The Grotto version of the Metaverse that spans a thousand years
Dunhuang is a city in China’s northwestern Gansu Province, on the edge of the Gobi Desert. It was once a frontier garrison on the Silk Road. It is known today for the Mogao Caves, a complex of 492 grottoes adorned with Buddhist statuary and frescoes. Mogao Caves are also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes or Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.
According to legend, in the first two years of the Qin dynasty, a monk named Le Zun traveled to Dunhuang at this time just as the sun was setting, the sun shone on the three dangerous mountains, looking at the summit of the golden light, as if there were ten thousand Buddhas, so Le Zun monk vowed to practice here, and he carved the first of the grottoes of the Mogao Caves into the cliffs of the Three Dangerous Mountains. Since then, through the Sixteen Kingdoms, Northern Dynasties, Sui, Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties, there have been 735 caves, 45,000 square meters of murals, 2,415 clay sculptures, commonly known as the “Thousand Buddha Cave”, and more than 50,000 pieces of ancient cultural relics, making it the world’s largest and richest surviving Buddhist art site.
An immersive blind box experience with a guaranteed 8 consecutive draws
The Mogao Caves have a total of 735 caves, but their integrity has been severely compromised by late human destruction and the ravages of age, and they cannot withstand additional tourism resources, so although the Mogao Caves have a reputation as a “museum on the wall,” they were not selected as a 5A scenic spot in order to preserve the area and showcase the Mogao Caves to the public. A restrained balance is preserved between the preservation of the site and the presentation of its history and culture to the public. In this balance, the Mogao Grottoes are released with only 66 grottoes, 12 routes, each of which randomly selects 8 grottoes to visit, and the grottoes open each day are randomly scheduled according to the number of people and opening hours, including a guaranteed 9-story tower of the Great Buddha Hall in Cave 96. This is why we affectionately refer to this tour schedule as the guaranteed 8-peat blind box tour. New card pools are also periodically released at the Mogao Caves; for example, the pool depth of the blind box in the grotto was only 40 until July 2020, and the current pool depth of 66 is being gradually opened as experts evaluate and are said to have special cave pools.
Each blind box is an immersive cultural experience across time and space
The caves of the Mogao Grottoes span the space from Rome to India and the time from the pre-Qin dynasty to the Yuan dynasty, spanning a thousand years. After more than a thousand years, the caves’ architectural styles, sculptures, and murals have become a chronicle of art and social culture, with different dynasties, different social styles, different beliefs, and different regional and national cultures all converging on the Mogao Caves. One can feel the gaze and communication from different time and space.
Although only 8 consecutive draws are available at a time and the guide is stingy with the flashlight light, in these 8 grottoes, we can see the prototype of the familiar Nine-Colored Deer story, the Three Buddhas of different dynasties, the classic bouncing lute, and even in the short tour, we can already distinguish the styles of different dynasties: the exquisite, delicate, and dynamic expressions of the Sui and Tang dynasties; the Song and Yuan dynasties imitating the Sui and Tang dynasties but with slightly juvenile skills; the inferior imitations for cultural export after the southern barbarian invasion; and if we see soulful statues with disproportionate proportions, stiff expressions, and earthy colors, they are definitely haphazardly repaired after being discovered by Wang Yuanluo in the Qing dynasty.
The so-called immersion is the intersection of different senses in detail, where one can feel the high density of the artisan painters of all dynasties in the same stage beyond time and space, and condense what they want to express in each grotto, connected through the eastern cliffs of the Mingsha Mountain, just like being in a cave version of the Metaverse that spans a thousand years.
What has enabled the Mogao Caves to achieve this effect is their millennia-long continuity and the UGC ecosystem created by a coincidental consensus.
Sustainability:
The stones, probably because of the perception of eternity, were used to express their culture in the form of painted sculptures and murals, and were preserved in the form of “canopies in front and caves in the back” of the grottoes.
Consensus:
The formation of the Mogao Caves was an accident of necessity, an inevitable phenomenon arising from the social context of the time. The year 366 A.D. was the period before the 16 Eastern Jin dynasties, when, on the one hand, the Silk Road was developing and Buddhism was entering the Middle Kingdom along the Silk Road.
On the other hand, there was a huge demand for religious beliefs during the war-torn, socially unstable and unsettled period of the Wei, Jin and Northern Dynasties. During this period, Buddhism was soon introduced to the Middle Kingdom, and monks from the Middle Kingdom began to travel to the West to seek scriptures and translate Sanskrit Buddhist texts, making Dunhuang a key hub for Buddhist culture. Another important coincidence was Dunhuang’s geological landscape, with its rocky hills on the edge of the desert and Gobi that could be carved into caves, and its cliffs, which were considered to be the link between earth and heaven, played a unique role in religious belief and life. Buddhist monks first practiced in wooden temples and later evolved into cave temples, which became prevalent in South Asia in the 4th century A.D. This means that the method of cave building was introduced to China via the Silk Road, without the need to explore and invent it on their own.
All of the above allowed the Mogao Caves to reach a multi-faceted and multi-party consensus in terms of geography, religious needs, and architectural techniques.
Consensus brings the UGC (or PGC) ecology:
What really created the splendor of the Mogao Caves was the UGC system of its cave feeders. During the cultural heyday of the Hexi Corridor, a large number of social talents were concentrated, creating a demand for cave excavation propaganda. And a number of senior officials who believed in Buddhism at the time visited Dunhuang to serve and excavate large Buddhist caves, just as KOLs now do on Twitter to change their ape and punk avatars to shout orders, after which they followed the example of local people from all walks of life, and it became a popular social fad to believe in Buddhism and excavate caves. The people who paid for the grottoes were called supporters, and almost all the grottoes had portraits of supporters, who were the owners of the grottoes, bringing together all classes of society, such as local officials, soldiers, monks, people, ethnic minorities, etc. They were all there because of religious, political, or political reasons. For religious, political, propaganda, or record-keeping purposes, they financed the excavations of the skilled craftsmen of the time, who, either to make ends meet or for artistic or religious pursuits, were willing to gather at Dunhuang and work under difficult conditions. Together, they form the UGC ecology of the Mogao Caves, which has been passed down to this day.
As the same way that the Mogao Caves rose to prominence, it also ended in the decline of consensus and persistent falsification
Weakening of consensus:
As the Middle Kingdom gradually lost its political dominance over the West and Central Asia, the Maritime Silk Road rose to prominence and the land-based Silk Road lost its scale advantage and gradually declined, and the Mogao Caves ceased to be built and gradually disappeared from the world’s view beginning in the Yuan Dynasty.
Persistent falsification:
Stones and pigments, even though they are made of materials that resist corrosion, still cannot resist the ravages of time and human destruction. After a thousand years, the Mogao Caves have become overburdened.
The modern generation is certainly looking for ways to keep this past alive. If carving it in stone was the ancient technical knowledge of eternity, digitization is the means to perpetuate it with modern technology. The Dunhuang Academy and other institutions have already enabled us to see the beauty of Dunhuang through digitalization, ARVR, painting restoration and other technical means. However, digital storage is not enough, blockchain technology is this generation’s technical knowledge of eternity, right?
If blockchain technology is the “stone” of our time, what will these “stones” leave for future generations?
Just as money needs to be accompanied by force, cultural export and influence cannot be achieved without the help of finance and power. The grottoes we can see now cannot be separated from the patronage of the people who were, in all probability, the providers of power and wealth at the time, and the religion, aesthetics, and scriptures reflected were the dominant expression of the powerful at the time.
NFT is a combination of smart contracts and information, information can eventually be expanded into culture, smart contracts can be expanded into defi and dao, derived from finance and power, so NFT can be seen as a combination of culture, finance and power, and naturally with the late speculative properties, not only to carry out the cultural heritage, but also to better cultural output or even invasion.
If the providers represent the powerful people in history, leaving behind the Buddha statues, statues and religion we see today, what kind of cultural form will the NFT, which naturally combines finance and power, leave behind for future generations?
If the demand for religion links the ancient UCG providers and artisan ecology and the cliff stones, creating the “Dunhuang version of the public chain”. What kind of consensus, then, could link global creators and producers to build a contemporary “Dunhuang bloom”?
It’s all worth thinking about.
Translated from: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/i55_2sNR5glGPd0-Wwh7qg
