About the Cover

Details: Artist unknown, Sui dynasty (581–618). Detail of west ceiling: Queen Maya, Dunhuang Cave no. 280, Gansu, China. Harvard Fine Arts Library, Digital Images and Slides Collection, 2001.00629, http://id.lib.harvard.edu/images/olvsite24499/catalog. Image courtesy of Harvard Fine Arts Library, Digital Images and Slides Collection.

Gracing the cover of this issue of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies is Queen Māyā, the Buddha’s mother. She took a star turn around the end of the sixth century among Chinese Buddhists, who venerated her as a symbol of fertility and safe childbirth, cosmic motherhood, and spiritual rebirth. Her life story reflected these qualities. She conceived the Buddha when a white elephant entered her side during a dream and delivered the child painlessly from under her right arm. Seven days after giving birth, she died and ascended to heaven, where the Buddha visited to lecture her at the time of his nirvana. The mural from which the image here was taken presents a stylized view of the nirvana scene. It is on the ceiling of Cave 280 at Mogao 莫高, Gansu Province, and dates to the Sui dynasty (581–618).¹ Reflecting the queen’s popularity, a number of similar scenes can be found among the forty-five thousand square meters of murals in Mogao’s network of 492 grottoes.

Mogao “represents the great achievement of Buddhist art from the 4th to the 14th century.”² It is one of only a handful of places to fulfill all six of UNESCO’s cultural criteria for inclusion on its list of World Heritage sites.³ It lies to southeast of the Dunhuang 敦煌 oasis, which once served as China’s gateway to the Silk Road. Perhaps even more than for its wealth of artistic treasures, stunning as they are, the site is renowned for the Dunhuang manuscripts, a cache of about sixty-thousand documents dating from the fifth to eleventh centuries. Mostly Buddhist and mostly in Chinese, the cache included the oldest surviving printed book (a copy of the Diamond Sutra, dated 868, now held at the British Library) and texts in languages ranging from Sanskrit and Tibetan to Hebrew and Sogdian on a wealth of topics religious and secular.

The Dunhuang manuscripts were sealed in the so-called Library Cave until their discovery in 1900 by Wang Yuanlu 王圓簶, a Daoist priest who had taken on himself the charge of protecting the Mogao Caves. Before long, Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, and other Orientalists and adventurers from western Europe, Japan, Russia, and the United States came to the site to buy and expropriate texts, resulting eventually in the dispersal of the documents around the world.⁴ The International Dunhuang Project , based at the British Library, is now digitizing the entire collection and making it freely available to researchers.⁵ HJAS thanks the Harvard Fine Arts Library for its kind permission to reprint the image.