An international conference, “Prospects for the Study of Dunhuang Manuscripts: The Next 20 Years,” will be held at Princeton University from 6–8 September. The theme covers areas from all disciplines of Dunhuang manuscript studies, including religious studies, literature, history, linguistics, and paleography. Many scholars from China, Japan, Europe, and the US involved in the International Liaison Committee for Dunhuang Studies will take part. The languages of the conference will be Chinese and English, and the 29 selected papers will be presented in either language.
Chapter 25 of Lotus Sutra manuscript. From csr.princeton.edu
The conference is co-sponsored by the Princeton University Buddhist Studies Workshop, International Liaison Committee for Dunhuang Studies, with major funding from The Henry Luce Foundation. The co-organizers are Stephen F. Teiser (Princeton University) and Takata Tokio (Kyoto University).
Roughly 60,000 texts were discovered at the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in Gansu Province, northwest China, in 1900. Most are Buddhist scriptures written in Chinese and Tibetan, but other languages are also represented, including Uyghur, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Khotanese, and Hebrew. The cache also included Buddhist liturgies, early Chan (Zen) compositions, Daoist scriptures, Nestorian texts, Manichaean hymns, and many other works.
Buddhist sutra from Dunhuang Library Cave. From The British Library in theguardian.com
The schedule is divided into nine panels discussing a variety of subjects, such as religious interchange, education and literacy, tantra, poetry, networks and communication, cosmology and religion, Tibetan manuscripts, paleography, codicology, digitization, and Buddhist ritual. There will be two keynote lectures, by Fang Guangchang of Shanghai Normal University and Susan Whitfield of the International Dunhuang Project. Fang Guangchang will open the conference with her lecture, entitled “The Status, Basic Concepts, Current Practice and Plan of the Digitization of Dunhuang Manuscripts,” while Susan Whitfield’s talk, “Bringing Manuscripts to All: Digitization, the Internet and the Internationalization of Dunhuang Studies,” will conclude the event.
Princeton University campus. From www.lehigh.edu.jpg
Among the panelists, Mary Anne Cartelli, associate professor of Chinese at Hunter College of the City University of New York, will focus on the Tang and Five Dynasties periods in her research paper “The Mount Wutai Poems and Painting of Dunhuang,” which highlights the substantial amount of Buddhist-inspired poetry in the Dunhuang manuscripts meriting scholarly attention. The anonymous collection of poems is an evocation of Mount Wutai, or Five-terrace Mountain, the abode of the bodhisattva Manjushri and the most important Buddhist mountain in the imperial period. “It contributes not only to a deeper knowledge of the development of Chinese Buddhist literature, but also to our understanding of Dunhuang culture and its interactions with other Buddhist sites in China,” she says.
In addition to the research on the Dunhuang manuscripts themselves, some scholars suggest how to preserve and develop the texts through digital media. In his abstract entitled “What should a High-end Digital Edition of Dunhuang Documents look like? Exploring best practices in the digital edition of Dunhuang texts,” Marcus Bingenheimer, assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Temple University, states: “During the last 50 years facsimile editions of Dunhuang manuscripts have become widely available in microfilm, print and in digital format. The next step is to produce full text editions of these texts that will allow them to be queried, analyzed and visualized in various ways. As the Dunhuang corpus provides a unique view on the textual universe of medieval China, the way it is represented needs to improve continuously.”
Xiuqing Yang, secretary general of the Dunhuang Research Academy in China, will also be a speaker at the conference. The academy hosts a number of programs to preserve and promote the manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang.