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The Mogao Caves, or Mogao Grottoes (Chinese: 莫高窟; pinyin: mò gāo kū) form a system of 492 temples near Dunhuang, in Gansu province, China. They are also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, Qianfodong (Chinese: 千佛洞; pinyin: qiān fó dòng) [1], or the Caves of Dunhuang.

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Mogao Caves in Popular Culture 3 See also 4 References 5 Gallery 6 External links

[edit] Introduction

Local legend says that in 366 CE the Buddhist monk Lezun (樂尊) had a vision of a thousand Buddhas and convinced a wealthy Silk Road pilgrim to fund the first of the temples. The temples eventually grew to number more than a thousand. From the 4th until the 14th century, Buddhist monks at Dunhuang collected scriptures from the west, and many pilgrims passed through the area, painting murals inside the caves. The murals cover 450,000 square feet (42,000 m²). The caves were walled off sometime around the 11th century, after they had become a dumping ground for old, damaged or used manuscripts; the documents were still sacred, and it has been suggested that:

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widespread in the tenth century, the handwritten manuscripts of the Tripitaka at the monastic libraries must have been replaced by books of a new type -- the printed Tripitaka.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 a 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.

The Mogao Caves are the best known of the Chinese Buddhist grottoes, and along with Longmen and Yungang are one of the three famous ancient sculptural sites of China.

Buddhist monks valued austerity in life, and they hoped that remote caves would aid their quest for enlightenment. The paintings served as aids to meditation, as visual representations of their quest for enlightenment, and as tools to inform illiterate Chinese about Buddhist beliefs and stories.

Image:DunhuangCave323.jpg

Around 1900, a Chinese Taoist named Wang Yuan-lu appointed himself guardian of some of these temples. Wang discovered walled up behind one side of a corridor leading to a main cave a small cave which was stuffed with an enormous hoard of manuscripts (all dating from between 406 and 1002 CE: old Chinese hemp paper scrolls, old Tibetan scrolls, paintings on hemp or silk or paper, many damaged figurines of Buddhas, and other Buddhist paraphernalia. The subject matter is diverse: the expected Buddhist canonical works are joined by original commentaries, apocryphal works, workbooks, books of prayers, Confucian works, Taoist works, works from the Chinese government, administrative documents, anthologies, glossaries, dictionaries, calligraphic exercises etc.

Rumors of this discovery brought numerous European expeditions (a joint British/Indian, led by Aurel Stein; a French expedition under Paul Pelliot; a Japanese expedition under Otani Kozui which arrived after the Chinese government's forces; and a Russian expedition under Sergei F. Oldenburg which garnered least of all) trekking across Central Asia to attempt to see and obtain these manuscripts, which they did around 1910. The remaining Chinese manuscripts were sent to Peking at the order of the Chinese government (the mass of Tibetan manuscripts remained).

Wang embarked on an ambitious refurbishment of the temples, funded in part by soliciting donations from neighboring towns, and in part by donations from European explorers such as Sir Aurel Stein (who discovered the famous Diamond Sutra in one of the Mogao Caves, one of approximately 2,000 copies of the Diamond Sutra discovered in the caves), and Paul Pelliot who was interested in the more unusual and exotic of Wang's manuscripts, such as documents dealing with the administration and financing of the monastery and associated lay men's groups which survived only because they formed a sort of palimpsest in which Buddhist texts (which were why they were preserved) were written on the other side of the paper.

Today, the site is an important tourist attraction and the subject of an ongoing archaeological project.

The Mogao Caves became one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1987.

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[edit] Mogao Caves in Popular Culture

The Mogao Manuscript Trove (re)discovered around 1900 forms the backdrop of the plotline of the movie The Silk Road.

[edit] See also

• Buddhism in China
• Jesus Sutras

[edit] References

• Hopkirk, Peter (1980). Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 0-87023-435-8.
• "The Tun-Huan Manuscripts", by Fujieda Akira in Essays on the sources for Chinese history, edited by Donald D. Leslie, Colin Mackerras, and Wang Gungwu. Published 1973 by the Australian National University, ISBN 0-87249-329-6

[edit] Gallery

A painting of Xuanzang performing ceremonies for the Buddha

Trade on the Silk Road

[edit] External links

• Introduction of the arts (mostly Buddhist arts) of the Mogao Caves with images
• A large collections of images of murals and other artifacts from the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang
• International Dunhuang Project
• Travel China Guide: Dunhuang Caves

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