What is the status of Dunhuang murals in the history of Chinese painting?

Dunhuang, a natural museum that has existed in the northwest for thousands of years, still tells thousands of years of stories in the vast desert through these remaining Dunhuang murals.

As mentioned in our first video: Some caves in Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes are not used for living, but for monks to practice. When monks practice meditation, they must first observe the image. It is said that observing the image is like seeing the Buddha.

In order to meet this need for practicing visualization and meditation, in the early days they depicted various stories of the Buddha on the walls of the caves according to the records of the Buddhist scriptures.

In fact, the practice of Buddha is simply: the process of constantly "sacrifice oneself" and sacrifice oneself to do good deeds. The reason why the Buddha became a Buddha was not by chance, nor did he become a Buddha by practicing under the bodhi tree. Rather, he only became a Buddha in this life after countless previous lives and countless lives of practice.

That day, he and his brothers were playing and hunting in the forest. When they reached the edge of a cliff, Satana was probably curious about what it looked like under the cliff, so he climbed on the edge of the cliff and looked down. Suddenly he shouted With a sound, he found a tigress and seven tiger cubs. The tigress was very, very weak, and the seven cubs were lying next to their mother, wanting to drink milk, but there was no milk.

Then Satana said to her brothers: "Is there anyone willing to jump off the cliff at this time and feed his body to the tiger?"

When you hear this, everyone must be as frightened as the brothers in Sabuna! We generally know that tigers eat people, and Wu Song beats tigers. We have never heard of feeding ourselves to tigers.

And he really wasn’t just talking, he actually jumped off the cliff and fed his body to the tiger. However, his jump was not as simple as we imagined, and this "sacrifice" was not completed:

It is said that the heart of Sattva accidentally jumped and was still some distance away from the tigers. But he was injured and couldn't get over it, and the tigers didn't have the strength to come over, so they just stared at each other... Finally, he used a branch to pierce his own veins and draw the blood to the tigers, and let the tigers drink some blood first to gain strength before coming over to him. Eating everything!

So the following Dunhuang murals tell the story of Sakyamuni from his birth, adulthood, becoming a monk, asceticism, enlightenment, preaching and even Nirvana through more than 80 plots of Buddhist stories.