In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha acknowledges that those who study the text can expect to be disparaged and held in contempt. The Buddha encourages forbearance and persistence with the promise that such persecution will be beneficial. Perhaps devotees took heart in such words; the oldest known printed book was created against a backdrop of suppression of Buddhism in China. Just two decades before Wang Jie commissioned his sutra, attempts to eradicate Buddhism saw monasteries destroyed, bronze statues melted down for coins, land confiscated, monks and nuns defrocked, and foreign monks sent packing. Not until the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s would Buddhism experience a crackdown so extensive. The persecution reached its peak in 845 under the Emperor Wuzong, a Daoist who issued an imperial decree attacking the Buddhist faith. He condemned it as foreign and idolatrous. It had seduced people’s hearts, corrupted their morals and robbed them of their gold and their strength to work. When men stopped farming and women stopped weaving, people went hungry and cold, yet the lavishly endowed monasteries rivaled palaces in their grandeur, according to the decree. In short, Buddhism was an evil that needed to be eradicated. Buddhists were not the only ones who felt the imperial wrath. Nestorians, Manicheans and Zoroastrians were also targeted as pernicious foreign imports, unlike home-grown Daoists and Confucians.
The emperor’s actions were driven as much by economics as ideology. The monasteries were wealthy but paid no taxes. And the emperor needed money, especially after a war against the Uyghurs two years earlier had further emptied already depleted imperial coffers. The suppression of Buddhism was short. The emperor died in 846, possibly—and ironically—because of the long-life potions he consumed. But during his six-year rule many of China’s estimated 4,600 temples and 40,000 shrines were destroyed, and more than a quarter of a million monks and nuns returned to lay and taxpaying life. Gold, silver, and jade were confiscated, and sacred images made of iron were turned into agricultural tools. Only images made of less valuable materials—clay, wood, and stone—were left alone.
Von Le Coq suspected he had found evidence of the suppression when he made a grisly find near Turfan in the winter of 1904–05. In a ruined Buddhist temple he uncovered the piled corpses of more than a hundred murdered monks. The dry desert air had preserved their robes, desiccated skin, hair, and signs of the fatal wounds. One skull had been slashed with a saber that split the victim’s head down to the teeth.
Although the next emperor was more favorably disposed to the faith, Buddhism never fully recovered in China. Its golden age was over and its long decline began. Dunhuang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas escaped the extensive destruction. This was largely because the oasis was effectively cut off from China, having fallen under Tibetan control. Tibet, which had conquered a number of Silk Road towns, seized Dunhuang around 781. The caves thrived under Tibetan control. The Tibetans had only recently become Buddhist and brought the zeal of the newly converted and their own art forms, creating nearly fifty caves. Tibet continued to control the oasis for the next seventy years—providentially this coincided with the worst of the persecution. The locals resisted the Tibetans, but the invaders were not ousted from Dunhuang until 848, three years after the persecution ended. As a result, much of the Buddhist art destroyed throughout China survived intact at the caves. No one knows when the printed Diamond Sutra arrived at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, but it found refuge in a place that escaped the religious crackdown elsewhere.
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The key that unlocked the Library Cave for Stein was the translator monk Xuanzang. His versions of Buddhist texts were among the first batch of scrolls allowed (albeit furtively) out of the caves, a discovery that proved astonishing to Abbot Wang and convenient for Stein. However, the printed Diamond Sutra was not the work of Xuanzang but of an even earlier monk named Kumarajiva, who translated the sutra from Sanskrit into Chinese around 402. Although Xuanzang is revered for his sixteen-year trek to India and back, Kumarajiva is the most highly regarded of China’s four great translator monks. His free-flowing translations remain the most popular even today, partly because they go beyond Xuanzang’s literal versions.
The Diamond Sutra, usually divided into thirty-two verses, has been translated many times into many languages. Six Chinese translations alone made between 402 and 703 survive. There were also early translations into Tibetan, Khotanese and Mongolian. But centuries passed before the words of the Diamond Sutra became known in the West. The first significant English translation, penned by a German scholar named Max Müller, appeared only in the 1890s, little more than a decade before Stein arrived in Dunhuang. It took more than half a century for the next major translation to appear when scholar Edward Conze, a Marxist turned Buddhist, published his translation in 1957. In recent years, translations of the Diamond Sutra have gathered pace, including versions by prominent Vietnamese author and monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Western Tibetan Buddhist monk George Churinoff and American writer Red Pine (Bill Porter).
The Diamond Sutra is one of the most revered texts in Buddhism. It was among the most popular sutras in China during the Tang dynasty, the era when Wang Jie commissioned his scroll. Its enduring popularity is in part because of its brevity—it can be recited in forty minutes. It is shorter than the Lotus Sutra but longer than the Heart Sutra, two other popular and influential texts. Some sutras can take hours, or even days, to recite. The Diamond Sutra has a special place among Zen Buddhists (known as Chan Buddhists in China) whose founding father, Huineng, is said to have achieved enlightenment when as a poor, illiterate youth he overheard a man reciting it.
~~Journeys On The Silk Road -By- Joyce Morgan & Conrad Walters
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