Dunhuang Manuscripts Reference

Author: Xu Jianping
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-12-01
Features: The 21 articles included in this collection of essays were selected from papers on Dunhuang studies. If there is any achievement, it is an account of the past eighteen years of work. However, with the abundance of tedious textual research in the collection, the author is inevitably labeled as such. One of my colleagues once my work like this: If ancient books are compared to pieces of torn clothing, my work is akin to mending those with numerous holes. After much deliberation, I had to agree with his analogy. God has given me a brain that lacks creativity—I can’t be a fashion designer, sew trendy and beautiful clothes, but only a street tailor, patching up torn clothes. However, the skill of mending torn clothes varies, and I certainly don’t possess the expertise of Qingwen in repairing brocade. I just hope that the few torn clothes I’ve encountered can be made a bit less torn through my efforts, rather than becoming more damaged. But whether I mend them well or not still depends on the critique from the advanced scholars in academia, so that I can "correct the inferior and improve the excellent." I would like to express my gratitude in advance.