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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 Dunhuang Academy, established in the 1940s, preserved and managed what could not be moved and recovered additional treasures.
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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. Discovery of the hidden library ended Dunhuang’s period of neglect. 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. Why these documents were hidden in this cave remains a mystery. 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. The next six hundred years brought earthquakes, drifting sand, neglect, decay and vandalism to the caves. 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. 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.Ĭave-temple building was an expensive enterprise, made possible through sponsorship by regional rulers and great families. These caves were excavated into shapes that imitate the interior rooms of tents and temples, then decorated with devotional paintings and sculptures. The caves of Ajanta in Maharashtra, India, may have been the original model for the Mogao Grotto. The Mahayana form of Buddhism spread into China from these regions, as did the practice of excavating and decorating caves. 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. Like many things from long ago, they survived because they were forgotten. Almost five hundred caves with elaborate wall paintings and statues still survive. While similar sites exist in other parts of China, Mogao Grotto dwarfs them all in sheer volume. The carving and decorating of caves began in the 4th Century CE and continued for a thousand years. 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 grotto is south of Dunhuang, an oasis city in a desert region of Gansu Province, about 1,500 miles west of Beijing. The Wutaishan mural is painted on the rear wall of a man-made cave carved into the cliff face of Mogao Grotto. I was expecting to see a paradise and what I saw looked like a map of the earth.
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The painted mural of Wutaishan was a surprise. I had expected to see paintings of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, local legends and scenes of daily life. I was there to see Chinese Buddhist paintings and sculptures.
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I wasn’t standing in front of the wall by chance. I could read all this from the images on the wall without knowing much about the legends and cosmology that populated the composition. I was looking at the map of a place, covered with buildings and connecting paths. I saw celestial beings descending from the clouds. 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 a mural that is larger than any person’s field of vision, over fifty feet long and twelve feet high. 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. Rethinking Ancient Buddhist Art as Information Design A Pilgrimage Through the Wutaishan Mural in the Hall of Mañjusrī Dunhuang, the Mural & the Library Cave