The Tun-huang caves are the sparkle of Buddhist art over the centuries. Situated at the foot of the Mountain of Singing Sands, they are the brush of the Buddha, where an itinerant monk Yüeh-ts’un watched the irridescent peaks in the sheen of blue satin, settled down to excavate the first cave in AD 344, and to paint its walls with colours brought by birds as the folk legend has it. Speechless with joy, he had begun a long journey of a thousand years of Buddhist meditation in the dazzling ecstasies of murals, scrolls and sculptures. This book reproduces and describes for the first time the paintings from Tun-huang in the National Museum, New Delhi. The 143 best scrolls have been narrated whose colours are still radiant images of the divine. The National Museum is one of the three major repositories of the Tun-huang paintings, the others being the British Museum London and the Musée Guimet, Paris. While the two latter collections have been published, this book fulfills a long-felt need and will cover a major lacuna of research in presenting the third large repository. The introduction traces the history of Tun-huang from the dreams of Chinese emperors to control the Deep Sands, the role of Yüeh-chihs, the excavation of the first cave, the folk legends, the iconography of the paintings, the three periods of the art of murals from AD397-1368, etc. The scrolls from Tun-huang are the charm of these caverns that once drew humans to their depths.

Nirmala Sharma is an Art Historian and Professor of Buddhist studies at the International Academy of Indian Culture, New Delhi. She is working on the project of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts on “Iconography of the mandalas of the Dukhang of Alchi”. She has two masters degree, one in Fine Arts and the other in Ancient Indian History Culture and Archaeology and her PhD thesis is on the Ragamala paintings. She has also been a senior fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies. With 27 years of teaching experience at the post graduate level, she has delivered lectures on Indian Art and Culture to IFS probationers at New Delhi, School of International Studies, Nirma University, Russian Centre for Science and Culture to students of Osaka in India. She has read papers in Indonesia on the Borobudur, on the Roerichs at Moscow, on Buddhist sculptures at Budapest, at the Dunhuang Academy and in several places in India. She is a member of The Association of British Scholars and the Programme Advisory committee at the IGNCA and has travelled extensively to Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Indonesia, Russia, Hungary, China and Central Asia (Silk Route), and Taiwan to attend seminars and conduct field studies. Her books include Kumarajiva: The Transcreator of Buddhist Chinese Diction, Bamiyan, Hariti and Kindred Iconics, The Twin Mandalas of Vairocana in Japanese Iconography, and Ragamala Paintings.