Tang Buddhist Sutras (Dunhuang, China)

Illuminated scrolls from the Mogao Caves – Buddhist scriptures as acts of cosmic inscription

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Tang Buddhist Sutras of Dunhuang, luminous calligraphic scrolls painted on silk and paper, emerge not merely as religious documents, but as what Michel Foucault would recognize as technologies of the self: practices by which individuals work to transform their souls, their truths, and their relations to the cosmos through ritualized engagement with sacred knowledge.

Located within the carved sanctuaries of the Mogao Caves, the sutras were not simply “read” in a modern sense. They were recited, copied, donated, hidden, meditated upon—each act constituting an ethical and ontological transformation. Through Foucault’s lens, these scrolls are spiritual instruments that enact what he calls subjectivation: the creation of a moral self through engagement with truth. These sutras are not instructional texts—they are aesthetic exercises, askēsis, to inscribe the Dharma into one’s being.

Foucault’s notion of aesthetics of existence—the art of making one’s life a beautiful, coherent work—is visible in the lavish artistry of the Dunhuang manuscripts: gold and silver inks, illuminated deities, flowing calligraphy, and delicate cosmographic motifs. These are not embellishments but disciplinary surfaces, shaping and refining the soul through repetitive, bodily acts of copying and beholding. The scribe’s hand is a spiritual organ. The scroll becomes a mirror of karmic becoming.

Moreover, in Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, the archive is never neutral. The sutras, preserved in hidden cave-libraries and sealed chambers for over a millennium, constitute a regulated knowledge space—an intentional sacred enclosure. The Mogao caves are not merely repositories—they are ritualized architectures of memory, where visual language, bodily gesture, and textual ethics coalesce into a theater of salvation.

In Foucauldian terms, the Tang Sutras are both ethico-aesthetic artifacts and spiritual tools—at once archives of Buddhist metaphysics and scripts for inner governance. The act of reading becomes a practice of the self, a visual and vocal rhythm that attunes the individual to the impermanence of all things and the luminous void from which truth arises.