Part 6 (2/2)

Even today, Aberystwyth on the mid-Wales coast is remote-if not by Gobi Desert standards then at least by British standards. In 1939 it was considered an unlikely target for military attack, which is why its library was chosen for safe storage. Many other inst.i.tutions also sought refuge within it for their treasures. Some of the National Gallery's smaller paintings went to Aberystwyth. Its larger ones-too big to pa.s.s through the doors or windows of the library-went elsewhere. Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait and John Constable's The Hay Wain were among those sent to Penrhyn Castle in north Wales. (That was not without problems; there were fears its habitually drunken owner might topple into the masterpieces.) Pictures in the Royal Collection arrived at Aberystwyth as did works from St. Paul's Cathedral, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Corpus Christi College Cambridge and, curiously, from the New South Wales Government in Australia.

Cardigan Bay along the Welsh coast had little to attract enemy bombers. But the National Library of Wales, prominent and almost impossible to camouflage, could serve as a landmark for aircraft en route to attack British cities, including the key port city of Liverpool, just 100 miles northeast. The main fear in Aberystwyth during the early days of the war was of a stray bomb rather than deliberate attack.

Air raid precautions were established at the Welsh library. Buckets of water and sand were placed throughout the building, along with stirrup pumps, hoes, shovels, and other fire-fighting equipment. Scholars whose pre-war days were spent scrutinizing ancient Hebrew script or early European printed books became familiar instead with steel helmets, respirators, and asbestos cloths. Twenty-four-hour rosters were organized so the collections were never unattended. Each night two armed constables patrolled the premises.

Room had to be found for the ma.s.sive influx of books, ma.n.u.scripts, prints, paintings, and people. Carpenters erected shelves, and rooms were a.s.signed for the collections and staff. Every bit of s.p.a.ce was needed. Even ancient papyri found a temporary home in a disused elevator shaft.

Overseeing Stein's Chinese scrolls and other non-European treasures was Jacob Leveen, the British Museum's deputy keeper of the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Ma.n.u.scripts. He was a Hebrew scholar who spent much of the war in Wales. Air-attack aside, his biggest worry was theft, and he feared the Oriental collection was the most vulnerable. Unlike the material of other departments that went to Aberystwyth, the Oriental ma.n.u.scripts were not isolated from the public but were housed in the Readers' Room. Locks on the fifty-five latticed ma.n.u.script cases were flimsy. He wanted chains and padlocks. The most secure option of all, however, was being secretly constructed only a few minutes' walk from the library. When finished, it would create a place in which Stein's collection would be strangely familiar. For tucked into Hangman's Hill, just 200 yards below the National Library of Wales, a manmade tunnel was being carved. During the war years, it was surrounded with every bit as much secrecy as Abbott w.a.n.g's grotto, and guarded far more closely.

Even before World War II began, thought had been given to creating underground storage for Welsh cultural treasures. A tunnel was first suggested in late 1937. Work began in August 1938, by which time the British Museum had agreed to pay half the cost of the bomb-proof cave in return for half of the s.p.a.ce. The horseshoe-shaped tunnel-six-and-a-half feet wide, ten feet high, and eighty feet long-was dug into the grey slate hillside. The tunnel hit geological snags and was still being built when war broke out and the first trains carrying the British Museum treasures arrived in Aberystwyth.

The site was referred to as the Air Raid Precaution tunnel-a name even more prosaic than Dunhuang's Cave 17-and construction of the 7,000 secret project was finished by October 1939. But before any of the fragile works on vellum, papyri, and paper could be placed inside, atmospheric testing was undertaken. This damp cave in the Welsh hillside lacked the natural climatic advantages of Abbot w.a.n.g's grotto in the arid desert. But it did benefit from cutting-edge technology. It was the United Kingdom's first experiment in air-conditioned underground storage. Electricity, heating, and ventilation were installed. In case the local power station failed, a hand-operated ventilation system was fitted. After several months of tests, the tunnel was ready to serve its secret purpose.

Printed books and ma.n.u.scripts were packed into millboard boxes and on August 2, 1940, the first treasures were discreetly carried down Hangman's Hill and into the tunnel. For nearly three weeks through the long summer days and short nights of that month, material was taken down what is now a track between fields where sheep graze. After nearly a millennium hidden in the Gobi Desert, Stein's precious ma.n.u.scripts were once again in a manmade cave.

German troops marched down the Champs Elysees, Hitler stood before the Eiffel Tower and France fell by June 1940. The n.a.z.is had reached Britain's doorstep and the threat of invasion loomed. Nowhere was considered safe, at least nowhere above ground. Not even the library at Aberystwyth. The tunnel was considered bomb-proof, but anything that could not be housed underground needed to be moved.

The British Museum looked at alternatives. It needed something bigger than the little Welsh tunnel. Eventually a disused stone quarry in Wilts.h.i.+re (then being used to grow mushrooms) was selected. Boxes and boxes of material were sent from Aberystwyth and elsewhere to Westwood Quarry in 1942. The National Gallery sent its paintings to a former slate mine, Manod Quarry, on a mountain above the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales. There, a road under a railway bridge was lowered to allow Anthony van Dyck's large Equestrian Portrait of Charles I to pa.s.s underneath without the monarch losing his head-as he did in life. Meanwhile, the s.p.a.ce freed up in the Aberystwyth tunnel was quickly filled with additional material from the British Museum. Leveen updated his boss in June 1942 about what had gone to Westwood Quarry and what was still to be removed. He also listed some doc.u.ments that were to remain in Aberystwyth. These included Hebrew and Arabic scrolls, mostly illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, that Leveen planned to work on. But also listed to stay in Wales were Aurel Stein's scrolls.

Back in London, the British Museum's galleries had been emptied of their greatest treasures. But when the air raids that had been antic.i.p.ated failed to materialize, a small show was mounted in August 1940 comprising duplicate antiquities, casts, and models that had been left behind. Staff dubbed it the ”suicide exhibition.” But within a month, the intense bombing of London-the Blitz-began. The British capital was targeted for nearly sixty consecutive nights. More than 43,000 people died across Britain in the Luftwaffe air strikes. The Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey all took hits. So, too, did the British Museum.

The museum's first direct hit, on September 18, 1940, pierced the roof and went through four concrete floors before lodging in a sub-floor. The 2,200-pound bomb was enough to destroy the entire building. Fortunately, it did not explode. Four days later, a smaller bomb hit with uncanny precision; it plummeted through the same hole-again, incredibly, without exploding.

Then devastation arrived. On September 23, at 5:38 a.m., a bomb pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed, 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 a.s.sociated 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 s.p.a.ces 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 c.u.mulative effect. He was a little man, but st.u.r.dy 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gla.s.s 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 bal.u.s.trade 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 ma.s.s-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 h.e.l.ls 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 sp.a.w.ned 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 j.a.panese layman, D.T. Suzuki. He first arrived in America at the turn of the century, and he taught in universities there and in j.a.pan 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 a.n.a.lytical psychologist, was among those who admired Suzuki's work. Suzuki's Zen and j.a.panese Culture sp.a.w.ned 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 j.a.panese 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 Prizewinning 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 j.a.pan for a decade to study Zen Buddhism, which he continues to practice. His teachers there advised against intellectually a.n.a.lyzing 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 Desolation 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 b.u.ms. The novel, in which Snyder appears as central character j.a.phy 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 G.o.d'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 publis.h.i.+ng The Dharma b.u.ms, 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 s.h.i.+pwrecked 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 t.i.tled Ah!, based on the Diamond Sutra, was performed in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in Los Angeles.

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