Collection: Lotus Sutra – Stein Collection

Authors: Unknown

Contents: ​The Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation Project at The British Library, is a multi-year project, started in 1994, and is one of the oldest digitisation project at the British Library. It is aiming to conserve and digitise almost 800 copies of the Lotus Sutra scrolls in Chinese, with a view to make images and information freely accessible on the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) website. This is also to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.

The Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation Project started in 2017.

​

These manuscripts come from a small cave in a Buddhist Cave complex near Dunhuang, in Northwest China, where tens of thousands of documents, paintings and artefacts dating from the late 4th to the beginning of the 11th centuries were discovered in 1900. 

Out of the 800 manuscripts included in this project, a large portion of them need conservation work.

The Lotus Sūtra, whose earliest known Sanskrit title is the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra and means “Sūtra on the White Lotus of the Sublime Dharma,” was possibly composed between the first century BCE and the second century CE. It is thought to contain the Buddha’s final teaching, complete and sufficient for salvation. Through the medium of parables and short stories, it delivers the message that all sentient beings have the potential to attain Buddhahood. As such, it is one of the most influential scriptures of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism, and it is highly regarded in a number of Asian countries, including China, Korea and Japan, where it has been traditionally practised.

​

I started working on this project at the beginning of 2022 and helped to conserve some of the scrolls to achieve IDP's deadlines in time.

​

• Liaise with the main IDP team and follow their guidelines concerning treatment.

• Doing conservation treatment on IDP scrolls, from dry cleaning, tear repairs, mould cleaning, flattening and infills.

• Making new cores to improve storage conditions (normal and opened clasp cores)

• Creating a step by step guideline for making the cores