THE INTERNATIONAL DUNHUANG PROJECT RECONSTRUCTING, DISSEMINATING AND ENABLING SCHOLARSHIP ON THE WORLDS EARLIEST BUDDHIST LIBRARY


			(back to list) THE INTERNATIONAL DUNHUANG PROJECT RECONSTRUCTING, DISSEMINATING AND ENABLING SCHOLARSHIP ON THE WORLDS EARLIEST BUDDHIST LIBRARY Dr. Susan Whitfield Director, The International Dunhuang Project (IDP), The British Library Background The Library Cave at Dunhuang in western China is the earliest extant Buddhist Library in the world containing tens of thousands of texts mainly in Chinese and Tibetan, the latter being the earliest extant Tibetan manuscripts in the world. But since its discovery in 1900, it has never been studied as a Buddhist library. In fact most scholarship has concentrated on the small percentage of social-economic documents in the cave rather than the more representative Buddhist manuscripts. One of the problems has been difficulty in accessing all the manuscripts which were dispersed to collections worldwide in the two decades after their discovery. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) was established as an international collaboration in 1994 to ensure the conservation, cataloguing, digitisation, research and, above all, greater dissemination of the Dunhuang and other Chinese Central Asian manuscripts. With centres in Beijing, Dunhuang, Kyoto, St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris and collaborations with over twenty institutions worldwide it now gives free online access to over 150,000 high-quality images of the manuscripts along with transcriptions, translations, research papers and educational pages (http://idp.bl.uk). As well as manuscripts, the Dunhuang Buddhist Library also contained some of the earliest printed documents in the world. Just as the new technology of printing increased dissemination of the Dharma in the first millennium, today the new technologies of the web and digitisation are making it possible to allow anyone worldwide access to these important Buddhist documents. This will lead to a new era in the understanding of the history and traditions of Buddhism and its spread from India across the Silk Road to China. Dunhuang and the Buddhist Library Buddhist monks and lay believers started moving along the Silk Road from northern India in the first few centuries of our era, taking the Dharma first to the oasis kingdoms of the Taklamakan and then to those of northern China. Within a few hundred years Buddhism was thriving on the Silk Road. Monastery complexes were built in every town and Buddhist cave complexes were excavated from the cliffs at many remote river valleys: places of peace where monks could meditate. Texts also travelled with the monks and merchants and started to be translated into the languages of the Silk Road and Chinese. Chinese monks soon realised they needed to learn more and many hundreds travelled to India to visit the sites of Buddhism, collect texts and study under Indian masters. Other monks from India and Central Asia travelled to China and to sites along the Silk Road. The monasteries along the Silk Road built up libraries, even sending monks to China and India themselves to collect missing sutras and other texts. When returned they often stamped the sutra scrolls with a library stamp. At Dunhuang, a thriving garrison town on the Silk Road, there were over a dozen monasteries and nunneries, several with libraries. By the ninth century the libraries contained tens of thousands of books. Many manuscripts came from Central China, but there were also palm leaf books from India, pothi from Tibet and many locally produced manuscripts. A cache of manuscripts, most probably belonging to one monastery library, were placed in a small side cave that had originally been built as a memorial chapel for a famous local monk, Hong Bian, Abbot of Dunhuang in the ninth century. His statue was moved out and the cave was filled floor to ceiling with this sacred cache. It also included many hundreds of fine paintings and banners on silk, as well as others on hemp and paper, and some printed documents. In total, the cave contained about 40,000 artefacts. In about AD 1000, for reasons which will probably always remain uncertain, the cave door was plastered and then painted over, hiding the entrance from view. The sacred cache remained safe in the dry desert air, undisturbed for almost a millennium until a Daoist monk, Wang Yuanlu, chanced upon it in 1900. He was renovating the Buddhist sculptures in the main cave and the workmen found the door when they were clearing sand from the corridor outside. Wang Yuanlu rearranged the contents of the cave and also presented some of the finest paintings and manuscripts to local officials after making his report about the cave discovery. But nothing happened and he continued his work of renovation. In 1907, Aurel Stein, the first of a series of archaeologists arrived. Stein was an Hungarian-born British citizen. A French scholar, Paul Pelliot, arrived in 1908. Both bought a large number of manuscripts and paintings from Wang Yuanlu and shipped them back to their respective countries. In 1909-10 a Chinese government appointed envoy was sent to Dunhuang to remove the remaining Chinese manuscripts from the cave: he left the Tibetan pothi behind. But then Japanese and Russian explorers both went to Dunhuang and were sold more manuscripts by Wang Yuanlu. Stein also made a second visit and acquired a further 600 items. Although it is very unfortunate that the cave’s contents and their original arrangement was not documented and that the materials were dispersed worldwide, at least the vast majority were sent to public institutions where they were conserved, catalogued and made available to scholars. But the turmoil of the twentieth century meant that scholarship was often interrupted and it was not until the latter part of the century that reasonably complete catalogues and microfilms became available and scholarship started on this material. The Importance of the Dunhuang Library Cave for our Understanding of Buddhism As the only surviving Buddhist Library from this period, the Dunhuang cave is enormously important for our understanding of Buddhism along the Silk Road and in China. Because there are multiple copies of certain texts in different languages, editions and translations, it can help us trace the lineage of texts. Many of the texts were acquired in central China and come from the imperial scriptorium. For example, there were large donations of manuscripts from the Chinese emperor to Dunhuang in 704 and 852. As such, they these provide very useful models of the standard editions of texts and translations in use at that time in China. These can be compared against the woodblocks of 1251 in Korea. In other cases, the Dunhuang manuscripts are useful for providing copies of previously unknown or rare texts and editions. Others provide information on Buddhist practices and the monastic structure in Dunhuang at the time. Buddhist Research to Date and the Factors Impeding Research Despite the fact that this was a Buddhist cave library, scholarship in China has tended to concentrate on the small proportion of socio-economic texts in the cave. These were probably there by accident. When paper was scarce it seems that scrolls were recycled – the blank verso was used for a new text. Also, old discarded paper documents were kept, probably to make patches and repairs for Buddhist scrolls as they became damaged through use. We find many patches which contain text from a secular document on the back of Buddhist sutras. This is probably why socio-economic documents were found among the Buddhist texts in the cave. Although some excellent work has been done by scholars worldwide on Buddhist texts, the socio-economic research has dominated the field. Moreover, the Buddhist research has generally focussed on one manuscript or a group of manuscripts. This is in large part owing to two factors: firstly, the dispersal of the texts and the lack of easy access to them for study; and second, the sheer quantity of the texts, numbers of languages involved and the fact that many contain non-standard characters and require manuscript reading skills. This latter factor means that meaningful research projects on the Buddhist Cave Library will have to be carried out by groups of scholars, rather than individuals. Such scholarship is not traditional in the humanities field and also requires grants to enable the scholars involved to meet to hold regular discussions. By digitising the manuscripts and making them freely available to all on the internet with search tools and catalogues, IDP is addressing the first problem: that of access. It is also addressing the second problem both by working together with groups of scholars and by developing web tools which will enable scholars to work together remotely. All IDP’s activities have been largely dependant on external funds since it was founded in 1994. It is thanks to the generous support of sponsors and foundations that it has been able to achieve so much. The Work of the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) The work of IDP encompasses the following areas: conservation, cataloguing, digitisation, research and education. All are essential to ensure the preservation, dissemination and understanding of the Buddhist Library Cave. A. Conservation Since its inception in 1994, IDP has recognized the importance of the manuscripts in the Library Cave at Dunhuang for Buddhist studies. One of the primary tasks of IDP has been to ensure the long-term preservation of these sacred manuscripts and early printed texts. Although many are in excellent condition, others are very fragmentary due to being handled and used so much by the monks and scholars of the time. They need careful care and attention to ensure they do not disintegrate further. This is a time-consuming and skilled task and requires sharing of skills and techniques among conservators worldwide to ensure that the highest standards are maintained and that new generations of conservators are trained for the future. IDP organises regular international conservation conferences, arranges staff exchanges, internships and publications. It recently launched a conservation section of its website with a multi-lingual glossary, videos, case studies, research papers and links. B. Cataloguing Publishing catalogues of the manuscripts is essential so that scholars and Buddhists can find the texts they want. IDP aims to make freely available online a basic catalogue of all the Dunhuang material by 2013, subject to funding. This will be fully searchable in several languages and also linked to more detailed scholarly catalogues and to online versions of the Tripitaka. In this way, Buddhist interested in reading different copies of a certain text will be able to find them very quickly and easily. By digitisation, they will also be able to read them immediately. For example, IDP has been working with an international team of scholars coordinated by Professor Karashima to catalogue the Sanskrit manuscript fragments from the Silk Road in the British Library. Most of these are Buddhist texts dating to the first millennium AD. The material was previously unpublished and uncatalogued and so inaccessible to scholars. IDP will complete conservation and digitisation of almost 6000 fragments in 2009. Professor Karashima and his colleagues worldwide will continue work on the identification, transcriptions and cataloguing of these fragments over the coming years. C. Digitisation Digitisation is being used by IDP to ensure the preservation of the original manuscripts while making them far more accessible to all worldwide. With high quality digital images on the internet, anyone interesting in reading a certain text can do so freely without having to travel long distances or handle the original. Because of the importance of this material and our respect for it, we are carrying out digitisation to the highest standards. While this is time-consuming and expensive, the resulting archives will last for many years and the level of detail captured by the digitisation process means that even the tiniest detail of any manuscript can be seen. IDP is training people worldwide to carry out the digitisation to the same high standards. Subject to full funding being available for both conservation and digitisation, IDP would be able to complete digitisation of over 95% of the Dunhuang Cave Library within five years. By the end of 2008, 60% of the material will be available. D. Research Once the material is conserved, cataloguing and digitised then it is immediately fully available to everyone worldwide for reading and research. But the internet and IDP can help facilitate research by developing links between scholars, internet links between relevant sites and internet tools for research. IDP is already working with many scholars worldwide and is planning future projects on groups of Buddhist texts, including Chan texts in Chinese and Tibetan from Dunhuang; dated Buddhist texts from Dunhuang; and Tangut Buddhist texts. Tools As well as digitising the manuscripts and catalogues, IDP is also preparing tools to help scholars in their research. For example, we have recently developed software which is now freely accessible which enables scholars to ‘cut-out’ characters and phrases from the digital images of the manuscripts and store them with related information. This was developed for our own palaeographical research but has many other possible applications. In 2008-9 we plan to develop an interface where scholars can compare two or more texts and images and which will automatically produce a critical edition of one or more texts, which the scholars will be able to supplement with their own annotations. The annotations can include links to other editions and images of the same text. By such means, we will be able to start compiling the lineages of texts across cultures, languages and time. Conclusion IDP has achieved much over the past ten years, making over 100,000 images of Buddhist texts freely available to everyone worldwide along with scholarly and educational resources. Its conservation and digitisation programmes are ensuring the long-term preservation of the manuscripts and artefacts from Dunhuang and elsewhere for future generations. Through its cataloguing, website, publications, lectures and educational programmes it has sought to spread information about Buddhism on the Silk Road to a much wider audience. It still has many years of work ahead but with new technology will be able to achieve much more than originally anticipated and will, we hope, open up Buddhist studies to a new generation.