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The Mogao Grottoes
Friday, August 19, 2005-2:56 PM
In 366 AD a tired and hungry Buddhist monk, Le Zun, traveling in present day Gansu province saw the images of thousands of Buddhas in the sky. Immediately he got to work on a cave to honor the Buddhas.
Other monks followed and, over the course of hundreds of years, around a thousand caves were built, each decorated with frescoes and sculptures made from wood, rock, and clay.
Only 492 of the Mogao Grottoes remain today. The rest eroded away. On any given day only a handful of caves are open to the public. Today there were eleven open for viewing.
Most of the caves we saw looked similar to each other. The natural light coming in through the entrance and the few fluorescent bulbs in each cave were not enough to see everything clearly. The guides and well-prepared tourists carried flashlights with them.
The caves were about the size of a large hotel room. The cave walls and ceilings were covered with elaborate paintings, usually thousands of identical Buddhas.
In the center were statues of androgynous Buddhas and disciples. Most of the statues were not the originals, but were rebuilt around the year 1900.
Some cave walls had paintings on the wall that told famous Buddhist stories in the form of comics. For example, the story of Sakyamuni sacrificing his body to a hungry tigress and her cubs, and subsequently being honored by his brothers and father with a temple was told in about ten frames.
The three most impressive caves we saw were numbers 96, 130, and 148.
Cave 96 houses the third largest Buddha statue in China. The 35 meter tall Buddha of the future is in excellent condition, but the statue is so tall it's difficult to appreciate it squeezed into a cave.
Cave 130 features three Buddhist statues. A huge statue of the Buddhist of the present is lying in the center with 70 Buddhist disciples and Boddhisatvas behind him. A smaller state of the Buddha of the past sits to the left, and another small statue of the Buddha of the future sits to the right.
Cave 148 features another huge Buddha statue, nearly as big as the statue in cave 96 but not in as good condition. This statue took 29 years to complete.
No photography is allowed inside the caves. A Belgian in our group got away with a few photos and Chinese tourists were also snapping photos with their cell phones, but when our guide caught another guest trying to snap a photo, she threatened to call the police if he didn't immediately check his camera at the gate.
The caves can easily be seen in one morning leaving the afternoon to relax in Dunhuang.
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