The Silk Road: A New History (40 page)

CLAY MONKEYS FROM YOTKAN
As was his usual practice, Stein carefully numbered and arrayed the different clay monkeys he found at Yotkan on a tray so that they could be photographed. Their sexually explicit positions suggest their use as talismans to enhance fertility.

Since the document is so important for the study of Khotan, let us consider the full text:

On the 18th day of the 10th month of the 3rd year, at this time in the reign of the king of Khotan, the king of kings, Hinaza Deva Vijitasimha, at that time there is a man of the city called Khvarnarse. He speaks thus: There is a camel belonging to me. That camel carries a distinguishing mark, a mark branded on it, like this—VA SO. Now I am selling this camel for a price of 8,000 masha [most likely Chinese coins] to the suliga Vagiti Vadhaga. On behalf of that camel Vagiti Vadhaga paid the whole price in masha, and Khvarnarse received it. The matter has been settled. From now on this camel has become the property of Vagiti Vadhaga, to do as he likes with it, to do everything he likes. Whoever at a future time complains, informs, or raises a dispute about this camel, for that he shall so pay the penalty as the law of the kingdom demands. By me Bahudhiva this document (?) was written at the request of Khvarnarse.

This document records the sale of a camel for 8,000 Chinese coins by a Khotanese man to a Sogdian named Vagiti Vadhaga. (The word
suliga,
used to describe Vagiti Vadhaga, originally meant “Sogdian” but later took on the broader meaning of “merchant.”)

The use of the Khotanese king’s reign year to date the contract suggests that it was drawn up in Khotan and carried to Endere. Scholars of the Khotanese language observe that all the names in the contract—the king’s, the seller’s, the purchaser’s, the scribe’s—all take Iranian forms. “King of kings” is the standard Iranian term for ruler, and “hinaza” is an Iranian word meaning “general.” Thus, a single wooden slip—another of Stein’s chance finds—documents the use of an Iranian language in Khotan in the third or fourth centuries, at the same time that the residents of neighboring Niya were speaking the Indic language of Gandhari.

The first documents in the Khotanese language surfaced on the antiquities market in 1895. A British captain named S. H. Godfrey bought them from some local merchants, who claimed that they had been found in Kucha, and sent them to Augustus Frederick Rudolf Hoernle, the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, who had deciphered the Bower Manuscript, the first major manuscript find in Xinjiang. In the following years, the British consul based in Kashgar, George Macartney, bought more documents and asked Hoernle to decipher them as well.
¹⁶
In 1899 Hoernle left India and retired to Oxford; continuing the practice of his predecessors, Stein sent him all manuscripts written in Brahmi script, which replaced Kharoshthi after it fell from use about 400
CE.
¹⁷

As early as 1901 Hoernle realized that some of the manuscripts, though written in Brahmi script, were in a language distinct from Sanskrit: “Only a few of the words or phrases have, as yet, been determined, but these seem to prove clearly that the language of the documents is an Indo-Iranian dialect, having affinities both with Persian and the Indian vernaculars, in addition to peculiarities of its own which connect it with the dialects of the Western Highlands of Central Asia.”
¹⁸
Initially Hoernle did not know if Khotanese was an Iranian language that borrowed a huge vocabulary from Sanskrit or a Sanskritic language with many Iranian words. A linguist encountering English would confront a similar problem: English might appear to be a Romance language with a large Germanic vocabulary, but it is actually a Germanic language that, after the Norman Conquest of 1066, absorbed many French words. By 1920 a scholarly consensus had formed: Khotanese was an Iranian language, contemporary with Middle Persian and Sogdian, with an extensive vocabulary borrowed from Sanskrit.

Because the script, spellings, and grammar of the different phases of Khotanese vary, Prods Oktor Skjærvø, the Aga Khan Professor of Iranian at Harvard, sees three distinct phases in the history of the language: Old Khotanese (fifth to sixth centuries), Middle Khotanese (seventh to eighth centuries), and Late Khotanese (ninth to tenth centuries). Each phase is associated with a specific group of manuscript finds: examples of Old Khotanese are almost exclusively translations of Buddhist texts of unknown provenance; the Middle Khotanese texts surfaced at Dandan Uiliq; and the Late Khotanese texts came from cave 17 at Dunhuang.
¹⁹

Only one manuscript in Old Khotanese is not a translation of a Buddhist text from Sanskrit:
The Book of Zambasta.
²⁰
The text is named for the official who commissioned it: at several places, the text states, “The official Ysambasta with his son Ysarkula ordered this to be written.” (The English letter
z
best approximates the sound of the combined
y
and
s
.) This, the most important work of literature in Khotanese, is an anthology of Buddhist writings. The text’s author is modest: as he explains, “Since I have translated this into Khotanese, however extremely small and poor my knowledge, I seek pardon from all the
deva
[divine] buddhas for whatever meaning I have distorted here. But whatever merits I may have obtained here, may I surely through these merits realize
bodhi
together with all beings also.”
Bodhi,
the knowledge and understanding of Buddhist teachings that comes with enlightenment, is a key teaching of the text, as is emptiness.

The Book of Zambasta
covers familiar ground for all students of Buddhism. One chapter on the topic of women’s wiles and how the listener can best withstand them stands out, since few Buddhist anthologies include such a discussion.
²¹
The chapter warns, “Those women’s cunning arts they learn without a teacher,” and concludes, “The official Ysambasta with all his sons [and] daughters,”—this is the only mention of Zambasta’s daughters—“ordered [me] to write [this]. May I surely become a Buddha.” The author adds a final comment: “The Acarya [“teacher,” a term of address for monks] Siddhabhadra read this section on women many times for the restraining of his mind: ‘Thus indeed I remained as agitated as the ocean when I had read this sutra. Then in fact there was no lying quiet for me, like the eyelashes, the hairs between the eyebrows, the hairs on the cheeks.’” This confession comes as a rare human note in what is often a dry anthology.

Proceeding chapter by chapter,
The Book of Zambasta
paraphrases certain Buddhist narratives, many associated with Mahayana teachings. It relates the tale of how the Buddha outsmarted the heretic magician Bhadra, who used his magic to transform a cemetery into a “palace of the gods.” One chapter recounts the Buddha’s biography and his enlightenment, while another narrates the Buddha’s departure and his entrusting of this world to the Maitreya Buddha. The chapter about the Maitreya has the same content as the text that was translated from “twghry” into Uighur, which underpinned Sieg and Siegling’s identification of the Tocharian language.
The Book of Zambasta
beautifully illustrates Khotan’s place as a central node for monks traveling among all the countries of the region, because it anthologizes and paraphrases texts from Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, and Uighur, among other languages.
²²

The Book of Zambasta
does not survive in its entirety. Two hundred and seven leaves of an original 298 are held in libraries in Calcutta, St. Petersburg, London, New Haven, Munich, and Kyoto. The Russian consul Nikolai Petrovsky purchased 192 leaves from locals in Kashgar, so no one knows the book’s original findspot.
²³
Scholars have identified five different manuscripts from which these leaves were drawn, the earliest dating to between 450 and 500.
²⁴

At the time that
The Book of Zambasta
was written, Khotan was an independent kingdom. In the early 600s it became a vassal of the Western Turks, and it was still part of their confederation when Xuanzang visited on his way to India in 630. In the following two decades, the Tang emperor Taizong (reigned 626–49) wrested control of Central Asia from the Western Turks; Tang forces took Turfan in 640 and Kucha in 648. In that year, the king of Khotan shifted allegiance. He sent one son and three hundred camels to aid the Tang army, visited the capital, and left his sons in the Tang capital as hostages. (It was common practice for future rulers to be raised in the capitals of their country’s allies so that they could learn their customs.) Khotan became one of the Four Garrisons where the Tang stationed troops in the far west; the other three were Kucha, Kashgar, and Yanqi (between 679 and 719 Tokmak took Yanqi’s place).

After 648 Khotan’s history was entwined with Kucha’s: the Tibetans conquered both oases and ruled them from 670 to 692, when the Chinese regained control, which they retained until 755. Then the An Lushan rebellion prompted them to withdraw their forces from Central Asia.
²⁵
The height of Silk Road contact for Khotan, like Turfan and Kucha, occurred during the seventh and eighth centuries, when the Tang military presence was strongest.

The largest cache of Khotanese-language documents comes from the site of Dandan Uiliq, 80 miles (130 km) northeast of Khotan. Hedin had visited the site in January 1896 on his second trip into the Taklamakan (on the disastrous first foray two of his men had died); a newspaper clipping about the lost city in the desert inspired Stein to apply to the Government of India for funding.
²⁶
Before setting off into the desert in 1900, Stein enlisted the help of Macartney, the British consul in Kashgar, and Petrovsky, the Russian consul, to question the men who had sold them small artifacts and excavated manuscripts. Two of the vendors recommended that Stein contact a Uighur named Turdi, who, as Stein explained, “found his bearings even where the dead uniformity of the sand dunes would to ordinary eyes seem to offer no possible landmark.”
²⁷
When the hired guides could not locate Dandan Uiliq, Turdi led Stein’s party to the ruins.

At Dandan Uiliq, Stein mapped fifteen structures in small clusters in the desert. The smallest structure measured 5 feet (1.5 m) square, the largest, 23 feet (7 m) by 20 feet (6 m). Some of the structures appeared to be dwellings, and documents found inside indicated that they were the residences of officials, who kept records in both Chinese and Khotanese.

One ruin held multiple leaves from Buddhist texts, evidence of a library at the site. Other structures were clearly religious; housing stucco sculptures, they had frescoes on their walls, many of which depicted deities. Some buildings also contained wooden panels buried in the ground.

Dandan Uiliq was sufficiently remote that most of the finds that were sold at the market must have been, Stein concluded, the product of short trips by a few individuals working alone or in small groups.
²⁸
Stein was wrong about the inaccessibility of Dandan Uiliq. Yes, the site was in the middle of the Taklamakan Desert and not easy to find, but those with sufficient determination could get there. The American geographer Ellsworth Huntington came in 1905, and the German traveler Emil Trinkler and his Swiss companion Walter Bosshard followed in the 1920s. In 1998 Christoph Baumer, a Swiss traveler, journeyed by camel train to the site, where—to the dismay of the archeological authorities—he uncovered several new paintings in an unauthorized dig.
²⁹
Modern technology, in the form of the Global Positioning System and off-road vehicles, has made it even easier for looters to reach Dandan Uiliq in recent years.

HOW THE SECRET OF SILKMAKING LEFT CHINA
Stein’s most famous find from Dandan Uiliq was this painted wooden panel measuring 18 inches (46 cm) long by 4 5/8 inches (12 cm) high, which a devotee left as an offering to the Buddha. A woman points to the crown of a princess who, according to legend, smuggled a silkworm cocoon out of China, thus revealing the secret of silkmaking to the peoples living in the Western Regions. In truth, the know-how for raising silkworms and spinning silk left China the same way that papermaking did, carried by people migrating along the Silk Road.

Since 1998 many Khotanese-language documents and objects with no clear provenance—but most likely from Dandan Uiliq or nearby—have surfaced on the antiquities market. Modern Chinese museums and universities face exactly the same thorny dilemma that curators of Western museums do: should they purchase the looted goods and preserve them for scholars to analyze? Or should they refuse to buy them in the hope that doing so will persuade looters to stop raiding ancient sites? If they do not buy them, the manuscripts will be lost; if they do, the unauthorized excavations will continue and quite possibly escalate.