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Encyclopédie des historiographies : Afriques, Amériques, Asies

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Nathalie Kouamé
, 
Éric P. Meyer
, 
Anne Viguier

D

Dunhuang Manuscripts (The)

Manuscrits de Dunhuang (Les)

Costantino Moretti

Résumé

L’expression « manuscrits de Dunhuang » fait référence aux dizaines de milliers de manuscrits, datant du ve au xie siècles, découverts au début du xxe siècle dans une grotte murée dans le complexe bouddhique de Mogao, à Dunhuang (province du Gansu, Chine). La plupart de ces manuscrits contiennent des textes bouddhiques et sont rédigés en chinois ou en tibétain, mais également dans d’autres langues, en particulier le sogdien, le khotanais, l’ouïghour et le sanskrit. Ces documents permirent de mieux comprendre l’histoire sociale, politique, religieuse et économique de la Chine et de l’Asie centrale médiévales, et donnèrent naissance à un nouveau domaine scientifique : les « études de Dunhuang » (dunhuangxue 敦煌學).

Texte intégral

1The thousands of manuscripts found in a sealed cave in Mogao complex at Dunhuang (see “The Dunhuang Caves” in this encyclopaedia), and referred to as “the Dunhuang manuscripts”, are among the most important discoveries of the last century. These documents, dating from the 5th to the 11th century, are written in Chinese and Tibetan for the most part, but also in other languages, notably Sogdian, Khotanese, Uighur, Sanskrit and even Hebrew. They contributed greatly to a better understanding of the social, political, religious and economic history of Medieval China and Central Asia, and also gave rise to a new branch of studies in the domain of Sinology, namely “Dunhuang Studies” (dunhuangxue 敦煌學). In particular, they allowed a new approach to the study of Chinese history, based on actual primary sources rather than documents manipulated by official historiography. A large number of paintings, banners, textiles and other objects were also found in the cave, thus contributing to research in other fields.

2Wang Yuanlu 王圓籙 (1859‑1931), a man originally from Hubei province who did his military service in Jiuquan (Gansu), before becoming a Taoist monk, is credited with the discovery of this corpus. After a period traveling around the region he arrived at Mogao, most likely around 1900. Thereafter, he undertook upkeep of the site and hired local people to restore some of the caves, collecting alms in the local area to support himself and his religious activity. The accidental discovery of the manuscripts took place during restoration work of Cave 16 - according to the numbering system currently in use - the main entrance of which was blocked by sand from the surrounding desert accumulated over centuries on the lower layer of the cliff. While clearing the entrance to Cave 16, one of the workers noticed a crack on the right (north) wall. He reported the fact to Wang who realized that the crack gave access to a hidden space, walled off from the outside. After digging an opening, Wang discovered a small cave filled with tens of thousands of manuscripts. This cave would later be named “Cave 17”, and is commonly referred to as the “Cave Library”. Initially, Wang kept his discovery a secret. Subsequently he decided to donate some manuscripts to various local officials in the hope of getting consistent donations to finance his own work and support the amateur restoration work he wished to carry out. Contrary to his expectations, the individuals who received the manuscripts did not show much enthusiasm. Though they had some interest in the calligraphic value of the manuscripts, they ignored the historical value of these documents. Most of the manuscripts dispersed at that time were in turn given as gifts to other officials, and after passing from one owner to another, eventually ended up in various minor collections and museums in Asia, Europe and the United States.

  • 1 Stein, 1912, vol. 2, p. 172.

3At the beginning of the 20th century, China was witnessing one of the most tumultuous periods of its history that would lead to the dissolution of the millenarian empire and the establishment of the Republic (1911). Leading European countries were carrying out ambitious expeditions through Central Asia, with the aim of both collecting archeological treasures and ensuring their political influence over the region. The major collections of Dunhuang manuscripts were constituted in this context. It was during his second expedition to Central Asia that Hungarian‑born British explorer Marc Aurel Stein (1862‑1943) reached this area and was the first to have access to the “Library”, in 1907. The description of Stein’s first glimpse at the cave’s content attests to the magnificence of this corpus in its original state.1 For a modest donation, Stein was able to acquire thousands of documents from Wang (more than 14,000 manuscripts), which he then sent to the UK and to India (a British colony at the time) where they were kept in various institutions (the British Museum, the India Office Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum). At the beginning of the 1980s, the manuscripts were transferred to the British Library where they still remain.

  • 2 Pelliot, 1908, p. 505‑529.

4The second western explorer to reach the Cave Library was French sinologist and at that time member of the École française d’Extrême‑Orient (EFEO), Paul Pelliot (1878‑1945), who arrived in Mogao less than one year after Stein. He worked in the cave for three weeks, opening all the remaining manuscripts - still tens of thousands despite the first dispersal -, carefully selecting the most interesting texts, which he then “bought” and sent back to France (about 6,000 manuscripts). His report stated that during the first 10 days he examined about 1,000 a day after which point he proceeded more slowly.2 The most famous image concerning his expedition at Dunhuang portrays him crouched inside the cave examining the material by candlelight. Pelliot had privileged relations with Chinese scholars. On returning to Beijing, he showed some of the collected manuscripts to a few specialists who immediately realized the importance of these documents and urged the Chinese authorities to collect the remaining material. In order to prevent further losses, they alerted the Ministry of Education, who eventually managed to bring the remaining Chinese documents to Beijing. However, the process was slow and complicated. Part of the corpus was first stolen and then recovered and added to the other manuscripts at the National Library of China, currently home to the largest collection of Chinese manuscripts (approximately 16,000). The Tibetan manuscripts were left in Gansu.

  • 3 Galambos, 2008.

5Japanese and Russian expeditions also reached Mogao, respectively in 1911‑1912 and 1914‑1915, and left the region with a significant number of documents that Wang had hidden from the Chinese authorities. These documents constitute two of the major collections of Dunhuang manuscripts: the “Ōtani collection” named after the Japanese count Ōtani Kōzui 大谷光瑞 (1876‑1948) who sponsored the expedition, and the “Oldenburg collection” kept at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St Petersburg, containing the documents collected by the Russian explorer Sergei Oldenburg (1863‑1934). The “Ōtani collection” was dispersed throughout various museums and institutions.3 The Russian collection, in particular, contains a large number of manuscripts of special historical interest. Moreover, Stein returned to the Cave Library during his 3rd expedition to the region, in 1914, and bought around 600 additional manuscripts, that are kept with the other manuscripts at the British Library.

  • 4 Gernet et al., 1970‑2001.

6These major collections are quite different in terms of both volume and artistic and historical value. While the Chinese collection has a larger number of manuscripts than the others, its value for research is usually considered inferior to that of the British and French collections as it is comprised of documents that were “left”, so to speak, i.e. “not selected” by the first scholars to acquire material from Cave 17. In fact, a great part of the Cave Library consisted of copies of well‑known Buddhist scriptures already included in the Canon and often found in many identical copies. However, these documents are of great use for correcting mistakes in printed editions of texts included in the Buddhist Canon. The British collection, which contains a vast number of documents of high scientific value, is also considered the most significant in terms of “artistic value”. It is no coincidence that some of the most beautifully decorated Chinese manuscripts are kept in the British collection: as Stein was not a sinologist, his choices were often motivated by the artistic or calligraphic value of the documents. Pelliot, one of the greatest European sinologists of the time, who also mastered several languages, made a fairly methodical selection of the Cave’s material. He was able to select the most interesting documents in terms of content and research value: in the limited amount of time he spent in the cave he selected manuscripts bearing colophons and dates, information on local administration, history and economy, bilingual and non‑Chinese documents, etc., that is to say, items providing useful material for the study of the political, economic and social history of the region and, more broadly, of Medieval China. For this reason, the French collection is considered the most valuable in terms of research interest. The cataloguing work of the Chinese manuscripts in the collection was initiated by Paul Demiéville (1894‑1979), continued by Jacques Gernet (1921‑2018) and Wu Chi‑yu (Wu Qiyu) 吳其昱 (1915‑2011), and completed by the research team led by Michel Soymié (1924‑2002). This work gave life to the most detailed catalogue of Chinese Dunhuang manuscripts.4

7Smaller collections of Dunhuang manuscripts are also scattered in private collections or public museums in China, Taiwan, Japan, Europe and the US. As the precise origin of much of the latter is difficult to trace, the authenticity of some manuscripts remains questionable.

  • 5 Drège Jean‑Pierre, to be published.

8Most of the Dunhuang material in the various collections became known to scholars through catalogues, facsimiles and photographic reproductions published over the course of about a century.5 In recent decades, the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) significantly contributed to ongoing research by publishing photographic reproductions of Dunhuang manuscripts from all collections online (http://idp.bl.uk). Unfortunately, this database is far from complete for some collections, notably the British and the Chinese.

  • 6 Rong, 2013, p. 109‑136; Galambos, van Schaik, 2012, p. 18‑28.

9One of the most widely debated issues concerning the Dunhuang manuscripts is why and when they were sealed in the Cave Library.6 This issue is closely related to another unresolved question: the origin and nature of the documents stored in this cave. Due to various elements, the cave is considered the meditation cave of the famous monk Hongbian 洪辯 (d. 868), who served as head of the Buddhist community of the Hexi region (Hexi du sengtong 河西都僧統) - the region’s highest religious rank -, in the early and mid‑9th century. A statue of Hongbian and a stele inscription referring to him were also found in the cave.

10Stein, the first westerner to gain access to the cave, when the documents were still arranged closer to their original state, provided one of the first theories. According to him, these documents, Buddhist scriptures and paintings for the most part, were obsolete or torn documents discarded from local monastic libraries. Due to their religious nature, they could not be literally “thrown away”, as they constituted a sort of “sacred waste”, and thus were deposited in the cave and sealed in a Geniza‑like practice. Assuming that the most recently dated manuscripts were produced during the 10th century, he speculated that the cave was sealed at around the beginning of the 11th century. In recent decades scholars have shown that burying damaged statues or scriptures is a well‑documented Buddhist practice. Various scholars supported this theory with a few variants. The Japanese sinologist Fujieda Akira 藤枝晃 (1911‑1998) believes that these documents were deposited (shortly after 1002) having become obsolete after the spread of printing and the diffusion of printed editions of the Buddhist Canon. Moreover, Fang Guangchang 方廣錩 linked them to the large‑scale inventory work of the region’s monastery libraries carried out by members of an important local family, the Cao 曹 family, who ruled Dunhuang for more than a hundred years, from the 10th century to the Tangut invasion of 1036. This operation, as documented in various sources, was carried out from 914 onward to collect torn buddhist texts, obsolete administrative documents, and scripture fragments that were subsequently deposited in the cave.

11Pelliot, who examined the material after Stein’s visit, had the impression that the cave had been sealed in a hurry. Due to the absence of Tangut manuscripts, he argued that the cave must have been sealed before the Tangut invasion of 1036, to prevent the documents from being destroyed.

  • 7 Rong, 1999‑2000.

12Another leading scholar in the domain of Dunhuang studies, Rong Xinjiang 榮新江, thinks that the cache is made of damaged and incomplete manuscripts that the monk Daozhen 道真 (active 934-987) of the Sanjie monastery 三界寺 collected during the first half of the 10th century from various monastic libraries in the region with the aim of repairing them, as suggested by various data found in the manuscripts themselves. They were first kept at the Sanjie monastery, located in front of the cave complex, and then deposited in Cave 17. Like Pelliot, Rong thinks that these documents were hidden to prevent them from being destroyed, not from the Tanguts (who were buddhists), but due to the possible invasion by muslim Karakhanids who occupied the region of Khotan in 1006. However, they never reached Dunhuang.7

13Imaeda Yoshirō thinks that Cave 17 became Hongbian’s commemorative chapel, after his death, and documents related to him were stored there. For unknown reasons, the cave served less and less as a chapel, and people started to deposit various unwanted documents from local monasteries in the available space. For Imaeda, the cave must have been sealed later in the 11th century, as suggested by data found in a few manuscripts.

  • 8 Or “transformation texts”, i.e., popular literature composed of both prose and verse, narr (...)
  • 9 Kuo, 2000.

14The majority of the Dunhuang manuscripts, probably more than 80 %, are either Buddhist texts (canonical scriptures, lost texts and apocrypha, commentaries, exegetical works, bianwen 變文 literature8, and sūtra lectures produced in Dunhuang) or administrative documents linked to the management of local monasteries. The earliest dated manuscript is a copy of a Vinaya text, the Shisong biqiu jieben 十誦比丘戒本 (The Essential Sarvāstivāda Precepts for Monks), which bears a colophon of 406 AD. Various scriptures, notably those banned in Central China or those later labelled as apocrypha, came to light thanks to this discovery.9 In Buddhist religious tradition, the act of copying or reproducing a sūtra has a specific meaning which is strongly related to the concept of “merit-making”. The latter is usually defined as the belief that a practitioner can gain merit by donating certain objects to the Buddhist community. In particular, the act of reproducing a sacred scripture could bestow religious merit upon the believer. Thus, it is no coincidence that this corpus is mainly composed of Buddhist scriptures.

15Moreover, the remaining percentage represents various genres: religion (notably Taoism, but also Zoroastrism, Manichaesim and Nestorianism, etc.), the Chinese classics, Standard Histories, classical literature, popular literature and lyrics in vernacular language, local gazetteers, texts that concern divination and medicine, administrative documents such as population figures, official letters, contracts, land and tax registers, etc.

16The thousands of manuscripts in Tibetan language, produced during and after the Tibetan Rule of Dunhuang (781‑848), are also invaluable to the study of the history of the Tibetan empire, and Tibetan Buddhist philology, religious history and scribal practices. Moreover, the complex historical background of the region, which due to political and geographic factors has become multicultural and multilinguistic, left a vast number of documents written in non‑Chinese languages that contributed to retracing the historical, social and political history of Central Asia. Foreign influence that contributed to modeling Chinese culture is also of great interest for researchers studying the interactive relationship between China and Central Asian countries.

  • 10 Drège, 1991, p. 179‑247.
  • 11 Drège & Moretti, 2014.

17Dunhuang manuscripts are of particular interest in the study of Chinese codicology and the history of Chinese medieval manuscript production, a field initiated in the West by Jean‑Pierre Drège, which became the most specific research domain of Dunhuang studies in France. The vast amount of codicological data found in this corpus and the variety of material supports (not only scrolls, but also codices, pothīs, concertina, butterfly bound books, and hybrid forms) makes this corpus unique and essential for the study of Buddhist monastic library organization10 and Medieval Chinese scribal practices and book production.11

Bibliographie

Books

Drège Jean‑Pierre, 1991, Les Bibliothèques en Chine au temps des manuscrits (jusqu’au xe siècle), École française d’Extrême‑Orient, Paris, 346 p. [9782855397610]

Drège Jean‑Pierre (dir.) & Moretti Costantino (coll.), 2014, La fabrique du lisible. La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale, Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, Paris, 422 p. [9782857570738]

Galambos Imre & van Schaik Sam, 2012, Manuscripts and Travellers, De Gruyter, Berlin and Boston, 247 p.

Gernet Jacques, Wu Chi‑yu, Soymié Michel et al., 1970‑2001, Catalogue des manuscrits chinois de Touen-houang. Fonds Pelliot chinois, vol. I (1970), Bibliothèque nationale, Paris ; vol. III (1983), Éditions de la Fondation Singer‑Polignac, Paris ; vol. IV (1991), EFEO, Paris ; vol. V (1995), EFEO, Paris ; vol. VI (dir. by WangToutain Françoise, 2001), EFEO, Paris.

Mair Victor, 1989, T’ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), London, 450 p. [9780674868151]

Rong Xinjiang, Galambos Imre (trad.), 2013, Eighteen lectures on Dunhuang, Brill, Leiden, 547 p. [9789004250420]

Stein Marc Aurel, 1912, Ruins of Desert Cathay: Personal Narrative of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China, Macmillan, London.

Papers and Contributions to Books

Drège Jean-Pierre, to be published, “Manuscript Cultures (China)”, in Friedrich Michael, Isaacson Harunaga & Quenzer Jörg B., to be published, Encyclopaedia of Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa, Volume I: Introduction. Histories of Manuscript Cultures, De Gruyter, Berlin, 320 p. [9783110217537]

Galambos Imre, 2008, “The third Otani expedition at Dunhuang: Acquisition of the Japanese Collection of Dunhuang Manuscripts”, Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology, 3, p. 29‑35.

Kuo Liying, 2000, « Sur les apocryphes bouddhiques », Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrêm‑-Orient, 87 (2), p. 677‑705.

Pelliot Paul, 1908, « Une Bibliothèque médiévale retrouvée au Kan-sou », Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême‑Orient, 8, p. 501‑529.

Rong Xinjiang, 1999 2000, “The Nature of the Dunhuang Library Cave and the Reasons for its Sealing”, Cahiers d’Extrême‑Asie, 11, p. 247‑275.

Notes

1 Stein, 1912, vol. 2, p. 172.

2 Pelliot, 1908, p. 505‑529.

3 Galambos, 2008.

4 Gernet et al., 1970‑2001.

5 Drège Jean‑Pierre, to be published.

6 Rong, 2013, p. 109‑136; Galambos, van Schaik, 2012, p. 18‑28.

7 Rong, 1999‑2000.

8 Or “transformation texts”, i.e., popular literature composed of both prose and verse, narrating Buddhist tales, see Mair, 1989.

9 Kuo, 2000.

10 Drège, 1991, p. 179‑247.

11 Drège & Moretti, 2014.

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