SMC 43Producing Buddhist Sutras in Ninth-Century Tibet

19 December 2024

Photo: De Gruyter

Studying the 1,500 Dunhuang copies of the ‘Sutra of Limitless Life’ in the British Library seems tedious. However, in the new volume of SMC, Brandon Dotson and Lewis Doney show that examining a large set of seemingly interchangeable manuscripts can reveal numerous fascinating issues.

In 1900, the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu was carrying out restoration work in the Mogao caves, a spectacular cave temple about 25 kilometres outside the Chinese city of Dunhuang. By chance, he made a sensational discovery: in ‘Mogao Cave Seventeen’, which has become famous as the ‘library cave’, he found around 50,000 manuscripts from the 5th to 11th centuries, including Buddhist manuscripts and texts from Daoism and Confucianism in languages such as Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan.

The find quickly attracted the attention of international researchers. In May 1907, Aurel Stein spent one week at the library cave sifting through the vast quantities of manuscripts, deciding which ones would be of interest to museums in London and Delhi. Among other things, he collected numerous copies of the so-called Sutra of Limitless Life. Today, the Stein Collection in the British Library includes no fewer than 1,492 copies of this sutra. Even after Stein’s foray, there were still so many copies left in the library cave that Paul Pelliot, a scholar who arrived at the cave a year later, was still able to get hold of a considerable number of them. Many European, American, and Japanese explorers also had a chance to get their hands on some. The fact that even after that hundreds of copies remained in the cave makes it clear that the Sutra of Limitless Life was available in almost limitless quantities.

The reason why there are so many copies of this sutra is related to its content: More than half of its 40 paragraphs call for it to be recited, copied, and distributed in order to receive several benefits, most notably a long life. Apparently, this call was heeded frequently. In the 820s, an unknown donor sponsored the production of a large number of copies of the sutra as a gift for the Tibetan emperor.

What is so abundantly available is generally not particularly appreciated, and this is also the case with the copies of this sutra. They were considered some of the least valuable of the Dunhuang manuscripts. Brandon Dotson and Lewis Doney have nevertheless – or rather precisely for this reason – devoted an extensive study to the copies of the Sutra of Limitless Life, which has now been published as the 43rd volume of the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures (SMC).

According to the two researchers, scholars usually study the manuscripts of the Stein Collection individually, with a particular interest in the rare texts of which only one manuscript is present in the collection. When one focuses instead on a whole bundle of manuscripts that at first glance appear to be hardly distinguishable from one another, completely different questions come to the fore, as they authors explain in the introduction to their volume: ‘Who copied and edited these sutras? (…) Did scribes always copy the same version of the sutra? Who oversaw the project? Why were these sutras produced? What did people do with the sutras? How and where were they kept?’ In short, Dotson and Doney take the examples of the Sutra of Limitless Life as their starting point to tell ‘a social history of the project that produced these copies in the 820s, and a history of how they were documented, conserved, and catalogued in England in the twentieth century.’

Like almost all volumes of SMC,the book is available open access and can be downloaded from the publisher’s website.