Journeys On The Silk Road Part 7

In the Bay Area of San Francisco, the city a.s.sociated with Kerouac and the Beats, another man has looked closely at the words of the Diamond Sutra. For the past decade, Paul Harrison, Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, has been working on a new translation. His detailed study is a far cry from Kerouac's freewheeling approach, but Harrison shares a concern about the sutra's name. Harrison prefers the Sanskrit t.i.tle Vajracchedika, rather than either the Diamond Sutra or Diamond Cutter as it is generally translated-or mistranslated, he argues. The name is based on two Sanskrit words vajra, usually translated as "diamond," and cchedika, usually translated as "cutter."

"The main problem for me is the diamond bit," he says. "Vajra isn't really a diamond." Vajra refers to a mythical weapon, a thunderbolt. It is the weapon wielded by powerful deities in various traditions: by the Norse G.o.d Thor in the West, by Indra in Hinduism and Vajrapani in Buddhism. This fierce protector is often depicted in Buddhist art standing beside the Buddha like a bodyguard and wielding a thunderbolt-as he is in the Diamond Sutra's block-printed frontispiece. (The figure appears in the upper left.) In some Gandharan sculptures, with their fusion of cla.s.sical and Indian images, he resembles a club-wielding Hercules.

But vajra has another meaning. It refers to a mythical, indestructible substance, harder than anything else in the universe. Because a diamond is the hardest material known, that is how vajra has been translated. For Harrison, this is not just semantics. The mistranslation affects how the sutra is understood.

"It's not that it cuts things with fine precision, it actually smashes. If I was to translate it into colloquial English, I would call it the Thunderbolt Buster rather than the Diamond Cutter," he says. "What's important is not its precision cutting but its destructive capacity . . . It just smashes any preconception you might have had, or false view, of how the world works."

The t.i.tle Diamond Sutra is now so entrenched in the West that any change is unlikely, as Harrison freely concedes. Yet it highlights the problems a translator faces. Rendering an ancient sacred text into English is more complicated than translating one modern European language into another. The German literary critic and translator Walter Benjamin encapsulated the difficulty when he wrote that "all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines; this is true above all of sacred writings."

"I think people regard it as a mechanical exercise," Harrison says. "It's easy enough to translate a French novel into English, so translating a Buddhist sutra must be the same only with a different language . . . But if you roll the clock back 2,000 years, in a different cultural context of which you are only dimly aware, the difficulties multiply."

In working on his translation, Harrison combed through numerous early versions, including Sanskrit, the language in which it was first written, as well as Chinese and Tibetan. And he found something curious. From the outset, China and Tibet took different paths with this text. When k.u.marajiva made the first translation into Chinese around the year 400, he made choices the Tibetans did not. k.u.marajiva's choices have been repeated in translations ever since, including into English. Harrison believes this has resulted in misunderstandings. In his view, the Tibetan translators got it right. "k.u.marajiva did a lot of very interesting and creative things with the text," he says. "[Yet] it's so unfaithful to the original." Nonetheless it has been the most popular translation.

The first English translation, by Max Mller in the 1880s, and a later one, by Edward Conze in 1957, have been highly influential. Yet they have reinforced the sutra's reputation in English as being opaquely mystical and beyond comprehension, Harrison believes. He is keen to correct what he sees as their misinterpretations and to aid understanding of the text. He also wants to move away from the odd, unnatural style of language that infuses many English translations of Buddhist texts, not least the Diamond Sutra. "They're often highly inaccurate, they misunderstand the text, and they're couched in this weird kind of language that isn't English," he says. Translations of Buddhist sutras into English still have a long way to go, he believes.

Harrison likens the Diamond Sutra to a piece of music that must be heard to be appreciated or a play that needs to be witnessed. Simply reading the sutra like a novel can be a puzzling experience, given its twists and repet.i.tions. "If you just approach the text with a logical mind expecting things to be done in sequence and no repet.i.tions to occur, it seems very weird," he says.

Memorizing or reciting the sutra might be an entirely different experience, he suggests. "These texts are not meant to be read the way we read books, where we scan pages for information. Unless we're reading poetry, we don't read for the sound of things. We just want to get the plot and find out what's happened or extract some bit of information. I don't think religious texts in a number of traditions work like that. They are meant to be deeply internalized," Harrison says.

There are many levels at which the Diamond Sutra can be understood, says Robert Thurman, one of the best-known exponents of Buddhism in the West. As an author, lecturer, and Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University in New York, Thurman has pioneered a Western way of teaching Buddhist philosophy, combining scholarly discipline and contemporary parlance. He was the first Westerner to be ordained a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition after he traveled to India in the early 1960s. He later returned to lay life, married and became a father (one of his children is Hollywood actress Uma Thurman). Throughout, he has retained his commitment to the religion he encountered in the Himalayan foothills. Thurman, who is fluent in Sanskrit and Tibetan, says that at their core all the Prajnaparamita genre of sutras, including the Diamond Sutra, deal with the same question.

"The essential part of the Prajnaparamita teachings is the relativity of everything. People get excited about the idea of emptiness, and they think that's something very, very deep and the world must disappear," he says. It doesn't. Rather, it means that contrary to our everyday a.s.sumptions, everything in our lives, including ourselves, constantly changes. "People think there's something in me that is really me, that is always unchanging. They think it was there when I was sixteen and it will be there when I'm sixty or seventy. They have this sense of a solid being there. But we're empty of that thing. That doesn't mean we don't exist. It doesn't mean we are empty of existence. We exist, but we don't exist in a non-relational way that we feel that we do."

He cautions against equating emptiness with nihilism and a view that life is meaningless. This is a misunderstanding many Westerners make, he says. "The word emptiness is not wrong, voidness is also not wrong. But a more interesting one for us in a modern time would be the word 'freedom.' We are not frightened of that word because we hear politicians rattling on about it," he says. "When you say sugar-free or salt-free or trouble-free, you mean lacking those things."

Thurman, who shares Harrison's concern over the adequacy of English translations of Buddhist texts, says our habit of seeing the world and ourselves as unchanging has unfortunate consequences. "It leads to an exaggerated sense of self-importance. This brings one into terrible conflict with the world, because the world will not agree that one's self is so important," he says. People get frustrated because they think others are getting more than their share, and then become mired in aggression, fear, and greed. "Everything is stressful when one is unrealistic about one's relationship to things."

When Thurman first arrived in India, he did so just as Buddhism was making one of the most remarkable journeys in its 2,500-year history: a return to the land of its origin. Buddhism was wiped out in India around the twelfth century by the spread of Islam and the ascendancy of Hinduism. Although Buddhism flourished in China, j.a.pan, and much of South-East Asia, the religion vanished from its birthplace.

After an absence of almost a millennium, Buddhism's revival in India in the past fifty years has been carried largely on a tide of human suffering. Refugees fleeing China's invasion of Tibet in 1959 have made the dangerous mountain crossing over the Himalayas into India ever since. Many have settled in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala, now the center for the Tibetan government-in-exile and the seat of its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Monasteries, temples, and other Buddhist inst.i.tutions have been established in the former Raj-era hill station, as they have elsewhere on the subcontinent.

No figure has drawn the West's attention to Buddhism more than Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Since he fled Tibet half a century ago, the n.o.bel Peace Prize winner and the world's best known refugee has traveled the globe to deliver Buddhist teachings about tolerance and compa.s.sion. In late 2009, the Dalai Lama arrived in Sydney for a series of public talks, discussions with scientists and meetings with religious leaders.

For the first of his public talks-in an arena more a.s.sociated with rock stars than red-robed monks-the stage was decked with flowers, colored brocade, iconic paintings, and a central throne. At its feet sat several dozen monks in maroon and saffron robes, their heads shaved, who quietly chanted as they awaited the figure they regard as the incarnation of the Buddha of compa.s.sion. The scene was redolent of the Diamond Sutra's frontispiece.

Nearby, in an anteroom decorated with white curtains, a white sofa and a couple of potted plants, the Dalai Lama took time for a private interview in which he reflected on the Diamond Sutra, speaking in English, although it is not his first language. The importance of the Diamond Sutra lies in what it says about the nature of reality, he explains. In particular, its insistence that nothing-and no one-has an unchanging, independent existence. "That does not mean [there is] no existence. Existence is there, but the very nature of existence is due to many other factors, not independently." Reality exists, but not in the way we habitually think of it.

"For example, when you look at me, you consider you are meeting or talking with the Dalai Lama," he says. "So it appears [there is] some almost independent self. You feel Dalai Lama's body is such and such, Dalai Lama's mind is such and such. You feel there is some absolutely independent Dalai Lama. That is ignorance, that is misconception. There is no such Dalai Lama. When I look at you, it's a combination of European body and white hair. There is this person, there is no doubt. I'm talking to this person. But if I investigate where is the person, I can't find [you]. That means absence of independent self."

Understanding this is not merely an abstract exercise. Humanity's problems stem from this mistaken view of reality, he says. "Why that theory is relevant is all these destructive emotions, such as attachment, anger, hatred, are based on ego, 'I.' The stronger the feeling of an independent 'I,' the more possibility of attachment: [we say] 'I love this, I like this, I don't want this,' that kind of thing. The less self-centered the ego, the weaker these destructive emotions automatically become . . . Positive emotions are not based on these misconceptions. Destructive emotion, in most cases, is based on misconception. Because of that [insight], this sutra becomes important and relevant."

Understanding how our view of reality can affect our emotions is of such importance that the Dalai Lama reflects on it each morning. "My daily prayers do not include Diamond Sutra, but [I] meditate on that meaning," he says. "My main practice, daily practice, as soon as I wake up, I investigate: Where is 'I'? Where is Buddha? You can't find him. Every day, as soon as I wake up, I think [about] that."

Before dawn nearly every morning in New York City, about twenty men and women a.s.semble at a single-story suburban home. Once inside, they remove their shoes and walk down a set of steps into the heated bas.e.m.e.nt where they sit on the floor and recite the Diamond Sutra. A reading takes about forty minutes, and when they have reached the sutra's final verse, they start again.

Depending on when they begin-some days they rise at 3 a.m., others at 4 a.m.-the group chants the Diamond Sutra in unison up to seven times. Afterwards they repeat the name of the Future Buddha known as Buddha Maitreya for half an hour. And then the members get up from their lotus and half-lotus positions and head off into the early morning light for their homes, to school or to work.

The Diamond Sutra Recitation Group is more than twenty years old, says a current member, Yoon S. (Robert) Han, a Seoul-born lawyer who specializes in maritime law and disputes about construction projects. The group is part of the Korean community in the Queens neighborhood of Flushing, one of America's most religiously diverse communities.

For its readings of the Diamond Sutra, the group uses the Chinese translation by k.u.marajiva, the same as Stein's printed version. The words, though, are spoken using a Korean p.r.o.nunciation of the Chinese characters. Despite this potential language barrier, not every member of the Diamond Sutra Recitation Group is Korean. An Italian man, a pharmaceutical company executive, is among the group's long-time members. The group does not restrict membership to the Korean community, nor does it recruit people. Those who come find it either by word of mouth or through the group's small website, diamondsutra.org.

In the bas.e.m.e.nt room where they a.s.semble, the words of the Diamond Sutra fill an entire wall, and a copy of the sutra is placed atop two cushions that adorn a golden lotus-shaped seat. This reverential treatment is derived from the sutra's text. "The Diamond Sutra specifically states that wherever this sutra is located, there will be a Buddha or his disciples. So the Diamond Sutra, to our understanding, is the Buddha himself," Han says.

Despite their familiarity with the text, the Diamond Sutra Recitation Group does not memorize the sutra's words. Rote learning the Buddha's words would be seen as lacking respect. "We recite it very reverently," he says. "The mindset we have is as if we are in front of the Buddha more than 2,000 years ago, actually listening to his lecture, the dialogue between Buddha and Subhuti."

Throughout the day, members practice what they call "housekeeping of the mind" in an attempt to avoid cultivating self-importance. "As I go through my daily routine, I see a lot of things arising in my mind as I face my adversary, as I face my client," the New York attorney says. "The practice is about training your mind in each of those situations."

Such acts are a continuation of practices that saw w.a.n.g Jie commission his printed Diamond Sutra of 868 for the merit of his parents. But intervening centuries and geography have not diminished the sutra's relevance. In Australia, forty minutes from central Sydney, in a building sandwiched between high-rises, the sacred text continues to be used to create merit for the dead.

The Nan Tien temple is an offshoot of Australia's largest Buddhist temple, located in Wollongong, New South Wales. But this modest center, in suburban Parramatta, serves a community of mostly Asian migrants who have settled in the city's sprawling western suburbs. Aside from a pair of lion statues that guard the entrance, the white building has little to distinguish it. But about once a month, nuns, monks, and lay members convene to chant the Diamond Sutra.

The Sunday morning ceremony begins with an offering of incense to a white ceramic Buddha that sits on a platform at the front of the room. Under a ceiling of angelic apsaras that would not look out of place on the walls of the Mogao Caves, the congregation then sits on red velvet cushions and begins chanting.

Led by two nuns and accompanied by a steady staccato beat tapped out on a wooden block, the group of about fifty people recites the sutra in Mandarin. For about forty minutes, the text reverberates hypnotically off the wooden floor and walls that are covered with miniature bas-reliefs of the Buddha.

When the sutra's recitation is finished, the a.s.sembly chants the Buddha's name and slowly weaves single file between the rows of red cushions several times, their palms pressed together in reverence. Then the lights are dimmed. A gong, a bell, and a drum sound. Finally, they dedicate the merit of their act for the deceased.

Just as Buddhism has evolved as it has traveled, adapting to local cultures and conditions, the Diamond Sutra is also being discovered, recited and studied in the West today beyond the traditional confines of temples.

A Sydney lawyer, Andrew Fisher, began reading the Diamond Sutra before high-pressure legal cases. A Buddhist friend suggested he do so to calm intense anxieties Fisher felt ahead of complex judicial proceedings. It was an unorthodox introduction to the Diamond Sutra. But Fisher, who died in 2008, never charted a conventional course. As a young man in London he had worked for the influential 1960s underground magazine Oz, which became the subject of an infamous obscenity trial. He later wrote a play about those turbulent years, A Taste of Oz, which was produced at Britain's National Theatre. His career also saw him venture into film, publishing, and television presenting, but Fisher was in his sixties before he embarked on his unusual way to cope with professional pressures.

"Andrew started reading the Diamond Sutra and made a strong connection with it. He found it actually did calm him down," says Fisher's widow, Renate Ogilvie. He particularly liked the figure of Subhuti in the Diamond Sutra, the disciple said to have had an ungovernable temper before he encountered the Buddha. Fisher continued reading the sutra even when he was not preparing for difficult cases. Ogilvie, a German-born psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher who married Fisher in 2000, read the sutra daily as part of an orderly practice. Fisher's approach was different.

"He read it in a completely unstructured way," Ogilvie says. "He read it in the evening in bed before he went to sleep. It is true to say it was his only Buddhist practice."

Fisher continued to enjoy reading the Diamond Sutra until Alzheimer's claimed his ability to do so. Yet it remained a part of his life until the end. As his long illness worsened, he fell into a coma and it was clear he had only days to live. Ogilvie moved into his hospital room to tend to her husband around the clock. Friends came to visit, and her students performed Buddhist rituals. But afterwards, when Ogilvie and Fisher were alone in the quiet room filled with flowers and candles, she returned to a familiar practice.

"He was in a coma, but as Buddhists we a.s.sume that the consciousness, the mind can freely communicate. I talked to him all the time and so on, but I also read the Diamond Sutra for him each day," Ogilvie says. "That was very soothing for me as well, because it was my practice anyway. But it was also something Andrew really loved and appreciated. So it was a very powerful thing to do. I remember it really quite fondly, reading this particular sutra in the circ.u.mstances. I thought there really could be nothing better than the Diamond Sutra."

Fisher died peacefully in Ogilvie's arms a few days before Christmas 2008, aged seventy. Ogilvie considered how best to prepare a funeral that would be attended by close friends and family, few of whom were Buddhist. She wanted to create a ceremony that was delicate and meaningful but not overtly Buddhist. After the eulogies were delivered, she read the final eloquent lines of the Diamond Sutra.

"Reciting that verse, which is the essence of the Diamond Sutra because it describes shunyata [emptiness] in these beautiful poetic images, was a discreet and tactful way of actually introducing the essence of Buddhist wisdom teachings," she says. "I thought just reading the verse was meaningful to him and me. And to the others, it was just a poem."

18.

Shifting Sands The eyes of the Diamond Sutra's reverential monks have focused on the Awakened One for more than a thousand years. But behind the locked door of the British Library's conservation department the robed figures have been joined in their devoted attention by Mark Barnard. As manager of the library's conservation section, he has come to know every fiber and wrinkle along the sixteen-foot five-inch doc.u.ment while undertaking the single greatest conservation effort in the scroll's long life.

On an April afternoon in 2009, he interrupted his labors to explain the work. Much of it has involved undoing the well-intentioned efforts of the past century since the scroll arrived in London. Those attempts to strengthen the scroll, including adding a border and linings, actually increased strain on the Diamond Sutra as the different papers pulled against one another each time the sutra was rolled.

Near a wall map of the terrain explored in Stein's epic travels, Barnard recounted how he had already devoted more than 600 hours to removing the early linings, concentrating on the sections of the scroll that contain the words of the Buddha rather than his image, working his way inch by inch across the text. He turned to a long wooden bench on which lay a square maroon box about the size of a family-sized pizza carton. He raised the lid and folded back a protective paper. Lying flat within was the ill.u.s.trated frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra. He had saved work on the iconic image until last.

The tools of Barnard's trade were a mix of high-tech and low, and looked as if they would be equally at home in an operating theater or a beauty parlor. An ultrasonic humidifier capable of emitting a fine mist sat beside round-nose scissors, a magnifying gla.s.s, tweezers, blades, and a row of four fine paintbrushes. But his most vital tool was invisible. It was patience. Just moistening sections of the scroll evenly before work could begin took up to four hours.

The roots of the conservation work go back more than twenty years. Since then, experts have a.n.a.lyzed every aspect of the scroll's creation, including the wheat starch glue that held the sheets together, the mulberry paper on which it was printed and even the dye that colored it yellow. This laid the groundwork for the hands-on conservation.

Conserving the scroll has also involved separating it into its seven sheets, just as when the sutra was printed from woodblocks. Keeping the sections flat makes them easier to work on and, more importantly, it removes strain on the scroll caused by repeated rolling and unrolling.

The Diamond Sutra of 868 was once a well-used scroll. To Barnard's trained eye, the evidence is apparent in wear along the middle where ties once prevented it from unrolling. Damage is also evident on the innermost portion, where the scroll has been wrapped tightest, and on the exposed exterior, which contains the frontispiece. Before it was stored in the Library Cave, the sutra had already been patched to prolong its life. Those repairs from centuries ago are visible in the earliest photograph of the sutra, published in Stein's Ruins of Desert Cathay.

"If you look very closely, there's evidence of patches on the verso [back] of the scroll," Barnard says. "It was fractured in places and repaired, which implies it was actually slightly worn, which is hardly surprising."

Also visible in that first photograph is a water stain that darkens part of the ill.u.s.tration, including the Buddha's face. Before the scroll's first exhibition in London, the frontispiece was separated from the rest of the scroll and washed. The disfiguring stain and the ancient patches were removed and the first lining was added.

Barnard has removed at least four linings applied between 1909 and the mid-1960s. In the years since the last lining was added, conservation skills and knowledge of materials have changed substantially. Conservation now involves techniques considerably more sophisticated than gluing one paper to another. However, the question of whether or not to line has been a source of debate. Current thinking is that unlined scrolls fare better. In addition, unlike Chinese calligraphy and paintings, religious scrolls such as the Diamond Sutra were not lined in antiquity. So leaving the Diamond Sutra unlined is consistent with its original form.

For many years after World War II, the scroll was on permanent display in the King's Library of the British Museum. (Appropriately for the Diamond Sutra, that s.p.a.ce is now called the Enlightenment Gallery.) While ceramics, bronzes, and other objects can be displayed without harm for long periods, books, with their sensitivity to light, need rest. Ideally, such sensitive material should occasionally be taken off exhibition.

Yet the renown of the world's oldest dated printed book made it difficult to remove the Diamond Sutra from permanent exhibition, says Dr. Frances Wood, head of the British Library's Chinese section. The scroll was on permanent display when she joined the library in 1977, but was removed in 1995, around the time the library prepared to move from Bloomsbury to its current purpose-built home at St. Pancras. "It was always something people asked for and it was therefore difficult to take it off display," she says. "So it had been on display for, we felt, too long."

Whether the scroll will be rea.s.sembled is still to be decided. But Wood does not favor this. "I don't think we should put it back as a scroll, because the endless rolling and unrolling is what does damage. If we can keep the sheets separate, if you wanted to exhibit it, you could put them back together to look as if it was a scroll."

In May 2010, after nearly 1,000 hours of conservation work, the sutra was on temporary display as the centerpiece of a British Museum exhibition. The five-month show, The Printed Image in China, covered 1,300 years of the artform's development. The scroll is unlikely to go on permanent exhibition again. But that does not mean the public can no longer see it. Online ways of viewing the scroll have become available in recent years. These reveal the Diamond Sutra in detail not possible for someone peering at it in subdued light through the gla.s.s of a display cabinet. An interactive version allows people to scrutinize the entire doc.u.ment. Viewers can pause at the ill.u.s.trated frontispiece where, with the click of a mouse, it is possible to zoom in on the downcast eyes of the Buddha and the wrinkles on Subhuti's neck. Even the creases that have acc.u.mulated as the scroll has been wrapped and unwrapped over the centuries are apparent. Along the scroll, the Chinese characters of the Buddha's teaching and the colophon that gives its date are all visible. This is part of the British Library's Turning the Pages project, which lets viewers inspect some of the most precious works among the library's 150 million items. William Blake's notebook, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart's musical diary, and Lewis Carroll's original Alice's Adventures Under Ground are other gems that can be viewed this way. Just a few years ago, this method of enjoying a literary treasure would have seemed as fanciful as a caterpillar smoking a hookah pipe. For some, it will never replace the experience of viewing the real object. But if the Diamond Sutra's life is to be extended, it offers a way to appreciate the scroll without causing harm-guiding principles of conservation and Buddhism.

For much of the twentieth century, even experts were unable to readily see the treasures of Dunhuang's Library Cave. The scattering of the objects posed geographic obstacles. The Cold War and the Iron Curtain posed political ones. Even after China opened its door and perestroika thawed Russia, deep pockets were still needed to examine relics as far apart as London and St. Petersburg or New Delhi and Beijing.

Now the contents of the Library Cave are being reunited in cybers.p.a.ce. The Dunhuang ma.n.u.scripts, paintings, and other Silk Road discoveries are accessible through a unique digital archive. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP), based at the British Library, was established in 1994 and grew out of the first meeting of conservators from the various international collections. When the specialists gathered, they recognized a common problem, says IDP's director, Dr. Susan Whitfield. "Everybody in all the collections felt a bit anxious, as if they hadn't done enough with this material and it wasn't accessible enough," she says. "It was quite a cathartic experience for everyone. It was like confession time and now let's work together."

Whitfield suggested one way to improve access was by digitizing the material and putting it online. It was a radical suggestion in the mid-1990s with the internet in its infancy. "Everybody looked at me as if I must be mad. 'There's no way the web is ever going to do that. There's too much material. It will be too slow,'" Whitfield said. Nonetheless, the work proceeded. The result is an extensive digital archive, among the largest of its kind in the world.

The website (http://idp.bl.uk) has information on ma.n.u.scripts, textiles, and paintings as well as historic photographs. By the middle of 2012, the online archive had digitized more than 125,000 of these items and contained more than 350,000 images-all freely available. From Stein's journeys alone, the website holds everything from his hand-drawn maps of the Mogao Caves to a portrait of the forger Islam Akhun and a mountain panorama taken the day Stein suffered frostbite. There is even information about Stein's dynasty of dogs named Dash.

The resource, available in seven languages, continues to grow. The aim is to have 90 percent of the Dunhuang collection online by 2015. The search for Silk Road antiquities may have been characterized by international rivalry and hostility, but today there is collaboration between cultural inst.i.tutions-including the National Library of China, the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, and the Inst.i.tute for Oriental Ma.n.u.scripts in St. Petersburg-to understand, conserve and make the material available to scholars and the public. IDP has received funding from the European Union as well as the Mellon and Ford foundations. But another way of financing the work has not changed since the days of the Diamond Sutra's merit-making patron w.a.n.g Jie. Individuals, or groups, can sponsor a sutra. The sponsored doc.u.ment is copied-through digital photography, not hand-copying-and made available online for free. The woodblock-printed Diamond Sutra is among those that have benefited from this program.

Much of what is known about the Silk Road and Buddhism's migration along it has its roots in Stein's epic journeys, his scholarship, and his stamina. He brought tangible evidence of how present-day Muslim Central Asia rests on Buddhist foundations. It is impossible to comprehend contemporary Central Asia-and its increasing importance in world events-without understanding the Silk Road. Stein is the thread that makes that possible.

He uncovered some of the only surviving records of daily life as it was more than a millennium ago-poignant letters by lonely soldiers, an angry missive from an abandoned wife. With his Persian Buddha, hymns to Jesus, and images of Eros, Heracles and Athena, Stein returned from the desert with sacred treasures from possibly the world's greatest and certainly least-known cultural melting pot. He showed that among the Silk Road's sands lie a magnificent lost Buddhist civilization, epitomized in the Diamond Sutra. In a world today riven by sectarian conflict, his discoveries remind us of the existence of places where people of different cultures and beliefs once coexisted peacefully and give hope that they may do so again.

Stein's resourcefulness is beyond doubt. His ability to plan and execute his epic journey over towering mountains and parched deserts and to organize teams of men and supplies is all the more remarkable given it was done without today's communication lifelines: satellite navigation, the internet, cell phones. At times, he had nothing more than a hand-drawn map to guide him, at others, not even that. But as much as his dedication and determination can be admired, his actions are more problematic. From today's perspective, the removal of ma.n.u.scripts and murals is alarming, his treatment of Abbot w.a.n.g seems calculating and manipulative. But these were not the standards of his era, and it is facile to judge one era by the values of another. Stein worked in an era when Western powers viewed the cultural objects of others as theirs for the taking and jockeyed for the right to do so. It was a time when the West claimed "superior" knowledge and argued it alone could care for the world's treasures. Not even the bones of indigenous people were safe, as Australia's Aboriginal people know.

While the Romantic poet Robert Byron railed against Lord Elgin, who made off with the Parthenon marbles, and writer Victor Hugo against Britain and France's looting of Beijing's Summer Palace, few Western voices were raised against Stein in his lifetime. One who did protest was Sinologist Arthur Waley, the translator of the Xuanzang-inspired Monkey. Waley asked people to "imagine how we should feel if a Chinese archaeologist were to come to England, discover a cache of medieval MSS [ma.n.u.scripts] at a ruined monastery, bribe the custodian to part with them, and carry them off to Peking." His words recalled criticism of Stein made by China's National Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities in the 1930s. Not that Waley had any sympathy for Abbot w.a.n.g, the "precious old humbug" as he called him. Stein well knew the Chinese were interested in their remote past, according to Waley. "But I was never able to convince him that the Chinese scholars who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote about the geography and antiquities of Central Asia were anything more than what he called 'arm-chair archaeologists.'"

Waley's dissenting voice aside, Stein died a hero in the West. But not so in China, where he has long been reviled as the greatest pirate to have crossed the ocean of sand, far worse than France's Paul Pelliot, America's Langdon Warner, Russia's Sergei Oldenburg or j.a.pan's Count Otani. Of all the material Stein removed, the Dunhuang ma.n.u.scripts have attracted the most ire. Certainly more than the murals he cut from desert shrines and which arguably caused greater damage and despoiled what remained. Perhaps part of the reason for this anger is because the ma.n.u.scripts were removed from within the confines of China itself, rather than Turkestan. China continues to feel aggrieved at being deprived of these records of its culture. A recent Chinese government book about the caves describes Stein as a looter and defrauder. Visitors to the Mogao Caves, or Peerless Caves, today receive a brochure that refers to the "theft" of the doc.u.ments and concludes: "We hope that later generations will learn from this lesson." But the lesson of the Library Cave is ambiguous and raises questions about what the fate of its scrolls might otherwise have been.

When Abbot w.a.n.g broke open the cave, he could elicit little interest from local authorities in its contents. By the time Stein arrived, w.a.n.g had already given away some ma.n.u.scripts to ingratiate himself with local officials. Stein's fear was that the rest would face a similar fate and be destroyed or lost. Wily and exploitative as Stein undoubtedly was in his treatment of w.a.n.g, there is no doubt his aim was to save the scrolls for the future and to better understand the past.

Personal gain and enrichment were never his motives. He lived frugally and his most treasured home was his tent. His appet.i.te for work and his eagerness to reveal the past never dimmed. His will provided for a fund to encourage Central Asian exploration. To see Stein simply as either hero or plunderer is simplistic, the reality is more nuanced. However one views the ethics of his actions, the consequences are that the Diamond Sutra and the other scrolls he took have been well cared for in one of the world's finest inst.i.tutions. They have been doc.u.mented and are increasingly available in ways unimaginable a century ago. Stein removed the scrolls when to do so was not illegal and China had neither laws nor advocates to prevent this. Certainly that had changed by the time Stein pig-headedly persisted three decades later in the face of Chinese protests.

It is possible China may one day seek the return of the Diamond Sutra and other Dunhuang treasures. China was weak and racked by political upheaval when Stein took them. Today it is a global player with the world's fastest-growing economy. As its power has increased, so has its interest in the fate of cultural treasures removed from its soil. So far this has focused on objects plundered from the Summer Palace. China estimates about 1.5 million items were stolen when French and British troops under the command of Lord Elgin-whose father acquired the Elgin Marbles-sacked and burned the palace in 1860 during the Second Opium War.

In early 2009, China attempted to stop the auction of two bronze heads belonging to the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent that once adorned a fountain at the Summer Palace. The Paris auction by Christie's went ahead, but then the buyer refused to pay. He later identified himself as Cai Mingchao, an adviser to China's National Treasures Fund, which seeks to retrieve treasures from abroad. A few months after the auction, China asked the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and other inst.i.tutions in the UK, the United States, and France to allow its teams to doc.u.ment the artifacts looted from the Summer Palace. In 2010, on the 150th anniversary of the sacking of the Summer Palace, Chinese authorities called for the return of the looted artefacts.

These moves come as other countries are increasingly seeking the return of iconic objects, reigniting debate about rest.i.tution and the repatriation of cultural treasures. Greece has long demanded that the British Museum return the Elgin Marbles and has built a museum in sight of the Parthenon to house them. Not that this has altered Britain's resolve to retain the statues. The British Museum argues the sculptures are part of everyone's heritage and transcend cultural boundaries. More recently Egypt has demanded Nefert.i.ti's bust from Berlin's Neues Museum and the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum.

The argument that only the West can adequately care for cultural items is less tenable than it was even a few decades ago. Yet so is the argument that the Dunhuang doc.u.ments are not available for study. Some argue that objects belong to the cultures that produced them. But even that is not clear-cut with the Dunhuang ma.n.u.scripts. Most of them are in Chinese, including the Diamond Sutra, but others are in a range of languages. Where, then, should the Manichean hymns go? Or the Sogdian letters?

Most countries today are more protective of their heritage with laws preventing the removal of their cultural objects. The ancient pilgrim Xuanzang could not openly venture from China to India now, intent on removing religious scrolls. Nor could he readily give objects to a major gallery or museum. Aware that acquiring antiquities can encourage looting, many museums no longer buy them without proof they left their country of origin legally. Yet despite international laws and museum ethical codes, the black market trade in looted antiquities has mushroomed. As ancient treasures are reefed from the soil or chipped off monuments without study or doc.u.mentation, their history and context are lost. The illegal trade has been fuelled in part by buyers' ignorance. Others have deliberately turned a blind eye to the most basic question: where did this come from and how did it get here?

One area especially vulnerable to looting is the Gandharan art Stein so admired. The war in Afghanistan has taken a tragic human toll, but the continued conflict has meant the region's ancient culture is at risk of systematic destruction, according to the International Council of Museums, which has issued a "red list" of items at risk. Among the targets of the illicit trade are ancient ma.n.u.scripts on palm leaf, birch bark, and vellum, as well as fragments of Buddhist wall paintings and figures.

Even as its art is at risk, knowledge of the Silk Road's 2,000-year history grows. Since the turn of the millennium, exhibitions in cities as far apart as London, Kyoto, Hong Kong, and St. Petersburg attest to the burgeoning interest. The romance of the Silk Road may have gone, but its imaginative power endures. Tourism has stimulated curiosity about an area off-limits to foreigners for much of the twentieth century. So has politics. As rival powers again compete for influence in Central Asia, and oil, not silk, becomes the coveted commodity, some speak of a new Great Game.

19.

Scroll Forward.

Traveling the Silk Road today no longer means facing the hazards the ancient caravans endured-not least hunger, thirst, and attack by bandits-nor even the privations faced by Stein just a century ago. The old walls of Kashgar, along which Stein groped his way in a dust storm, have gone. They have fallen victim to the wrecker's ball that has reduced much of the old city to rubble in the past decade. But tucked away behind two high-rise hotel buildings bearing its name, Chini Bagh still stands. The former British consulate is a Chinese restaurant today. Diners fill the tables on a shady veranda beside the main entrance, through whose welcoming doorway over the years have pa.s.sed Stein and Dash, Chiang, Father Hendricks, the formidable Russian consul Petrovsky, Australian journalist and correspondent for The Times G.E. Morrison, and writers Peter Fleming and William Dalrymple.

The castle-like ramparts, familiar from old photographs, and their whitewash and ochre exterior paintwork remain. But there are no traces of the shady orchard and gardens Mrs. Macartney so lovingly created, just a small vegetable patch beside some al fresco tables. Inside, the walls have been elaborately plastered and gilded, creating a baroque atmosphere in the light-filled rooms. From the rear, the view is no longer of a river, fields and the Russian cemetery where Father Hendricks' friends kept a candle burning on his grave, but of buildings and construction sites.

A fifteen-minute walk from Chini Bagh, the former Russian consulate also still stands. The once lonely outpost of the rival empire is similarly surrounded by Chinese hotel buildings. The original austere brown-and-grey-brick residence is less welcoming than Chini Bagh. In a rear room, a mural stretches the width of one wall. The painting depicts a cla.s.sical landscape in which a brave Greek soldier wrestles a bull by its horns, a florid reworking of Carle van Loo's Theseus, Vanquisher of the Bull of Marathon. The French artist's name-in Russian script-appears in the corner. How long the mural has been there and who really painted it is unknown. Perhaps Petrovsky dined under it and saw in the mural an allegory of Great Game rivalries in which Imperial Russian force subdued the British beast. A more recent hand-perhaps of Chini Bagh's plasterer-has been at work, covering the Russian consulate's walls too in ornate curlicues. The building, known as the Seman, is not open to the public, but houses the office of a property company. The Russian Cossacks once stationed there, whose airs Stein could hear from Chini Bagh, would today be inaudible over the horns of taxis and buses that in the past two decades have replaced donkey carts as the main form of transport.

The yellow-and-white Id Kah Mosque still calls the faithful to prayer and within its walls the shady poplars are a peaceful refuge from the bustle of the night market, flashing neon and a billboard advertising a forthcoming Kashgar attraction-a golf course. Men with wispy beards and green embroidered hats sell circular bread cooked in clay ovens. Elderly women, faces veiled for modesty in coa.r.s.e brown fabric, nonchalantly raise their dresses to reveal ample bloomers in which they keep their money.

From Kashgar, the southern oases through which Stein pa.s.sed still see few foreigners. The route lacks the more impressive remains of Xinjiang's Buddhist past that dot the northern oases. At Yarkand, there is no sign of the yamen where Chiang lived before joining Stein and eventually becoming Macartney's secretary at Chini Bagh. No doubt Chiang knew of Yarkand's female poet, Aman Isa Khan, who died in childbirth in the sixteenth century and whose tomb remains the town's landmark. In its nearby bazaar, metal workers hammer tin into chests and the onion-domed barbecues used by street hawkers, the customers all locals. Yarkand was once a Silk Road crossroads, filled with travelers from Tibet, Afghanistan, and Ladakh and its population bigger than Kashgar. Today it is a backwater where the presence of foreigners sparks good-natured attention.

Farther east, jade is still the mainstay of Khotan, known today as both Hotan and Hetian. The stone extracted from its mountain-fed rivers, especially the white "mutton fat" variety, continues to be highly prized among the Chinese. High-end shops attract the cashed-up while street traders display lumps of stone of dubious value on shabby cloths.

Stein once dreamed of a museum in Hotan to house the treasures of Rawak Stupa, whose sculptures he reburied only to discover jade hunters had destroyed them in a futile search for treasures concealed within. The city does have a museum that displays remains of Hotan's Buddhist past, including statues and two mummies, but nothing can undo the damage to Rawak.

A camel across the sea of sand dunes was the only way to reach the stupa, until the recent opening of a road. Yet few visitors appear to travel along it. About ten miles from Rawak is the shrine of a Muslim saint where Stein once camped under a full moon. Each May pilgrims from far afield, including Sufi musicians, pay homage to the Islamic martyr. On a late summer day it is silent and devoid of pilgrims. But a soft cooing penetrates the still air. Behind the shrine, the sacred pigeons are better housed in their brick coop than when Stein offered them a handful of grain.

The princess who brought to Hotan silkworm eggs concealed in her headdress-and hence the means to make silk-may be largely forgotten, but a compound of silk-makers still spins and weaves the fabric just outside the oasis. A young woman, baby in her lap, sits before a bath of silkworm coc.o.o.ns. She teases out a few threads and pa.s.ses them to a man seated behind a large wheel, who hand spins the gossamer thread. It will be transformed into ikat-dyed fabric with a bold pattern favored by local women for clothing. On the edge of Hotan, an elderly man keeps another ancient tradition alive. He has been dubbed the last mulberry paper-maker of the Taklamakan. Within his family's mud-brick compound he pounds the tree's bark to a pulp. When it is the consistency of watery porridge, he pours it into a mold and leaves it to dry in the sun. The result is a strong creamy paper-the same type of paper on which the Diamond Sutra was once printed.

In Hotan's main square, the disparate influences of its recent past are evident. Beneath a statue of the late Chairman Mao, looming paternalistically over a former Uyghur leader, an evening concert begins. A man crooning pop songs vacates the stage for a group of Cossack-style dancers who perform a Cinderella story as they compete to fit a young maiden with a pair of red shoes. The streets teem with donkey carts next morning for the weekly Sunday market. The scents of cardamon, c.u.min, and rose flowers fill the air in a corner of the bazaar where merchants pound drums full of spices. Elsewhere, a man whittles wooden spoons, another sells metal-spiked brushes that create the swirling pattern on the circular naan bread. The old constantly b.u.mps up against the new: two musicians perform on traditional Uyghur instruments to mark the opening of a whitegoods store.

The Taklamakan Desert itself has been tamed. Near the Thieves' Road, where Stein and his party almost died of thirst in search of the Keriya River, a sealed cross-desert highway links the northern and southern oases. Traders, travelers, and troops no longer have to take the slow, circuitous route to reach the far side of the desert, but can cut straight across it. Along each side of the road, ma.s.s plantings of rice straw in a neat grid attempt to hold back the moving sands-and the demons once conjured by this realm of deadly illusion. Trucks and buses now convey goods and people in about twelve hours along the once-trackless wastes. Pa.s.sengers on a bus from Hotan to Kucha pa.s.s the hours watching dubbed Turkish soap operas, except for an elderly Uyghur man who quietly performs his prayers to Mecca in the aisle.

Across the desert on the old northern Silk Road the work of Albert von Le Coq is evident. At the Kizil Caves near Kucha, the German sawed off many murals. But he is not the only one to have left a destructive mark there. Treasure hunters have removed gold leaf from the robes and haloes of the Buddhas painted on the walls. Muslim iconoclasts have scratched the eyes and mouths from the sacred images. The caves, some older even than those at Mogao, were still used as dwellings until the 1980s, a guide explains, and evidence of cooking and heating is apparent on some soot-blackened paintings. Nonetheless, many murals remain. Outside the caves, a statue of k.u.marajiva honors the great translator who was born in Kucha and whose translation was used for the Diamond Sutra of 868.

The Kizil Caves contain more surviving murals than at Bezeklik near the oasis of Turfan. Von Le Coq, who daubed "Robbers' Den" over his accommodation near Bezeklik, stripped these domed caves more thoroughly. Also near Turfan are the ruins of the ancient Buddhist city of Gaochang. Donkey carts convey visitors a mile or so along its hot, dusty length. In the once-thriving city, Xuanzang was detained by its king before being released to make his epic trip to India and back, returning via Dunhuang.

In Dunhuang's open-air market, Muslim hawkers grill sticks of mutton over charcoals, a Tibetan in a cowboy hat sells "medicinal" dried snakes, animal horns and paws, while a Han Chinese artist etches images of angels onto gourds. The town remains a cultural crossroads, but it is far removed from the dusty garrison where Stein struggled to find someone to cut up his silver horseshoes for currency. Now he would queue at an ATM. With shop windows full of leather goods, fashion, and electronics, Dunhuang looks like any other prosperous Chinese town, although few anywhere are surrounded by towering sand dunes that creep ever closer.

As in the days of the Silk Road, Dunhuang's life blood is visitors from afar. But today's travelers are the result of a recent phenomenon: global tourism. Travelers to Dunhuang no longer arrive on plodding camels or b.u.mpy donkey carts, but by planes, trains, and private cars. They come to see the Jade Gate, the ruined clay fort through which so many Silk Road caravans traveled. And they come to see Crescent Lake, nestled in a hollow and surrounded by towering dunes. Stein once wished to be buried by its tranquil banks. Perhaps it is just as well his wish was never realized. There is little solitude by the lake today, where tourists ride brightly decked camels and hire toboggans to slide down the dunes. But the Ming Sha dunes no longer rumble. Pollution, not least from so many visitors, has affected the sands and since the early 1980s they have fallen silent.

Above all, people come to Dunhuang to see the Mogao Caves. And they arrive not once a year for an annual pilgrimage, but daily. Today, a paved path to the caves crosses a footbridge over the dry bed of the Daquan River, near where Stein camped. The poplars Abbot w.a.n.g planted along the river banks still provide welcome shade from the summer heat. The caves remain a place of pilgrimage for some. A visiting brown-robed priest lights incense sticks near a central paG.o.da, places them in a large incense holder and bows three times. Other visitors follow his example, although most simply pose at the photogenic spot. The rickety ladders to the caves have been replaced by steps and walkways. The once-exposed entrances to the honeycombed grottoes that reminded Stein of troglodyte dwellings have been fitted with metal doors. It is no longer possible to wander unescorted from cave to cave, as Stein did.