Dunhuang manuscripts refer to a wide variety of religious and secular documents in Chinese and other languages that were discovered at the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, during the 20th century.
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15 Facts About Dunhuang manuscripts
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Dunhuang manuscripts documents include works ranging from history and mathematics to folk songs and dance.
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3.
The Dunhuang manuscripts are a major resource for academic studies in a wide variety of fields including history, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies.
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The majority of surviving Dunhuang manuscripts were kept in a cave, the so-called Library Cave, which had been walled off sometime early in the 11th century.
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Many of these Dunhuang manuscripts survived only because they formed a type of palimpsest whereby papers were reused and Buddhist texts were written on the opposite side of the paper.
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Hundreds more of the Dunhuang manuscripts were sold by Wang to Otani Kozui and Sergey Oldenburg.
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7.
Scholars in Beijing were alerted to the significance of the Dunhuang manuscripts after seeing samples of the documents in Pelliot's possession.
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8.
Several thousands of folios of Tibetan manuscripts were left in Dunhuang and are now located in several museums and libraries in the region.
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9.
Aurel Stein suggested that the Dunhuang manuscripts were "sacred waste", an explanation that found favour with later scholars including Fujieda Akira.
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10.
Variety of languages and scripts found among the Dunhuang manuscripts is a result of the multicultural nature of the region in the first millennium AD.
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The largest proportion of the Dunhuang manuscripts are written in Chinese, both Classical and, to a lesser extent, vernacular Chinese.
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12.
An unusual feature of the Dunhuang manuscripts dating from the 9th and 10th centuries is that some appear to have been written with a hard stylus rather than with a brush.
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Dunhuang manuscripts represent some of the earliest examples of Tibetan writing.
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14.
Several hundred Dunhuang manuscripts have been identified as notes taken by students, including the popular Buddhist narratives known as bian wen .
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Much of the scholarship on the Chinese Buddhist Dunhuang manuscripts has been on the Chan texts, which have revolutionized the history of Chan Buddhism.
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