Journeys on the Silk Road

by Joyce Morgan

  Then devastation arrived. On September 23, at 5:38 a.m., a bomb passed through the roof and floor of the Ethnographic Gallery and exploded in the King’s Library, the room where the Diamond Sutra had been on display. The King’s Library bomb destroyed thirty feet of bookcases and set fire to others. More than 400 volumes were destroyed or damaged beyond repair.

  Just a month later, on October 16, an oil bomb hit the building’s magnificent domed Reading Room. Once again the museum was fortunate. Most of the burning oil spilled across the roof’s copper sheeting. Of all the attacks, though, none was more destructive than that on the night of May 10, 1941, when dozens of incendiaries struck the building. Fire spread through many rooms, and more than 200,000 volumes were lost, either destroyed in the flames or damaged by water from fire hoses. By then, the wisdom of removing not just the Diamond Sutra but all the treasures was apparent.

  Bombing in World War II, of course, was not one-sided. Berlin alone was subjected to hundreds of air raids. The city’s Ethnological Museum—which held many of the Silk Road objects Albert von Le Coq returned with—was among the buildings damaged in bombing runs launched by the Allies. Some of the largest of Bezeklik’s magnificent murals, which had been permanently attached to the museum’s walls, were reduced to rubble.

  Not all the wall paintings the Germans brought from the Silk Road were destroyed. After Berlin fell in 1945, the Russians carried off some of what survived. The fate of the paintings was little known until 2008 when the Hermitage in St. Petersburg displayed a number of them as part of a Silk Road exhibition. The exhibition catalogue obliquely acknowledged that part of the German collection “found itself in the Soviet Union” after World War II.

  In the UK, when the war ended, the treasures that had been stored in the Hangman’s Hill tunnel returned to the British Museum and elsewhere. The last load left the tunnel on May 23, 1945, and power was switched off the next day. Today vines tumble over the tunnel’s brick entranceway. Behind its locked metal door, damp has seeped through the arched brick ceiling from which disconnected electrical wires dangle. Long abandoned, the tunnel has been largely forgotten.

  Soon after the scrolls he had removed from a manmade cave in the Gobi Desert found refuge in a manmade tunnel in the Welsh hillside, Stein was back in India. Retired from the civil service, he continued to camp in his tent on Mohand Marg during the warm Kashmiri summers. There he enjoyed the solitude to write and walk amid the alpine scenery with the latest Dash by his side. He left, reluctantly, when duty called or the autumn chill arrived. He never ceased his intrepid travels and explorations, including through Swat Valley, coastal Baluchistan, and the Middle East. In his later years, on a tour through the mountainous North-West Frontier region of present-day Pakistan, he was accompanied by a hardy young Pashtun soldier. At the end of the trip, the exhausted man reported on his experience to his military superior: “Stein Sahib is some kind of supernatural being, not human; he walked me off my legs on the mountains; I could not keep up with him. Please do not send me to him again, Sir.” Even in his sixties Stein could tire men half his age. He ventured into Iran four times and, in his mid-seventies, took to the air to survey Iraq.

  In the summer of 1943 as war raged in Europe, eighty-year-old Stein was about to fulfill a boyhood dream: to visit Afghanistan. His desire to see the land where Gandharan civilization once flourished and Alexander the Great left his mark had shaped Stein’s life. It was why he took up Oriental studies, why he went to England and why he then went to India. In 1906, he briefly stepped on Afghan soil as he crossed its slender northeast finger on his way to Dunhuang, but repeated attempts to return had been thwarted by bureaucracy and politics over four decades, until an unexpected invitation arrived.

  In late September 1943, he left Mohand Marg and stayed a few days in Srinagar with his friend Dr. Ernest Neve, whose late brother had treated Stein’s injured foot decades earlier. On his last evening with Dr. and Mrs. Neve, Stein fainted but had sufficiently recovered by the next morning to leave by truck for Peshawar, near the Afghan border. In Peshawar, once a center of Buddhist learning, he visited a longstanding friend. Without a trace of irony Stein confided to his diary that his friend appeared alert “but his age of 60 shows.” Stein traveled by car from Peshawar to the Afghan capital, Kabul, arriving on Tuesday, October 19. He stayed at the US Legation, hosted by another friend, Cornelius Engert, America’s representative in Kabul. Stein wanted to spend the winter in Helmand Valley, where Alexander the Great had passed, but within days of arriving in Kabul, he caught a chill. He cancelled a trip to the cinema to watch Desert Victory—not about the Taklamakan, but World War II and the battle for North Africa. His condition worsened by Sunday evening and he had a stroke. He knew he would not recover and requested a Church of England funeral.

  He approached his death without regret. “I have had a wonderful life, and it could not have been concluded more happily than in Afghanistan, which I had wanted to visit for sixty years,” he told Engert. Stein died on the afternoon of October 26, a week after he arrived in Kabul and exactly a month short of his eighty-first birthday.

  He was buried in the Christian graveyard in Kabul. Within the mud walls and wooden gate of the cemetery, his grave and those of other foreigners—nineteenth-century soldiers, sixties-era hippies, aid workers and other victims of more recent conflict—have so far survived the ravages of the past decades. His gravestone reads: “A man greatly beloved.” Above it is engraved: “He enlarged the bounds of knowledge.”

  His death prompted effusive tributes. One obiturist compared Stein to his great Venetian hero: “As Marco Polo is regarded as the greatest traveller of medieval times, so Marc Aurel Stein is likely to be considered . . . the greatest traveller and explorer of modern times.” Another described him as “the last of the great student-explorers who have written Finis on the exploration of the world.” The same writer noted that the discovery closest to Stein’s heart was not the hidden Library Cave but a fortress associated with Alexander the Great in Swat Valley, the once-Buddhist valley where more recently the Taliban have battled for control. Said The Times:

  He brought to light a vast realm of buried and forgotten history. His excavations in the arid and deserted spaces of Central Asia drew aside the veil from conditions which existed hundreds and even thousands of years ago . . . He had a genius for unearthing ancient remains and for reconstructing from them a picture of the past, piling up detail on detail with cumulative effect. He was a little man, but sturdy and hard as nails.

  The most eloquent tribute came not in death, but in life. Following Stein’s return from his second Turkestan expedition, his friend at the British Museum Lionel Barnett compared him to ancient Greece’s great traveler. “Like Odysseus, Dr Stein has travelled wisely and well, and has seen the cities of many men, and learned their thoughts, and like Odysseus, he has also gone below the face of the Earth and questioned the mighty dead.”

  Indestructible as Stein appeared in life, in death his name has not been so enduring. He has sunk from memory as quietly and almost as thoroughly as one of his sand-buried cities. Many factors have contributed to this. At the time of his death, the world’s attention was focused elsewhere, convulsed by the Second World War. His death was hardly a dramatic, untimely explorer’s demise, even if he was poised to embark on a journey few octogenarians would contemplate today. He was not murdered on a Hawaiian beach like Captain James Cook or frozen in the Antarctic like Robert Scott. He remained a reserved, conservative, scholarly man and his writings reflect that. Even his “popular” accounts are largely devoid of the colorful adventures and anecdotes of Albert von Le Coq or Sven Hedin. There is no image of Stein posing in “exotic” local costume, resplendent in turban and flowing robe, as there are of other explorers of the era.

  Stein worked in the twilight years of the great age of exploration and archaeological discovery. Even then, the public was far more dazzled by the discoveries
of others than by what Stein found. Agamemnon’s mask has immortalized Heinrich Schliemann’s name; Tutankhamen’s tomb Howard Carter’s. Stein did not return with gold, jewels or richly decorated sarcophagi. His greatest finds were scrolls. He died just as the sun set on colonialism, imperialism, and the British Empire, which left their own troublesome legacy. The Great Game ended, India became independent, China and Russia locked their doors and Central Asia was off-limits to the West. Stein died barely a decade before the space race dawned, bringing a new field for scientific exploration. And for the popular imagination, the prospect of life on Mars was bound to seem more enticing than the nature of life long ago in a little-known desert.

  In the British Museum, a key beneficiary of his travels, hardly any of the objects from Stein’s expeditions are on show. In that sense, little has changed since author Peter Hopkirk lamented in 1980: “One cannot help feeling that he merely dug them up in China only to see them buried again in Bloomsbury.” Still, no large museum or gallery can display its entire collection, and the material from Stein’s expeditions could easily fill a museum of its own. His finds, once the centerpiece of the British Museum’s new wing, now occupy only a few glass cases in the museum’s Joseph E. Hotung Gallery of Oriental Antiquities, sharing the long gallery with other objects from China, India, and South Asia. In 1914, when thunderstorms darkened the gallery for the King’s visit, Stein’s objects filled the room. Today, visitors can see little more than a carved wooden balustrade from Loulan, leather armor from Miran, a handful of coins, and a few stucco busts of the Buddha as proof of Stein’s arduous journeys through the unforgiving deserts of Central Asia.

  The happiness of one who writes this sutra down, receives, recites, and explains it to others cannot be compared.

  VERSE 15, THE DIAMOND SUTRA

  17

  Facets of a Jewel

  Stein’s name barely registers today and the treasures he found are rarely on view, but the philosophy his work drew attention to has captured popular imagination. Once the preserve of specialist bookstores, today even mass-market chains are likely to stock works on Buddhism. In music, the Buddha’s name and image have been appropriated by the popular Buddha Bar series of chill-out CDs. Arthouse directors such as Werner Herzog and Bernardo Bertolucci have made films on the subject, while Buddhism’s impact on such Hollywood films as I Heart Huckabees and The Matrix has been widely discussed in popular reviews and the blogosphere. The religion’s leap from the rarefied scholarly world to mainstream Western culture has come in just over a century. Oddly, it began with a poem.

  The Light of Asia, an epic in blank verse published in 1879, recounted the life of the Buddha. It was a best seller. More than a million copies were snapped up, and it was read aloud in Victorian parlors across Britain as well as in America. Perhaps the time was right. The publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 questioned long-held religious beliefs. Across the Atlantic, in an America still reeling from the Civil War of the 1860s, it is not hard to imagine why a popular account of a non-violent philosophy may have found fertile ground.

  The poem’s author was English journalist Edwin Arnold, the editor of London’s Daily Telegraph. Arnold noted that a generation before he penned his poem, little or nothing was known in Europe of the faith then followed by nearly 500 million people. “Most other creeds are youthful compared with this venerable religion,” Arnold wrote in his introduction. Not everyone was pleased with Arnold’s poem, which began:

  The Scripture of the Saviour of the World,

  Lord Buddha—Prince Siddartha styled on earth—

  In Earth and Heavens and Hells Incomparable,

  All-honoured, Wisest, Best, most Pitiful;

  The Teacher of Nirvana and the Law.

  Thus came he to be born again for men.

  Devout Christians balked at his parallels between Jesus and the Buddha, and scholars quibbled over aspects of his interpretation. But the public loved it. The work even spawned a Broadway show in 1928, with leading US actor Walter Hampden as the Buddha. The adaptation was less than successful, though, and the show was panned as “amateurish and shallow slop.”

  By then the life of the Buddha had gone well beyond the cloistered world of Western scholars into the popular and artistic imagination. The German composer Richard Wagner attempted an opera on the subject. He read widely on Buddhism and drafted Die Sieger, or The Conquerors, about an incident in the life of the Buddha. He never completed the work he toyed with for two decades, although some of its ideas fed into his other operas, especially Parsifal.

  The Theosophists, an influential and at times eccentric group of thinkers and mystics, took an interest in the world’s religions, including Buddhism. But the great popularizer of Buddhism in the West during the first half of the twentieth century was a Japanese layman, D.T. Suzuki. He first arrived in America at the turn of the century, and he taught in universities there and in Japan throughout his life. He espoused Zen Buddhism—a form of Buddhism in which the Diamond Sutra is esteemed. He did so especially after he studied Pelliot’s Dunhuang manuscripts in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  Suzuki was a bridge between East and West, between an ancient tradition and a modern phenomenon. He was a prolific and accessible writer who had studied the Christian mystics of the past, including Emanuel Swedenborg and Meister Eckhardt. He was also in tune with the times and engaged with the emerging discipline of psychology. Carl Jung, the influential Swiss analytical psychologist, was among those who admired Suzuki’s work. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture spawned a series of Zen-related books in the West. Soon the Zen name was linked to everything from flower arranging to motorcycle maintenance.

  In the 1950s, less than a decade after Stein died, the words of the Diamond Sutra made an impact in an unlikely place: amid a group of post-war American artists who looked toward Buddhism for inspiration. The Beat Generation was hardly a monastic order, but a radical, hedonistic group of writers and poets. They shook the literary scene in the 1950s and laid a path for sixties counter-culture. The writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder in particular alerted a young generation to spiritual traditions of the East.

  As a young man, Snyder was drawn to Chinese and Japanese landscape painting and poetry. He had already begun his inquiries into Buddhism when, in about 1950, he came across a book that contained the Diamond Sutra. “I read it as poetry. I was taken with that particular kind of logic: x is not x, therefore we call it x,” says the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet. “It’s not philosophy, it’s not normal poetry. It’s a very special kind of literature. It’s a strange kind of literature. It’s a wonderful, magical, poetic text that you’re not sure if you understand or not.”

  Snyder packed a copy of the sutra in his rucksack when, in the early 1950s, he spent a summer as a fire lookout on a mountain on the Canadian border. It was a short translation contained in D.T. Suzuki’s Manual of Zen Buddhism. Soon after, he went to Japan for a decade to study Zen Buddhism, which he continues to practice. His teachers there advised against intellectually analyzing the Diamond Sutra and its teaching on emptiness. “They told me, ‘Don’t read that, you’ll get the wrong ideas. Emptiness cannot be understood that way.’ So they make you stay away from trying to philosophically grasp something like the Prajnaparamita sutras, except to just chant them. The tradition I am in does not debate or discuss something like the Diamond Sutra or the Heart Sutra—not until you are very, very far along in your practice.”

  None of the Beat poets was as affected by the Diamond Sutra as Snyder’s friend Jack Kerouac. From the time he borrowed—and never returned—an anthology of Buddhist writing from San Jose Public Library in 1952, the Diamond Sutra became Kerouac’s favorite Buddhist text. He studied the sutra almost daily for several years, and few writings influenced him more.

  Kerouac also spent two months alone as a fire lookout, at Des
olation Peak on the Canadian border in 1956. He studied one verse of the Diamond Sutra each day and gathered his thoughts for his spiritual odyssey, The Dharma Bums. The novel, in which Snyder appears as central character Japhy Ryder, refers repeatedly to the Diamond Sutra and echoes its paradoxical language—including in its opening pages which find the narrator sleeping rough on a California beach and contemplating, Subhuti-like, the grains of sand.

  On his mountain lookout, Kerouac, dissatisfied with the ponderous rendition of the Diamond Sutra he had with him, began writing a more accessible version. He was also unhappy with the sutra’s English name. He knew “Diamond Sutra” was a shorthand and considered it inaccurate. But “The Diamond Cutter of God’s Wisdom” and “The Diamond Cutter of the Wise Vow,” alternative names he toyed with, are considerably less catchy than another phrase he coined: “Beat Generation.”

  As Kerouac was publishing The Dharma Bums, British author Aldous Huxley was also drawing on the Diamond Sutra, alluding to it in his final novel, Island, in which a cynical journalist is shipwrecked on a utopian island inhabited by Buddhists. It was the favored reading matter of characters in J.D. Salinger’s 1961 novel Franny and Zooey. More recently, the sutra has inspired other artists. In 1999, German artist Thomas Kilpper incorporated aspects of it in a 4,300-square-foot woodblock carved into the parquet flooring of an abandoned building in London’s Blackfriars. The building, since demolished, was the former home of the British Library’s Oriental and India section, guardian of Stein’s printed Diamond Sutra. In 2009, an avant garde opera titled Ah!, based on the Diamond Sutra, was performed in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in Los Angeles.