As people from various walks of life, both inside and
outside of the Buddhist establishment, became famil-
iar with the notion that it was possible to write down
elements of spoken language, the length of the written
vernacular grew from occasional words to a stray sen-
tence or two, and then to a few sentences or even a
whole paragraph. Eventually, entire texts written in
heavily vernacularized Literary Sinitic came to be com-
posed. In this manner, Vernacular Sinitic was born in
China.
Dunhuang manuscripts
The first sizable collection of texts consisting of more
than a few words or lines that are conspicuously ver-
nacular were recovered in the early twentieth century
from the famous cave library of manuscripts at DUN-
HUANG, located at the far western end of the north-
western province of Gansu. Sealed up during the
early part of the eleventh century, the cave yielded
more than forty thousand manuscripts that are cur-
rently preserved mainly in Paris, London, and Bei-
jing, although there are smaller collections in St.
Petersburg (Russia), Japan, Finland, and elsewhere.
Most of the manuscripts are sutras that were already
well known, but there are also several hundred
uniquely important documents and texts that pro-
vide detailed information about daily monastic and
lay life. In particular, the Dunhuang manuscripts in-
clude about 150 texts dating to the eighth through
tenth centuries (primarily from the later part of that
period) that represent the earliest group of vernacu-
lar narratives in China.
For the first half century of research on the Dun-
huang manuscripts, the entire corpus of vernacular
narratives was referred to as BIANWEN(transforma-
tion texts), and this loose usage still continues to find
acceptance in many quarters, largely out of sheer
habit. Technically speaking, bianwenare character-
ized by, among other features, the prosimetric form
(alternating between spoken and sung portions), ver-
nacular language, the special verse-introductory for-
mula “X chu, ruowei chen shuo?” ([This is the] place
[where X happens], how does it go?), and a close re-
lationship to pictures. Bianwenwere originally re-
stricted to religious themes, but they were later also
used to describe secular subjects, such as heroes from
the past and the present. Another significant aspect
of bianwenis that they were copied by lay students
and derive from a tradition of oral storytelling with
pictures, whose most outstanding practitioners were
women from secular society.
To be distinguished from bianwenare other Dun-
huang vernacular genres called jiangjing wen(sutra lec-
ture texts, elaborate exegeses of specific scriptures),
yazuo wen(seat-settling texts, prologues for the sutra
lecture texts), yinyuan(circumstances, stories illus-
trating karmic consequences), and yuanqi(causal ori-
gins, tales illustrating the effects of karma). These
vernacular prosimetric genres, which were strictly re-
ligious in nature, were used for particular services and
were characterized by specific pre-verse formulas. Un-
like bianwen,with its lay background, jiangjing wen,
yazuo wen, yinyuan,and yuanqiseem to have been pro-
duced and used by monks of varying status.
Like bianwen,these vernacular genres were pre-
served only at Dunhuang. Although intensive research
has demonstrated that such types of literature must
have been current elsewhere in China, no printed or
manuscript evidence survives to document them. How
did it happen that material proof for such popular gen-
res survived only in a remote, peripheral region? The
answer is simple. No one was interested in preserving
anything written in the vernacular. In other words, ver-
nacular manuscripts were not considered worth pre-
serving and should, by all rights, have been left to
disintegrate, which, outside of Dunhuang, is precisely
what happened. In addition, Dunhuang’s remoteness
from the mainstream traditions of central China prob-
ably contributed to the chances for preservation of the
written vernacular. Until recently, it was considered by
proper Confucian literati to be almost immoral to write
in the vernacular, and they certainly would not have
taken pains to preserve vernacular texts for future gen-
erations. However, since the Dunhuang cave monas-
teries were so thoroughly Buddhist and located on the
frontier, the keepers of the libraries there deemed even
bianwen, jiangjing wen, yazuo wen, yinyuan,and yuanqi
to be worthy of protection. The dry climate of the desert
region also played a key role in the preservation of the
Dunhuang manuscripts. Finally, by sheer chance, the
Dunhuang manuscripts were placed in a side cave in
the early years of the eleventh century, where they were
sealed up, plastered over with wall-paintings, and for-
gotten for ten centuries. When they were rediscovered
at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was as
though a time capsule had been opened, preserving un-
changed a marvelous slice of life, thought, and art from
Tang (618–907) and Five Dynasties (907–960) China.Manifestations in Chan, fiction, and drama
Not long after Tang lay Buddhists and the monks who
preached to them decided there was nothing wrong inCHINESE, BUDDHISTINFLUENCES ONVERNACULARLITERATURE IN