Dunhuang Manuscripts - Studies of The Dunhuang Manuscripts

Studies of The Dunhuang Manuscripts

While most studies use Dunhuang manuscripts to address issues in areas such as history and religious studies, some have addressed questions about the provenance and materiality of the manuscripts themselves. Various reasons have been suggested for the placing of the manuscripts in the library cave and its sealing. Aurel Stein suggested that the manuscripts were "sacred waste", an explanation that found favour with later scholars including Fujieda Akira. More recently, it has been suggested that the cave functioned as a storeroom for a Buddhist monastic library, though this has been disputed. The reason for the cave's sealing has also been the subject of speculation. A popular hypothesis is that the cave was sealed to protect the manuscripts at the advent of an invasion by the Xixia army, or alternatively in the fear of an invasion by Islamic Kharkhanids that never occurred. But as there is not evidence to support either theory, Yoshiro Imaeda has suggested a more pragmatic reason for the sealing of the cave:

Would it not be more natural to assume that during the course of more than one and a half centuries following its excavation old documents were steadily brought into the cave with the result that, even after Hongbian’s portrait statue had been moved elsewhere, there was no longer any space for storing further documents, and the cave was sealed when it could no longer function even as a storage room, which occurred in the first half of the eleventh century?