Mongolia | Ulaan Baatar | Silk Road Restaurant

Moving on quickly from Turpan to Ulaan Baatar but staying on the Silk Road theme I sauntered into the Silk Road Restaurant near the Choijin Lama Museum for dinner. Restauranteur extraordinaire Ankha, proprietor of the Silk Road Restaurant, in his trademark Atalas Silk shirt beside a reproduction of the Three Uighur Noblemen from the Bezeklik Grottos near Turpan in Xinjiang. The original of this artwork is now in the Indian Art Museum in Berlin, Germany. At least I think that’s the original. Knowing Ankha, he might have the original here and the one in Berlin might be a fake.

Copy (?) of Two Uighur Ladies from Bezeklik: The original (?) is in Berlin

Map of the Silk Road in the Dining Room of the Silk Road Restaurant

Detail of Silk Road Map

Nice wine selection at the Silk Road Restaurant

Around the table were translator, publisher, and gadfly Batbold, the inimitable American Red Hat monk Konchok “The Penthouse Lama” Norbu, Mongolian monk Nyamochir, an Indian guy who lives in New York City, and a young American guy who also lives in New York City. These latter two are in town for a couple of weeks scanning old sutras in the National Library, where Nyamochir works, for inclusion in a vast digital library of Buddhist texts being prepared by Asian Classics. Batbold is in the final throes of giving birth to a translation into Mongolian of Alan Wallace’s latest tome, The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind. Alan Wallace’s better half is Vesna Wallace, author of The Inner Kalacakratantra: A Buddhist Tantric View of the Individual and Kalacakratantra: The Chapter On The Individual Together With The Vimalaprabha. Vesna is a regular summer migrant to Mongolia but is wisely spending the winter in California, where she teaches.

Batbold in his passive mode

Conversation was wide-ranging, to say the least. The Indian guy (sorry, I didn’t catch his name and neither him nor the American guy had business cards; are we living in a post-business card era?) gave a concise explanation of karma from the Mind-Only School point of view. Batbold expressed his decidedly idiosyncratic views on the current Dalai Lama. His main beef seems to be the Dalai Lama’s flirtation with the scientific method. Science can only measure the three-dimensional world. Only “direct yogic perception” can ascertain the higher levels of reality, according to Batbold. Nyamochir gave a fascinating justification of the use of alcohol from a tantric point of view. Konchog was kept on his toes nimbly sparring with both Batbold and Nyamochir. The lamb kebabs weren’t bad either.

Batbold in his manic mode

Germany | Berlin | Dahlem | Indian Art Museum

As I mentioned, most of the surviving art work from the Bezeklik Grottos Near Turpan is now scattered in museums around the world. Curious to see some examples I caught a bus from Turpan back to Urumqi and hopped a plane to Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates, on the Persian Gulf.

Skyscapers in Dubai

Crossing the Creek on a water taxi from Old Dubai to New Dubai

From Dubai I winged on to Berlin, Germany. From the airport I took a bus down to Potsdamer Platz.

The new Bahnhof at Potsdamer Platz

I was of course anxious to see the Bezeklik artwork, but I thought it might be downright churlish not to stop in first at the Gemäldgalerie, just a stone’s throw from Potsdamer Platz, and see Botticelli’s famous painting of Venus.

Botticelli’s Venus (or perhaps Eve?)

Then I took the metro out to the Indian Art Museum (somewhat of a misnomer, since it covers Central Asia, among other Asian locales) in Dahlem, on the outskirts of Berlin. Here were the wall paintings “stolen” by Le Coq from Bezeklik.

Three Uighur Noblemen
Closeup of the Uighur Noblemen

Two Uighur Ladies

The museum also has a fabulous collection of Gandharan Buddhist Art plundered from what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan, plus a smattering of work from other Asian countries.

Gandharan Buddha

Cambodian Woman

See more photos of the Indian Art Museum. While in Berlin I also popped by the Museum of Egypt in Charlottenberg to see, among other items, the jaw-dropping statue of Nefertiti.

Nefertiti, often cited as one of the World’s Great Beauties, was born circa 1400 B.C. She later became the wife or consort of Amenhotep IV, famous for his worship of the god Aten. Amenhotep IV, or Akhenaten, as he is sometimes called, was one of the heroes of the notorious Savitri Devi (1905-1982), also known as Hitler's Priestess. Also see The Saffron Swastika.

China | Xinjiang | Turpan | Bezeklik

From Gaochang I mosied up to the nearby Bezeklik Grottos, located in the gorge of the Murtuk River, which flows through the Flaming Mountains. Here there are seventy-some caves dating from the fourth to thirteen centuries. At one time the caves were filled with one of the most staggering collections of Buddhist wall paintings in Central Asia and perhaps the world. Moslem iconoclasts, who arrived in the area in the late fourteen-century, damaged some of the paintings; Western archeologists, including Aurel Stein and Von Le Coq, removed many of the remaining paintings at the beginning of the twentieth century; and what was left was almost completely destroyed by the Mao’s Little Generals, the Red Guards, during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although a dozen or so of the caves are now open to the public almost no of the original artwork, with the exception of some barely visible 1000 Buddhas motifs on the ceiling of one or two of the caves, has survived in situ. Many examples of the wall paintings, “stolen” by Western archeologists such as “the thief Stein” and others—as information signs at the complex are now quick to point out, can however be seen in museums in London, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. See Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia for the sordid details on Stein, Le Coq, et. al.

Given the fact that nearby Gaochang is often posited as a possible location of the history Shambhala, it is interesting to speculate the Kalachakra Tantra was composed here or at the many Buddhist monastic complexes tucked away in the adjacent mountains. However, the art work produced here was entirely lacking in any Vajrayana influences, leading one to believe that tantric Buddhism was not practised in this area.

The gorge of the Murtuk River, flowing through the Flaming Mountains. The cave complex is just above here.

The caves were dug into cliffs along the bank of the Murtuk River.
More views of Bezeklik:

Uighur women at Bezeklik

Near where the Murtuk River debouches onto the desert floor is another cave complex known as Shenjinkou, just visible above the curve of the river. This area is now closed to the public.

See More Photos of Bezeklik