In 1900 A.D., along the old Silk Road, a Chinese monk found a cave on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Within it was a secret library containing 40,000 scrolls and documents, sealed away almost a thousand years earlier.
Seven years later, Marc Aurel Stein, a British-Hungarian architect heard about the cave on an expedition. He bribed the abbot of the monastic group to let him smuggle thousands of documents back to Britain. Among these documents was the oldest dated printed work in the world – ‘Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra’ from 768 A.D.
Printed via woodcut 600 years before the Gutenberg Bible, the ‘Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra’ is a Chinese translation of a Sanskrit text by Kumārajīva, a half-Indian and
half-Turkish scholar who lived in a part of eastern Turkistan called Kucha but later migrated to China. The words themselves were from the Buddha himself in 400 B.C., preserved by oral tradition.
It was an incredible find. Embedded on its lower right corner was the following:
Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents.
As Harvard Professor Amartya Sen writes in his hugely influential book, “The Argumentative Indian”, these early Buddhist works were instrumental in expanding public communication. Copying Buddhist texts was seen as a merit in East Asian society, as one could help many others by doing so.
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