Overview

Early Buddhist Books: The Evidence from Dunhuang

In June 1900, a large hoard of Buddhist manuscripts was discovered in a sealed shrine room—the so-called “library cave”—at the Mogao cave site near the old Silk Road town of Dunhuang in what is now Gansu province, China. Dating from the fourth to the early eleventh centuries, the Dunhuang finds suddenly added tens of thousands of physical books to the archives of Central Asian and Buddhist codicology.

We will continue to share updates concerning research in this area supported by Hidden Stories.
For example, the next page features discussion of an article by Amanda Goodman and Jessica Lockhart about copies of a block-printed illustrated prayer sheet from 947 CE Dunhuang, including one now at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). We would like to thank our colleagues at the ROM, in particular Gwen Adams, Janet Cowan, and Wen-chien Cheng, for their ongoing contributions to this research including facilitating microscopic examination of the leaf in their collection, and leading a discussion of this work for their Curator Conversations series.

A fragment of Cao Yuanzhong’s Avalokiteśvara woodblock print in which the image block is printed at centre, with roughly symmetrical margins of 5–6 cm around each edge – one of them created by the addition of a vertical strip of reused paper from an official document. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, P.4514 (6) 4.
A view under optical microscope revealing inclusions in the paper fibres of one of Cao Yuanzhong’s Avalokiteśvara woodblock prints (Toronto, Royal Ontario Museum 927.24). Photo: Jessica Lockhart
Paper painting depicting seated Buddha triad with standing Bodhisattvas and donor, with hanging tabs added; mounting holes in upper and lower margins. Guiyijun period (848/851–1030/1036), tenth century. From Mogao Cave 17, Dunhuang. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, P.4518 (21).