The book
The scroll is a copy of the Diamond Sūtra, a short Perfection of Wisdom text in Kumārajīva's Chinese translation. It is about five metres long, printed from carved wooden blocks on sheets of paper joined together, and opens with a finely cut picture of the Buddha teaching his disciple Subhūti.
At the end, a note says it was made "for universal free distribution" by a man named Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents, on a date that corresponds to 11 May 868.
Why it was printed
Mahāyāna sūtras promise great merit to those who copy and share them, and printing was a way to multiply that merit. Buddhists were among the earliest users of printing in East Asia: small printed charms and prayers survive from Korea and Japan from the 8th century, earlier than this scroll, though they carry no such date.
The Diamond Sūtra itself teaches that all conditioned things are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow, like dew or a flash of lightning.
Found in the Library Cave
The scroll lay for about nine hundred years in a small side chamber of the Mogao caves at Dunhuang, sealed around the year 1000 with tens of thousands of other manuscripts. The cave was opened by a Daoist caretaker, Wang Yuanlu, in 1900, and in 1907 the explorer Aurel Stein took the scroll, with thousands of other documents, to London. It is now in the British Library.
Why it matters
Buddhist institutions became deeply involved in the history of printing and textual transmission.
History and tradition
What historians can say
The date and the circumstances of the scroll are recorded in its own colophon, and its later history is well documented. How the Library Cave came to be sealed is still uncertain. The removal of its contents to collections abroad remains a sensitive subject in China.