Conclusion
Early modern East Asia brought to fruition a number of long-term political, intellectual and social trends: the desire of strong states to exert an unprecedented level of hegemony over society, a new theological and intellectual egalitarianism among both clergy and laity, and the orientation of social interests around religious ideas and groups.
The confluence of these trends pointed to conflict, sometimes but not always violent, over authority: a struggle for precedence between political and religious power, and within the religious world, among schools, monasteries, temples, sects and teachers.Stepping back from individual regimes, reigns and moments of crisis, we see certain striking trends in the exercise of violence in, by and against religion. Regimes across early modern East Asia all saw themselves as curators of the sacred, and were thus willing to employ the full coercive power of the state to suppress challenges to orthodoxy and ensure compliance with moral and ritual norms. While not precisely modelled on political authority, hierarchy within smaller communities such as villages also revealed these same moral and ritual dimensions. The religious nature of authority limited the freedoms of individuals or groups within society. From the viewpoint of the political centre, proper religion was the mortar of a stable society, but conversely, deviant devotion and ritual could easily become a breeding ground for heresies, an invitation to dark forces or a conduit to communal violence.
But these states were not theocracies, and nor were they unable to distinguish diversity from dissent. Political power was built on an ideological framework that served the state rather than the reverse. As tools of statecraft, these frameworks left a place for institutional and devotional diversity, such as competing Buddhist schools, particularistic ritual communities and unique local deities.
Nonetheless, while this religious diversity was not suppressed, it was closely managed. Just as the sprawling Ottoman Empire created a legal space for self-governing Christian and Jewish minorities to exist within the context of an Islamic state, so Confucian kingship in China and Korea, and warrior rule in Tokugawa Japan provided an overarching structure that held together and managed other expressions of religion.[767] Law and violence policed and tested the limits of this framework and the boundaries of the communities that existed within it.Nowhere was the danger of uncontrolled religion more evident than in the overlapping place of violence in religious and political cosmologies. Religion provided a structure for peasants and townspeople to form communities, including those that could violently turn against each other, or against the state. But more than that, illicit religion could fundamentally challenge the state's claims to legitimacy, either on its own terms or by bringing to bear entirely new ideas about divine command, universal time and moral justice. This threat of religious-inspired violence was the mirror image of the state's own legitimacy, and was the constant worry of statecraft throughout this period.