Buddhist Art
The Buddha's form, born in Gandhara, travels east along the Silk Road. The caves of Mogao, at Dunhuang, began to be carved in 366 CE, and carving continued for roughly a thousand years after that. From there, through China and the Korean peninsula, Buddhist statues and paintings reach Japan. A form of prayer brings a form of art along with it. Japan's current of beauty begins with this great exchange. The route connects here with the landscape of faith drawn in the kami map. Dunhuang has a long story about a single room. In June 1900 a Daoist caretaker, Wang Yuanlu, found a door that had been plastered over behind a wall of Cave 16. Behind it was a small chamber packed to the ceiling with scrolls: Cave 17, the Library Cave. Some fifty thousand manuscripts and paintings, from the fourth century to the eleventh. Chinese, and also Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian and more — several languages stacked in one room. The Silk Road, in the form of books. What followed is the difficulty. Stein came in 1907, Pelliot the year after, then Warner, Oldenburg and others, and they carried a great deal away. The contents of the Library Cave are now scattered across London, Paris, St Petersburg, Tokyo and Beijing. What had been one room is now in five countries. But there is a continuation. In 1994 the International Dunhuang Programme began, imaging the dispersed holdings and putting them back together online. Something that will never physically reassemble is being laid out in one room again, as copies. Copies keep coming up on this map; this is another of them.