THE INTERNATIONAL DUNHUANG PROJECT RECONSTRUCTING, DISSEMINATING AND ENABLING SCHOLARSHIP ON THE WORLDS EARLIEST BUDDHIST LIBRARY

Dr Susan Whitfield, Director, The International Dunhuang Project (IDP), The British Library

The Library Cave at Dunhuang in western China is the earliest extant Buddhist Library in the world containing tens of thousands of texts mainly in Chinese and Tibetan, the latter being the earliest extant Tibetan manuscripts in the world. But since its discovery in 1900, it has never been studied as a Buddhist library. In fact most scholarship has concentrated on the small percentage of social-economic documents in the cave rather than the more representative Buddhist manuscripts. One of the problems has been difficulty in accessing all the manuscripts which were dispersed to collections worldwide in the two decades after their discovery.

The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) was established as an international collaboration in 1994 to ensure the conservation, cataloguing, digitisation, research and, above all, greater dissemination of the Dunhuang and other Chinese Central Asian manuscripts. With centres in Beijing, Dunhuang, St. Petersburg, Kyoto and Berlin and collaborations with over twenty institutions worldwide it now gives free online access to over 130,000 high-quality images of the manuscripts along with transcriptions, translations, research papers and educational pages (http://idp.bl.uk).

As well as manuscripts, the Dunhuang Buddhist Library also contained some of the earliest printed documents in the world. Just as the new technology of printing increased dissemination of the Dharma in the first millennium, today the new technologies of the web and digitisation are making it possible to give access to anyone worldwide to these important Buddhist documents. This will lead to a new era of understanding of the history and traditions of Buddhism and its spread from India across the Silk Road to China.