Organised Religious Violence

Sacred Time and Millenarian Rebellion

The exploration of sacred time became particularly important to the development of religious violence in Ming dynasty China, where ideas of kalpic change combined with other intellectual trends to produce new traditions of religious thought.

The first of these new influences was central Asian Manichaeism, which inspired an underground cult based on the veneration of a deity called the Lord of Radiance. This tradition aroused the suspicion of the Chinese authorities, who accused it of the stock crimes of sorcery and illicit sexual activity, but who lacked the will or resources to pursue the teaching within local society. The second was an intellectual trend to combine the wide variety of theological and practical elements into a single teaching. This sort of synthetic exploration was an established tradition within schools of Buddhism and Daoism, as well as among lay religious thinkers such as Ming literatus Lin Zhaoen (1517-98), who developed one branch of this thinking into a teaching called the Three-in-One (San yijiao). Openly at first, Lin's teaching spread among the literati and, aided by a turn to egalitarianism and a general breakdown of social order, more broadly throughout the populace. Later schools, such as the Luo Teaching (Luo jiao), spread underground through secret networks that offered both spiritual and physical protection to the vulnerable.

Already in a state of decline, the Ming faced difficulty enforcing its edicts against these new teachings. It was the Qing that pursued them more aggressively, reasserting bans on the Three-in-One and actively persecuting the Luo Teaching and its kin.^{^[760]} However, rather than destroying this tradition, political repression served only to drive it underground and further fragment it into new and often more violent directions.

One particular change was the addition of an apocalyptic element to the Three-in-One theology. According to an eschatology that first appeared in the Ming Dragon Flower Scripture (Longhuajing), a deity called the Eternal Venerable Mother (Wusheng Laomu) had sent successive generations of teachers (including the founders of the ‘three teachings': Confucius, the Buddha, and the Daoist sage Laozi) to turn humankind away from its wicked ways and prepare the way for the arrival of the True Teaching, which would itself announce the advent of the new kalpa. While the original Hindu cosmology had portrayed kalpa as an immeasurably long period of time, these new schools came to regard its end as somewhat more immanent. Drawing on an older tradition of messianic belief in the Maitreya Buddha (which had already produced outbreaks of millenarian violence in China and Korea) the eschatology of the Eternal Venerable Mother spread through the populace, providing fertile ground for political unrest that aimed to usher in the new age by destroying the remnants of the corrupt order. Often such movements were sparked by figures who announced themselves to be the bearer of the True Teaching, or Maitreya, the Buddha who would reign over the coming kalpa.

The goal of using violence to accelerate the fruition of sacred time often combined with ritual practices that aimed to give divine protection to a righteous army. Following practices that had already appeared as early as the second century ce, the rebel armies that first challenged the Mongol Yuan entered battle protected by charms and blessed water.^{^[761]} Other armies went into battle confident that a regimen of ritual purification would make them invulnerable to harm (literally, that ‘swords and bullets will not enter'), or that their leaders possessed the ability to transform beans into allied soldiers or wooden benches into horses. The power of such ideas was on display in small-scale riots of the late eighteenth century, not only among rebel soldiers but also among the dynasty's own troops and commanders, who countered illicit magic with measures of their own.

When late eighteenth-century rebels claiming divine protection besieged the fortified northern Chinese county town of Linqing, defenders counteracted the rebels' ritual purity by sprinkling the city walls with the menses and urine of the city's prostitutes.^{^[762]} Even the famed nineteenth-century moderniser Li Hongzhang (1823-1901), took care to douse his troops' weapons in dog urine before going off to confront the adherents of an unknown religious sect.

Despite official attempts to capture leaders, burn scriptures or destroy temples, new teachings could reconstitute themselves as quickly as old ones were suppressed. Part of the difficulty in rooting out popular teachings was that they were not necessarily violent. Teachings could circulate peacefully during periods of stability and growth, turning violent only when under pressure, as they did in the twilight of Mongol rule and during periods of stress under the Ming and the Qing dynasties. They could also change, reinterpreting the well-known ideas of cyclic cosmological change, messianic leadership and divine protection. The so-called White Lotus Rebellion of 1796-1805 prophesied the coming of the new age (voiced here as the destruction of the Manchu Qing, and return to Chinese rule under the Ming). Rather than a single event, this movement actually consisted of numerous parallel rebellions that played on the same eschatological themes and spread across numerous provinces of central China. The rebellions were bookended by two smaller and more quickly suppressed disturbances: the Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 and Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813. The latter of these, which named both a reincarnation of the Maitreya and a true heir to the Ming throne, even managed to threaten the imperial palace in Beijing.^{^[763]} But these small rebellions and occasional reports of sorcery were just a portent of much greater crises that would come during the middle and end of the nineteenth century, when a combination of demographic pressure and state mismanagement exploded in a series of large-scale millenarian rebellions. All of these, including the mid-century Taiping Rebellion led by a man claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, presented this same combination of worldrenewing cosmology, magical protection and moral rhetoric.

Temple Armies and Defenders of the Dharma

Religious violence in Japan exhibited similar influences but followed a fundamentally different trajectory. One source of this violence was fighting between militarised temples and sects. The largest Buddhist temples wielded significant political and economic influence, which grew and transformed as they allied with warring factions and clans. Violence around Buddhist temples deepened through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as networks of allied peasants and labourers were mobilised to destroy rival temples with ‘monotonous regularity', and groups of armed monks numbering the thousands regularly descended from fortified monasteries to harass the civil authorities. At its root was a conflict over resources: political patronage, land, commercial interests, and increasingly, the loyalty of followers.^{^[764]}

As in China, the politicisation of the Buddhist laity in Japan was prompted partially by an interpretation of sacred time. In Japan, such ideas characterised the age as the waning of the kalpa, or the ‘decline of the dharma' (mappo). This sense of cosmic decay carried with it an explicit criticism of politics and society (including the machinations of the Buddhist clergy). However, while in China such ideas fed millenarian longings, in Japan they led to the rise of simplified devotional practices which made organised Buddhism accessible and appealing to the masses for the first time. And the lay believers organised themselves into militarised networks that further fuelled the often violent conflict between existing temple networks, especially the anti-clerical tendencies within schools such as True Pure Land and Nichiren.

These two trends of temple violence and lay devotion converged to form the foundation of the 1571 clash between Oda Nobunaga and the Enryakuji, as well as the sustained popular response. Over the course of the sixteenth century the large temples had exerted an extremely strong influence over the politics of the capital and on the increasingly violent internal struggle between True Pure Land and Nichiren.

In 1536 the Enryakuji had intervened by allying with the True Pure Land, unleashing a wave of recriminations that laid waste to the southern part of Kyoto, but also giving the temple what they believed to be an unassailable position in the city. When Oda Nobunaga was making his rise to power a few decades later, there was no way that he could avoid the decision to either accommodate or challenge the temple. His destruction of the Enryakuji made it clear that he would brook no rivals, either among the military or among the clergy. This resolve carried through to his conflict with the militarised devotees of the True Pure Land. Although the destruction of the temple was not without precedent, the ferocity of the attack sent a shockwave through the whole of Japanese Buddhism. In a letter the priest Kennyo declared Oda Nobunaga to be an enemy of the Buddha, and commanded his followers to resist him in any way they could, with the promise of salvation to those who lost their lives in the defence of the dharma. The message resonated with the faithful, who resisted for ten years with great resolve and ferocity, until the movement collapsed in 1580 with the fall of the Ishiyama fortress.

Religion and Communal Violence

Not all religious violence involved the state. Popular teachings and ritual communities often provided the spark that caused local tensions to erupt into organised violence. Some of these disputes have already been mentioned: the violent feuds between Muslim lineages in south-east China, and the internecine violence between Buddhist schools and temples in Japan. Armed Buddhists elsewhere, such as the Shaolin monks of China, could work either for or against the state, but could also use force towards entirely non-political ends, such as land disputes between monasteries. Although Buddhist militancy in both China and Korea had peaked in previous centuries, and subsequently declined in proportion to the power of the landed monasteries, it remained a sufficient threat to prompt continued official vigilance.^{^[765]}

Religion often drew the lines of conflict between communities.

Within China's shifting ethnic landscape, it was often religion that gave structure to the definition and defence of common interests. Violence was especially frequent at the boundaries of state power, where ethnic divisions were the most complex, and where vulnerable frontier communities of new settlers, miners and timber cutters turned to religious identities in order to protect and expand their interests. In the mountains of nineteenth-century Yunnan, near the Burmese border, spiralling violence between groups of Han Chinese and Hui Muslims drew heavily on the organisation both of Muslim religious communities and Han ‘incense brotherhoods'.^{^[766]} From a law and order perspective, ritual community was always a double-edged sword, since the same ritual life that held villages, lineages, guilds and other groups together also gave voice to armed struggle between rival communities.

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Source: Antony Robert, Carroll Stuart, Pennock Caroline D. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 3: AD 1500-AD 1800. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 710 p.. 2020

Organised Religious Violence

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