Painted sculptures, murals and Tibetan scriptures in Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes

Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, Luoyang Longmen Grottoes and Datong Yungang Grottoes are also called the three major grottoes in China. Mogao Grottoes are 128 years earlier than Longmen Grottoes and 94 years earlier than Yungang Grottoes. The Mogao Grottoes are famous for their age. The scale of architecture, the number of murals, the number of statues and the integrity of preservation are famous for their profound artistic value, and they are well-known at home and abroad. Tourists come one after another in a year, which plays an important role in promoting cultural exchanges, spreading theories, promoting national art and carrying out patriotic education. The mural art of Mogao Grottoes is not found in Longmen Grottoes and Yungang Grottoes, and it is incomparable to any cave temple in the world. It is the essence of Mogao Grottoes. If you connect these 45,000 square meters of murals one by one, it will be 25 kilometers long. If you put these murals on the roadside, you can form a long gallery from downtown to Mogao Grottoes. It is called "a big gallery" by Japanese scholars because of its large scale, wide range of subjects and exquisite art. French scholars call it "the library on the wall"; As a scholar said with emotion after seeing the Mogao Grottoes, "Seeing the Li Huang Grottoes means seeing the ancient civilization of the world".

Gaoxiang Cave is commonly known as Thousand Buddha Cave. The "thousand" here does not refer to a specific number, but to many things. Because there are many Buddhist statues and murals in the cave, it is commonly known as the "Thousand Buddha Cave". The name of Mogao Grottoes first appeared in the inscription of Cave 423 in Sui Dynasty. There are different opinions about the origin of its name, and there are roughly three versions. First, it is said that the Gao Fei Grottoes are named after being dug high in the desert. In ancient Chinese, the word "Mo" in "Mo" and the word "Mo" in "Mogao Grottoes" are interchangeable words. Secondly, according to the documents unearthed in the Tibetan Sutra Cave and many documents in the Tang Dynasty, Dunhuang County in Shazhou in the Tang Dynasty was called "the mountain of desert" and "the desert Korea". According to this research, Mingsha Mountain was also called desert mountain in Sui and Tang Dynasties, so the grottoes were named after nearby towns and villages. The third is that the sound of "Mogao" means liberation in Sanskrit, and "Mogao" is a transliteration of Sanskrit.

Since the Han and Wei Dynasties, Dunhuang has always been the settlement of the Han nationality and many ethnic minorities, where the cultures of all ethnic groups meet and blend. Dunhuang is also the throat of the western regions and the eastern Central Plains. Since ancient times, people have been convinced of Buddhism, and local officials, nobles, good men and women, and poor people have taken out silver coins to open caves and make statues and paintings as their own temples to support Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Businessmen, messengers, monks, etc. People who traveled to and from the ancient Silk Road, in order to pray for their own safety, raised the Taklimakan Desert, or with blessings, died and entered the kingdom of heaven. So on the cliff of Mingsha Mountain, large and small caves and shrines are constantly emerging.

You can see that the green building in front is the Mogao Grottoes, with its back against Mingsha Mountain and facing three dangerous peaks. The total length of the South and North Grottoes is 1600 meters, and there are 492 existing caves. Caves vary in size, strewn at random up and down, with dense cliffs. Each cave has lifelike statues, elegant flying, exquisite murals and exquisite tiles, forming a whole. The Mogao Grottoes were built in 366 AD, two years earlier than the Qin Dynasty. After the dynasties of Beiliang, Northern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Zhou, Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties, Song, Xixia, Yuan, etc., there are more than 45,000 square meters of existing grotto murals, more than 2,400 statues, the largest statue owner is more than 30 meters, and the largest mural is about 50 square meters. These murals and statues reflect the society, production, life, transportation, architecture, art, music, dance, folk customs, religious beliefs, ideological changes, ethnic relations, and Chinese-foreign exchanges at that time to varying degrees. It lasted for thousands of years in China from the 4th century to14th century. Among the three major grottoes in China, the Mogao Grottoes are the earliest discovered, longest lasting, largest and most abundant grottoes. It also has precious value in the history of world culture. Known as "the treasure of human culture", "the museum of image history" and "the world gallery".

Now I am going to visit the cave. First, we will visit the famous "Tibetan Sutra Cave". This cave is located on the north side of Kavino Tunnel. System engineering, numbered Cave 17. It was originally the "shadow cave" of monks in Hexi, Hong Tong in the late Tang Dynasty, and it was recorded in inscriptions. 1900 One day in May, the Taoist Wang, who was in charge of the Mogao Grottoes, accidentally opened the "Tibetan Sutra Cave" that had been hidden for more than 100 years. These precious cultural relics were finally discovered, but the corruption of Qing Dynasty and the ignorance of Wang made these precious cultural relics plundered and robbed by imperialists. 1905, Obruchev of Russia came to the Mogao grottoes and used six packs of daily necessities as bait to defraud a batch of cultural relics. 1907, the Englishman Stein snatched about 10,000 scrolls with only dozens of horseshoe silver, and more than 500 Buddhist embroidery and paintings are now in the British Museum. 1908, Frenchman Pelliot stole more than 6,000 copies of cultural relics, which are now in the National Library of France and the Ji Mei Museum. 19111Koichiro Yoshikawa and Ju Ruichao of Otani Guangrui Expedition in Japan stole about 900 volumes. It was not until 19 10 that the Qing government transported the looted cultural relics to Beijing and collected them in the Beijing Library. Many cultural relics were stolen, damaged and lost in transit and after being transported to Beijing, which is an inestimable loss in the archaeological history of China. The contents of these documents found in the Tibetan Sutra Cave include religious classics and secular desires written in many languages. They involve many disciplines and are important materials for studying ancient religions, politics, economy, military affairs and culture. After decades of research by scholars at home and abroad, they have developed a brand-new hot subject-Dunhuang studies.

So when and why was the Sutra Cave closed? One is: at the beginning of the eleventh century, Xixia invaded Dundun Dunhuang and hid it to protect the scriptures; One is: store the scriptures that are not used but cannot be discarded; Another is to hide in order to prevent the destruction of Islamists. Later, these classic monks were incorporated, and those who should have escaped fled, and those who should have been secularized died. No one knew about this cave until it was discovered at the beginning of this century.

Next, I will take you to visit Cave 328. The beauty of this cave lies in the statue. Before entering the cave, I will give you an overview of color sculptures. The colored sculptures in Mogao Grottoes include circular sculptures, floating sculptures and shadow sculptures. The smallest is less than an inch, and the largest is 34.5 meters high, making it the fourth largest Buddha statue in the world. Statues are generally made of wood, wrapped in straw, straw, reed, hemp and so on. , then coated with special plastic, shaped and carved, and finally painted with color. There are four main types of Buddha statues: (1) Buddha statues, including Sakyamuni, Maitreya, Pharmacist, Amitabha, III Buddha and VII Buddha; (2) Statues of Bodhisattvas, including Guanyin, Manjusri, Pu Xian and offering sacrifices to Bodhisattvas; (3) Disciples, including Ye Jia and Ananda; (4) Statues of gods, including Heavenly Kings, Lux and Lohan. And some animal statues such as ghosts and gods. Due to the different production years, the styles are quite different, especially the styles of "showing bones and clearing images" in Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, "Cao clothes coming out of the water" and "Five Dynasties prevailing" in Tang Dynasty, which fully reflected the extraordinary imagination and superb thinking of artists at that time.

Statues are the main body of the grottoes, mostly the combination of 1 Buddha 2 bodhisattvas, which gradually evolved from thick in the early stage to thin in the later stage. Since the Sui and Tang Dynasties, there have been a group of portraits of seven or nine bodies, as well as large statues, such as 148 and 158 caves, which are more than 16 meters long.

Nirvana statues, the 3405-meter-high North Buddha in Cave 96 and the 26-meter-high South Buddha in Cave 130 are all works of a period, and their artistic styles tend to be graceful and gorgeous, especially many excellent works in the Tang Dynasty, which give people the impression of real life.

Cave 285 is the representative cave of Mogao Grottoes in the Western Wei Dynasty. Its architectural form is a square Zen cave with overlapping roofs, which covers the four or five years of the unification of the Western Wei Dynasty. It is the earliest cave in the Mogao Grottoes, with a record of years.

There is a story of "500 robberies of Buddha's fate" painted on Nanbi Zen Cave. It is about that in ancient India, 500 people rebelled and stole the king's army, captured them, gouged out their eyes and exiled the mountains. They were in great pain and cried out the name of the Buddha. Hearing this, the Buddha was merciful, restored their light with the efforts of God, and finally converted them to Buddhism. The picture is very realistic, and every link is described in detail. This story is equally instructive to people today. As long as you get lost, it's not too late.

Cave 220 was excavated in the early Tang Dynasty. The north and south walls of this cave were originally covered with murals of the Song Dynasty. 1948 after the damaged thousand Buddha paintings were stripped off, the murals of the early Tang Dynasty were revealed below, which were very fresh and beautiful, extremely well preserved and very beautiful. The south wall is the Pure Land Change of Amitabha, which is painted according to the Amitabha Sutra, and there is a treasure pool surrounded by railings in the middle. Amitabha sits on the lotus platform under the double trees in Shaluo, with the mighty bodhisattvas as the center, and saints such as Bodhisattvas, Tian Fei and geisha Lotte gather. The scene is very spectacular. There is a platform paved with red, green, black and white tiles in front of Baodi. On the front stage, musicians are playing various musical instruments. In the center of the platform, there are two dancers who stand on tiptoe and dance with the rhythm of music, their feathers fluttering and fierce. British architectural art mainly refers to the shape of caves. Grottoes themselves are buildings with three-dimensional space. In the early days, caves were mainly in the form of central towers. When the so-called central tower column is excavated, a square column is left in the center of the hole, and a niche is opened on the column to create a statue in the niche; The cave excavated in the middle period is relatively large, and the central tower column is replaced by the temple-style Moment One. Most of them open large niches on the front wall of the cave to create multi-body statues. The ceiling is covered with buckets, and the patio is beautifully painted. The caves dug in the later period are relatively large, with a depth of 20 to 30 meters, which is called palace caves. There is a Buddhist altar in the center of the cave, on which many large statues are shaped. In addition, there are Zen Cave, Giant Buddha Cave and Nirvana Cave. The transformation and diversification of cave architecture reflects that ancient artists are accepting foreign cultures and melting them into their own. In addition, the Mogao Grottoes also preserve five wooden eaves of the Song Dynasty and a dozen unique pagodas scattered around them. In addition, the pavilions, terraces, buildings, pavilions, temples, cities, houses, Maoxiang, wild shops, etc. painted in the murals constitute a treasure house of architectural art in the Mogao Grottoes, and also a history of Dunhuang architecture.