HOLLAND COTTER ESSAY

DUNHUANG, China - Sand is implacable here in far western China. It blows and shifts and eats away at everything, erasing boundaries, scouring graves, leaving farmers in despair.
It’s one of many threats to the major tourist draw of this oasis city on the edge of the Gobi desert: the hundreds of rock-cut Buddhist grottoes that pepper a cliff face outside town. Known as Mogaoku - “peerless caves” - and filled with paradisiacal frescos and hand-molded clay sculptures of savior-gods and saints, they are, in size and historical breadth, like nothing else in the Chinese Buddhist world.
And Mogaoku is in trouble. Opened to visitors in recent years, the site has been overwhelmed by tourists . The caves now suffer from high levels of carbon dioxide and humidity, which are severely undermining conservation efforts.
Plans are under way to recast the entire Dunhuang experience . Digital technology will give visitors a kind of total immersion encounter with the caves impossible before now, but that immersion will take place 24 kilometers from the site.
The question of access versus preservation is a poignant one and is by no means confined to Mogaoku. It applies to many fragile monuments. What are we willing to give up to keep what we have? If you’re a Buddhist - I am not - you know that the material world is a phantom or a dream, “a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp,” as the Buddha puts it in the Diamond Sutra.
As part of that world Mogaoku is a phantom too, but one that I had always wanted to see . And finally I was here. With the permission of the Dunhuang Academy, the Chinese conservation and research body that oversees the caves, I stayed in quarters at the site rather than in Dunhuang itself, a city that doesn’t look like much now but certainly must have once.
Set between Mongolia and Tibet, it was a vital, cosmopolitan juncture on the Silk Road. And because of its gateway position, it was where Buddhism spilled out of India and Central Asia into China, leaving a residue of spectacular art.
The first cave at Mogaoku was carved in A.D. 366 by an itinerant monk named Yuezun . The earliest caves, small and plain, were used for shelter and meditation, occasionally for burials. Larger and larger grottoes were excavated as temples and monastic lecture halls .
Of the 800 or so caves created here from the 5th to 14th centuries, nearly half had some form of decoration. What survives adds up to a developmental timeline of Buddhist art in China .
But of course much of it has not survived. By the 11th century Dunhuang’s fortunes were in decline. Monks, possibly panicked by rumors of an Islamic invasion, sealed up tens of thousands of manuscript scrolls in a small cave.
Nature went to work. Sand swept into the grottoes. Rock facades gave way, leaving interiors exposed.
When people finally reappeared, the damage only increased. In the late 19th century a wandering Taoist priest named Wang Yuanlu settled down and started a ruinous program of “conservation,” discovering the bricked-up library cave with its precious scrolls in the process. He didn’t know it, but he had made of one of the most important archaeological finds of modern times.
Other people soon knew. In 1907 the British explorer Aurel Stein arrived. For a pittance he bought around 5,000 silk and paper scrolls from Wang and sent them to England.
Of all Stein’s books the prize was a ninth-century woodblock copy of the Diamond Sutra, or the “Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom of the Diamond that Cuts Through Illusion.” This marvelous scroll is the earliest known dated example of a printed book, six centuries older than the Gutenberg Bible.
In the 1920s the swashbuckling American art historian Langdon Warner sliced 26 murals from Mogaoku cave walls and gave them to Harvard University, along with a pilfered sculpture.
“There was nothing to do but gasp,” Warner wrote of his first glimpse of decorated caves. This is still a natural reaction. It was my reaction. Accompanied by a Dunhuang Academy researcher and guide, Liu Qin, I visited two dozen caves in a single day .
First there is darkness, intensified because of the blazing desert sun. When your eyes adjust to the dusky light filtering in, you see that you’re being observed by other eyes, those of a larger-than-life fifth century Northern Wei Buddha.
Further inside, the only illumination is Mr. Liu’s flashlight. Visions come and go. Calligraphic figures, blue against white, tumble across the wall like swallows in a wind. Then they are gone, replaced by court musicians with banjos and flutes. Soon these are gone . Then a drama in several scenes about bandits being blinded for their crimes and rejoicing as the Buddha restores their sight. Gone. The total effect is riotous, hallucinatory, of another realm.
Although no one is saying so, it is possible that without major change, all the caves will have to be closed to the public.
Plans for drastic action are in place. The academy will build by 2011 a new visitor center several kilometers from the caves .
All Mogaoku-bound travelers will be required to go to the center first, where they will be given digital tours of interiors . They will then be shuttled to the site itself, where they will see the insides of one or two caves before returning to where they started.
For Westerners addicted to the concept of authenticity, the idea of a primarily digital experience of Mogaoku is hard, if not impossible to accept. The art experience depends on being there.
Yet conservators know that often the only way to protect the “real thing” is by restricting access to it, by forcing an audience to accept a condition of not being there, by substituting virtual auras for actual ones. And so the contradictions pile up, and change inexorably goes on.