orangey yellow. There is no indication of a date, but, from a scientific study of the weaving, it has been established that the stain was made using a concoction extracted from the bark of the Huangbo tree, characteristic of the Han dynasty, and analysis of the ink, which is of exceptional quality and has retained all the intensity of its strong dark black, seems to prove that this mysterious work probably dates from the second or third century of our era, which makes it the oldest roll preserved to date.
“On the second strip, which is in more luxurious silk stained light blue, there is a long colophon of thirty columns of ivory-coloured Chinese ideograms, with calligraphy details by Huizong in gold dust—which still gleams in places—mixed with glue, a technique used in Buddhist temples for copying sacred texts. (Did Huizong have some premonition about the nature of this text written in an unknown language?)
“The colophon begins with a short biography of An Shih-Kao, the first Chinese translator of Buddhist sutras, a hereditary prince of Parthia in the Middle East, who converted to Buddhism, became a monk and, when his father died, gave up his inheritance in favour of his uncle. Leaving the confines of Indo-Iran, he followed a route through the oases of Central Asia, Khotan, Kucha, Turfan … all the way to Gansu, having travelled through the cosmopolitan cities of Dunhuang, Zangye and Wuwei. He reached the valley of the Yellow River in northern China and his presence there is recorded in the middle of the second century, in the year 148 to be precise, in the capital, Luoyang. Alongside his reputation as a linguistic genius—he spoke some twenty languages—was his vast historic erudition, and not a day passed when he did not devote several hours to his works of translation. He spent ten years in his room translating into Chinese the many sutras brought home from his travels. His translations were usually in verse, honed and restrained, betraying no trace of his previous existence as a Parthian prince or indeed of any personal pretension; they stir the readers very soul, whereas his spoken Chinese was hesitant and tainted by a strong accent and grammatical errors. Once in the middle of the night—as he later told his emperor—during a visit to Xi’an, the former capital of China, where he had come to preach in the outskirts around Fufeng, he saw beams of light springing up from the ground on a stretch of wasteland, lighting up certain areas as in mystic visions depicted in religious paintings. According to the report he made to the Court in the year 480 before our era, once the Buddha Shakyamuni achieved the unfathomable peace of Parinirvana, his disciples shared his relics among themselves and set off in several groups, heading in different directions to spread his word all over the world. Those who reached China met with insurmountable problems, for the country was ravaged by war, and they died one after the other. The last of them, a very elderly man, died when he reached the Wei valley along the course of the Yellow River, where he had had to bury the Buddha’s relics, which then revealed themselves to An Shih-Kao with those beams of divine light piercing through the earth. It was the first time the Court had heard the name Buddha, which amused everyone; even so, on the emperors orders, the army carried out excavations and found crystal structures in the shape of teeth and finger bones, but larger than normal size, golden in colour and translucent, gleaming in the bottom of a ditch. That was how An Shih-Kao succeeded in converting the emperor of China, who, in memory of this miracle symbolising the triumph of Buddhism, erected a ravishing stupa on the site (a stupa being a tall edifice made of wood and brick and painted white), in whose crypt the Buddha’s relics were kept. He had a house built beside it for An Shih-Kao to spend the rest of his days praying, meditating, translating and teaching. After An Shih-Kao’s terrible death (he was assassinated during one of his frequent religious pilgrimages), his house became the first Chinese Buddhist temple, the Temple of the Gates of the Law.
“Almost a thousand years passed, the colophon written by Huizong goes on, and in mid-August of the year 1128, deep into a stormy night racked with thunderclaps and squalls of hail and torrential rain, the superior at the Temple of the Gates of the