Chapter 1 A Brief History of the Pantheon: Ancestors and Gods in State and Local Religion and Politics

Transcription

1 Chapter 1 A Brief History of the Pantheon: Ancestors and Gods in State and Local Religion and Politics In my book published in 1987, Daoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History, I made the outrageous claim that, with regard to the legitimization of dynasties, Confucianism never held a candle to Daoism. 1 I had expected howls of protest, but to my surprise, the only response was deafening silence. I consoled myself with the thought that historians had better things to do than read descriptions of Daoist ritual in Tainan. I probably would have left matters at that had I not come upon David Faure s book on The Structure of Chinese Rural Society. In reviewing it, 2 I focused on the fact that New Territories lineages created in accord with Confucian ideology invited Daoists to do Jiao 醮 for territorial gods in the lineage hall. If then on the village level there was a lineage (xueyuan 血緣 ) and a territorial (diyuan 地緣 ) China, a China of (Confucian) time and history and a China of (Daoist) space and cosmos, then the same Confucian misreading of China I had denounced on the level of the state was just as patent on the level of local society. This in turn led me to concentrate my fieldwork on local society in an attempt to see, from a multitude of case studies, whether Faure s observations in Hong Kong could be extended to other parts of China. The results of these case studies will be the subject of subsequent chapters, so I will say no more of them here. But in this opening chapter, it seems to me crucial to sketch the background for the chapters to follow, in order to underscore to what degree the same questions inhabit them all: what is the place of Daoist ritual in Chinese society and history? What does our recovery of this foreclosed chapter of Chinese history imply for our understanding of Chinese society, whether viewed from the bottom or from the top? If I have chosen to begin with the top-down view, it is because we know very little of local society in early China, and the history of state religion prior to the emergence of religious Daoism in the second century of our era is vital to our understanding of how Daoism has interacted with state and society since. Pre-imperial China ( BC) I used to think there was a clear-cut case for contrasting the virtual omnipotence of an anthropomorphic high god Di 帝 in the Shang with the lesser powers of the lineage ancestors: that Di alone could order (ling 令 ) and give consent (nuo 諾 ), that he had a court, and that he was in charge of success in warfare and hence the fate of the state, as well as of the weather and hence of the harvest. Robert Eno has convinced me we must be more prudent. In the first place, virtually everything we can say about the Shang pantheon depends on oracle bones from the reign of Wuding ( BC). Second, Di may be understood simply as a generic term for the Powers. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the fact Di alone does not receive sacrifice may be the best proof that he is indeed a 1 The exact statement is as follows (John Lagerwey, Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 274: Chinese political history is indeed one of an unequal contest between Confucianism and Taoism but contrary to what has always been said, it is Confucianism which never had a prayer, not Taoism. 2 John Lagerwey, review of The Structure of Chinese Rural Society: Lineage and Village in the Eastern New Territories, by David Faure, in Cahiers d Extrême-Asie 5, 1990), pp

2 high god. Eno also mentions the ideas of David Pankenier to the effect that Di was conceived as a function of astronomical aspects of Shang religion... [He notes] the care with which foundations of palatial and ceremonial structures were aligned in relation to the North Celestial Pole. Pankenier also argues that Di dwelt at the true Pole and links him to Taiyi 太一 of the fourth century. 3 If that could be proven, the virtually automatic character of the ritual-calendrical cycle of the late Shang would also appear as a harbinger of the later link between the emperor s person and the calendar, and the apparent contradiction between the probably anthropomorphic high god Di of Wuding s pantheon and his disappearance under later kings in favor of ritual automaticity would be just that: apparent. However we read the Shang data, everyone seems to agree that the Zhou invented Heaven and its Mandate (tianming 天命 ). According to Eno, the earliest reference in the bronzes dates to ca. 998 BC, when King Kang is described as saying to a minister: I have heard that the Yin lost the Mandate because the greater and lesser lords and the many officials assisting the Yin sank into drunkenness and so were bereft of their capital. The concomitant term Son of Heaven (tianzi 天子 ) becomes pervasive in the inscriptional record from the reign of King Mu (r. ca BC) on. An ethical Heaven that gives the Mandate to the worthy had clear propaganda value for the usurping Zhou. The virtual reduction of the pantheon of the written record to Heaven and the ancestors, together with the fact that Di would seem to be the equivalent of Tian, seems to imply that a shift has also occurred from the anthropomorphic to the abstract and philosophical: Tian is at once the physical heavens of the astronomers and the calendar and a moral being not unlike the Hebrew God. Both Confucianism and Daoism will exploit that ambiguity, albeit in quite different ways. Having spoken of Heaven, we must speak of Earth, for its cult too is an integral part of the construction and representation of power. Kominami Ichiro traces the basic features of the earth god cult back to King Tang, founder of the Shang ca BC and of its first capital in Bo 亳. Kominami cites three references in the oracle bones to Botu, earth of Bo 亳土 and concludes from their analysis that the earth god (tu 土, 5 understood as she 社 ) represented the earth of an area, especially an agricultural area. The degree to which this cult site was linked with human sacrifice Kominami wonders whether the drops around the mound on some oracle bones might represent blood may explain why much later texts refer to the people-eating she. As a site which represented conquest, it was also inseparable from the ancestors in whose name conquest was undertaken. So tight was the link, says Kominami, that royal armies could go into battle without the ancestor tablets and carrying only the clods of earth taken from the Boshe 亳社, these clods representing the ancestors and their previous conquests. The relationship of the earth god to Heaven may be seen in the fact it was represented by an open-air tan 壇, and the Shang Boshe in the various states were converted into roofed-in wooden 4 3 Robert Eno, Shang State Religion and the Pantheon of the Oracle Texts, in Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp Ibid., p Kominami Ichirô, Rituals for the Earth, in Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp

3 enclosures when these states were conquered by the Zhou. Finally, in the myth of Yu 禹 taming the flood waters and creating the Nine Continents (jiuzhou 九州 ) by spreading out the earth (futu 敷土 ) stolen from Heaven by his father Gun 鯀, the cosmic and heavenly dimensions of the earth god cult are clear. As Kominami says, this is xirang 息壤, living earth, and represents the vitality of Heaven (and the ancestors) transmitted to earth. The she, he suggests in conclusion, is a mediator between Heaven and Earth, because the original clod comes from Heaven and represents the place where the ancestors first landed on earth. 6 The next step along the way is what has come to be called, since Jessica Rawson first introduced the notion, the ritual revolution (or reform) of the ninth century BC. In Lothar von Falkenhausen s rendition, this reform may be summarized as a transition from shamanistic dionysian to formalized apollonian rituals. This change may be seen in the move from the mask-like animal decorations of Shang and early Western Zhou bronzes to the abstract, geometric designs of the late Western Zhou, the replacement of wine by meat and grain vessels, the new prominence of chime-bells, the emergence of standard sets of vessels which were correlated with élite ranks according to strict sumptuary rules, and, finally, the appearance of new types of vessel that seem deliberately simple and humble... This suggests a desire to reform the spirit of ritual by reducing its complexity and linking it with everyday activities. 7 So vital were the meat vessels to the reformed Zhou order that, in later texts, eaters of meat (roushizhe 肉食者 ) referred to the nobility, defined by its right to a share of the leftovers of the sacrifices to the ancestors. In the Zhou, the ultimate ancestor was Houji 后稷, lord of grains. According to the Liji 禮記 (Book of Rites), he was sacrificed to secondarily, after the sacrifice to Heaven. Young bulls were first selected by divination and then fed a special diet. The first bull, for Heaven, was burned entirely, while the second, for Houji, was offered in the first place to the grandson referred to as a cadaver (shi 尸 ) who represented him in the ritual drama. 8 Thus, as Jean Levi points out, Heaven and the Ancestor did not receive the same victim, and the sacrifice created a radical separation between Heaven on the one hand and ancestors and humans on the other. After the cadaver had tasted them, the leftovers were presented, first to the king, then to his three highest officials, and so on, in ever-widening circles, until the entire class of nobles had received its share of blessed food. Heaven receives no leftovers but also gives none. It is the source of all leftovers, but no leftovers return to Heaven nor emanate from it. The food Heaven receives involves no leftovers and is foreign to the law of leftovers because it is indivisible. 9 Read in this light, the lack of sacrifice to Di in the Shang would be precisely what implies transcendence: the origin or foundation of a system its premise must be outside the system. 6 Ibid., pp Lothar von Falkenhausen, Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius ( BC): The Archaeological Evidence (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, 2006), pp The use of this term suggests quite clearly that the grandson had to be possessed by the ancestor in order to represent him. 9 Jean Levi, The Rite, the Norm, and the Dao: Philosophy of Sacrifice and Transcendence of Power in Ancient China, in Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), p

4 In the rest of the chapter by Jean Levi just cited, he shows how, in the late preand early imperial periods, the contending schools of thought characteristic of the Warring States ( BC) sought, each in its own way, to prepare and then justify a unified political order. For the Confucians the key concept was li 禮, ritual, for the Legalists fa 法, norm, and for the Daoists dao 道, way. The Dao as expression of a transcendent Whole, prior to division into Yin and Yang and prior to analysis, becomes the cosmic model for the Saint, that is, the emperor. As the source of all laws and norms, which the ruler applies implacably, he is himself above the law or, rather, he is the law. But this law is itself but the social version of natural law, of the law embodied in the calendar and given ritual expression in the Mingtang 明堂, the Hall of Light. All of this converges in the new myths of the Yellow Emperor 黃帝, 10 that is, the invention of the center: The Yellow Emperor achieved pre-eminence in myths and, as a result, came to serve as a federating symbol of all the diverse themes of sovereignty because he reigned over the center, and because that position is not a priori a part of the cycle of the seasons. If liturgical time coincides with the seasonal cycle, this also means that social and natural norms are replicas one of the other. For the laws decreed by Heaven have as a counterpart the laws promulgated by the sovereign. It is by means of the rites that the laws of nature receive their necessary translation into social action. But in becoming the model of human time, the cycle of seasons is subverted and spatialized. This spatialization is visible in the transition from the four natural to the five ritual seasons, obeying the law of classification by five for the elements. But there is no fifth season. There is no middle of the year. It is but the mark of the centrality of the royal figure par excellence, symbolized by the Yellow Emperor, who reigns from the center of the earth over a fictive season. Emperor of an abstract and supernumerary season, the Yellow Emperor, exemplary image of sovereignty, rules over time. Like the Dao, and like Heaven in the Zhou liturgy, he is at once the vacant point and the motor on which the entire system depends and converges. That is why he has such an intimate link to Taiyi, of whom he is the terrestrial counterpart, but also to Heaven in his role as pivot and central point. In the imperial cult, the Yellow Emperor is constantly assimilated to Taiyi, expression of sovereign power and compass for human conduct, just as the sovereign carries out his civilizing work by circulating in the Hall of Light. 11 The center of power is like the hub of Laozi s wheel which, because it is itself empty of all particularity and specification, holds the wheel together and enables it to turn. If we imagine the spokes emanating from this hub as leading to the specific places of local 10 Yellow Emperor is the traditional translation, and I personally long resisted using the alternative translation of di as thearch (Edward Schafer), primarily because it was a hybrid neologism combining the Latin theos ( god ) and English monarch. But I have come more recently to see this alternate translation as a stroke of genius that underscores the theological nature of Chinese political theorizing: emperors are gods, and it is less a matter of projecting this world onto that as of retrojecting that world onto this. In what follows, however, thearch will be primarily used to refer to the divine emperors of the spirit world. 11 Ibid., pp On Taiyi (Great One), see below, the section on Qin and Han in this chapter. 4

5 society, we must ask of what the spokes are made that they can link hub to wheel? The answer is given by the Classic of Mountains, in which local society is represented in terms of geographic situation, specific products, resources, and, above all, gods, together with their iconography and preferred offerings. The spokes linking center to periphery are thus central recognition of local cults expressed in regular dispatch of offerings to them. The Qin and Han (221 BC-220 AD) The stele inscriptions of the First Emperor are an excellent window on his religious policies. The earliest, for Mount Yi, dated 219, refers in its very first line to the title the First Emperor adopted for himself in 221, huangdi 皇帝, which Martin Kern translates as August Thearch and says has quasi-religious significance. 12 The emperor goes on to recall how he had reported his conquest of the six cruel and violent ones the last rival states in his ancestral temple, making manifest the way of filial piety (xiaodao 孝道 ): Now today, the August Thearch has unified all under heaven under one lineage. 13 If in his first proclamation in the year 221, the First Emperor ascribed his successes to power he had received from the ancestral temple, 14 he also invested in a great number of other sacrifices to the sacred mountains, main rivers, civilizing heroes, and ancient kings. By the fall of the Qin in 207 BC, there were more than one hundred shrines to cosmic, mostly astral spirits in Yong alone. 15 Among the sacrifices performed in this ancient Qin capital there must have been one to the Five Emperors or Thearchs (wudi 五帝 ), for in one of the stele inscriptions, the merits of the emperor are said to surpass those of the Five Thearchs. 16 If I make special mention of this point, it is because the cult of the Five Thearchs, reflection of the cosmo-calendrical foundations of the newly created imperial power, is usually associated with the Han synthesis. Indeed, the traditional account of the origin of the cult, found in Sima Qian s Records of the Historian (Shiji 史記 ), says the Qin worshiped only four divine emperors in Yong, and it was the Han Founding Ancestor, Gaozu, who added the fifth, to the Thearch of the North. The importance of this cult to the definition of imperial power may be seen from two facts: when the First Emperor made history s first fengshan 封禪 sacrifice on Taishan 泰山 to lay claim to the Heavenly Mandate, he made use of the rites of Yong; the Han Martial Emperor, Wudi (r BC), made the Yong sacrifices no less than ten times, on occasion even going in person. But the real religious novelty of the Former Han was the introduction of the worship of the Great One, Taiyi 太一. In the year 135 BC one Miu Ji, a master of recipes (fangshi 方士 ) from Shandong, 17 having explained the Great One was the master of the Five Thearchs, persuaded the Martial Emperor to have the ritual performed on an altar built in the southeastern suburb of the capital. In 114 BC, the discovery of a tripod 12 Martin Kern, The Stele Inscriptions of Ch in Shih-huang: Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Imperial Representation (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2000), p Kern, ibid., pp Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p It has always intrigued me that he is said to have come from a place called Bo, as in Botu; cf. below, the birthplace of Laozi. The literal meaning of his name, Erroneous Taboos, is also strange, to say the least. 5

6 provided an opening for one Gongsun Qing, another master of recipes from Shandong. According to Gongsun, this discovery made the emperor, like the Yellow Thearch, a candidate for immortality. He told the emperor to put the tripod in the ancestral temple and to build an altar to sacrifice to the Great One in Ganquan 甘泉, 70 kilometers northwest of the capital. The altar, based on that of Miu Ji, placed the Great One in the center, flanked by the Five Thearchs the Yellow Thearch was moved to the south-west, corresponding to his position in the center of the year and a vast number of other deities was arrayed around them. The ritual used was that of Yong, as were the offerings, with the addition of the jujubes and dried meat that immortals liked. Soon thereafter, the Martial Emperor built a Hall of Light and made sacrifices in it to the Great One and the Five Thearchs on the upper floor and, on the lower, to Earth. 18 According to Marianne Bujard, the sacrifice in Ganquan became the model of the reinvented sacrifice to Heaven in the southern suburb (nanjiao 南郊 ) first performed by Wang Mang (r. AD 9 23) and then by the Brilliant Martial Emperor (Guangwudi 光武帝, r. AD 25 57), founder of the Latter Han. This became the standard sacrifice on the Altar of Heaven (tiantan 天壇 ) of all successive dynasties until Wang Mang set a pattern for what were in fact parallel sacrifices to Heaven and Earth by associating the Han founder, Gaozu, with Heaven, and his wife, the Empress Lü, with Earth. The name Wang Mang used for Heaven, Huangtian Shangdi Taiyi 皇天上帝太一, August Heaven Thearch on High Great One, shows it to be a synthesis of all previous high gods and confirms the central role of the Great One, who is in the Han at once associated with the Polestar (beiji 北極 ) and portrayed in anthropomorphic manner on the famous Mawangdui document on silk. 20 The Vast Martial Emperor also followed Wang Mang in building a Hall of Light south of the capital, where sacrifices were performed until the building was destroyed in the year 219. Some staggering statistics give perhaps the best measure of the Han imperial investment in religion: in 31 BC the chief minister Kuang Heng 匡衡 reduced the number of officially supported sites of worship from 683 to 208 and also eliminated 200 of 373 sites for Han ancestor worship. He was, however, removed from office the following year, and by the end of Wang Mang s reign, the number of cult sites had soared to sites for ancestor worship are particularly interesting: when the father of the Han founder died in 197 BC, the emperor ordered the creation of sites of worship for his father throughout the empire, and the same was done for him when he died two years later. This explains why, at the time of the failed reforms of Kuang Heng, there were 167 shrines in the provinces and 176 in the capital city, plus 30 sites dedicated to the memory of various empresses. For local cults, the Former Han had a bureau of shamans (wu 巫 ) composed of wu from each of the formerly warring states. It also had a process involving written 18 Michael Loewe, Chinese Ideas of Life and Death (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962), p Marianne Bujard, State and Local Cults in Han religion. In Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski, Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp : 794. This tan, in turn, is the model for the Daoist altar space: see my Taoist Ritual Space and Dynastic Legitimacy, (Cahiers d Extrême-Asie 8, 1993), pp Li Ling, An archaeological study of Taiyi 太一 (Grand One) worship, translated by Donald Harper in Early Medieval China 2 ( ), p Loewe, pp. 138, The 6

7 reports and inspections to vet local gods, as can be seen in a series of six steles dating AD from a single Hebei mountain site. One new kind of local god in the Han is the immortal (xian 仙 ), such as Wangzi Qiao 王子僑, said in a stele to have first appeared in Henan in AD 136. The prefect built a temple for him, and it became a center for adepts who sang hymns to the Great One and meditated on their principal vital organs. The site was sufficiently famous for Huandi (r ) to have sent a representative to sacrifice to him in 165, the same year he made sacrifice to Laozi: Daoism, in both its local and national forms, had been born. 22 The state could also intervene to repress local gods, as in the case of Luan Ba, prefect of Yuzhang (modern Nanchang): seeing the people in his charge ruining themselves for sacrifices to the gods of the mountains and rivers, he destroyed all private cults (fangsi 房祀 ) and had the shamans executed: Then all the strange events ceased. 23 When Emperor Huan came to the throne at the age of 14 in the year 146, one of his first acts was to build a temple to Laozi in the latter s putative birthplace (Bozhou 亳州 ). The fact that the walls of the temple were adorned with the image of the meeting between Laozi and Confucius is like a premonition of the conflicted relations with the literati that would characterize his reign. After sending a eunuch to sacrifice at Laozi s birthplace in the first month of the year 165, in the fourth month he issued an edict for the destruction of private shrines (fangsi 房祀 ) throughout the empire. In the eighth month, he meditated on the gods and nourished his nature, his aim being transcendence. His mind focused on the Yellow Thearch, he was in mystic accord with the high ancestor and, in a dream, saw Laozi. He then commissioned the famous Laozi Inscription ( Laozi ming 老子銘 ), the preface to which is the source of the above quote. 24 The following year, he himself made sacrifice in the palace to Huang-Lao 黃老 and the Buddha: From these items of evidence it appears that Emperor Huan, in the last years before his death, was attempting to take over the patronage and the authority of the popular religion which centered on the worship of Laozi, and re-establish its mystical alliance and approval of the House of Han. 25 As Anna Seidel has shown, The Book of the Transformations of Laozi (Laozi bianhua jing 老子變化經 ) is perhaps the best commentary on the events of Huandi s reign. In it, Laozi is a cosmic god on the model of the Great One. He makes a series of five appearances in Chengdu in the years and says to his disciples: If you think of me even in your dreams, I will appear to you as proof of my confidence. In order to shake up the Han dynasty, I have transformed my body... If you wish to know where I am, recite the text of five thousand words ten thousand times. 26 Another new form of worship which cannot go unmentioned is that of the Queen Mother of the West 西王母. In the year 3 BC, during a drought, people were running around hither and thither, exchanging tokens, preparing for the royal advent and 22 Bujard, p Cited from the Hou Hanshu by Lin Fu-shih, Handai de wuzhe (Taipei: Daoxiang, 1987), p Anna Seidel, La divinisation de Lao Tseu dans le taoïsme des Han (Paris: École française d Extrême- Orient, 1969), p Rafe de Crespigny, Politics and Philosophy under the Government of Emperor Huan, A.D. (T oung Pao , 1980), p Seidel, p. 70. The text of five thousand words is the Daode jing or Laozi. 7

8 worshipping the Queen Mother of the West... They held services and set up gaming boards for a lucky throw, and they sang and danced in worship of the Queen Mother of the West. They also passed around a written message, saying, The Mother tells the people that those who wear this talisman will not die. 27 It is perhaps not mere chance that the earliest known representation of the Queen Mother dates to the same period and shows her, on the ceiling of a tomb, welcoming a deceased couple shown in their ascension to the heavens, escorted by mythical animals... Representing and venerating Xiwangmu in the sepulture must have helped the deceased attain Mount Kunlun, considered as an axis mundi, and enter into the world of the immortals. 28 The Period of Division ( AD) The primary feature of this period is the emergence of Daoism and Buddhism as rivals of Confucianism for state support together with the creation of a kind of united front of the three teachings (sanjiao 三教 ) against shamanism. We know from the work of Lin Fushih that shamanism nonetheless continued to play a part in state politics, as well as in local society, but our focus here will be on the Three Teachings and, in particular, on their respective relationships with the state. The reason for this shift in focus is simple: all three religions have (relatively) systematic theologies, that is, unifying principles which incorporate the gods into a system. These systems either distinguish themselves from the state, as in the case of Buddhism and, to a lesser extent, Daoism, or continue to identify themselves entirely with the state, as in Confucianism. To put it another way, hitherto the state was the church; henceforth, the state had rival social organizations. The Han synthesis of the Classics with Yin/Yang-Wuxing cosmological theory continued to play a major rule in court debates, and from the Wei (220 65) to the Sui ( ), each successive dynasty saw itself as the expression of the ascendancy of one or another of the Five Agents (wuxing 五行 ). The suburban sacrifice on the round altar to Heaven was carried out by almost every emperor in this period. The importance of this sacrifice to the definition of legitimacy may be seen in Wang Su s 王肅 ( ) challenge to the interpretation of the great Han commentator, Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 ( ). Whereas for Zheng the sacrifice was addressed to the Five Thearchs and the Supreme Thearch of Bright Heaven (Haotian shangdi 昊天上帝 ), Wang contended the Five Thearchs were human, not celestial, and that there was but one Heavenly Thearch. Worship of the Five Thearchs was to be done in the Hall of Light, where they were associated with the welcoming of the seasonal ethers. Sima Yan, the maternal grandson of Wang Su, was the first to adopt the latter s view, and he therefore eliminated the seats of the Five Thearchs before sacrificing to Heaven in the year 266. Subsequent dynasties, however, followed Zheng Xuan, and the debate was not settled until the Tang, which opted for the views of Wang Su. As in the Han, the ancestors were associated with this sacrifice and therefore received sacrifice secondarily, after Heaven. Most dynasties also 27 Loewe, p Michele Pirazzoli-t Serstevens, Death and the Dead: Practices and Images in the Qin and Han, Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp

9 built a Hall of Light, as well as a square altar for worship of the earth god. In the year 325, the descendants of Confucius were given the wherewithal to sacrifice to him four times a year. 29 The story of the state s relations with Daoism in this period begins with the capitulation by Heavenly Master Zhang Lu 張魯 to Cao Cao in the year 215. Cao Cao gave titles to Zhang and his five sons, a fief of ten thousand families to Zhang, and the hand of his son in marriage to Zhang s daughter. Li Fu, a close collaborator of Zhang s, was so intimately involved in the founding of the Wei in 220 that Howard Goodman concludes: This may be the first episode in a long tradition of Daoist legitimation of emperors. 30 But if Daoists may thus be seen to have fired the first shot, Erik Zürcher was clearly right to speak of the Buddhist conquest of China in this period, as may be seen from the following table, based on the early Tang polemical work, the Bianzheng lun 辯正論 by Falin 法琳 : Dynasty Temples Monks Eastern Jin 1,768 24,000 Liu-Song 1,913 36,000 Qi 2,015 32,500 Liang 2,846 82,700 These statistics for the South may be juxtaposed with those given by the Treatise on Buddhism and Daoism (Shi-Lao zhi 釋老志 ) of the Weishu 魏書 : in 477, twenty-five years after the end of the first persecution of Buddhism, there were about one hundred monasteries in the capital and more than two thousand monks and nuns; in the Wei empire, there were 6,478 temples and 77,258 monks and nuns. By the early sixth century, there were 13,727 Buddhist temples, and by the end of the dynasty, 30,000 temples and two million monks and nuns. 31 The attractiveness of Buddhism in the political realm lay in its dualistic universalism: the Indian religion assumed a distinction between matter and spirit between the political and religious realms far more radical than anything China had known hitherto, and the emperor could appropriate the prestige of the new transcendent principle by identifying himself, either with the Tathâgata (in Chinese, Rulai 如來 ) himself or with the royal patron of the Buddhist community, King Aśoka 育王. Daoism responded to the challenge with a form of initiation that had its roots in the Han apocryphal texts. They transmitted to the emperor registers (shoulu 授籙 ) that gave him power over the world of the gods and thereby implied the recognition of his legitimacy 29 For a full account of the incessant changes in all these sacrifices, see Chen Shuguo, State Religious Ceremonies, in Early Chinese Religion, Part Two: The Period of Division, edited by John Lagerwey and Lü Pengzhi (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp Howard Goodman, Ts ao P i Transcendent: The Political Culture of Dynasty-founding in China at the End of the Han (Seattle: Scripta Serica, 1998), p Leon Hurvitz, translator, Wei Shou Treatise on Buddhism and Taoism, an English translation of the original Chinese text of Wei-shu CXIV and the Japanese annotation of Tsukamoto Zenryû, reprint of Yünkang, the Buddhist Cave-Temples of the Fifth Century A.D. in North China, vol. 16 supplement (Kyoto: Jimbunkagaku kenkyusho, 1956), p

10 by Heaven and the Dao. 32 Being cut of the same cosmological cloth as state Confucianism, the Daoists regularly presented themselves, in the imperially sponsored debates of the period, as natives, by opposition with foreign Buddhism. At the heart of the controversy launched by Yu Bing 庾冰 ( ) in the year 340 was the question whether monks should, like officials, bow before the emperor or whether, as representatives of the transcendent principle, they were above the emperor and should revere only the Buddha. To upholders of the literati tradition, this amounted to contravening the fundamental Confucian virtue of zhong 忠, loyalty, just as the Buddhist monk s exit from the family (chujia 出家 ) meant he was unfilial (buxiao 不孝 ). Yu Bing therefore insisted on the universal nature of the state, based on the Confucian doctrine of human relationships. According to Yu, the kings of antiquity did not allow foreign customs to interfere with the administration of the state... Let the monks practice Buddhism in the family or as individuals, but its practice on the level of the state and the court must be forbidden. 33 He Chong 何充 ( ) responded that there was no precedent for such restrictions on monks liberty and affirmed that Buddhism, by encouraging virtue, produced subjects who obeyed the laws. In addition, the monks prayers were beneficial to the state. Buddhist apologists such as the monk Zhi Dun 支遁 (314 66) identified Buddhist compassion (ci 慈 ) with the supreme Confucian value of humanity (ren 仁 ) and explained the Buddhist model of holiness in Daoist terms of eliminating desire and returning to the simple Origin. Thus were commingled, writes Zürcher, Chinese ideas of a cosmic and natural order with the Buddhists thus-soness. 34 Northern Buddhists apparently had fewer reservations about bowing to the emperor: the head of the monks at the court of the Northern Wei, Faguo 法果 (fl ), explained that he was paying homage, not to the emperor but to the Buddha. 35 The Treatise on Buddhism and Daoism portrays the Wei state as totally invested in the promotion of Buddhism. In 398, an edict ordered officials to build residences for the faithful. When Taizong 太宗 (r ) came to the throne, he erected images in the capital and its suburbs and ordered monks to instruct the people. 36 Of Shizu 世祖 (r ) it is said that he continued the practice of his predecessors in inviting superior monks in order to discuss doctrines with them. On the birthday of the Buddha, when the statues of the buddhas were paraded in the avenues of the capital, the emperor ascended the watchtower of his palace in order to watch and to throw flowers so as to display his devotion. 37 It was, nonetheless, the same emperor who led the first great repression of Buddhism beginning in See Anna Seidel, Imperial Treasures and Taoist Sacraments: Taoist Roots in the Apocrypha, Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R.A. Stein, vol. 2, edited by Michel Strickmann (Brussels: Institut Belge des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1983), pp Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China (Leiden: Brill, 1959), p From present-day perspective, it is ironical that Yu Bing is in fact proposing a modern definition of religion as belonging to the private sphere! 34 Ibid., p Hurvitz, p Cf. Hurvitz, p Ibid., p

11 This campaign was occasioned by a memorial to the throne by the minister Cui Hao 崔浩 ( ), in which he claimed that books revealed by the Most High Old Lord (Taishang laojun 太上老君 ) to the Daoist Kou Qianzhi 寇謙之 (d. 448) in the years 415 and 423 on the Central Peak (Songshan 嵩山 ) were truly a sign your majesty, like the Yellow Thearch, is in accord with Heaven. The emperor Shizu invited Kou and his numerous disciples to the capital and built for them a five-story altar for their rituals. Monthly banquets for thousands were also provided. 38 According to Li Daoyuan 酈道元 (d. 527), the altar was modeled on the Hall of Light. In the year 431, altars were created with Daoist priests to serve them in every provincial capital. This is the first recorded unified system of state-supported religious institutions in Chinese history. 39 In 439, imperial steles evoking these events were set up on Songshan 嵩山 and Huashan 華山, the central and western of the five sacred mountains. That on Huashan refers to Kou as the successor to the Heavenly Master 繼天師 who, during his more than thirty years on the Central Peak, accumulated merit, accomplished the Dao, and moved the obscure Void. The gods approached him from on high and invested him as True Master of the Nine Continents, in charge of the governance of men and demons, to aid the state and support the mandate, and sustain and guide the True Lord of Great Peace 太平真君. 40 It is in the revelations of 423 that Kou had been told how to reform Daoist liturgy so as to help the True Lord of Great Peace, Shizu, who, after a victory over Liangzhou, in 440 promulgated the new reign era title of True Lord of Great Peace. In 442, he became the first emperor in history to receive a Daoist initiation. In 445, after the discovery of arms in a Chang an monastery, Shizu ordered the execution of all the monks of Chang an and the destruction of all Buddhist images, and then the extension of the edict to the entire empire. A decree of 447 threatened with extermination any household that served the foreign gods. The persecution of Buddhism came to a halt after Shizu s assassination in 452, but a number of precedents had been set: the first and perhaps most important was the attack on Buddhism as foreign, for this argument would resurface in every Buddho- Daoist confrontation thereafter, in the Northern Zhou, the Tang, the Song, and the Yuan. The second is that all successive emperors of the Northern Wei received a Daoist initiation, as would the next persecutor of Buddhism, Wudi of the Northern Zhou (r ). 41 The Wei emperor Gaozong (r ) not only halted the persecution, he allowed the redeployment of Buddhism, albeit it under the control of a special office 38 James Ware, translator, The Wei shu and the Sui shu on Taoism, T oung Pao (1932), pp : p For references, see my Religion et politique pendant la période de Division, Religion et société en Chine ancienne et médiévale (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2009). 40 Cited from Lagerwey, The Old Lord s Scripture for the Chanting of the Commandments, Purposes, Means and Convictions in Taoism: A Berlin Symposium, edited by Florian Reiter (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag), pp See Seidel, Imperial Treasures and Taoist Sacraments, and, on Zhou Wudi s initiation, my Wu-shang pi-yao, somme taoïste du VIe siècle (Paris: École française d Extrême-Orient, 1981), p

12 created to that effect. He ordered the sculpting of a statue of the Buddha that resembled him and, in 454, the same year he was initiated as a Daoist, the placement of five statues of the Buddha in a temple: one for each successive Wei emperor, himself included. He also launched the great Yungang sculpture project. It may be in reaction to state control of Buddhism that a critical text for the future of church-state relations was produced, the Sutra of the Humane King (Renwang jing 仁王經 ). According to this text, if the humane sovereign protects the Buddhist community and supports grandiose Buddhist rituals, he will in turn benefit from the protection of the state by the Buddha. But the disciple who registers (the monks) or serves as an official is not my disciple. 42 In 493, when the Wei decided to move its capital to Luoyang, one of the emperor s first acts was to build a new Daoist temple for the Veneration of Emptiness (Chongxusi 崇虛寺 ) in the southern suburb. 43 The festivals of the Three Officers 三官 were celebrated there annually until 534, when the first emperor of the determinedly Buddhist Northern Qi abolished them. In the year 500, the Longmen cave sculptures were undertaken with imperial patronage. The emperor Shizong (r ), who loved profoundly the principles of the Buddha, had a vast Buddhist temple of Light (Jingmingsi 景明寺 ) constructed where every year the statues of all the Buddhist temples in the capital were gathered in order to participate in a procession on the Buddha s birthday. In South China, the high point of Buddhist involvement in government came under Wudi of the Liang (r ). He began by choosing the date of the Buddha s birthday for his accession to the throne in the southern suburb of the capital. In 504, he put an end to ceremonies in honor of Laozi, publicly renounced his clan s affiliation with Daoism, and announced his conversion to Buddhism, urging his officials to follow his example. In 517, Wudi decreed the abolition of blood sacrifice on the ancestral altar and had two altars for vegetarian offerings and two Buddhist temples built for his parents, staffed respectively with 1,000 monks and 400 nuns. (The traditional small sacrifices to the rivers and mountains were, however, excluded from the abolition of blood sacrifice, as were the people s annual sacrifices of request and thanksgiving to the earth god.) In 519, having been ordained as a bodhisattva, Wudi tried to use this new role to acquire a greater degree of control over the Buddhist community. In 522, he restored the monastery dedicated to King Aśoka, presenting himself as the Indian king s heir, even his reincarnation. He also persecuted Daoism, with the result that many Daoists fled from Maoshan 茅山 to the north, where they no doubt contributed to the massive use of southern scriptures in the Northern Zhou Daoist encyclopedia, the Wushang biyao 無上密要. The emperor who ordered the compilation of this encyclopedia after a series of Buddho-Daoist debates was yet another Martial Emperor. In 567, he was initiated as a Daoist and received the memorial of a former monk, Wei Yuansong 衛元松, proposing 42 Charles Orzech, Politics and Transcendent Wisdom: The Scripture for Humane Kings in the Creation of Chinese Buddhism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p Cf. my Religion et politique (note 39 above), where I suggest the name chongxu, veneration of emptiness, derives from the Heavenly Master movement, in which it referred to the central place of meditation in each Daoist diocese (zhi 治 ). 12

13 the establishment of a great church which would include everyone in the empire... In this universal church, there would no longer be any distinction between monks and lay persons. Let the temples of walls and moats become the temples and stupas, and let the lord of the Zhou be the Tathâgata. The cities will be the monks quarters, and harmonious husbands and wives the holy congregation. 44 Wei was in effect proposing that state and church once again be one, as before the arrival of Buddhism. From 569 to 574, Wudi organized a series of seven debates between the Three Teachings. One of the byproducts of these debates was a book by the Buddhist monk Dao an 道安, called Discourse on the Two Religions (Erjiao lun 二教論 ). Making use once again of the distinction between body and soul, Dao an says that Confucianism managed the material, Buddhism the spiritual worlds, and that Daoism was therefore superfluous. The chief Daoist counter-argument focused on Buddhism s foreignness. Having opted for the Daoists, Wudi launched the second major persecution of Buddhism and turned Daoism into the state religion. When he conquered the Northern Qi in 578, he extended the interdiction of Buddhism to its territories: The Buddhist books are a foreign system, of which this land has no need. I am not one of the five barbarians who do not know the meaning of respect. Buddhism is not an orthodox religion: that is why I abolish it. 45 But Wudi died soon after, and his successor, Xuandi 宣帝 (r ), legalized Buddhism anew. The emperor then sat with the images of the Buddha and Yuanshi facing south. 46 Yuanshi tianzun 元始天尊, Heavenly Worthy of the Primordial Beginning, was the supreme Daoist god introduced in the heavily Buddhist-influenced Lingbao scriptures 靈寶經 revealed in South China ca The end result of four centuries of debate and jockeying for power was thus an emperor who sat facing south flanked by the images of the high gods of the two religions no emperor could henceforth ignore. Sui/Tang ( ) and Song ( ) While the universal cakravartin king ideal clearly played a fundamental role in Sui ideology and practice, the first dynasty to unify all China in nearly four centuries also continued to support Daoist institutions and even use Daoist reign titles (Kaihuang 開皇 ). The Tang would continue the basic policy of equal treatment, but like all native dynasties from the Tang on, it would also have a clear bias in favor of Daoism. In the case of the Tang, the justification for this bias lay in a name: the House of Tang was surnamed Li 李, like the Most High Old Lord. This link was affirmed as early as 620, when the Louguan 樓觀 (Pavilion Hermitage), whose abbot Ji Hui ( ) had taken sides with the Tang already in 617, 44 Kenneth Chen, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p Lagerwey, Wu-shang pi-yao, p Anna Seidel, Imperial Treasures and Taoist Sacraments, p

14 was given the name Zongsheng guan 宗聖觀, Hermitage of the Ancestral Saint, that is, the very Laozi who was said to have delivered himself of the Daode jing 道德經 at this site to the Guardian of the Pass, Yin Xi (he then went west to huahu 化胡 ). 47 In the same year, the Old Lord made a series of appearances to the illiterate Ji Shanxing, on one occasion telling him: Go tell Gaozu that I am the greatest of the immortals, Li Boyang, the imperial ancestor, the Old Lord. Near my temple in Bozhou, an old tree will flower as proof of what I am saying. 48 In his final appearance in 622, the god promised he would send ten thousand divine soldiers (shenbing 神兵 ) to help the new dynasty destroy one Liu Heita, who had taken Luoyang. A decree of the emperor Taizong in 637 gave formal precedence to Daoism over Buddhism on the grounds the latter was a foreign religion, while Daoism derived from the nameless Origin of the universe, and Laozi was the origin of the imperial clan. When the monk Zhishi protested, he was whipped to death. In 678, Daoists were placed under the authority of the Bureau of Clan Affairs (Zongzhengsi 宗正司 ), while Buddhism remained under that of Religious Affairs (Chongxuansi 崇玄司 ), a part of the Foreign Affairs Bureau (Honglusi 弘盧寺 ). A debate in 696 on the Scripture of Foreign Conversion (Huahu jing 化胡經 ) concluded it was authentic, and that Buddhism therefore derived from Daoism, but a new discussion in 705 came to the opposite conclusion and an order was given to destroy the scripture and efface all paintings of this subject in Daoist temples and all portraits of Laozi in Buddhist temples. The height of Daoist influence was reached under Xuanzong (r ). One factor was clearly the loss of taxes due to the creation of Buddhist chapels on the estates of the wealthy, especially graveside chapels, called Merit Halls (gongde yuan 功德院 ). In 714, 30,000 monks and nuns were forcibly returned to lay status. Edicts against proselytizing in villages and ordering the destruction of village chapels and small Buddhist shrines followed. 49 Sima Chengzhen 司馬承貞 gave Xuanzong his first Daoist initiation in 721, Li Hanguang 李含光 his second in 748. Like his grandfather in 666 during the fengshan sacrifices of legitimacy, Xuanzong went in person to Laozi s temple in Bozhou on his way back from Taishan in 725. He also created a festival for the god s birthday. After discussions at the court on the Laozi, the emperor s commentary on the text was engraved in stone in It contains such statements as this: The great man is the prince who is in possession of the Dao ; The compassion of the saint is universal because it is impartial. 51 The next year, state examination questions based on the Laozi replaced questions on the Confucian classics, and it was decreed that each house in the realm should have a copy of the Daoist scripture (as well as of the Scripture of Filial Piety, Xiaojing 孝經 ). In 738, Xuanzong ordered that every district select one Buddhist 47 Huahu may be translated as conversion of/into the foreigner. When understood in the sense of into, it refers to the idea that Laozi, after revealing the Daode jing, went west and turned into the Buddha. For obvious reasons, this became one of the most contentious notions in the history of Buddho-Daoist relations. 48 Charles David Benn, Taoism as Ideology in the Reign of Emperor Hsüan-tsung (712 55) (University of Michigan microfilm, 1983), p Stanley Weinstein, Buddhism under the T ang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp The ultimate model for this act was the engraving of the five Confucian classics on stone in the year AD Benn, Taoism as Ideology, pp. 154,

15 and one Daoist temple to be called Kaiyuan 開元 (there were 331 of each!) and transfer the celebration of his birthday to these temples. Imperial dreams of Laozi in the years 740 and 741 led to the unearthing of a statue of Laozi near Pavilion Hermitage imperial confirmation that this was indeed the subject of Xuanzong s dream creation of a new temple to house it, and distribution of painted copies throughout the empire. The name of this new Daoist temple in Chang an was Palace of Great Clarity (Taiqinggong 太清宮 ), and in it the statue of the emperor was placed next to that of Laozi. By the end of his reign, the rites in the Palace of Great Clarity were classed as superior to those of the ancestral temple (Taimiao 太廟 ) and the southern suburb (nanjiao 南郊 ). A decree dated 743, promulgated after an imperial sacrifice to Laozi, explains Xuanzong s vision of Daoism: Those who wish to safeguard mankind must revere the Great Way. Those who have successfully maintained the Mandate have steadfastly relied on their illustrious predecessors. They have venerated especially the Great Sage, Emperor of the Mystic Origin. His Way illumines the Great Ultimate. He sprang forth before the origin during chaos... From the establishment of Our dynasty to the present time he has repeatedly conferred good fortune on us and many times graced Us with the appearance of his true image. 52 Nor were traditional state cults to the mountains forgotten in Xuanzong s drive to turn Daoism into a universal state religion. Already in 725, at Sima Chengzhen s behest, the emperor had added to the worship of the gods of the Five Peaks 五嶽 that of Daoist Perfected (zhenren 真人 ). In 732, Daoists were selected for the temples of the Five Peaks and two other cults, notably that of the Messenger of the Nine Heavens (Jiutian shizhe 九天使者 ), who had appeared to Xuanzong in a dream. Wu Daozi 吳道子 was commissioned to paint the subject of the emperor s dream for hanging in the Temple of the Nine Heavens. (The same painter did murals of the conversion of the foreigners for a Daoist temple near Luoyang.) In 748, a series of Daoist altars (tan 壇 ) was created on 46 mountains with caves, where the ritual throwing the dragons and slips (tou longjian 投龍簡 ) was performed. Each cave-heaven (dongtian 洞天 ) was supported by the tax payments of 30 households. Rarely favored outright, Buddhism was nonetheless able to resist attempts to make monks bow before their parents and the emperor. It also contributed significantly to the legitimization of the Tang ruling house. A decree in 629 ordered all monks in Chang an to recite the Scripture of the Humane King fourteen days in every month. In the same year, Taizong (r ) ordered the building of seven monasteries, each on a battle site, so that monks could offer constant prayers for the repose of the soldiers who had died. At the end of his life, Taizong s admiration for Xuanzong led him even to declare Buddhism superior to Daoism and Confucianism and to ordain 18,500 new monks. In 659, Gaozong (r ) ordered that an image of King Aśoka with Gaozu s own features be installed in the Famensi 法門寺, a popular center of pilgrimage because 52 Ibid., p