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Cuilan Liu

• The selling and buying of human beings as slaves were highly sensitive, controversial, and profitable businesses on the trading networks along the Silk Road. Manuscripts excavated from Cave 17 in Dunhuang (敦煌) and tombs in the Astana graveyard in Turfan contain records documenting how Buddhist institutions and individual monks and nuns were involved in the slave trade as buyers, owners, sellers, and transaction witnesses between the 7th and 10th centuries. Examining lawsuits over slave ownership related to monks and nuns, this article explores the roles Buddhists played in the slave trade along the Silk Roads, and the legal implications of such involvement. It reveals that despite disapproval of slave ownership in Buddhist canon law and strict legal regulations on slave trade in the Tang Dynasty (618–907, 唐), Buddhist monks and nuns showed little concern over these restrictions when participating in the trading of slaves in the local markets in Dunhuang and Turfan. Whenever others challenged their possessions of slaves, these monks and nuns showed no reluctance in seeking legal intervention in the state court. In these practices, such Buddhist monks and nuns received evident support from the lay legal system. On one occasion, the local government ruled in favor of a Buddhist nun to protect her rights as the adoptive mother whilst ignoring her enslavement of a free commoner’s daughter, a severe crime against Tang law.