Why they stopped building wooden stupas

In the fifth century, a Chinese Buddhist monk named Faxian walked from central China to India.

公元五世纪，一位名叫法显的中国佛教僧人从中国中部步行到印度。

It took him six years.

他花了六年时间。

When he reached the city then called Purushapura (modern Peshawar, in what is now Pakistan) he saw a building that he described as “the highest of all the towers” in the world.

当他到达当时称为普鲁沙普拉（现代白沙瓦，位于现在的巴基斯坦）的城市时，他看到了一座被他描述为世界上“所有塔楼中最高的”的建筑。

This was the Kanishka Stupa , built in the second century CE by the Kushan emperor Kanishka to house relics of the Buddha.

这就是迦腻色佛塔，由贵霜皇帝迦腻色迦建于公元二世纪，用于存放佛陀的舍利。

It was a genuinely colossal structure: around 400 feet tall by modern estimates, though the Chinese pilgrims who visited it over the centuries reported heights of up to 700 feet.

它确实是一座巨大的建筑：根据现代估计，它高约 400 英尺，尽管几个世纪以来访问过它的中国朝圣者报告的高度高达 700 英尺。

Even at the lower estimate, it would have dwarfed almost anything standing in Rome or Constantinople at the same period.

即使按照较低的估计，它也会使同时期罗马或君士坦丁堡的几乎所有东西相形见绌。

The stupa had a stone base in the shape of a cruciform plinth, roughly 270 feet across.

佛塔有一个十字形底座的石头底座，大约 270 英尺宽。

But the remarkable thing was what rose above it: a massive wooden tower, crowned with an iron pillar bearing thirteen gilded copper parasols or chatras , the disc-shaped ornaments that in Buddhist architecture symbolize the heavens.

但最引人注目的是它上面的东西：一座巨大的木塔，塔顶有一根铁柱，上面有十三把镀金的铜阳伞或chatras，这些圆盘形的装饰品在佛教建筑中象征着天堂。

Beautiful as it may be, anyone who builds a 400-foot wooden tower and tops it with metal confronts a big problem.

尽管它可能很漂亮，但任何建造 400 英尺高的木塔并用金属覆盖塔顶的人都会面临一个大问题。

The Chinese pilgrim Song Yun, visiting the stupa around 520 CE, reported that it had already been struck by lightning at least three times, and rebuilt after each strike.

公元 520 年左右，中国朝圣者宋云参观了这座佛塔，他报告说，这座佛塔已经被闪电击中至少 3 次，每次闪电后都会重建。

1 This is entirely plausible.

1 这是完全合理的。

A tall wooden structure topped with a conductive metal finial, standing on an elevated platform in the Peshawar Valley (the site of frequent thunderstorms) would attract numerous lightning strikes.

在白沙瓦谷（雷暴频繁的地方）的一个高架平台上，有一个顶部有导电金属尖顶的高木结构，会吸引大量雷击。

Each strike could easily ignite the wooden superstructure.

每一次打击都可以轻松点燃木质上层建筑。

And unlike a stone cathedral that might lose its roof timbers but retain its walls, a wooden tower that catches fire is simply gone.

与可能失去屋顶木材但保留墙壁的石头大教堂不同，着火的木塔就消失了。

This is likely what happened, over and over, until eventually no one rebuilt it.

这很可能就是一次又一次发生的事情，直到最终没有人重建它。

When the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang visited in the 630s, he found the stupa damaged and partially repaired but still standing.

公元630年代，中国朝圣者玄奘来访时，发现这座佛塔已损坏，部分修复后仍然矗立。

By the time the Korean pilgrim Hyecho arrived in 726, the monastery was still there, though he reported that the stupa “constantly glows” — a detail that might refer to the gilded surfaces, or might preserve some memory of the fires.

726 年，韩国朝圣者慧鸟 (Hyecho) 抵达时，这座寺院仍然在那里，尽管他报告说这座佛塔“不断发光”——这一细节可能指的是镀金的表面，也可能保留了一些关于火灾的记忆。

After that: nothing.

之后：什么也没有。

Today the site is an unpreserved neighborhood called Akhunabad on the outskirts of Peshawar.

如今，该地点是白沙瓦郊区一个名为阿库纳巴德的未受保护的社区。

It was re-identified only in 2011.

直到2011年才被重新识别。

Res Obscura is a reader-supported publication.

Res Obscura 是一本由读者支持的出版物。

To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

要接收新帖子并支持我的工作，请考虑成为免费或付费订阅者。

The rise and fall of the wooden stupa is a surprisingly significant event in history, because scholars believe it was the direct ancestor of the East Asian pagoda.

木塔的兴衰是历史上一个令人惊讶的重大事件，因为学者们认为它是东亚塔的直接祖先。

The low hemispherical stupas of early Indian Buddhism gradually evolved in the Gandhara region (present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan) into taller, more vertical tower structures.

早期印度佛教的低矮半球形佛塔在犍陀罗地区（今巴基斯坦和阿富汗）逐渐演变为更高、更垂直的塔楼结构。

Buddhism spread from Gandhara along the Silk Road into Central Asia and China, and the Gandharan stupa aesthetics traveled with it, merging with Chinese multi-story wooden watchtowers to produce the pagoda.

佛教从犍陀罗沿着丝绸之路传播到中亚和中国，犍陀罗佛塔美学也随之传播，与中国的多层木制敌楼融合，产生了佛塔。

But today, the structures that inspired this architectural evolution are all gone.

但今天，激发这种建筑演变的结构都消失了。

We tend think of ancient history as being defined by stone.

我们倾向于认为古代历史是由石头定义的。

But the vast majority of buildings in the ancient world were made of wood, thatch, mud brick, and other perishable materials.

但古代世界的绝大多数建筑都是由木头、茅草、泥砖和其他易腐烂的材料建造的。

What we see when we look at “the ancient world” is not a representative sample.

当我们观察“古代世界”时，我们所看到的并不是具有代表性的样本。

It is whatever happened to be made of the most durable stuff.

它是由最耐用的材料制成的。

I try to keep this sort of pattern in mind whenever I think about history (and, by extension, the present!)

每当我思考历史（以及延伸到现在！）时，我都会尝试牢记这种模式。

The absent wooden stupa is an example of survivorship bias, like this internet-famous diagram illustrating Abraham Wald’s work on which WWII fighter planes survived anti-aircraft fire and which didn’t.

缺失的木制佛塔是幸存者偏见的一个例子，就像这张网络著名的图表，展示了亚伯拉罕·沃尔德（Abraham Wald）的作品，其中二战战斗机在防空火力中幸存，而哪些则没有。

Going further: very often importance itself creates the reason why something fails to survive.

更进一步说：很多时候，重要性本身就是某些事物无法生存的原因。

A sacred image is smashed precisely because it is sacred.

神圣的形象之所以被粉碎，正是因为它是神圣的。

A text is censored or a letter is burned because it is important.

文本被审查或信件被烧毁，因为它很重要。

A wooden tower is struck by lightning precisely because it is high.

木塔之所以会被雷劈，正是因为它很高。

When we look at what remains and call it “the historical record,” we are seeing the fire-resistant remnants of something immeasurably bigger than we can easily imagine.

当我们审视剩下的东西并称之为“历史记录”时，我们看到的是一些比我们想象的更大的东西的耐火遗迹。

The fire thing is partly a metaphor: not all erasures of the historical record are due to things burning down.

火灾在一定程度上是一个隐喻：并非所有历史记录的删除都是由于事物被烧毁而造成的。

On the other hand, it really is striking to contemplate not just how many structures have burnt, but how many letters have.

另一方面，令人震惊的不仅是有多少建筑物被烧毁，还有多少字母被烧毁。

For instance, in the archives of William James at Harvard, there are large gaps in the letters between the philosopher/psychologist and his wife, Alice.

例如，在哈佛大学威廉·詹姆斯的档案中，这位哲学家/心理学家和他的妻子爱丽丝之间的信件存在很大的空白。

It’s obvious from the context that whole months or even years of their correspondence was destroyed, likely either by Alice or by her children.

从上下文中可以明显看出，他们整整几个月甚至几年的通信都被毁掉了，很可能是被爱丽丝或她的孩子们毁掉了。

It’s also common when reading historical manuscripts to encounter drafts with whole pages that have been crossed out, like William James complaining bitterly in 1892 about the “repulsive” town of Pallanza, Italy (which looks pretty nice to me!)

在阅读历史手稿时，经常会遇到整页被划掉的草稿，就像威廉·詹姆斯 (William James) 在 1892 年对意大利帕兰扎 (Pallanza) 这个“令人厌恶的”小镇（在我看来相当不错！） 的苦涩抱怨一样。

It’s a common experience, when in archive, to encounter traces of what is missing, the negative space around the texts.

在档案中，遇到缺失的痕迹，即文本周围的负空间，是一种常见的经历。

Wooden stupas have their counterparts all throughout the historical record.

历史记载中都有类似的木佛塔。

The existence of so many hits for phrases like “destroy this letter” in Google Books is one example of this negative space.

谷歌图书中存在如此多的诸如“销毁这封信”之类的短语的点击率就是这种负空间的一个例子。

For every letter which survived this clear injunction to destroy it, imagine how many didn’t make it!

对于在明确的销毁指令中幸存下来的每一封信，想象一下有多少信没有成功！

A final thought, inspired by William James.

最后一个想法，受到威廉·詹姆斯的启发。

Perhaps we can think of historical emotions as wooden stupas too.

或许我们也可以把历史情感想象成木塔。

For James famously argued that if we strip away the subjective experience of an emotion, we end up with nothing much at all:

詹姆斯有句名言，如果我们剥夺情感的主观体验，我们最终什么也得不到：

If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no ‘mind-stuff’ out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains…

如果我们想象出某种强烈的情感，然后试图从我们的意识中抽象出其特有的身体症状的所有感觉，我们就会发现我们什么也没有留下，没有可以构成情感的“精神物质”，而剩下的只是一种冷漠而中立的理智感知状态……

What kind of an emotion of fear would be left, if the feelings neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible to think.

如果没有心跳加快、呼吸急促、嘴唇颤抖、四肢无力、起鸡皮疙瘩、内脏翻腾等感觉，那会是什么样的恐惧情绪，简直无法想象。

Isn’t that precisely what we encounter when we read sources from the past, though?

然而，这不正是我们在阅读过去的资料时所遇到的情况吗？

Sometimes when we read an account of something truly terrifying or emotional, we re-experience some of the emotions of the people involve.

有时，当我们读到一些真正令人恐惧或情绪激动的事情时，我们会重新体验所涉及的人的一些情绪。

But that requires either context or artistry (art, of course, evokes emotions directly, and in a sense short-circuits things).

但这需要背景或艺术性（当然，艺术直接唤起情感，并且在某种意义上使事物短路）。

Most things in an archive, though, even when they persist, have their deep emotional context stripped away.

然而，档案中的大多数东西，即使它们持续存在，其深层的情感背景也被剥夺了。

Part of why I love history so much is that I do feel something when I see a displaced photograph like this, from the James archives:

我如此热爱历史的部分原因是，当我看到詹姆斯档案馆中这样一张错位的照片时，我确实感受到了一些东西：

But it has very little relation to the ideas and emotions those people, whoever they are, would have actually felt.

但这与那些人（无论他们是谁）实际感受到的想法和情感几乎没有关系。

The wooden stupa effect of history is not just a question of burnt letters or destroyed monuments.

历史上的木塔效应不仅仅是烧毁的信件或毁坏的纪念碑的问题。

It’s also about the gradual diminishing of our emotional connection and bonds to the non-famous people from the past.

这也与我们与过去的非名人的情感联系和联系逐渐减少有关。

The great artists, the famous thinkers, the people whose memoirs we read — they survive and continue to connect to our inner lives.

伟大的艺术家、著名的思想家、我们读过其回忆录的人们——他们幸存下来并继续与我们的内心生活联系在一起。

They are the stone Chinese pavilions that were once accompanied by now-vanished towers made of things more burnable .

它们是中国的石头亭子，曾经伴随着现在已经消失的由更易燃烧的东西制成的塔楼。

Ideologies, facts, and theories can still (sometimes!) be perceived through the written sources.

意识形态、事实和理论仍然（有时！）可以通过书面资料来感知。

But the vast majority of feelings from the past are gone, like tears in rain.

但过去的感情绝大多数都消失了，就像雨中的泪水。

They mattered much more to people than the ideas which survived them.

它们对人们来说比遗留下来的思想更重要。

But they can be felt only at a remove, for instance through great art, as a shadow of the thing, never the thing itself.

但它们只能在远处被感觉到，例如通过伟大的艺术，作为事物的影子，而不是事物本身。

• Two upcoming events for those in California: I’m going to be speaking on psychedelic history and the Shulgins at the Berkeley Alembic alongside a fascinating group of fellow speakers (including the creators of Erowid , in my opinion one of the greatest websites from the Internet’s golden age) on Sunday, May 17.

• 加利福尼亚州即将举办的两场活动：我将于 5 月 17 日星期日在 Berkeley Alembic 与一群迷人的演讲者（包括 Erowid 的创建者，在我看来，互联网黄金时代最伟大的网站之一）一起就迷幻历史和 Shulgins 进行演讲。

More info here .

更多信息请点击此处。

• And I’ll be speaking on a panel alongside various UCSC notables including Donna Harraway (who, I have on good authority, will be dressed as a giant blue mushroom — seriously) at a UCSC event on Tuesday, May 19 discussing Merlin Sheldrake’s wonderful book Entangled Life .

• 我将在 5 月 19 日星期二的 UCSC 活动上与包括唐娜·哈拉威 (Donna Harraway) 在内的多位 UCSC 名人（我有充分的权威，她将打扮成一个巨大的蓝色蘑菇——认真的）一起在小组中发言，讨论梅林·谢尔德雷克 (Merlin Sheldrake) 的精彩著作《纠缠的生活》。

I’ll also be interviewing Sheldrake on stage later in May .

五月晚些时候我还将在台上采访 Sheldrake。

• Proto-Elamite, one of the oldest ancient scripts, is being deciphered ( New Scientist ) and translations have been made available online via a collaborative archive .

• 原始埃兰语是最古老的古代文字之一，正在被破译（《新科学家》），并且已通过协作档案在线提供翻译。

Not only do I love these sorts of heroic, multi-decade efforts to decode ancient scripts, I also really like how this particular archive highlights the material significance of the objects the words are inscribed on.

我不仅喜欢这些英雄般的、数十年的解码古代文字的努力，我也非常喜欢这个特殊的档案如何突出这些文字所刻的物体的物质意义。

Elamite art is one of the most underrated ancient cultural productions, in my opinion — it is similar to Mesopotamian and Egyptian styles in some ways, but also quite distinctive and extremely beautiful.

在我看来，埃兰艺术是最被低估的古代文化作品之一——它在某些方面与美索不达米亚和埃及风格相似，但也非常独特且极其美丽。

• New article in IEEE Spectrum about how language models have dramatically improved OCR for historical texts, featuring the work of Mark Humphries .

• IEEE Spectrum 中关于语言模型如何显着改进历史文本 OCR 的新文章，其中介绍了 Mark Humphries 的工作。

I’m quoted a bit toward the end — apologies in advance to my classicist colleagues for seeming to imply that no one reads obscure texts in archaic languages, they very much do!

在最后，我被引用了一点——提前向我的古典主义同事道歉，因为他们似乎暗示没有人阅读古语言的晦涩文本，他们非常这样做！

My comments were in the context of a discussion about the opening up of those texts (like, say, Latin demonology manuals ) to people (like undergraduate students) who previously lacked the requisite language knowledge.

我的评论是在讨论向以前缺乏必要语言知识的人们（例如本科生）开放这些文本（例如拉丁恶魔学手册）的背景下提出的。

I think language models are well past the point of providing “good enough” transcriptions and translations for teaching, but that historians haven’t quite caught up to that fact yet.

我认为语言模型已经远远超出了为教学提供“足够好”的转录和翻译的范围，但历史学家还没有完全意识到这一事实。

Res Obscura is a reader-supported publication.

Res Obscura 是一本由读者支持的出版物。

To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

要接收新帖子并支持我的工作，请考虑成为免费或付费订阅者。

Hans Loeschner, “The Stūpa of the Kushan Emperor Kanishka the Great, with Comments on the Azes Era and Kushan Chronology,” Sino-Platonic Papers , 227 (July, 2012), link

Hans Loeschner，“贵霜皇帝迦尼什卡大帝的佛塔，对阿泽斯时代和贵霜年表的评论”，《汉柏拉图文集》，227（2012 年 7 月），链接

I wrote my dissertation on Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin, and Mary Shelley—and there were vastly more biographical and archival records from the men than Mary.

我的论文是关于林奈、伊拉斯谟·达尔文和玛丽·雪莱的，这些人的传记和档案记录比玛丽多得多。

Not because she was mute: she supported herself and her single surviving child by writing for encyclopedias and one can find many of her biographies of authors and scientists in Lardner’s and others.

并不是因为她沉默寡言：她通过为百科全书写作来养活自己和唯一幸存的孩子，人们可以在拉德纳和其他人的著作中找到她的许多作家和科学家的传记。

But because she valued her privacy: the very fact that she was married to Percy Shelley virtually guaranteed that all their letters and most of the diary entries were destroyed.

但因为她重视自己的隐私：事实上，她与珀西·雪莱结婚这一事实就注定了他们所有的信件和大部分日记都会被销毁。

Someone (who else but Mary?) preserved a bit from the period we all care about, before and after their journey to Byron’s villa—but 9/10 of it is a log of what they were reading, with no commentary!

有人（除了玛丽之外还有谁？）保留了我们都关心的那段时期的一些内容，包括他们前往拜伦别墅之前和之后的内容，但其中 9/10 是他们正在阅读的内容的日志，没有评论！

You could add to this the overreliance on digitization and availability on the Internet as erasing whole swathes of history.

除此之外，对数字化和互联网可用性的过度依赖也会抹去整个历史。

Countries where archival material hasn’t been digitized are frequently understudied.

档案材料尚未数字化的国家经常得不到充分研究。

I’m a Venezuelanist art historian and I am very familiar with the problem.

我是一名委内瑞拉艺术史学家，我对这个问题非常熟悉。