Journeys on the Silk Road (35 page)

Before dawn nearly every morning in New York City, about twenty men and women assemble at a single-story suburban home. Once inside, they remove their shoes and walk down a set of steps into the heated basement where they sit on the floor and recite the Diamond Sutra. A reading takes about forty minutes, and when they have reached the sutra’s final verse, they start again.

Depending on when they begin—some days they rise at 3 a.m., others at 4 a.m.—the group chants the Diamond Sutra in unison up to seven times. Afterwards they repeat the name of the Future Buddha known as Buddha Maitreya for half an hour. And then the members get up from their lotus and half-lotus positions and head off into the early morning light for their homes, to school or to work.

The Diamond Sutra Recitation Group is more than twenty years old, says a current member, Yoon S. (Robert) Han, a Seoul-born lawyer who specializes in maritime law and disputes about construction projects. The group is part of the Korean community in the Queens neighborhood of Flushing, one of America’s most religiously diverse communities.

For its readings of the Diamond Sutra, the group uses the Chinese translation by Kumarajiva, the same as Stein’s printed version. The words, though, are spoken using a Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters. Despite this potential language barrier, not every member of the Diamond Sutra Recitation Group is Korean. An Italian man, a pharmaceutical company executive, is among the group’s long-time members. The group does not restrict membership to the Korean community, nor does it recruit people. Those who come find it either by word of mouth or through the group’s small website, diamondsutra.org.

In the basement room where they assemble, the words of the Diamond Sutra fill an entire wall, and a copy of the sutra is placed atop two cushions that adorn a golden lotus-shaped seat. This reverential treatment is derived from the sutra’s text. “The Diamond Sutra specifically states that wherever this sutra is located, there will be a Buddha or his disciples. So the Diamond Sutra, to our understanding, is the Buddha himself,” Han says.

Despite their familiarity with the text, the Diamond Sutra Recitation Group does not memorize the sutra’s words. Rote learning the Buddha’s words would be seen as lacking respect. “We recite it very reverently,” he says. “The mindset we have is as if we are in front of the Buddha more than 2,000 years ago, actually listening to his lecture, the dialogue between Buddha and Subhuti.”

Throughout the day, members practice what they call “housekeeping of the mind” in an attempt to avoid cultivating self-importance. “As I go through my daily routine, I see a lot of things arising in my mind as I face my adversary, as I face my client,” the New York attorney says. “The practice is about training your mind in each of those situations.”

Such acts are a continuation of practices that saw Wang Jie commission his printed Diamond Sutra of 868 for the merit of his parents. But intervening centuries and geography have not diminished the sutra’s relevance. In Australia, forty minutes from central Sydney, in a building sandwiched between high-rises, the sacred text continues to be used to create merit for the dead.

The Nan Tien temple is an offshoot of Australia’s largest Buddhist temple, located in Wollongong, New South Wales. But this modest center, in suburban Parramatta, serves a community of mostly Asian migrants who have settled in the city’s sprawling western suburbs. Aside from a pair of lion statues that guard the entrance, the white building has little to distinguish it. But about once a month, nuns, monks, and lay members convene to chant the Diamond Sutra.

The Sunday morning ceremony begins with an offering of incense to a white ceramic Buddha that sits on a platform at the front of the room. Under a ceiling of angelic apsaras that would not look out of place on the walls of the Mogao Caves, the congregation then sits on red velvet cushions and begins chanting.

Led by two nuns and accompanied by a steady staccato beat tapped out on a wooden block, the group of about fifty people recites the sutra in Mandarin. For about forty minutes, the text reverberates hypnotically off the wooden floor and walls that are covered with miniature bas-reliefs of the Buddha.

When the sutra’s recitation is finished, the assembly chants the Buddha’s name and slowly weaves single file between the rows of red cushions several times, their palms pressed together in reverence. Then the lights are dimmed. A gong, a bell, and a drum sound. Finally, they dedicate the merit of their act for the deceased.

Just as Buddhism has evolved as it has traveled, adapting to local cultures and conditions, the Diamond Sutra is also being discovered, recited and studied in the West today beyond the traditional confines of temples.

A Sydney lawyer, Andrew Fisher, began reading the Diamond Sutra before high-pressure legal cases. A Buddhist friend suggested he do so to calm intense anxieties Fisher felt ahead of complex judicial proceedings. It was an unorthodox introduction to the Diamond Sutra. But Fisher, who died in 2008, never charted a conventional course. As a young man in London he had worked for the influential 1960s underground magazine
Oz,
which became the subject of an infamous obscenity trial. He later wrote a play about those turbulent years,
A Taste of Oz,
which was produced at Britain’s National Theatre. His career also saw him venture into film, publishing, and television presenting, but Fisher was in his sixties before he embarked on his unusual way to cope with professional pressures.

“Andrew started reading the Diamond Sutra and made a strong connection with it. He found it actually did calm him down,” says Fisher’s widow, Renate Ogilvie. He particularly liked the figure of Subhuti in the Diamond Sutra, the disciple said to have had an ungovernable temper before he encountered the Buddha. Fisher continued reading the sutra even when he was not preparing for difficult cases. Ogilvie, a German-born psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher who married Fisher in 2000, read the sutra daily as part of an orderly practice. Fisher’s approach was different.

“He read it in a completely unstructured way,” Ogilvie says. “He read it in the evening in bed before he went to sleep. It is true to say it was his only Buddhist practice.”

Fisher continued to enjoy reading the Diamond Sutra until Alzheimer’s claimed his ability to do so. Yet it remained a part of his life until the end. As his long illness worsened, he fell into a coma and it was clear he had only days to live. Ogilvie moved into his hospital room to tend to her husband around the clock. Friends came to visit, and her students performed Buddhist rituals. But afterwards, when Ogilvie and Fisher were alone in the quiet room filled with flowers and candles, she returned to a familiar practice.

“He was in a coma, but as Buddhists we assume that the consciousness, the mind can freely communicate. I talked to him all the time and so on, but I also read the Diamond Sutra for him each day,” Ogilvie says. “That was very soothing for me as well, because it was my practice anyway. But it was also something Andrew really loved and appreciated. So it was a very powerful thing to do. I remember it really quite fondly, reading this particular sutra in the circumstances. I thought there really could be nothing better than the Diamond Sutra.”

Fisher died peacefully in Ogilvie’s arms a few days before Christmas 2008, aged seventy. Ogilvie considered how best to prepare a funeral that would be attended by close friends and family, few of whom were Buddhist. She wanted to create a ceremony that was delicate and meaningful but not overtly Buddhist. After the eulogies were delivered, she read the final eloquent lines of the Diamond Sutra.

“Reciting that verse, which is the essence of the Diamond Sutra because it describes
shunyata
[emptiness] in these beautiful poetic images, was a discreet and tactful way of actually introducing the essence of Buddhist wisdom teachings,” she says. “I thought just reading the verse was meaningful to him and me. And to the others, it was just a poem.”

18

Shifting Sands

The eyes of the Diamond Sutra’s reverential monks have focused on the Awakened One for more than a thousand years. But behind the locked door of the British Library’s conservation department the robed figures have been joined in their devoted attention by Mark Barnard. As manager of the library’s conservation section, he has come to know every fiber and wrinkle along the sixteen-foot five-inch document while undertaking the single greatest conservation effort in the scroll’s long life.

On an April afternoon in 2009, he interrupted his labors to explain the work. Much of it has involved undoing the well-intentioned efforts of the past century since the scroll arrived in London. Those attempts to strengthen the scroll, including adding a border and linings, actually increased strain on the Diamond Sutra as the different papers pulled against one another each time the sutra was rolled.

Near a wall map of the terrain explored in Stein’s epic travels, Barnard recounted how he had already devoted more than 600 hours to removing the early linings, concentrating on the sections of the scroll that contain the words of the Buddha rather than his image, working his way inch by inch across the text. He turned to a long wooden bench on which lay a square maroon box about the size of a family-sized pizza carton. He raised the lid and folded back a protective paper. Lying flat within was the illustrated frontispiece of the Diamond Sutra. He had saved work on the iconic image until last.

The tools of Barnard’s trade were a mix of high-tech and low, and looked as if they would be equally at home in an operating theater or a beauty parlor. An ultrasonic humidifier capable of emitting a fine mist sat beside round-nose scissors, a magnifying glass, tweezers, blades, and a row of four fine paintbrushes. But his most vital tool was invisible. It was patience. Just moistening sections of the scroll evenly before work could begin took up to four hours.

The roots of the conservation work go back more than twenty years. Since then, experts have analyzed every aspect of the scroll’s creation, including the wheat starch glue that held the sheets together, the mulberry paper on which it was printed and even the dye that colored it yellow. This laid the groundwork for the hands-on conservation.

Conserving the scroll has also involved separating it into its seven sheets, just as when the sutra was printed from woodblocks. Keeping the sections flat makes them easier to work on and, more importantly, it removes strain on the scroll caused by repeated rolling and unrolling.

The Diamond Sutra of 868 was once a well-used scroll. To Barnard’s trained eye, the evidence is apparent in wear along the middle where ties once prevented it from unrolling. Damage is also evident on the innermost portion, where the scroll has been wrapped tightest, and on the exposed exterior, which contains the frontispiece. Before it was stored in the Library Cave, the sutra had already been patched to prolong its life. Those repairs from centuries ago are visible in the earliest photograph of the sutra, published in Stein’s
Ruins of Desert Cathay
.

“If you look very closely, there’s evidence of patches on the verso [back] of the scroll,” Barnard says. “It was fractured in places and repaired, which implies it was actually slightly worn, which is hardly surprising.”

Also visible in that first photograph is a water stain that darkens part of the illustration, including the Buddha’s face. Before the scroll’s first exhibition in London, the frontispiece was separated from the rest of the scroll and washed. The disfiguring stain and the ancient patches were removed and the first lining was added.

Barnard has removed at least four linings applied between 1909 and the mid-1960s. In the years since the last lining was added, conservation skills and knowledge of materials have changed substantially. Conservation now involves techniques considerably more sophisticated than gluing one paper to another. However, the question of whether or not to line has been a source of debate. Current thinking is that unlined scrolls fare better. In addition, unlike Chinese calligraphy and paintings, religious scrolls such as the Diamond Sutra were not lined in antiquity. So leaving the Diamond Sutra unlined is consistent with its original form.

For many years after World War II, the scroll was on permanent display in the King’s Library of the British Museum. (Appropriately for the Diamond Sutra, that space is now called the Enlightenment Gallery.) While ceramics, bronzes, and other objects can be displayed without harm for long periods, books, with their sensitivity to light, need rest. Ideally, such sensitive material should occasionally be taken off exhibition.