Dunhuang Manuscript Culture

End of the First Millennium

Imre Galambos

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110727104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Literature

"Dunhuang Manuscript Culture" explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of pre-modern routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for for almost nine hundred years. The discovery comprised tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, a period when the region was an independent kingdom ruled by local families. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural diversity of the region during this period, exhibiting—alongside obvious Chinese elements—the heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. As a result, it was much less 'Chinese' than commonly portrayed in modern scholarship. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads.

1 Multiple-text Manuscripts

Manuscripts come in many forms. This is especially true for a vast collection the size of the Dunhuang corpus, which contains tens of thousands of items written over the course of several centuries, in a variety of languages. In addition to the one-text-per-one-manuscript model, there are also many physically homogeneous manuscripts which include discrete texts written in succession, sometimes in the same hand, but not necessarily so. Among the Dunhuang manuscripts, a particular group of such multiple-text manuscripts stand out.⁴⁹ These are about three dozen codices or concertinas with several shorter Buddhist scriptures, incantations, or mantras. As a group, they have obvious typological similarities, yet the selection of texts and their order is almost never the same, suggesting they were intended for personal use and it was the individual owner determining which texts to include and in what order.

Former researchers have drawn attention to such manuscripts, recognising them as a distinct group. Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮 described them as ‘scriptures written in succession’ (renshakyō 連寫經), referring to the fact that the same manuscript contained multiple consecutive texts.⁵⁰ Later he used the same expression for the whole group and noted that many of the texts were apocryphal scriptures, some of which—for historical reasons—survived only in Dunhuang.⁵¹ Hypothesising about the function of such booklets, Stephen F. Teiser raised the possibility that they may have been temple copies used by monks in practical services.⁵² Kuo Liying discussed these manuscripts in the context of apocryphal texts, highlighting their connection with esoteric practices.⁵³ In his study of the history of Chinese bookbinding, Li Zhizhong 李致忠 drew attention to the physical peculiarities of such manuscripts, calling them ‘compendium’ booklets, which is a codicological term analogous with the concept of multiple-text manuscript used in this chapter.⁵⁴ Amanda Goodman emphasised how the analysis of the physical format had the potential to reveal a great deal about how the constituent texts were understood at the time.⁵⁵

This chapter examines multiple-text manuscripts in a holistic way, including both content and form, hoping to gain insights into their production and use. My initial approach, therefore, is from the point of view of the typology of book form and binding, contrasting these features with those in other manuscripts. While textual content is an equally important part of the equation, I hope to go beyond the practice of focusing solely on the texts.⁵⁶

As we will see below, such manuscripts may have been produced collectively by smaller groups of individuals as acts of religious offering. The personal transcription of a text would have triggered the religious efficacy of the manuscript and appropriated the merit generated by the copying. As most similar items are small booklets, it is not unreasonable to assume they were carried on the body and possibly served an apotropaic function. Conversely, the fact that such multiple-text manuscripts make up a substantial portion of the total number of surviving codices and concertinas is an indication that the religious motivation involved in their production also played a role in the spread of these book forms in Dunhuang and elsewhere.

1.1 New book forms in Dunhuang

The ninth century saw the appearance of several new book forms in Dunhuang. Although in terms of overall numbers the scroll remained the dominant form, the introduction of folded and layered manuscripts was a milestone in the history of the Chinese book. This was the time when Chinese books first began having pages and, consequently, folio numbers.⁵⁷ Due to only a small portion of the relevant items being dated, it is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when such book forms made their debut. Most researchers date them to the Tibetan and the Guiyijun periods, when the region’s closest ties were not with the Tang empire and its successor states but with Central Asia and Tibet, resulting in new types of cultural stimuli.

The new book forms differ from the dominant scroll in marked ways. Fujieda Akira dubbed them ‘irregular formats’ as a means for distinguishing them from the ‘standard format’ of the scroll.⁵⁸ Naturally, the terms ‘irregular’ and ‘standard’, with their normative connotations, are not ideal as conceptual categories. It is true, however, that the new forms deviate from the majority of Chinese manuscripts, even if this is by no means the case for Tibetan ones. They are also less uniform than scrolls which often followed prescribed standards and thus tended to be of similar size and layout. In contrast, the new forms exhibit considerable diversity in size and shape. From the point of view of general physical structure, we can identify three major types: 1) the pothi, 2) the concertina and 3) the codex. Unlike the scroll, which is a longer stretch of paper rolled up around a central axis, all three new forms consist of folia stacked or folded into a single booklet. In the following, I briefly examine the main characteristics of these three types.⁵⁹

1.1.1 Pothi

The pothi book consists of oblong rectangular folia stacked together. The prototype of this form is the Indian palm-leaf manuscript (Skt. pustaka > pothi) which is still in use in parts of South and South-East Asia. Pothis from Dunhuang and other sites in Western China structurally replicate the same palm-leaf manuscripts but using paper. The switch to paper may have been related to the limited availability of palm leaves in the desert climate of Chinese Central Asia, although the popularity of paper in the region must have also been a decisive factor. Accordingly, the pothi folia made of paper retain the shape of palm leaves, including the string holes originally used to bind the leaves together. This remains so in Dunhuang, although the holes usually do not serve a practical function and at times are merely drawn on the surface, leaving the paper unperforated. Evidently, the holes remained part of the design symbolising a connection to earlier stages of the Buddhist manuscript tradition.⁶⁰ They survived as a design feature, as a reference to an earlier stage of the Buddhist book.⁶¹

The majority of pothi books from Dunhuang are in Tibetan, and only relatively few are in Chinese. Although manuscripts in pothi form survive in various languages from other sites in Western China, their appearance in Dunhuang is unquestionably linked with the Tibetan presence. Accordingly, Jean-Pierre Drège dates the introduction of the pothi to the second half of the eighth century.⁶² Tibetans wrote on the pothi leaves horizontally, with lines parallel to the long edge of the leaves, similar to the way scribes in India and Central Asia wrote on them with scripts that had a horizontal orientation. When writing Chinese, the leaves had to be turned 90 degrees for the vertical lines of text to remain parallel to the long side. This was a simple solution that presented no difficulties unless the languages were to be mixed.

An example of a Chinese pothi is manuscript S.5635, a single folio 26.6 × 9.2 cm in size, with the beginning of the Weimojie suoshuo jing 維摩詰所說經 (Skt. Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa-sūtra; Sutra Spoken by Vimalakīrti). Fig. 1 shows the recto and verso of the same folio side by sid...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Multiple-text Manuscripts
• 2 Manuscripts Written by Students
• 3 Writing from Left to Right
• 4 Circulars and Names
• Concluding Remarks
• Index
• About the Author