For two thousand years Buddhists have recognized the power of technology as a means to follow the Buddha's teachings and disseminate the Dharma. Paper and printing were seized upon by the Buddhist community of China and the eastern Silk Road (Fig. 1) to replicate sutras: one of the earliest and largest caches of paper manuscripts in the world is a Buddhist cave library; and it is also the source of the earliest dated printed book in the world, a copy of the Diamond Sutra (Fig. 2). Their colophons tell us that many of these texts were copied by monks and lay believers in order to bring merit to the donor's family and all sentient beings. It is therefore appropriate that the manuscripts, printed texts and Buddhist paintings from this cave and from other ancient sites on the eastern Silk Road are now accessable to a much wider audience through the new technologies of the World Wide Web and digitization. Making them available is the purpose of the International Dunhuang Project.
THE DUNHUANG LIBRARY CAVE The Dunhuang library cave is one of over five hundred extant Buddhist cave temples at Mogao near the town of Dunhuang, in present-day Gansu province, China. From the first century BCE Dunhuang was an important garrison and market town on the Silk Road. It lay at the junction where the Silk Road, more accurately a network of trade routes rather than a single, linear and well-defined road, split into two main branches along the north and south of the Taklamakan desert as travellers went west from China. Nine miles south-east of the town is a small river valley with a friable cliff face running north to south for about a mile. A monk named Lezun happened upon this spot in 366 CE and, beguiled by its tranquillity, he fashioned a meditation cave in the cliff from where he could look across at the Mingsha Mountains. Others followed, and the early monks lived in excavated caves. A monastery complex was probably built on the valley floor some time later. New caves continued to be excavated but as places of worship. Their walls and ceilings were decorated with multiple images of the Buddha, jataka scenes and, later, complex paradise scenes. Statues were fashioned from clay and then painted (Fig. 3). By the eighth century there were probably as many as a thousand caves in several tiers along the cliff (Fig. 4).
In the first millennium the area was controlled mainly by the Chinese and the Tibetans. It was also influenced by the many cultures and peoples of the Silk Road, especially the neighbouring Iranian Khotanese to the west, who sent a princess to marry the King of Dunhuang in the tenth century, and the Turkic Uighurs to the north. This cultural diversity is reflected in the languages and scripts of the manuscripts and in the painting styles and subjects. They reveal a vibrant and largely non-sectarian Buddhist world, with monks, translators, scribes and lay believers all eager to acquire more manuscripts and paintings and to make copies both for personal and wider use.
In the ninth century the abbot of the Dunhuang area, Hongbian, paid for a new cave to be excavated about halfway along the cliff at ground level. When he died in 868 a small side cave was dug out and a statue of Hongbian and a stele recording his achievements were placed inside. For reasons that are not clear, sometime in the following century the statue was moved elsewhere and the small memorial cave was filled with paintings on silk, votive banners, manuscripts and documents in many different languages and scripts. In about 1000 CE the doorway was then plastered and painted over and, it seems, the cave and its contents were forgotten.
They lay undisturbed until 1900, when another monk stopped at the caves and decided to restore the neglected paintings and statues. In the course of his work he uncovered the hidden door and found the cache of manuscripts and paintings (Fig. 5). Eager to receive official support for this restoration work he s
