Read The Silk Road: A New History Online
Authors: Valerie Hansen
The religious texts in the library cave indicate that people living at Dunhuang tolerated each other’s beliefs to an extraordinary extent. The monks putting aside these texts did not necessarily know the languages in which they were written and probably could not read them. But their willingness to preserve texts written in other languages underlines the cosmopolitanism characteristic of the Silk Road. Even though they lived in a small community of some 30,000 people, they respected other people’s languages, writings, and probably even their right to worship as they liked.
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The sources from the library cave, like those from Turfan and the Christian monument in Xi’an, are particularly important because they offer the view of the devotees, not that of high-ranking clergy or the Chinese authorities, whose views so often shape the historical record about religion. As instructive as they are, the Dunhuang texts do not describe the congregations of these different religions, with the result that we know little of their size. If all the surviving texts from a given religion are in a foreign language, we can surmise that the church did not attract many Chinese converts; on the other hand, Chinese-language translations point to the presence of local converts.
The survival at Turfan of Manichaean texts in multiple Iranian languages—Parthian, Middle Persian, and Sogdian—and old Turkic, and at Dunhuang in Chinese, have made it possible for scholars to study the teachings of a world religion otherwise known largely through the writings of Saint Augustine, who wrote in his
Confessions
about being a Manichaean before converting to Christianity.
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The library cave holds a total of three Manichaean texts written in Chinese characters.
Even though some of the texts are written in Chinese characters, they suggest that most Manichaean believers spoke an Iranian language. The longest of the three, a hymn scroll, uses Chinese characters to phonetically record twenty different Sogdian-language hymns and prayers. Because the text does not translate these hymns, they remain incomprehensible to a native speaker of Chinese. Someone who knew how to speak Sogdian but couldn’t read it—the child of Sogdian migrants to Dunhuang, say—could use these pronunciation guides to sing along with the congregation.
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One hymn in the hymn scroll, “Praise of the World of Light,” appears to be a direct translation of a Parthian text found at Turfan. But the Chinese version equates the World of Light with the Amitabha Buddha’s Western Paradise. The Light World is a “world of perfect bliss,” where “everything is light, and no place is dark; where all buddhas and envoys of Light live” and “everything is clean and pure, eternally happy, calm and quiet, undisturbed and unhindered; one receives happiness and has no worry or affliction.”
44
Mani urged his followers to use the terminology of existing religions in seeking converts. This text beautifully illustrates this chameleon strategy by naming Mani as one of the three most important teachers in China along with Buddha and Laozi; in this telling Mani has assumed Confucius’s position.
Another Manichaean text even more closely mimics a Chinese text. The prologue of the small scroll sounds exactly like the prologue to the famed Buddhist text of the Diamond Sutra. Yet in this version, Mani—not the Buddha—addresses a disciple: “Good indeed! Good indeed! In order to benefit the innumerable crowds of living beings, you have addressed to me this query, profound and mysterious. You thus show yourself as a good friend to all those living beings of the world who have blindly gone astray, and I will now explain the matter to you in detail, so that the net of doubt in which you are ensnared may be broken forever without recall.”
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Even the title misleads: the text is called
The Compendium of the Teachings of Mani the Buddha of Light.
The text so closely resembled a Buddhist text that it fooled even an expert like Pelliot, who chose not to take it to Paris, and today it is one of the most important texts in the Beijing Library Collection. Sogdian missionaries prepared this translation in response to an imperial order issued in 731; they hoped to convert the Chinese emperor himself.
The missionaries of each church took different approaches to translation. Whereas the Manichaeans freely adopted Buddhist terms, the Christians from the Church of the East insisted on strict accuracy in translation, no matter how confusing the result might be.
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What was the best way to render “God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” into Chinese? The translator of the hymn “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” chose the most literal solution: “Merciful father, Light son, King of the pure wind.” Of the three terms, only “merciful father” would have made sense to a Chinese convert. On the same sheet of paper is a list of holy books entitled “The Book of Honor.” It states that the three bodies of the “father emperor,” the “son emperor,” and the “witness” all form a single body—i.e., the Holy Trinity—another teaching that would certainly have puzzled a Chinese audience.
47
A note at the end of this list refers to Jingjing (or Adam), the author of the Christian stele of Ch’ang-an, indicating that it, like the stele, was composed sometime in the late eighth century, a period when the Church of the East was active in China.
The nature of the materials in the cave changed quite noticeably in the mid-eighth century. Before the An Lushan rebellion, almost all of the texts in the cave came from central China and consisted of Buddhist texts. The latest text in the cave from Chang’an is dated 753; after that date, all the texts were locally produced.
48
At this time, lay students began to copy a much larger variety of material, including—in addition to Buddhist texts—contracts, charters for lay associations, and literary texts. They even doodled in the margins of texts.
49
One hand copy of a market certificate, written sometime between 742 and 758, records the purchase of a thirteen-year-old non-Chinese slave boy for twenty-one bolts of raw silk. Adhering exactly to the detailed regulations of the Tang Code, it lists the names and ages of the seller, slave, and five guarantors, confirming that the Tang enforced the code throughout its realm.
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In 745 the Tang central government sent a payment of fifteen thousand bolts of silk in two installments to a garrison near Dunhuang.
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A bureaucratic document about someone’s salary allows us to see exactly how the Tang state made such payments. The central government deposited two shipments of silk in a commandery in Liangzhou (modern Wuwei, Gansu), about 435 miles (700 km) east of Dunhuang, the location of the regional military headquarters. From there, the silk was shipped to the Dunhuang garrison. As the French scholar Éric Trombert astutely remarks, “One has here a concrete example of two military convoys, each carrying more than 7,000 bolts of silk, that has nothing in common with the images of caravans of private merchants to which we are accustomed.”
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These individual payments of seven thousand bolts of silk are much higher than all the individual transactions recorded in the Turfan documents, which involved at most a few hundred bolts of silk. This document shows just how important the central government’s payments to the military were.
The Tang government had a complex monetary system in which three different currencies—textiles (both hemp and silk), grain, and coins—circulated alongside one another. Confusingly, the central government used a single aggregated unit to represent all three goods. The payment to the Dunhuang garrison included six different types of woven silk and silk floss. Because different localities paid their taxes using locally produced cloth, the Tang authorities simply transferred those textiles to the Dunhuang garrison. Garrison officials converted the tax cloth first into coins and then into grain, some used to feed the soldiers in the garrison, some paid directly to local merchants. This record affords a rare glimpse of payments sent to the military before the An Lushan rebellion: the Tang government injected massive amounts of money—in the form of woven cloth—straight into the Dunhuang economy.
As earlier chapters have recounted, in 755 the central government lost control of the northwest. In an attempt to defeat the rebels, the Tang emperor turned to the rulers of the Tibetan Empire for help. The Yarlung dynasty of Tibet was a relative newcomer to Central Asian politics. Before 617, the Tibetan plateau, some 13,000 to 15,000 feet (4,000–5,000 m) above sea level, was home in the north to herders who raised horses in the grasslands and, in the south, to farmers who planted barley in the river valleys.
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With no indigenous writing system, they knotted cords and marked tallies as their means of record keeping. Around 617 the rulers of the Yarlung dynasty, who took their name from the river valley to the southeast of Lhasa, unified Tibet for the first time. They modified the Sanskrit alphabet to form their own writing system, and, at the same time, adopted elements of the Tang legal system.
In 755, after An Lushan rebelled, the Tang emperor wrote to the Tibetans, promising large payments in exchange for their help in suppressing the rebels. The Tibetans were fine horsemen, and the Chinese admired their military equipment. As the official history of the Tang explains, “Their armor is excellent. They clothe their entire body in it, except for their two eyes. Even powerful bows and sharp knives cannot harm them very much.”
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Although ostensibly in the service of the Tang, Tibetan soldiers raided the capital of Chang’an for two weeks in the fall of 763 before retreating. Each autumn until 777 the horsemen returned to plunder Chang’an, and the weakened Tang armies could not keep them out.
During the 760s and 770s, when they were at peak strength, the Tibetans gradually increased the territory under their control and expanded into Gansu. In 781 they conquered the town of Shouchang, south of Dunhuang, and in 786, when the Tang government failed to pay the stipulated amount for their assistance in putting down a rebellion, they seized the prefectural center of Dunhuang. Governing eight former Tang-dynasty prefectures in the Gansu corridor, the Tibetans appointed a council of generals to rule the military districts. The Tibetans immediately established a dual administration headed by a Tibetan military governor and the highest civil official, in Dunhuang, who was often Chinese. Each district was further subdivided into units of one thousand, and these into twenty units of fifty households. The head of the smaller fifty-household units assigned each household tasks so that they could fulfill their labor obligation to the state.
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Some male residents in the Tibetan-occupied territory were conscripted into the army, while others labored in military colonies. In addition to serving as guards, those in the colonies cultivated crops and paid agricultural taxes in grain, which they had to carry to collection points, sometimes several days’ travel away. The Tibetans staffed their army using corvée labor; they did not pay their soldiers with bolts of cloth, grain, and coins as the Tang dynasty had.
The imposition of Tibetan rule in Dunhuang had an immediate effect on the local economy, as contracts written in both Tibetan and Chinese show.
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In 788–790, a few years after the Tibetans took Dunhuang, the financial records of a storehouse mentioned coins; this is the latest known Chinese-language reference to coins.
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It is possible that some Chinese coins, perhaps those minted before 755, circulated in the ninth and tenth centuries, but under Tibetan rule coins largely dropped from use. During the Tibetan period, prices are given in either measures of grain or bolts of cloth.
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A representative contract, dated 803, documents the sale of a cow for a price of twelve piculs of wheat (20–30 bushels, or 720–1080 L) and two of millet (3.5–5 bushels, or 120–180 L). The penalty for breach of contract is also denominated in grain: three piculs of wheat (5–8 bushels, or 180–270 L).
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With only a few mentions of
dmar
(the Tibetan word for “copper,” which probably indicates bronze coins), the contracts record exchanges almost entirely in grain.
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Sometimes people borrow cloth or paper, but they always pay back their debts using grain.
Earlier analysts saw the Tibetan occupation from 786 to 848 as a brief interlude in Dunhuang’s history, with few lasting repercussions. Sixty years, however, was sufficiently long that the residents of Dunhuang adopted some Tibetan customs. In the early years of Tibetan rule, most Chinese followed Chinese practice and used a family name followed by a given name. But over time the Chinese residents of Dunhuang adopted more and more Tibetan-sounding names. By the second or third generation of Tibetan rule, some even gave up their use of Chinese family names and used only a first name, just as the Tibetans did.
Some Chinese living under Tibetan rule made an even bigger change: they stopped writing in Chinese and adopted the Tibetan alphabet. Immediately following the Tibetan conquest, local scribes learned the language in order to draft government documents for officials or contracts for Tibetan speakers. Between 815 and 841 the Tibetan military governor launched a large-scale initiative to copy Buddhist texts. The project employed over one thousand scribes, many of them Chinese.
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As they copied texts, these scribes grew more proficient in writing Tibetan. They realized that it was easier to use a phonetic alphabet than to memorize thousands of Chinese characters.