers were reused and Buddhist texts were written on the opposite side of the

paper Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distrib ...

. Hundreds more of the manuscripts were sold by Wang to Otani Kozui and Sergey Oldenburg.Paragraph 1 in Neil Schmid "Tun-huang Literature", chapter 48 in Mair 2001. In addition to the manuscripts that he acquired from Wang, Pelliot also uncovered a large number of manuscripts and printed texts from Caves 464 and 465 (Pelliot's Caves 181 and 182) in the northern section of the site. These documents date to the

(1271–1368), and are written in various languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, and Old Uyghur. The documents also include over two hundred fragments of texts written in the

Tangut language Tangut (Tangut: ; ) is an extinct language in the Sino-Tibetan language family. Tangut was one of the official languages of the Western Xia dynasty, founded by the Tangut people in northwestern China. The Western Xia was annihilated by the Mo ...

, which is significant as the

Tangut script The Tangut script ( Tangut: ; ) was a logographic writing system, used for writing the extinct Tangut language of the Western Xia dynasty. According to the latest count, 5863 Tangut characters are known, excluding variants. The Tangut characte ...

(devised in 1036) is entirely absent from the Library Cave documents. Pelliot cave163

Scholars in Beijing were alerted to the significance of the manuscripts after seeing samples of the documents in Pelliot's possession. Due to the efforts of the scholar and antiquarian Luo Zhenyu, most of the remaining Chinese manuscripts were taken to Beijing in 1910 and are now in the

National Library of China The National Library of China (; NLC) is the national library of the People's Republic of China and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It contains over 41 million items as of December 2020. It holds the largest collection of Chines ...

. Several thousands of folios of Tibetan manuscripts were left in Dunhuang and are now located in several museums and libraries in the region. Rumours of caches of documents taken by local people continued for some time, and a cache of documents hidden by Wang from the authorities was later found in the 1940s. Those purchased by Western scholars are now kept in institutions all over the world, such as the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. All of the manuscript collections are being digitized by the

International Dunhuang Project The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) is an international collaborative effort to conserve, catalogue and digitise manuscripts, printed texts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from the Mogao caves at the Western Chinese city of Dunhuang and v ...

, and can be freely accessed online. “The Chinese regard Stein and Pelliot as robbers,” wrote the British sinologist Arthur Waley. “I think the best way to understand he feelings of the Chineseon the subject is to imagine how we should feel if a Chinese archaeologist were to come to England, discover a cache of medieval manuscripts at a ruined monastery, bribe the custodian to part with them and carry them off to Peking. ..Pelliot did, of course, after his return from Tun-huang, get in touch with Chinese scholars; but he had inherited so much of the nineteenth-century attitude about the right of Europeans to carry off ‘finds’ made in non-European lands that, like Stein, he seems never from the first to last to have had any qualms about the sacking of the Tun-huang library.”; quoted after

Studies

While most studies use Dunhuang manuscripts to address issues in areas such as history and religious studies, some have addressed questions about the provenance and materiality of the manuscripts themselves. Various reasons have been suggested for the placing of the manuscripts in the library cave and its sealing.

suggested that the manuscripts were "sacred waste", an explanation that found favour with later scholars including Fujieda Akira. More recently, it has been suggested that the cave functioned as a storeroom for a Buddhist monastic library, though this has been disputed. The reason for the cave's sealing has also been the subject of speculation. A popular hypothesis, first suggest by Paul Pelliot, is that the cave was sealed to protect the manuscripts at the advent of an invasion by the

Xixia The Western Xia or the Xi Xia (), officially the Great Xia (), also known as the Tangut Empire, and known as ''Mi-nyak''Stein (1972), pp. 70–71. to the Tanguts and Tibetans, was a Tangut people, Tangut-led Chinese Buddhism, Buddhis ...

army, and later scholars followed with the alternative suggestion that it was sealed in fear of an invasion by Islamic Kharkhanids that never occurred. Even though cave 16 could easily have been enlarged or extended to cave 17, Yoshiro Imaeda has suggested cave 16 was sealed because it ran out of room. Liu Bannong compiled ''Dunhuang Duosuo'' (敦煌掇瑣 "Miscellaneous works found in the Dunhuang Caves"), a pioneering work about the Dunhuang manuscripts.

Languages and scripts

The variety of languages and scripts found among the Dunhuang manuscripts is a result of the multicultural nature of the region in the first millennium AD. The largest proportion of the manuscripts are written in Chinese, both Classical and, to a lesser extent,

vernacular Chinese Written vernacular Chinese, also known as Baihua () or Huawen (), is the forms of written Chinese based on the varieties of Chinese spoken throughout China, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used during imperial China up t ...

. Most manuscripts, including Buddhist texts, are written in

Kaishu Regular script (; Hepburn: ''kaisho''), also called (), (''zhēnshū''), (''kǎitǐ'') and (''zhèngshū''), is the newest of the Chinese script styles (popularized from the Cao Wei dynasty c. 200 AD and maturing stylistically around the ...

or 'regular script', while others are written in the cursive Xingshu or 'running script'. An unusual feature of the Dunhuang manuscripts dating from the 9th and 10th centuries is that some appear to have been written with a hard stylus rather than with a brush. According to Akira Fujieda this was due to the lack of materials for constructing brushes in Dunhuang after the Tibetan occupation in the late 8th century. The Dunhuang manuscripts represent some of the earliest examples of Tibetan writing. Several styles are represented among the manuscripts, forebears of the later Uchen (dbu can) and

Ume ''Prunus mume'' is an East Asian and Southeast Asian tree species classified in the ''Armeniaca'' section of the genus ''Prunus'' subgenus ''Prunus''. Its common names include Chinese plum, Japanese plum, and Japanese apricot. The flower, long ...

(dbu med) styles. Both Old Tibetan and

Classical Tibetan Classical Tibetan refers to the language of any text written in Tibetic after the Old Tibetan period. Though it extends from the 12th century until the modern day, it particularly refers to the language of early canonical texts translated from ot ...

are represented in the manuscripts, as well as the undeciphered

Nam language Nam is an unclassified extinct language preserved in Tibetan transcriptions in a number of Dunhuang manuscript fragments. The manuscript fragments are held at the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Classification Accordin ...

and a language that some have identified as the

Zhang-zhung language Zhang-Zhung () is an extinct Sino-Tibetan language that was spoken in what is now western Tibet. It is attested in a bilingual text called ''A Cavern of Treasures'' (''mDzod phug'') and several shorter texts. A small number of documents preserv ...

. Other languages represented are Khotanese,

, Sogdian, Tangut, Tibetan, Old Uyghur, and

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

, as well as

(e.g. '' Irk Bitig'').

Buddhist texts

By far the largest proportion of manuscripts from the Dunhuang cave contain Buddhist texts. These include Buddhist sutras, commentaries and treatises, often copied for the purpose of generating religious

merit Merit may refer to: Religion * Merit (Christianity) * Merit (Buddhism) * Punya (Hinduism) * Imputed righteousness in Reformed Christianity Companies and brands * Merit (cigarette), a brand of cigarettes made by Altria * Merit Energy Company, ...

. Several hundred manuscripts have been identified as notes taken by students, including the popular Buddhist narratives known as ''bian wen'' (). Much of the scholarship on the Chinese Buddhist manuscripts has been on the Chan (or

Zen Zen ( zh, t=禪, p=Chán; ja, text= 禅, translit=zen; ko, text=선, translit=Seon; vi, text=Thiền) is a school of Mahayana Buddhism that originated in China during the Tang dynasty, known as the Chan School (''Chánzong'' 禪宗), and ...

) texts, which have revolutionized the history of Chan Buddhism. Among the Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts, the texts of early Tibetan tantric Buddhism, including Mahayoga and Atiyoga or Dzogchen have been the subject of many studies.

Other textual genres

* Non-Buddhist religious texts **

Taoist Taoism (, ) or Daoism () refers to either a school of philosophical thought (道家; ''daojia'') or to a religion (道教; ''daojiao''), both of which share ideas and concepts of Chinese origin and emphasize living in harmony with the '' Tao ...

texts, including the '' Hua Hu Jing'', and the

Xiang'er The ''Xiang’er'' (also ''Hsiang-erh''; Simplified Chinese: 想尔, Traditional Chinese: 想爾) is a commentary to the '' Dao De Jing'' that is best known for being one of the earliest surviving texts from the Way of the Celestial Master variant ...

commentary to the '' Tao Te Ching'' **

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

Selihot Selichot ( he, סְלִיחוֹת, səlīḥōt, singular: , ''səlīḥā'') are Jewish penitential poems and prayers, especially those said in the period leading up to the High Holidays, and on fast days. The Thirteen Attributes of Mercy are ...

prayers ** Nestorian Christian texts ** Manichaean texts * Social documents, such as contracts, account books and loan receipts * Philosophy, notably the

Confucian Confucianism, also known as Ruism or Ru classicism, is a system of thought and behavior originating in ancient China. Variously described as tradition, a philosophy, a religion, a humanistic or rationalistic religion, a way of governing, or ...

classics, including an ancient edition of '' Analects'' commented by Huang Kan (), and ancient editions of the ''

Shang Shu The ''Book of Documents'' (''Shūjīng'', earlier ''Shu King'') or ''Classic of History'', also known as the ''Shangshu'' (“Venerated Documents”), is one of the Five Classics of ancient Chinese literature. It is a collection of rhetorica ...

'' * Literature, including Chinese folk songs and Classical poetry * History, both official and local * Geography, including the '' Wang wu tianzhu guo chuan'' * Medicine, including treatments for plagues and illnesses. The medical texts include a fragment of ''Bencaojing jizhu'', one of the earliest Chinese pharmacological texts. * Astronomy, including the

Dunhuang star map The Dunhuang map or Dunhuang Star map is one of the first known graphical representations of stars from ancient Chinese astronomy, dated to the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Before this map, much of the star information mentioned in historical C ...

* Mathematics * Divination, including the '' Irk Bitig'' * Dictionaries, including fragments of the '' Qieyun'' * Music scores and dance notations * Recreational games (the '' Dunhuang Go Classic'')

References

Cited works

* Mair, Victor H. (ed.) 2001. '' The Columbia History of Chinese Literature''. New York: Columbia University Press. . ( Amazon Kindle edition.)

External links

The International Dunhuang Project
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