It should be said
Cave 20, Silifo, is not yet a collapse in the full sense of the word
Except for the head that is missing
The whereabouts of the right arm are unknown
The carving of the body part was thought to have been cut off before the earthquake
Just wait quietly for the patch and then reinstall
……
Cave 20 collapsed!
This is undoubtedly the biggest nightmare in the history of Yungang Grottoes.
It's hard to imagine when people are in that moment
How frightened, how shocked, how painful, helpless.
When did Cave 20 collapse?
Why did it collapse?
What was it like before it collapsed?
Where did the collapsed statue go?
All kinds of doubts, tempting thoughts.
With nearly a hundred years
In the previous archaeological excavations of yungang caves
Obtained a large number of excavated artifacts
The mystery of the collapse of Cave 20
Basically formed a more objective understanding
One
Nightmare: Black "512" earthquake
Cave 20 belongs to one of the first five caves excavated in Yungang, located at the westernmost end of the five caves, it is a representative and symbol of the carving art of the Yungang Grottoes, and an unprecedented masterpiece of early Chinese Buddhist carving art.
Originally, Cave 20 was also a complete cave with a roof, but due to the accidental collapse of the façade wall, the main Buddha sat in the open air (Figures 1 and 2). The sandstone above the chest of the Big Buddha is white, so the cave was also commonly known as the "White Buddha Cave" in the old days.
Figure 1: Old photo of Cave 20 of Yungang in 1919 (Japanese) Taken by Akira Yamamoto
Figure 2: A map of the situation after the collapse of Cave 20 in Yungang
On the east and west sides of the Great Buddha, a Standing Buddha and a Standing Bodhisattva are carved, of which only remnants of the statues of the Western Buddha and the Bodhisattva remain. The steps built during the Northern Wei Dynasty were originally hidden in the wasteland layer, but were reproduced during archaeological excavations in the early 1990s.
A large number of fragments of the Thousand Buddhas indicate that the outer wall of Cave 20 was covered with Thousand Buddha carvings before it collapsed. The carving of a thousand Buddhas on the outer wall of the Five Caves of Tanyao was the last large-scale royal project before the Northern Wei Dynasty moved to Luoyang, and since the collapse in front of the cave contains these carvings, the pouring time of the cave is at least after this or equivalent. Archaeological excavations have also shown that the outer wall of Cave 20 was repaired several times after it collapsed. During the Northern Wei and Liao-Jin dynasties, wooden structures were built in front of the caves.
Mr. Hang Kan was concerned earlier about the collapse of the standing wall in front of Cave 20, and he believed that the main reason for the collapse at that time was the purple-red weak rock layer, the so-called mudstone layer, which was moving in an east-west direction across the middle of the mountain. The mudstone layer is soft and brittle, easy to decompose and collapse on its own, and the weathering is more serious after water erosion. This mudstone layer runs across the chest of the 20th Cave Buddha and below the neck of the Dongli Buddha, and everywhere it passes, it takes on a dark brown slag shape. When the fragile mass of the mudstone layer is not enough to support the weight above, especially the load on the front wall caused by the beams of the building in front of the cave, coupled with the original unloading fissure, shore fracture, stratigraphic fissure, etc. of the cliff wall, it gradually expands, and finally causes the gravity of the rock mass to peel along the fracture and cause collapse.
Nevertheless, the weak rock formation itself did not cause Cave 20 to collapse earlier, and the final fatal blow to it was the Great Earthquake of the First Year of Yanchang of the Northern Wei Dynasty (512).
In the early morning of May 20 of that year, the sun turned white and the earth fell silent. Suddenly, the strange wind was fierce, and it passed suddenly, and then the mountain shook the rock, the river broke the spring, the earth and stones flew over, the gods shook their souls, and one of the strongest earthquakes in history occurred!
The epicenter is in the Datong Basin. Magnitude: 8, Intensity: 11 degrees, Destruction surface length of 180 km.
Under the strong earthquake, Mount Wuzhou first trembled, and the cracking sound of the mountain rock alarming the ghost god could be heard. Then the boulder roared, and the niches fell like a fall.
Just like that, Cave 20 collapsed!
Two
Cave 20 after the fall
Now, we combine the stone artifacts excavated in front of Cave 20 to try to restore the scene before and after the collapse of the cave.
After the completion of Cave 20, like the other four caves, there is a roof, a front wall, a window on the front wall, and a cave door under it. There are also large roof-shaped niches and a thousand Buddhas on both sides of the outer wall. The relief on the right side of the door and window is a pagoda with an eaves of about 2 meters wide, 2 to 5 meters high, and more than three floors, and several small shrines where two Buddhas sit side by side. After that, wooden structures were erected in front of the caves, which became one of the components of the temple of the five caves. After the completion of the Cave Silifo, due to the quality of the rocks, there were some dangers.
In fact, soon after the excavation of Cave 20, an east-west rock crack occurred in the middle of the cave roof, causing a hidden situation of collapse in the future. In the first year of Yanchang, a sudden earthquake first destroyed the fissured front wall, and the wooden buildings built on the front wall of the cave collapsed with it. After the disaster, Northern Wei craftsmen cleaned up the site in time, cut a large number of collapsed irregular rocks into small square stones, and masonry the Lifo platform in front of the cave. Archaeological excavation data confirmed that the front wall of Cave 20 had collapsed many times, and there were also small areas of collapse during the Liaojin period.
Adjacent to Cave 20, the west ear hole of Cave 19 on the east side and the east wall of Cave 21 on the west side were also affected by the earthquake, and the standing wall in front of Cave 19 West Ear Hole collapsed at the same time due to pulling force, causing the cave to sit on the Open Air buddha statue (Figure 3). The east wall of Cave 21, which was supposed to remain in the form of a multi-layered cloth niche like the west wall, was forced to change to the structure of the upper and lower niches due to the collapse event. Cave 21 was chiseled after the capital was moved in the nineteenth year of Taihe, which belongs to the late Yungang Cave, and the final completion time of the West Ear Cave of Cave 19 has also been extended to the Taihe year, and since the collapse of Cave 20 affects them, the upper limit time of collapse has been referred to. Therefore, there is no basis for some people to say that Cave 20 collapsed at the beginning of or during excavation.
Figure 3: The front wall of Cave 19-2 of Yungang collapsed
In short, roughly in the era of Emperor Xuanwu of the Northern Wei Dynasty, Cave 20 formed what we see today.
Three
Rescue Silifo
The ancients also seemed to have a certain understanding of the harm of weak rock strata.
Between the main seated Buddha of Cave 20 and the two-sided Statue of the Two-WingEdi Standing Buddha, there are two statues of bodhisattvas carved at the same time, each of which has been hewn through a hole (Fig. 4), and dug a tunnel around the Big Buddha backwards along the mudstone layer. The practice of digging a hole is naturally not the initial design scheme, the width of the tunnel is only allowed to pass by one person, the height of the cave entrance is comparable to the height of the appearance of the mudstone layer, the ground inside the cave is uneven, the path is tortuous, and the left and right walls are all clastic mud rocks, indicating that this tunnel is not used for chanting and circumvention. To be precise, this is a ventilation channel to isolate the water seepage of the mountain, the ancients broke the image of the hole, took the method of saving the car, so that the degree of mud and rock in the cave was greatly reduced, and also reduced the erosion hazard caused by the mountain water seepage to the Big Buddha, in fact, played a certain protective role. The timing of this project is unknown, probably shortly after the collapse of the former vertical wall.
Figure 4: Diagram of the opening of the cave opened by the bodhisattva on the north wall of Cave 20 of Yungang
In the "92 Archaeology", more than 130 pieces of Buddha statue clothing stones were found in the exploration square on the slope on the west side of Cave 20, all of which were hidden in the red-boiled soil layer of the Northern Wei culture layer with a thickness of 1.4 meters (Figure 5), stacked in an east-west direction, of different sizes, and there was no order of arrangement, but it can be seen that they were deliberately concentrated here, and the fragments of the clothing pattern still maintained the original layout.
Figure 5: Excavation site of stone carvings on the slope on the west side of Cave 20 of Yungang
——The shape of the stone blocks is mostly square, the surface remains earth red, the clothing pattern carving technique is skillful, the lines are smooth, and the texture is clear, which is consistent with the pattern of the 20th Cave Dongli Buddha. The most remarkable thing is that most of the stone sculptures have 2 or 3 tenon grooves chiseled out of the back and on both sides, and the size and depth of the grooves are different, measured according to the size of the stone blocks. Several other stone sculptures have notches above and below (Fig. 6 and 7), which are supposed to be connecting components. The existence of mortise grooves indicates that these stone fragments were once simulated and spliced. There are also some remnants of stone with uneven surfaces, no carvings, not even a strict sense of the plane, only grooves, which are also used to "bridge" other statues. "It's a pity that I didn't see any silver ingot mortise. The remnants of red, rectangular shape, tenon structure, some of the marks of the broken mouth of the tenon on the coated stone, and even the slightly white color of individual stones indicate that these stones are not entirely original carvings, and some may belong to the cutting of the original carvings, and the other parts belong to the accessories of the other carvings." Xi Lifo inevitably encountered mudstone layers from the neck down, and the Northern Wei craftsmen had to replace and reorganize with stones at that time.
Figure 6: Tenon mouth trough stones excavated in front of The 20th Cave of Yungang
Figure 7: Tenon mouth trough stones excavated in front of Cave 20 of Yungang
Around the end of the Northern Wei Dynasty (511-512), the officials who stayed in Pingcheng had planned a large-scale project to rescue and repair the Xili Buddha, and at that time, all the mud and rocks below the neck of the Lifo and above the legs had been cut down, only to be spliced back into the original carving, looking like building blocks. After a winter, seeing that the spring of the first year of Yanchang is about to warm up, people can continue to work outdoors, adjusting the stone carvings previously laid on the ground. Unexpectedly, a devastating earthquake occurred, and the overturned building buried the stones, and then the wooden components covering them were also on fire. After the strong earthquake, desperate people completely abandoned the repair plan. In this way, the stones hidden deep in the ground were silent for more than fifteen hundred years.
Removing the original loose rock blocks, filling in new stones, and carving after the snap is stable, this is the way to solve the mud and rock layers encountered in the caves in the Northern Wei Dynasty. It should be said that the 20th Cave Xili Buddha is not yet a collapse in the full sense, except that the head is missing, the right arm is unknown, and the carving of the body part is considered to have been cut before the earthquake, only quietly waiting for repair and reinstallation.
Four
Siri buddha was reborn
I always think that one morning, if I can continue the Northern Wei people to restore the dream of the Western Buddha in the open land on the western slope in front of Cave 20, it should be a matter of etiquette!
In the early spring of 2014, the splicing of scattered stone carvings of the 20th Cave Xili Buddha was officially launched. However, it was silently carried out in a warehouse of the Yungang Grotto research institute.
Stressing symmetry is one of the biggest features of the Yungang Grottoes statue, although the West Buddha in Cave 20 has disappeared, the East Buddha stands tall, and in addition to gestures, there should be no big difference in appearance, height, posture, clothing and so on. According to this, the staff first superimposed the stitched photos of the clothing stones on the Dongli Buddha for comparison. Next, the method of turning zero into whole is adopted to enter the stage of physical pairing. Three months later, scattered stones of the Originally spread out Silifo were joined together (Figure 8). After the completion of the splicing, the Xili Buddha once again confirmed the original judgment, more than 130 stone carvings are basically from the Lifo itself, about seventeen layers of stones in the horizontal, each layer is not the same height, basically controlled between 25 and 35cm, but the height of the same layer is almost the same, there are six to eight columns in the longitudinal direction, the width and narrowness of the stones are different, and the upper and lower seams are staggered, so as to facilitate the more solid when building. It can be seen that the original cutting line basically chose the concave surface or secondary position of the clothing pattern, so that the seam after the splicing was very hidden, which did not affect the visual beauty, and see how carefully the ancients considered it at that time. The thickness of the coated stone blocks is equal, and occasionally if it exceeds the thickness specification, it is cut open, and the cut part is not discarded and prepared as a connecting stone. In the process of reconstructing the fragments of the carved fragments of Xili Buddha, people can more clearly understand the reasons for the collapse of Cave 20 and the means, processes and efforts used by people to repair endangered Buddha statues during the Northern Wei Dynasty.
Figure 8: Fragments of Xili Buddha in Cave 20 of Yungang
With the resurrection of Silifo, the nightmare of Cave 20 is coming to an end. It is believed that soon, the Buddha will be re-erected and recreated in its former glory (Figure 9).
Figure 9: Drawing of the restoration line of Xili Buddha in Cave 20 of Yungang
Five
Monument to the Ephemeral
In 1956, while repairing the rocky site that collapsed in the early years before Cave 20, a bhikshuni statue inscription of the Fourth Year (503) of the Northern Wei Jingming Dynasty was excavated (Figure 10). The stele is square, gray fine sandstone, 30 cm in length, 29 cm in width and 6 cm in thickness. Judging from the style and style, this is not an ordinary statue inscription, but a party praise inscription.
Figure 10: Monument to The Monument
The inscription reads:
□□ spirit mirror sense, condensed and iterated. Zhao Zhouxiang?" Bang, feeling the object. Profit at the time, Zetan machine" season. Don't invite Changchen, qingzhong broadcast the last thoughts. Love" Lingfu Tong, imitation of the golden stone. The one who hopes to see the face adds "Qi, Pious?", and the imaginer increases his fear. Sheng Sheng Zi Jin," ten parties Qi Qing. Ode: "Spiritual contemplation, enlightenment." Silent Illumination Week," stupid and clear. With the image of the instrument, Zhan Zi Yi wo." Life invites benefits, ten parties are the same." On April 6, 1944, the bhikshunis were created.
This stele may have been embedded in a niche in Cave 20, is a single stone stele that can be loaded and unloaded, because the stone where the inscription is located is not suitable for inscription, a vacant space is reserved, and another stone engraving text is selected to make up for it. Reading the inscription on the Monument, we can feel the nun's desire to revere the Dharma, and at the same time let us understand the belief concept of the monks and nuns who stayed in Pingcheng after the Northern Wei Dynasty moved to Luoyang, and the buddhist development of the society at that time.
However, in the ephemeral words, there is a faint hint of melancholy trembling.
Could it be that she already knew that the sky in Pingcheng was about to fall into the evening!
Source: Yungang Grottoes Guanwei
Original title: Like a nightmare - the mystery of the collapse of Cave 20