ELSLEY ZEITLYN LECTURE ON CHINESE ARCHAEOLOGY AND CULTURE

Carving Stone Sutras before the World Ends: The Inscription of 1118 CE at Cloud Dwelling Monastery near Beijing

Professor Lothar Leddernose FBA

4 December 2003

In 616 C.E. Buddhist monks at Cloud Dwelling Monastery in the mountains 70 km south-west of Beijing began to engrave the canonical scriptures into stone. Half a millennium later they had produced about nine thousand slabs with about fifteen million engraved characters. Hoping to preserve the holy scriptures for the days after the apocalypse the monks stored their stones in mountain caves. When the caves were full, the monks sealed them to make them inaccessible. The stones carved thereafter were buried in an underground pit in the monastery grounds.

In 1118 the monks erected a pillar above the pit and engraved a long inscription on its shaft. The inscription explains the goals of the great carving project and describes the methods of production. It relates, how a certain Great Master Tongli came to the monastery in 1093 and raised sufficient funds to carve more than four thousand stones in less than two and a half years. Thereby he almost equalled the amount of stones which the monks had produced in the five preceding centuries.

All engraved stones were excavated in the 1950s. Rubbings of the inscriptions have recently been published. By investigating the shape and layout of the original slabs, Tongli's scheme of mass-producing sutra stones can now be understood. By looking at the selection of texts and the sequence in which they were carved it is further possible to analyse Tongli's doctrinal predilections. The excavated slabs even contain two short texts which Tongli authored himself. Thus it can now be ascertained that he was a leading figure in the Chan Buddhist school with close ties to the imperial court of the Liao dynasty.

More on the Elsley Zeitlyn Lectures on Chinese Archaeology and Culture