Mural Paintings from Dunhuang Mogao Caves

• Theme: Buddhist cosmology

• Visual: Paradise of Amitabha, flying apsaras, narrative scrolls of the Jataka tales, Avalokiteśvara with thousand arms

Thinking Through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)’s Philosophy on Art Essence

The Dunhuang murals are not museums of the East. They are vast orchestral canvases of a spiritual dream, stretching across a thousand years of human longing. But for Nietzsche — the destroyer of otherworldly hopes and prophet of the earth — these images would evoke both deep suspicion and unwilling admiration. Suspicion, because they enshrine a metaphysical negation; admiration, because in doing so, they explode with aesthetic power.

Consider the Paradise of Amitabha: a celestial mandala, a floating city of gold, filled with musicians, Bodhisattvas, and pure beings. This is not heaven in the Christian sense — no judgment, no wrath. It is a vision of liberation through harmony, painted in luminous blues, cinnabar reds, and flowing lotus fields. The entire composition is meant to quiet the mind and sever the ties of rebirth.

Yet Nietzsche would ask: Why must one escape? Why must the wheel of becoming be seen as a burden to overcome, rather than a rhythm to affirm? In The Gay Science, he poses the question of the eternal return — can we say yes to life, even to its horrors, again and again? The murals say: no. The murals offer liberation from recurrence. They depict a peace without tension, a Being without Becoming. They are, at their root, anti-Dionysian.

But—and this is crucial—the art betrays the philosophy.

The flying apsaras (celestial musicians), fluttering across the ceilings like butterflies of music, are not agents of negation. They are Dionysian dancers, creatures of ecstasy. Their robes swirl with rhythmic force, their movements evoke sound and breath. They are not still. They are celebrations of motion, of sensual presence. Nietzsche would smile. For even as Buddhism denies desire, its artists cannot help but give the senses their due. They depict a paradise of tactile seduction, of visual saturation. Even Nirvana becomes voluptuous.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche tells us that art does not lie — it transfigures. It does not erase suffering — it gives it form, it dances over it. The Dunhuang murals, in this light, are Dionysus wearing the mask of the Buddha. The Thousand-Armed Avalokiteśvara is not just a symbol of compassion. She is a sculptural storm of becoming. Her arms do not still the world — they touch it in every direction, they embrace multiplicity.

And then there are the Jataka scrolls—the visual novels of the Buddha’s former lives. These are not sermons. They are epic tales, full of drama, moral paradox, and suffering endured and overcome. Nietzsche would not read them as examples of ethical nobility. He would see them as a visual genealogy of the will — the will to transform fate through action, through sacrifice, through style.

Most ironic of all is the very existence of the caves: built by patronage, by labor, by desire — painted in pigment imported from across the world, their existence demands the affirmation of effort. These are not acts of surrender. They are monuments to the human need to shape truth into color, into rhythm, into story. Even in their call for transcendence, they celebrate life through the joy of form.

Thus, the Dunhuang murals, for Nietzsche, would become a supreme contradiction: an art that denies the world, but can only do so by rendering the world more beautiful than it ever appears in reality. A renunciation so aesthetically rich that it undoes itself.

It is here that Nietzsche would find his final verdict: this is not art that redeems life through truth, but art that redeems truth through illusion — and thus becomes more honest than the doctrines it illustrates.