Military Rituals and Religiously Motivated Warfare
Pre-imperial warfare had long been closely associated with rituals and religious beliefs, and historical writings of the period provide more detailed accounts of the rituals and religious practices before and after the fighting than they do of the combat itself.[561] Those practices were still prevailing in the early empires.
Historical records document the exercises of prognostication, divination and other occult techniques that served military purposes, as well as titles and excerpts of treatises on the subject handed down from preceding ages or written by contemporary writers. Military rites and religious beliefs were always mixed and intermingled. In the Warring States period there was a myth about the warfare between the Yellow Emperor, the creator of Chinese civilisation, and Chi You, a beastlike figure who created weapons. Chi You was defeated and killed, but because of his invention of weapons he became a deity of war in popular culture.[562] When Liu Bang, the would- be founding emperor of the Former Han, first rose up as a rebel leader, he made sacrificial offerings to both the Yellow Emperor and Chi You for their auspices in his military campaigns.[563] The status of Chi You as a warrior god was officially acknowledged by the Han emperors. Emperor Wu of the Former Han, for example, paid visits and worshipped at the shrine of Chi You, recognising him as the Lord of Weaponry. Several centuries later, the Eastern Jin armies still gave offerings to Chi You before they went into battle.While the practices of popular beliefs and cults permeated various aspects of pre- and early imperial warfare, it was only after the late second century ce that organised religious communities, the Daoists first and the Buddhists later, emerged, flourished, and took part in war.
The Daoist religion became popular and developed rapidly in the last years of the Later Han. One large sect called the Way of Great Peace initiated an empire-wide Yellow Turban Rebellion in 184 ce that nearly toppled the dynasty.[564] Largely seeded by the corrupt politics and economic hardships of the last years of the Later Han, the Way of Great Peace preached the promise of a new world that would bring peace and prosperity. Although a canon attributed to the sect named the Scripture on Great Peace (Taiping Jing) counted war, disease, flood and fire as the four evils in the world,[565] the sect still adopted violence as a necessary evil in trying to overthrow the reigning dynasty and realising their pursuit of an ideal world. This was a sacred violence for believers, to rescue them from sufferings in this world. The Yellow Turbans finally failed, but the ethos of replacing the corrupted present world by violent means was preserved among certain Daoist sects; it also provided a notion for justifying war. Two regimes underpinned by Daoist cults even emerged in the south-west during the late second and fourth centuries,[566] while other Daoist sects earned widespread influence in the south-east, where the political, cultural and economic core of the southern dynasties was located. In 399 ce a Daoist preacher named Sun En initiated a vigorous rebellion against the Eastern Jin regime. His followers were called the Immortals. Although Sun killed himself in 402 after military setbacks, his brother-in-law Lu Xun took the lead and reinvigorated the followers. The revolt was finally suppressed in 411 with the devastation of the core economic regions of the Eastern Jin, which gravely undermined the dynasty.[567] A feature of this rebellion worth mentioning is that the insurgents moved with their families and when the tide of battle turned against them, they drowned their children, saying, ‘We congratulate you on first ascending to the palace of the immortals! We shall follow you shortly.'[568] This gave the act of infanticide a religious meaning.Buddhism, a foreign religion that arrived in China in Later Han times, also developed rapidly and assumed increasing social and political influence in the turbulent period after the collapse of the Later Han. Buddhist monasteries, especially in the north, became great landholders under the auspices of royal courts or aristocrats. Furthermore, they owned their own troops of retainers, tenants and serfs, which could be transformed into private military forces in times of emergency. These Buddhist monasteries certainly competed with the state for the acquisition of manpower and also threatened the state monopoly of violence. Thus, while the armies of monasteries might serve the political authorities on certain occasions, they were also potential adversaries. Large-scale conflicts between state authorities and Buddhist monasteries broke out twice in the northern dynasties, once in 446 c e and again in 574 ce, in which Buddhist communities were disciplined, monks and nuns forced to return to secular life, monasteries destroyed and their property confiscated for the state coffers.
On the other hand, certain Buddhist sects challenged the status quo in the most violent way. The incessant warfare of the secular world helped the propagation of millenarianism. Some Buddhist sects, like their Daoist counterparts, promoted belief in the coming of a perfect world by resorting to military means. Buddhist-initiated uprisings were recorded, for example, in 473, 481 and 514 ce. The largest such uprising broke out in 515 ce, in which a monk named Faqing called himself ‘Mahayana', claiming that a new Buddha, supposedly himself, had descended and would purify the world and establish a new world order for believers. Faqing quickly gathered over 50,000 insurgents, and his campaign spread over a wide area and lasted for two years.
Although there were no wars between religions in early imperial China, insurrections with religious elements still played an important part in warfare during the third and sixth centuries ce. Such sacred violence revealed the widespread nature of violence in this age of turmoil.