Situated at a strategic point along the ancient Silk Road, the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in northwestern China preserve a thousand years’ worth of cultural, religious, and artistic history. Among the 492 decorated Buddhist... [ view full abstract ]
Situated at a strategic point along the ancient Silk Road, the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in northwestern China preserve a thousand years’ worth of cultural, religious, and artistic history. Among the 492 decorated Buddhist cave temples, caves 249 and 285, which are the focus of this study, were built in the Western Wei dynasty (535–557).
Since the 1950s, scholars have identified motifs in these caves as adopted from Chinese tomb murals of both local and Central Chinese origin. Caves 249 and 285 are thus pivotal to understanding the integration of Chinese culture and artistic values into the foreign Indian Buddhist imagery that had dominated the two-dozen extant earlier caves. In contrast to the prevailing view that the artists of the caves adopted motifs from funerary art to showcase a multicultural aesthetic, I argue that caves 249 and 285 were in fact funerary monuments that served as extensions of the tombs built by the donors’ families. They functioned differently from most—if not all—other caves, which were used primarily in Buddhist liturgy or meditation.
I will examine the relationship between these caves and several tombs, paying particular attention to their architectural structure, the extensive employment of funerary motifs in their painted decoration, and the well-preserved sixth-century inscriptions on cave 285’s north wall. I claim that after helping the spirit of their deceased family members to ascend to heaven through a conventional funerary ritual, the donors’ families constructed these caves to further direct the spirit toward a Buddhist heaven.
