‘Residing in obscurity, the image does not dim; The darker its location, the brighter its radiance.’
– Monk Huiyuan (334-417), “Inscription on Buddha’s Shadow”

CAMLab’s Shadow Cave reinterprets a foundational myth of Buddhism for an international contemporary audience. Around the year 400 CE, a story arose in Nagarahāra (modern-day Afghanistan) that the Buddha had leaped into a cliffside cave and left his “shadow image” there to preach his teachings. Radiant like a mirror when seen from afar, it miraculously receded into the rocky surface upon approach. Spread by word and image throughout the Buddhist world, this story inspired pious yearning and ritual visualization, motivating a millennium of icon-making practices and drawing countless pilgrimages along the Silk Road.

Constructed in the late 5th century, Cave 254 at Mogao, Dunhuang is among the extant Buddhist artefacts closest in time to the shadow cave myth. The cave’s program of murals and sculptures bring together Buddhist stories to map the transformation between states of being—from an embodied individual, through meditative concentration, into a disembodied spirit-consciousness. The program ranges between radically different scales of time, from the immediate present to eons past and the infinite future. It turns physical space into virtual space and identifies it with the mind, giving form and structure to the afterlife.

Using cutting-edge digital technology and theatrical lighting and color, CAMLab has recreated Cave 254 as an immersive experience shuttling between the real and the virtual. The contemporary “black box” is here reconnected to an ancient lineage of caves of the mind. A rush of AI-generated Buddha icons places the viewer in a stream of consciousness, echoing the ambiguities between yearning and doubt, image and imagination at the heart of the original myth.