Rethinking Ancient Buddhist Art as Information Design

Paul Kahn
Paul Kahn
Aug 22, 2017 · 27 min read

A Pilgrimage Through the Wutaishan Mural in the Hall of Mañjusrī

Dunhuang, the Mural & the Library Cave

When I stood in front of the painted mural of Wutaishan during a visit to Mogao Cave 61, I saw a masterpiece of information design that combined landscape painting, narrative, and geography. I saw a mural that is larger than any person’s field of vision, over fifty feet long and twelve feet high. I saw the pilgrims and monks in and around the monasteries of Wutaishan (Five Terrace Mountain), a sacred mountain range in north China. I saw celestial beings descending from the clouds. I was looking at the map of a place, covered with buildings and connecting paths. I could read all this from the images on the wall without knowing much about the legends and cosmology that populated the composition.

I wasn’t standing in front of the wall by chance. I was there to see Chinese Buddhist paintings and sculptures. I had expected to see paintings of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, local legends and scenes of daily life. The painted mural of Wutaishan was a surprise. I was expecting to see a paradise and what I saw looked like a map of the earth.

The Wutaishan mural is painted on the rear wall of a man-made cave carved into the cliff face of Mogao Grotto. The grotto is south of Dunhuang, an oasis city in a desert region of Gansu Province, about 1,500 miles west of Beijing. This mile-long cliff on the western bank of the Daquan River contains one of the richest collections of Buddhist art in the world. The carving and decorating of caves began in the 4th Century CE and continued for a thousand years. While similar sites exist in other parts of China, Mogao Grotto dwarfs them all in sheer volume. Almost five hundred caves with elaborate wall paintings and statues still survive.

Like many things from long ago, they survived because they were forgotten. Dunhuang was once an important stage on the caravan routes that connected China to the “Western Regions” — the Indian subcontinent, and the Turkic, Persian, Arab and Mediterranean worlds. The Mahayana form of Buddhism spread into China from these regions, as did the practice of excavating and decorating caves. The caves of Ajanta in Maharashtra, India, may have been the original model for the Mogao Grotto. These caves were excavated into shapes that imitate the interior rooms of tents and temples, then decorated with devotional paintings and sculptures. As the site attracted the sponsorship of ruling dynasties, Mogao Grotto came to include two giant Buddhas, the tallest being 115 feet, inspired perhaps by descriptions of the gigantic Buddhas thousands of miles to the west in Bamiyan, Afghanistan.

Cave-temple building was an expensive enterprise, made possible through sponsorship by regional rulers and great families. This millennium of construction stopped in the 14th Century when Ming China withdrew from its western frontier and Dunhuang’s role as a military outpost and connector to the West came to an end. The next six hundred years brought earthquakes, drifting sand, neglect, decay and vandalism to the caves. Then in 1900 Wang Yuanlu, a local Daoist priest who had taken on the self-appointed task of restoring the religious site, discovered a sealed cave containing 42,000 manuscripts and paintings. Why these documents were hidden in this cave remains a mystery. The latest documents date from the 11th century, a time when local monasteries may have felt threatened by wars between Buddhist and Moslem kingdoms in the west. Discovery of the hidden library ended Dunhuang’s period of neglect. Scholars from many countries — Mark Aurel Stein from British India, Paul Pelliot from France, Sergei Oldenburg from Russia, Zuicho Tachibana and Koichiro Yoshikawa from Japan, Langdon Warner from the US — took most of the movable artifacts back to their home institutions. The Dunhuang Academy, established in the 1940s, preserved and managed what could not be moved and recovered additional treasures. That Chinese institution has devoted enormous resources to the study and preservation of the surviving artwork that at Mogao and several nearby cave sites.

The documents in that hidden library and the image that survive in the region’s caves tell us a great deal about the people who lived there. They make Dunhuang doubly unique: it is the only site where large amounts of portable artwork and documents have survived and it is the largest site of cave paintings and sculptures representing a thousand years of Buddhist art.

The Hall of Mañjusrī

The Wutaishan mural is in Cave 61. The neutral numbering scheme adopted by art historians is a reasonable solution when you have 500 caves to refer to, but I will use the name it was given in a 10th Century document, The Hall of Manjushri (Mañjusrī). Manjushri is the bodhisattva associated with prajñā (wisdom), a celestial figure who has pledged to help all beings attain enlightenment. He is one of the most important figures in the Mahayana Buddhist pantheon, playing a major role in sutra texts such as the Lotus Sutra, the Vimalakirti Sutra, and the Flower Garland Sutra (Avataṃsaka). In the Flower Garland he is said to reside on a mountain in the northeast, a reference that led Chinese Buddhists to connect Manjushri to Wutaishan, a mountain site in China’s Shanxi Province that was considered sacred long before Buddhism entered China. This association developed during the early centuries of Chinese Buddhism and Wutaishan became a Buddhist pilgrimage site that attracted travelers from India, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan. The association between the bodhisattva and the sacred mountain represented China’s ascension as the new center of Mahayana Buddhism. In the 7–8th Centuries, Manjushri was promoted in China as part of the Buddhist state cult. Stories recorded how Manjushri appeared in various manifestations — seated, standing or flying, a glowing light, an old man, a young prince riding a lion — to pilgrims and monks. Monasteries and meditation huts proliferated on the sacred mountain during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE). Two of the religious buildings depicted on the mural, Nanchen and Foguang Temples, are now recognized as two of China’s oldest surviving wooden structures. Pilgrimage accounts from this period describing travel routes for reaching each major monastery, stupa and temple. Cave 61 is not the only one at Mogao containing paintings and statues of Manjushri and several have him as the central statue on an altar. What makes this cave one of the finest and often studied caves is its combination of paintings, statues (now lost) and the mural that represents Wutaishan’s physical and sacred space.

Dunhuang was within the region controlled by Tang China, defended by garrison forts. During this same period, Wutaishan became the symbolic and physical link between the Chinese world and the pure lands of Buddhist deities, visited by pilgrims from China and many other parts of the Buddhist world: India, Tibet, Korea, and Japan.

The Tibetan kingdom took control of Dunhuang in the 9th century and ruled the region for seventy years. Tibetan rule was followed by a regional Chinese government known as the Return to Righteousness Army (Guiyijun), led by the Zhang and Cao families. The Zhang patriarch drove out the Tibetans and governed the provinces as a Chinese state allied through marriage to other states along the Central Asian trade routes[1]. When Cao Yuanzhong took his turn as local king, his family had devoted resources to the Mogao Grottos for generations. He and Lady Zhai sponsored the repairs of many existing caves and commissioned a number of new ones. Started in 950, Cave 61 was to be their biggest and most ambitious project.

I imagine a master designer working in collaboration with the Cao family and the abbot of the local monastery to developed the design program. Many of the chosen subjects repeated themes already found in other caves sponsored by members of their clans. Making Manjushri the devotional focus appears to be part of a larger program to identify the political leadership with this religious figure[2]. Cao had also embraced the new technology of block printing to spread the Buddhist faith and identify his rule with Manjushri, based on example prints found in the library cave. The innovative choice of a large-scale mural of Wutaishan may have been part of this program, evoking both Manjushri’s home on earth and the time when the Dunhuang region and central China were closely and safely linked.

Cave 61 was built deep into the Mogao cliff and given a high ceiling. The cave consists of an entrance hallway leading to a rectangular chamber with a floor space of over 2,000 square feet. The walls are 10 feet high with an upward sloping ceiling capped by a central recessed medallion. About half of the chamber floor was occupied by a raised platform built out from a pillar. The platform itself was covered with life-sized statues, all of which have disappeared. The pillar is 13 feet wide and only a foot deep, connecting the ceiling to the floor. Behind the pillar is a 6-foot-wide passageway.

Figure 1 Perspective drawing of Mogao Cave 61 by Lin, Building a Sacred Mountain, 179

The wall paintings are divided into upper and lower registers. The upper register of the side walls were divided into ten areas devoted to jingbian paintings, a popular form of religious art that visualized the messages from individual Mahayana sutras. The entire wall facing the platform is devoted to another sutra, while the back wall around and behind the pillar is given to the mural depicting Wutaishan. The lower register of the wall facing the platform is covered with images of the donors. Wrapping around behind the platform, the lower register is divided into many small panels showing events in the life of Shakyamuni Buddha. The ceiling is covered with the thousand Buddha pattern.

Figure 2 View of Cave 61 facing the western wall, from Fang, “The restoration for statues on the central butsudan in Cave 61”

Many of these design elements had already been used in other caves. Why did the master designer decide to block the view of the most innovative and original element, the massive Wutaishan mural, by placing it behind the statues and the screen? The answer lies in the importance of the statues as a focus for worship. Statues had been placed in wall niches for centuries. When space permitted, flanking statues were moved onto small platforms built out from the walls. The size of this cave permitted the designer to locate the statues on a platform entirely separated from the back wall. From the earliest caves, painting behind the statue was used to create continuity of depth, joining two- and three-dimensional representations. The painted wall behind a statue generally contains the statue’s aura, as well as portraits of companions and attendants. All the statues in this design program stood away from any wall, but the main object of veneration — Manjushri on his lion — required a backdrop. The pillar was painted with images of attending bodhisattvas and the flowered canopy and lion’s tail was attached to the wall. Once the choice was made, only the side portions of the mural could be viewed from the front of the cave. The complete mural had to be viewed from the circumambulation corridor cut behind the pillar. The viewer walking behind the pillar would never be more than a few feet from the painted wall that rose more than ten feet above his head.

Today the entrance to the cave is a metal door built into the reinforced concrete façade preserving the cliff face from erosion by wind and blowing sand. I can imagine entering the cave through its original wooden structure that extending outward from the cliff. The wooden walls give way to the narrow stone passageway piercing into the cliff between adjoining older caves. The narrow entrance ends suddenly in the large chamber. The ceiling rises up over my head suggesting I have entered an enormous tent. A thousand Buddhas in alternating colors seated in lotus position cover the ceiling above me. The four guardian kings appear on concave areas where the ceiling joins to the four corners of the walls.

There are many statues in front of me on a raised platform, backed by a screen covered with bodhisattvas beneath an umbrella of flowers and clouds. In the center is Manjushri on his lion flanked by six figures on each side: two small attendants, two bodhisattvas, and two heavenly kings[3]. In front of Manjushri‘s lion are two more figures associated with Wutaishan: the Indian monk Buddhapālita and a manifestation of Manjushri as an old man dressed in white. I can see the statues only in digital reconstruction based on conjecture and traces left on the platform. Today the platform is empty and covered in dusty sand. All that remains of the statues is the tail of Manjushri’s lion emerging from the screen and a fragment on the platform of the lion’s right front paw.

Figure 3 Digital reconstruction of statues on the platform, from Fang, “The restoration for statues on the central butsudan in Cave 61”

It is hard to express how dazzling and “busy” this kind of design program appears to the modern eye. Every inch of the walls are covered with paintings. The eye scans dense patterns trying to distinguish narrative elements that appear at various scales from repeating design patterns with no narrative significance. The five sutra illustrations painted on each side wall seem to hang from the illusion of wooden rafters covered with flowered borders. Exterior light can enter the cave only through long entrance corridor, so the original lighting program may have used floor lamps and reflectors to illuminate the walls.

The wall facing the statue platform — the wall the statues look out at — contains illustrations from the Vimalakirti sutra. This sutra was very popular in Tang China because Vimalakirti was a layman who understood the Buddha’s teachings, a role model that appealed to the Chinese literati and intellectual tradition. In the sutra, Manjushri is sent by the Buddha to ask about Vimalakirti’s health. The layman responds to Manjushri with a dialog about desire, sensation and perception of reality.

Vimalakirti dressed in white sits on a platform beneath a canopy on the northeast wall. Below him is a group of Central Asian men and women dignitaries, people from non-Chinese ethnic groups the 10th century visitor might have seen at the Dunhuang market. Manjushri sits on a platform on the southeast wall shaded by a floating umbrella, surrounded by flowers. Below his platform is the Chinese emperor flanked by mitered attendants, mirroring the Central Asians below Vimalakirti. The image of Vimalakirti and Manjushri engaged in this dialog witnessed by the leaders of the known world is found in many caves. They are always with the same attendants, their audience bringing together celestial and earthly figures from the Middle Kingdom (China) and the Western Regions (Central Asia). It is analogous to colonial-era European cathedral paintings that show symbols of the continents — a European, an African, an Asian, a Native North American — gazing raptly at a central figure of Christ.

Figure 4a Vimalakirti on his platform, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive
Figure 4b Western kings below Vimalakirti, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive
Figure 4c Manjushri on his platform, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive
Figure 4d Chinese emperor and attendants below Manjushri, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive

The lower register of the eastern walls is devoted to representations of the donors who made cave possible. It is lined with portraits of a few monks and many women. Like the figures that are witnessing Vimalakirti and Manjushri ’s debate, these women, their ethnicity signified by their hairstyle, are from various cultural groups in and around the Dunhuang region — the Cao family had intermarried with Uighur and Khotanese nobility to solidify their regional alliances. We are surrounded by the names and faces of the noblewomen who have gained merit by contributing to this cave. The scale of these patron galleries grew during the 500 years since the cave painting tradition began. In the oldest caves, patrons are the size of a raised palm. In these 10th Century caves, the portraits are four feet tall.

Circumambulating the cave

Cave 61 is designed for circumambulation, a form of worship in which the devotee circles a shrine in a clockwise direction. Upon entering from the east, with Vimalakirti and Manjushri at our back and Manjushri on his lion with attending statues before us, we turn south to begin a circle around the platform.

As we start to circumambulate the platform, we pass in front of five sutra screens. On the distant western wall we can see small figures ascending and descending mountain pathways into a mountain landscape. The center of the landscape is completely obscured by the screen rising behind the statues. We pass an illustration of Buddha reciting the Lotus Sutra and then the Sukhavati or Sutra of Infinite Life. We see the Buddha speaking to a symmetrically assembled crowd of haloed bodhisattvas being entertained by two levels of musicians and dancers. On the lower tier devotees are turned towards the past and future Buddha and the musicians have the upper bodies of humans with wings and feet of birds. The donor portraits on the lower register give way to illustrations from Buddha’s life. The narrative vignettes from the life of Shakyamuni Buddha are depicted in a landscape, architecture and costume that are entirely Chinese. These vignettes continue around the western side of the cave beneath the sutras and mural.

Figure 5a Sutra paintings on the southern wall, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive
Figure 5b Patrons and first panels of Life of the Buddha detail on the southern wall, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive

Visual conventions for representing space in the cave paintings were adapted to the two most common formats in Chinese painting, vertical hanging banners and horizontal scrolls. The depictions of Vimalakirti and Manjushri on opposite sides of the entrance passage resemble two panels of a single scroll painting. They are wider than they are tall and could fit together easily if the doorway were removed. The five sutra illustrations we pass on the southern wall resemble hanging banners, each bordered by a strip painted to resemble embroidered cloth.

As we reach the Wutaishan mural on the western wall, the format changes. This mural is neither a banner nor a scroll, yet the information design of the composition combines unique characteristics of both. A common characteristic of the composition of a Buddhist painting places items that should be perceived as closest to the viewer at the bottom and items at greatest distance in the upper areas. This convention is common to all the paintings in the cave illustrating sutra stories. The lowest part of the composition is in the foreground, in front of the main figures in the center, which in turn are closer than the figures on the top, descending from or riding on clouds in the sky. In the Wutaishan mural this convention is extended across the entire length of composition. One view of the mural is to see the entire composition divided into three “worlds”, corresponding to three horizontal registers. [4] Pilgrims occupy the lower section of the mural, while the middle section is filled with mountains and monasteries, and the upper section is populated by celestial beings. The composition of the painting does not follow this division in any strict sense, as the central section penetrates upward and downward into the other “worlds”. At the same time the viewer, whose sight is limited to vertical sections, can’t see any largely horizontal organization principles.

Depth of space and size of figures

What we can see are two information design techniques that create a sense of deep space in the landscape while simultaneously drawing our attention to specific characters in a crowded composition.

As we move along the circumambulation corridor, we are restricted by the space to looking up at the vertical section of wall before us, turning the viewing into an experience similar to unrolling a scroll on a gigantic scale. Scroll paintings are viewed on a table in horizontally continuous sections. While the convention for distance within the composition remains lower-near/upper-far, scroll painting also make use of orthographic projection to create local relationships between figures and architecture. The parallel lines of the projection create a sense of depth and distance that are locally coherent within a section. These sections do not align across the entire composition. The minor convergence or divergence of otherwise parallel lines can represent visual adjustments we experience when looking at an object in the distance. These local suggestions of vanishing point enhance the composition. But the scroll painting style does not need to follow a single grid to accomplish that purpose, and a single vanishing point would be impractical in such a wide format.

The representation of furniture in ‘Han Xi-zai Gives a Banquet’ by Gu Hong-zhong illustrates this point.[5] The painter, who was contemporary with the creators of Cave 61, uses variations in the size of furniture legs along with divergence in the parallel sides of tables to suggest depth. We can see that the Wutaishan mural designer uses the alignment of roof angles and temple walls to create establish the viewer’s point of view and suggest depth similarly to the way Gu uses the furniture in the banquet rooms. In each section of Gu’s painting the converging lines of the tables and chairs draw the viewer’s eye into the depth of the room, but each of the angles are local to a section of the scroll. Alignment to a single vanishing point would distort the space of such a wide scroll painting.

Figure 6 ‘Han Xi-zai Gives a Banquet’ (retouched sector of extended scroll), by Gu Hong-zhong (Five Dynasties, 907~ 950). White construction lines reveal the strong dominance of parallelity within surfaces (or the implied surface where the chair and table legs meet the floor), but not necessarily between surfaces of the same object. From Tyler & Chen, 8.

In the Wutaishan mural, the steepest angles appear in the lower and middle left registers. The angle of the first entrance gate and the first temple complex direct the eye upwards toward the first mountain terrace and the groups of celestial beings descending on clouds from above. As we move our gaze across the composition, the angle of the roof lines decrease from left to right, directing the gaze less upward and more forward, acting as connectors between the groups of temple buildings arrayed across the landscape. The monastery wall lines align to steeper angles, supporting another sense of depth. The vertical sections of the mural are also connected horizontally by emanations descending on clouds. These flowing spiritual cloud lines create downward diagonal connectors that complement the zigzagging lines representing pilgrimage roads ascending between the hills. The overall effect creates a parabolic space, reinforced by the height of the central mountain extending behind the top frame, drawing the viewer into the mountains in the center of the composition and returning the view back to the foreground at the end of the wall.

Figure 7a Complete Wutaishan mural on the eastern wall, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive (click for a link to a larger version of this image).
Figure 7b Diagram of the Representation of Mt. Wutai, *=celestial beings and image of manifestations; + : major temples; → →: pilgrimage routes; o : towns and stations on the pilgrimage routes, drawn by Wong, 31
Figure 7c Retouched composite image of Wutaishan mural showing converging/diverging roof angles (red) and wall angles (blue). The upper area occupied by celestial being is masked (green). Emanations penetrating into the monastic/human area (yellow) create strokes generally diagonal to the roof lines (click for a link to a larger version of this image).

The earthly Wutaishan is an area of peaks and valleys. The five terrace peaks are laid out symmetrically along the middle register, with the central mountain ascending through the celestial zone. While a purely geographic map would arrange the peaks with the west on the left, the mural presents a visually and experientially foreshortened view of the peaks that aligns with the Tang-period pilgrimage narratives. Wong explains the layout in terms of the pilgrim’s experience: “when visitors enter the valley from the southeast, they directly face the Central Peak in front and turn their gaze from left to right; then the five peaks spread out horizontally in the same order as depicted in the mural: Southern, Western, Central, Northern, and Eastern.”[6]

As we walk along the mural we encounter an entrance gate in the lower left corner. This represents the city wall of Taiyuan in Shanxi Province, the pilgrimage road’s southwestern gateway. The buildings and pathways are well populated with figures. Human figures are drawn on several scales, generally sized in proportion to the height of the adjacent wall or building, though they all occupy adjoining spaces. These differences in size encode in some way to the figure’s religious importance rather their position in space. The pilgrims on the road below the mountains are small. Monks involved in religious devotion — approaching a stupa or a temple, praying to an emanation descending from the sky — are larger than pilgrims. This is even more noticeable when the monk and layman are both involved in prayer.

Figure 8a Relative size of monks and laymen on the mural

The monasteries on the southern and western peaks are populated with monks. The peaks themselves display a mixture of monks and laymen ascending and descending the mountainsides. Large groups of monks, celestial beings and dragons are descending from the sky on clouds, all moving towards the peak at the center of the mural.

On a mound between the western and central peaks we find the Indian monk Buddhapālita meeting Manjushri as an old man, the same legend depicted in the statues on the platform. The monk had walked from India to Wutaishan to experience a vision of Manjushri. On a path between the peaks he met an old man dressed all in white, who asked for a sutra. When the monk admitted he had left his copy of this specific sutra in India, the old man told him to go back and retrieve it. Below these figures is the largest figure on the mural, a gigantic Lokapala (a Buddhist guardian) wielding a thunderbolt ready to defend the faith against any threat. Size is used to emphasize the importance of all three figures — both the monk and the man robed in white are more than double the size of the other figures in the landscape and Lokapala towers over laymen on a nearby hillside.

Figure 8b Lokapala (left) is the largest standing figure in the entire composition. His height is roughly equal to height of Manjushri seated on his lion (center) and Shakyamuni Buddha seated on a lotus (right).

The viewer who knows the story of Buddhapālita will expect to see him again when he returns with the sutra and encounters Manjushri a second time. These figures, now reduced in size, are encountered later on the wall.

Figure 8c Relative size of Buddhapālita encountering Manjushri as an old man in white the first time (left) and the second time with a servant (right).

When we are entirely behind the screen separating us from the statues on the platform, we reach the central peak. The importance of this location is communicated by a shift in the visual perspective. Rather than sloping away from our view, we are now directly facing the entrance to the monasteries. Their rooflines and walls gently converge towards the central peak. The occupants of the monasteries also change. The largest figure in the entire composition — a seated Shakyamuni Buddha — occupies the monastery courtyard, flanked on each side by Manjushri on his lion and Samantabhadra on his elephant. Below this is a smaller monastery filled not with monks but with haloed bodhisattvas. The centrality of both buildings is strongly reinforced by an effect called “herringbone perspective”[7] by which the sloping lines converge on the central peak above where envoys ascend with offerings. The top of this peak contains an open grassy terrace, as do several of the other peaks. This grassy meadow contains a round felt tent, the sole appearance of nomadic steppe culture that existed to the north. The peak itself is outside the frame, continuing beyond the ceiling border, emphasizing its grandeur.

Figure 9 Manjushri (left), Buddha (center) and Samantabhadra (right) in the monastery with wall lines converging on the Central Peak, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive

The angles of exposed walls on the monastery buildings immediately reverse as we move along the wall beyond the central peak, curving the sacred space back towards the viewer. Now the rooflines slant downward and the monasteries are once again filled with monks and laymen. Feasts and teaching ceremonies take place within the courtyards. On a hill between the northern and eastern peak we encounter Buddhapālita again, accompanied by a servant, facing the white-robed man. These figures are smaller than when we first encountered them. A close examination reveals all have lost their facial details, but they are still larger than nearby monks and laymen. Visions descend on clouds towards monks seated in wicker huts at the base of the eastern peak while women and men ascend towards its peak. The composition ends on the lower right with the only entirely symmetrical element, a walled gate similar to the one in the lower left corner with the reverse orientation. The pilgrim has trekked over 150 miles and reached eastern entrance at Zhenzhou in Heibei Province.

Figure 10 The walled gate of Zhenzhou in the lower right corner of the mural. Figures are in scale relative to the buildings closest to them, The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive

Mapping spiritual and geographic space

A tradition of mapping Wutaishan can be traced back to the 7th century, hundreds of years before Cave 61 was designed. A text from that period describes the monk Huize, sent by the Tang Emperor to investigate the “saintly traces” on the mountain, creating a scroll to document his journey. At this time when Wutaishan was a magnet for pilgrims from throughout the Buddhist world — China, Korea, Japan, Khotan, India, Tibet — several text mention maps of this sacred space. When the Japanese pilgrim Ennin visited Wutaishan in the early part of the 9th century, he described receiving a map of the mountain in his diary[8]. The Tibetan King sent an envoy to Tang Emperor requesting a map of the Wutaishan pilgrimage routes at the same time. The maps are mentioned but no copy or a detailed description of the images survives. They must have contained some information about the sacred geography, institutions and routes through the region. Such a portable image would serve as a souvenir to the experienced pilgrim and as an inspiration his co-religionists. It could be displayed during ceremonies honoring Manjushri.

The fifty-foot version that fills the western wall of Cave 61 is the antithesis of a portable image. It is filled with an enormous quantity of specific details. Over one hundred towns, temples, stupas, huts and other buildings are represented, most of which can been identified by labels and corresponding texts in the composition[9]. Packed into all this detail is a compendium of information about the real and imagined link between earthly and sacred spaces. The pilgrimage experience is represented in layers of legend, architecture. Social observation pilgrims and monks, plants and trees, birds and animals, celestial beings and visions are intermixed a geographic representation of the mountain landscape.

Walking along the corridor illuminated by flashlights, knowing very little about what I was seeing, my first impression was of several layers of superimposed images upon a wall. The cartouche — a layer of rectangles filled with text — seemed to float on the surface of a mountainous landscape, and those stylized mountains and trees lay behind the buildings and human figures walking the interconnecting paths. The cloud layers of celestial beings and dragons were far above my head.

I had the sense that they represented specific monasteries but did not reproduce the actual 10th century buildings on Wutaishan. The architecture itself was too simple, just as the mountains themselves were a reference to and not a reproduction of the actual landscape, represented with alternating strokes of three to four colors. The texts that float on the surface contain almost two hundred lines of prayers, sayings by famous monks, historical texts and names of figures and locations.[10]

Yet with all this detail, the mural was not meant to guide a pilgrim from one monastery to the next. A 50-foot cave mural is not a wayfinding tool. Wei-cheng Lin makes a good case that the entire composition served as a means of bringing the sacred space of Wutaishan into the cave, so that the worshipers in Dunhuang could experience a miniaturized version of the pilgrimage. In Lin’s view the cave functioned as an immersion tool, a physical space the viewer entered and moved through to experience a vision that combined religious, social and political message.[11]

Lin’s argument is convincing, but we should keep in mind that we have no contemporary description of how the cave was used for religious ceremonies, despite all the documentation and visual materials that survive from this period and place. Robert Sharf challenges the assumption that the decorated caves of Dunhuang and similar sites were ever meant to support monastic religious practice. He argues that “the majority of the shrine caves at Mogao functioned as private memorial chapels, and that the inner precincts of these chapels were entered only rarely.”[12] He suggests the caves were built and decorated to provide religious merit to the patrons and donors, and that purpose was served once the cave was completed. We can imagine Cave 61 being planned and built by the Cao family as a religious and political statement. Perhaps family members seldom visited the highly decorated interior chamber and the wooden structure built out from the cliff face (now gone) was the location used for public feasts to demonstrate piety and wealth. In Sharf’s view, the caves served primarily as mortuary shrines rather than as the site of monastic rituals and prayer or meditation practice. While we know that pilgrims visited the grotto, we don’t know that anyone actually resided there. There is no clear evidence that a monastery occupied in the narrow area between the Mogao cliff and the river. If the Hall of Manjushri was ever used to support religious ceremonies, we have no evidence of how the enormous cave was illuminated.

Returning to Lin’s view of the cave as immersion tool, we can say that the immersion experience has returned to this thousand-year-old cave, but in ways that could not have been intended by the original designers. Dunhuang is experiencing an accelerating boom in cultural tourism. The town is recently been connected by China’s expanding national transportation infrastructure — it can now be reached by highway, train station and commercial jet. The 21st century Chinese consumer economy that encourages tourism has flooded the caves with visitors. All this interest has brought conservation partnerships between Chinese and international art institutions along with new commercial development.

The artwork of Dunhuang was studied and artists were trained to reproduce its paintings and sculpture in the 20th century. Today everything is being digitized, which means that everything is being reproduced not simply as an image — a photograph, a tracing, a drawing — but as reproducible information with higher resolution than the human eye could perceive when viewing the original caves. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) at the British Library began digitizing and cataloging all their manuscripts in the 1990s to make the Aurel Stein collection more accessible[13]. At the same time, the IDP forged collaborations that have re-gather in digital form the materials dispersed in collections around the world. The 21st Century has brought us digital reproduction on a scale that allows not only viewing of manuscript fragments too fragile to display but also reproductions of entire caves in both 2- and 3-D space.[14]

I have relied on the digital images of Cave 61 to see the mural that I could barely see when visiting the cave itself. It is this digital reproduction that has finally given us the complete view that its original designers never intended us to have. We can see what could, quite literally, never be seen before. We can bend over the panoramic view of a sacred mountain with our faces illuminated by the glow from the plasma screen, moving our view in and out to see details that were invisible to a member of the Cao clan a thousand years ago, when perhaps the colors were brighter and the continuity of the design could only be experienced a few steps at a time.

Glossary

Buddhapālita: an Indian Buddhist monk who visited Wutaishan in the 7th Century CE.

Lokapala: a muscular and threatening Buddhist guardian of the faith.

Mahayana Buddhism: a form of Buddhist religion that emerged around the 1st century CE, typically concerned with altruistically oriented spiritual practice as embodied in the ideal of the bodhisattva. This form of Buddhism spread from India across Central Asia into China, Korea and Japan.

Manjushri (Mañjusrī): a bodhisattva associated with prajñā (insight) in Mahayana Buddhism, often depicted riding on a lion.

Return to Righteousness Army (Guiyijun) Period: a political era local to the Dunhuang region (848–1036 CE) that corresponds to the Five Dynasty (907–960 CE) in Chinese history.

Samantabhadra: a bodhisattva associated with practice and meditation, often depicted riding on an elephant.

Shakyamuni Buddha: the historic founder of the Buddhist religion who lived in northern India during the 5th Century BCE.

Vimalakirti: an ideal Buddhist figure represented in a Mahayana sutra as a contemporary of Shakyamuni Buddha

Wutaishan: a Buddhist sacred site located at the headwaters of river Qingshui, in the Chinese northeastern province of Shanxi, surrounded by a cluster of flat-topped peak. Also known as Wutai Mountain or Qingliang Shan, is

Sources

Fan Jinshi, (Susan Whitfield trans.) The Caves of Dunhuang, Dunhuang Academy/London Editions, Hong Kong, 2013

Fang Ling-kuang, “The restoration for statues on the central butsudan in Cave 61”, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange http://imlab.tw/dunhuang/en/p23.html

Sarah, E. Fraser, Performing the Visual, The Practice of Buddhist Wall Painting in China and Central Asia, 618–960, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)

Natasha Heller, “Visualizing Pilgrimage and Mapping Experience: Mount Wutai on the Silk Road” in The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road, ed. Andreas Kaplony, (Brill’s Inner Asian Library, 2008)

International Dunhuang Project, http://idp.bl.uk/

Sonya S. Lee, “Repository of Ingenuity: Cave 61 and Artistic Appropriation in Tenth-Century Dunhuang,” The Art Bulletin, Vol.94(2), (2012): 199–225

Lin Wei-Cheng, Building a sacred mountain: the Buddhist architecture of China’s Mount Wutai, (Seattle: University of Washington Press 2014)

The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive (MIDA) http://www.artstor.org/content/mellon-international-dunhuang-archive

Robert Sharf, “Art in the Dark: The Ritual Context of Buddhist Caves in Western China,” in Art of Merit: Studies in Buddhist Art and its Conservation, edited by David Park, Kuenga Wangmo, and Sharon Cather (London: Archetype Publications, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2013): 38–65.

C. W. Tyler & C. C. Chen (2011). “Chinese Perspective as a Rational System: Relationship to Panofsky’s Symbolic Form,” Chinese Journal of Psychology, 53(4) (2011): 7–27.

Dorothy C. Wong, “A Reassessment of the Representation of Mt. Wutai from Dunhuang Cave 61,” Archives of Asian Art, 1 January 1993, Vol.46, (1993): 27–52


FOOTNOTES

[1] Fan Jinshi, The Caves of Dunhuang, trans. Susan Whitfield, (Hong Kong: Dunhuang Academy/London Editions, 2013), p.246

[2] Lin Wei-Cheng, Building a sacred mountain: the Buddhist architecture of China’s Mount Wutai, (Seattle: University of Washington Press 2014), pp. 176–177

[3] Fang Ling-kuang, “The restoration for statues on the central butsudan in Cave 61” Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, http://imlab.tw/dunhuang/en/p23.html. Fang illustrates several potential variations of the statues on the platform, based on 10th Century illustrations and statue groups found in other Buddhist shrines.

[4] Lin, Building a Sacred Mountain, 182

[5] C. W. Tyler & C. C. Chen, “Chinese Perspective as a Rational System: Relationship to Panofsky’s Symbolic Form,” Chinese Journal of Psychology, 53(4) (2011): 7–8

[6] Dorothy C. Wong, “A Reassessment of the Representation of Mt. Wutai from Dunhuang Cave 61,” Archives of Asian Art, 1 January 1993, Vol.46, (1993): 27–52

[7] Lin, Building a Sacred Mountain, 188

[8] Heller, Natasha, “Visualizing Pilgrimage and Mapping Experience: Mount Wutai on the Silk Road” in The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road, ed. Andreas Kaplony, (Brill’s Inner Asian Library, 2008): 32–33.

[9] Fan, The Caves of Dunhuang, 202

[10] Fan, The Caves of Dunhuang, 202

[11] Lin, Building a Sacred Mountain, 193

[12] Robert Sharf, “Art in the Dark: The Ritual Context of Buddhist Caves in Western China,” in Art of Merit: Studies in Buddhist Art and its Conservation, edited by David Park, Kuenga Wangmo, and Sharon Cather (London: Archetype Publications, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2013): 60

[13] International Dunhuang Project, http://idp.bl.uk/

[14] The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive (MIDA) http://www.artstor.org/content/mellon-international-dunhuang-archive

)

Paul Kahn

Written by

Paul Kahn

Lecturer Northeastern Univ, IA and UX at Kahn+Assoc, Dynamic Diagrams & Mad*Pow. Hypertext research & information design, books: Mapping Websites, UnderStAnding

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