Dan Waugh
Daniel C. Waugh is Professor Emeritus at the University of
Washington (Seattle, USA), where in the mid-1990s, his
interests shifted from his original specialization, pre-modern
Russia, to Central Asia. The watershed from which has flowed ‘the
rest of his life’ was his commitment in 1998 to start teaching a
course on the Silk Roads, in preparation for which he enrolled in a
summer program at the Mogao Caves, co-sponsored by the Silkroad
Foundation and the Dunhuang Academy. In subsequent years, he was the
founding director of Silk Road Seattle, which sponsored a series of
educational programs and created an extensive set of Internet
resources. In 2003 he became editor of the Silkroad
Foundation’s journal, which has now grown from a thin
newsletter to a substantial annual. Projects to develop and share
educational resources on the Silk Roads with the IDP are ongoing.
His chosen object is the Dunhuang silk banner 1919,0101,0.139.
Dan Waugh writes:
In 2009, I was in London examining
the objects in the British Museum which had been donated by C. P. Skrine
after he had served as British Consul General in Kashgar in the
early 1920s. Skrine’s modest collection included fragments of
early Buddhist paintings and manuscripts which he had acquired
in Khotan. The article I co-authored with Ursula Sims-Williams
on the Skrine material and the antiquities market in Khotan then
appeared in my journal The Silk Road, Vol.
8(PDF), and has since been published in Chinese
translation.
On that trip to London, I was fortunate to be
included in a private viewing of some of the Dunhuang banners,
which Roderick Whitfield had organized for a colleague. When
asked there in the storage rooms of the British Museum whether
there were any of the banners from Mogao Cave 17 that I
particularly wanted to see, with little hesitation I chose 1919,0101,0.139, a late ninth-century painting on
silk depicting a bodhisattva holding a glass bowl. Why that
painting? In the first instance for the bowl, which to my mind
embodies much of what the ‘Silk Roads’ are all about. It is one
of the Middle Eastern cut glass bowls (numerous in the Sassanian
period) which traveled along the Silk Roads all the way to Japan
where one is in the collection of the Shōsō-in at Nara. When
found in archaeological contexts these bowls usually have a
rough patina and no longer are transparent, but here one can see
through the bowl the hand that is holding it. In a recent
addition to its display of such Sassanian glass, the British
Museum has included a replica (2007.6004.1) made by Japanese
glass artist Tami Ishida to give a sense of how their facets
would have sparkled when new.
That Dunhuang banner also
evokes memories for me. When at the Mogao Caves for the first
time in 1998, I was particularly struck by Cave 196, dated to
893–4, that is, approximately the same time as the banner. Cave
196 is distinctive in that, unlike most of the other Mogao
caves, it has preserved its original entrance hall and also some
of its statues in their original position on the large U-shaped
altar platform of the main hall. The best known of these is a
bodhisattva of great beauty in the position of 'royal ease',
whose features remind us of the bodhisattva depicted on the
banner.
Cave 196 is an early example of the the design of
some of the largest and most impressive of the Mogao caves, best
known from the ones commissioned by the Cao family in the tenth
century. Among them is Cave 61, constructed about half a century
after Cave 196, which contains the famous depiction of Mt. Wutai
on the west wall and the numerous donor images of the Cao family
in the lower register at the east side of the room. The
imposing, larger-than-life statuary, which would have occupied
the central altar platform in those caves, is no longer extant.
Cave 196 thus offers a rare sense of what the devotee of the
ninth or tenth century might actually have experienced upon
entering such a cave, as though re-born in Paradise in the
actual presence of the Buddhist divinities. The devotee of my
imagination might well have earned merit by commissioning a
banner whose elaborately garbed subject bears what would have
been considered a most precious offering.
When we
contemplate Dunhuang, our gaze tends to be directed inward, to
the treasure trove of manuscripts, banners, murals and statuary
which have so transformed our understanding of the Silk Roads.
It is easy to get lost in the details. For many over the
centuries down to the present, to visit the Mogao Caves has been
a life-changing experience, with some of the most vivid memories
the result of turning the gaze outwards. Remember that the
founding of the caves is associated with a vision experienced at
sunrise over the Sanwei Mountain to the east: Mogao is special
not in the least for its extraordinary natural setting. Too few
visitors today climb the hills to see the fragile strip of green
below in its starkly beautiful desert setting and experience the
landscape turning purple at sunset. Even fewer would spend a
night (as I did in 1998) at the temple on the top of Sanwei
Mountain with its curious ‘folk’ image of Guanyin, watching the
moon rise and awakening next morning to a rosy-fingered
dawn.
Link to original post on IDP blog.