The Mogao Caves, or Mogao Grottoes are along the Silk Road in China.
The Silk Road was the route that Marco Polo and his other travelers took to trade for spices to preserve meat in China from Europe. The Mogao Caves form a system of 492 temples near Dunhuang, in Gansu province, China. They are also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, Qianfodong , or the Dunhuang Caves. The use of the word "cave" is a bit of a misnomer, since these are not natural, but instead examples of rock-cut architecture.
History
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 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.
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 several European expeditions by 1910: a joint British/Indian group led by Aurel Stein (who took hundreds of copies of the Diamond Sutra because he was unable to read Chinese); 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 the least of all. Pelloit 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. The remaining Chinese manuscripts were sent to Peking (Beijing) 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 Stein and Pelliot.
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.
Mogao Caves in popular culture
* The Mogao manuscript trove forms the backdrop of the plotline of the Japanese movie The Silk Road (1988, English subtitles), adapted from a 1959 novel by Yasushi Inoue.* One of the stories from the caves were adapted into a Chinese animation in 1981 titled a A Deer of Nine Colors.
The Silk Road was the route that Marco Polo and his other travelers took to trade for spices to preserve meat in China from Europe. The Mogao Caves form a system of 492 temples near Dunhuang, in Gansu province, China. They are also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, Qianfodong , or the Dunhuang Caves. The use of the word "cave" is a bit of a misnomer, since these are not natural, but instead examples of rock-cut architecture.
History
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 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.
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 several European expeditions by 1910: a joint British/Indian group led by Aurel Stein (who took hundreds of copies of the Diamond Sutra because he was unable to read Chinese); 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 the least of all. Pelloit 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. The remaining Chinese manuscripts were sent to Peking (Beijing) 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 Stein and Pelliot.
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.
Mogao Caves in popular culture
* The Mogao manuscript trove forms the backdrop of the plotline of the Japanese movie The Silk Road (1988, English subtitles), adapted from a 1959 novel by Yasushi Inoue.* One of the stories from the caves were adapted into a Chinese animation in 1981 titled a A Deer of Nine Colors.
添加到百度搜藏
没有评论:
发表评论