Almost Lost

In 868 a man named Wang Jie paid for a woodblock print of the Diamond Sutra, and wrote at the end why. Reverently made for universal free distribution, on behalf of his two parents. It is the oldest printed book that carries a date.

Then it was not distributed.

Around the year 1000 someone bricked a small room shut inside the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi, and filled it with paper. Tens of thousands of scrolls. Nobody wrote down why. Maybe an army was coming. Maybe the room was full. The wall held for nine hundred years, and nobody opened it.

A Daoist monk, Wang Yuanlu, found it in June 1900 while clearing sand from the caves. He was not a scholar. He was raising money to repair the buildings. He sold the scrolls off: about 7,000 manuscripts and 6,000 fragments to Aurel Stein for £130, almost 10,000 to Paul Pelliot for £90. Today they are scattered across London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, and free to read online.

Wang Jie printed his sutra to send it out into the world. It survived nine centuries because it never went anywhere.

If you are carrying words you keep not sending, I write letters for people. [email protected]