Regulation and Repression of Religion

These new states had strong but not uniform policies towards religion. Each set up structures to support ecclesiastical allies, and moved to liquidate religious threats. The identification of friends and enemies, and the choice of when to use violence reflected the different configurations of religious interest on the ground, tempered particularly by the experience of dynastic founders.

China

In China, the Ming became the prototype of the Confucian ideology state. Not only more centralised and more administratively ambitious than any preceding Chinese regime, it was also more overtly devoted to the social and political thought known in retrospect as Neo-Confucianism. Rather than a single school, this tradition represented a wave of exploration into new areas, such as metaphysics and the nature of the heart-mind, that had been absent from the original writings of Confucius and his contemporaries. These innovations are sometimes characterised as a Confucian adoption of Daoist metaphysics, but as a political philosophy it was, above all else, an impetus to social ordering and moral education.

The resurgence of Confucianism was also a political response to two centuries of Jurchen (1115-1234) and Mongol rule. Confucian learning had not been suppressed as such, but it did suffer the ascendance of other intellectual and clerical traditions, such as Tibetan Buddhism, which were visibly foreign. In a thinly veiled appeal to Han chauvinism, Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-98) aggressively promoted a return to proper norms as a remedy for the perceived failings of the Mongol Yuan. On the eve of proclaiming the new dynasty, Zhu released an open declaration condemning Mongol rule as a perversion of the natural laws of social hierarchy. The problem was not that the rulers were foreign, but that they had ‘ceased to follow ancestral instruction and ruined moral norms'.

Such statements were to a certain degree a propaganda exercise aimed at reassuring the Confucian scholarly elite that they would regain the status they had lost under Yuan rule. But they were not simply empty rhetoric. Once in power, the Ming would take very seriously both the moral precepts of Confucianism and the promotion of a newly intrusive role for the state in inculcating among the commoners the virtues of filial piety. Confucian orthodoxy was written into every level of government, most notably the new legal code, which in the name of order and hierarchy made the state newly responsible for enforcing the proper performance of such seemingly personal matters as ritual mourning for deceased relations.

Ming policy towards other religions was theologically tolerant but ruthless against any hint of religious organisations that might be gathering indepen­dent power. The founding Ming emperor aggressively persecuted the leaders of the Isbah rebellion (1357-66), a decade-long clash between Muslim lineage militias in the south-east, and rescinded the tax exemptions that Buddhist and Daoist monasteries had enjoyed under the Mongols, but stopped short of seizing property. He was openly critical of the development of Tibetan Buddhism, but never banished the lamas from court. Later emperors were known to favour particular religions, but generally not persecute others. Enamoured with Daoism to the point that would eventually prove fatal (due to a medical regimen), the Ming Jiajing Emperor (r. 1521-67) revoked imperial patronage of the Buddhist temples and laicised monks, but even these campaigns did not extend to mass violence against the Buddhist sangha or ordinary believers.^[747]

Instead, the Ming state reserved its deepest loathing and strictest punish­ments for expressions of religious dissent.

Korea

Choson Korea reflected the Ming's attitudes towards religious orthodoxy, but retained some important differences. The fourteenth-century shift in Korea's loyalty from the Mongols to the Ming was accompanied by a number of internal transformations including the adoption of Chinese legal practices and an enthusiastic acceptance of the aggressive and holistic interpretation of state Confucianism.

On the other hand, there was less sense of an internal crisis, either from Buddhism or from the looming threat of hidden heresy within. No less than the Ming, Choson Korea was committed to ideological orthodoxy. As it did with much else of the Chinese administrative system, the Choson accepted the Ming's laws as the basis for its own code (administrative handbooks such as the early nineteenth-century Mongminsimso referenced both Ming and Choson statutes). Korean law in this way came to include similar prohibitions on witches, shamans and the possession or reproduction of heretical texts. These provisions were employed against individuals in accusations of various types of sorcery, and were among the legal weapons used to suppress the spread of Catholicism during the early nineteenth century.^[751] However, in contrast to China, the threat of mass violence of or against religion would not materialise in Korea until the Tonghak Rebellion of the late nineteenth century.

Japan

The military regime of the Ashikaga shoguns maintained close relations with the Ming court, and certain schools of neo-Confucian thought, particularly those that supported the promotion of ethical norms or policies of social structuring, took root in Japan during the early modern period.

More important than direct ideological or political ties, what Japan shared in common with the early Ming was the experience of political instability. The Ashikaga shogunate itself was riven by conflict between military clans, culminating ultimately in four decades of civil war at the end of the sixteenth century. Emboldened by the patronage of powerful clans, and their status as protectors of the nation (as illustrated in the mobilisation of Buddhist prayers to ward off the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century), large landed temples frequently became involved in both political and military struggles. Their confidence would backfire spectacularly in 1570, when the defeated rivals of Oda Nobunaga (1534-82), who was quickly becoming the dominant power in the central region, sought refuge at the Enryakuji temple complex on Mount Hiei near Kyoto. When the well-defended temple refused to surrender the men, Oda Nobunaga returned with 30,000 soldiers and embarked on a week of slaughter. All the priests, as well as the lay population, were hunted down and beheaded, countless cultural treasures were destroyed or looted and every structure was burned to the ground. The bloodshed did not end there. Although the unprecedented level of violence seen in the destruction of Enryakuji had tamed the ambitions of most other monasteries (the 1585 destruction of Negoroji by military successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537-98), drove home the lesson), it was one of the factors that stoked the outrage of militarised lay Buddhists, particularly the sect called True Pure Land (Jodoshinshu). Driven by a combination of political, eco­nomic and religious concerns, and aided by rival clans, these popular armies would manage to keep Oda Nobunaga at bay for the next ten years.

The institution of state policy in the subsequent Tokugawa shogunate reveals the importance of lessons learned from this period of instability. Even more than in Korea, Buddhist temples in Tokugawa Japan were subjugated by a combination of strict regulation and economic patronage. The many schools of Buddhism were forced to stop their tradition of internal fighting - in 1606 the losers of a theological debate (such events had been banned due to their tendency to devolve into violence between schools) were punished by having their eyes, noses and other parts mutilated. Once subjugated, the temples would remain loyal to the regime until its collapse in 1868. Part of this loyalty was the assurance that temples would serve as community watchdogs against unruly popular religious movements - counted among these were the more difficult to control sects of salvationist Buddhism such as the Fuju-fuse school of Nichiren, which was banned in 1669, and especially the Catholics.^[752]

Responses to Catholic Mission

The Catholic powers of the Iberian Peninsula came to East Asia seeking both commerce and converts, and their arrival represented a combination of threats and opportunities that both energised and destabilised the region. The high value of seaborne trade shifted power to coastal regions and brought the new availability of weapons and financing to bear on internal struggles. The Iberians also brought new ideas, particularly Christianity. Like their guns and gold, the ideas of the new arrivals became a problem when they threatened to exacerbate existing instability.

The strong drive to exert control over religion shaped the political reaction to the arrival of Iberian Catholicism. Portuguese Jesuits reached East Asia from established bases in Goa and Malacca, arriving first on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. After a period of acclimatisation (including intense study of the Japanese language), they quickly made friends in the courts of regional daimyo and many converts among the samurai, who as a class were themselves deeply influenced by schools of Buddhism, particularly Zen. In 1560 the Jesuit priest Gaspar Vilela visited the Ashikaga shogun and was granted permission to spread the Catholic faith within the realm. However, the initial success of the Jesuits was cut short by a deepening of the civil war, including a conflict between their Kyushu patrons and the emerging hege­mony of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had developed his own dislike for militarised religion as a result of experience fighting the armed Buddhist laity. After an initial promise of tolerance (which may have been a ruse to ensure safe passage through Christian territory in Kyushu), Hideyoshi turned violently against the Catholics. Beyond the daimyo and samurai elites, the campaign against the Catholics reached down to the populace, many of whom had themselves been converted by force and who were now forced to apostatise by defacing a picture of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus. Whether for piety or out of fear of repercussions, this act was clearly one that could be deeply troubling. As one interrogator described it, ‘Old men and women when made to tread upon the image of Deus get agitated and red in the face; their breath comes in rough gasps, sweat pours off of them.'^[753] Those who refused to apostatise were subject to more literal torture, including crucifixion. This campaign against the Christians overlapped with the 1638 Shimabara Rebellion, during or after which roughly 37,000 primarily Catholic rebels were killed. To root out any resurgence of Catholic loyalties among the populace, the Tokugawa regime entrusted the newly rehabilitated Buddhist sangha with registering each household as temple parishioners.

After their ejection from Japan, the Jesuits became established in China, an adventure that ended in conflict but notably without the violence seen in Japan. In 1577 a contingent of forty-two priests reached the Portuguese trading enclave of Macao. As they had done in Japan, they immediately set about learning the local language and culture and cultivating converts among the elite. The Jesuit fathers, who in China styled themselves as Confucian scholars, were recognised as bearers of a new kind of learning, but were also prized for their mastery of various practical sciences such as map making and astronomy, as well as for their connection to the lucrative galleon trade. Again as in Japan, the newcomers concentrated on the ultimate ambition of converting the emperor, and forged political ties that actually survived the transition from Ming to Qing. When crisis did come, it was largely as a result of infighting between orders, particularly the Spanish-backed Franciscans and Dominicans,

who objected to the accommodation the Jesuits had made to Confucian ritual in the lives of Chinese Catholics. Dismayed both by Catholic infighting and by two papal decisions that disallowed Chinese Catholics from practising the funerary and reverential rites that Ming and Qing law demanded of them, the Qing's Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661-1722) and Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1722-35) expelled the missionaries and banned the propagation of the faith.

Importantly, the suppression largely stopped there. In contrast both to seventeenth-century Japan and to the nineteenth-century persecution of Catholics in Korea, Christians in Ming and Qing China were not system­atically targeted for suppression or forced apostasy. Although many among the literati viewed Christian teachings to be in the mould of perverse religion, the government seemed to feel that the unruly element was the priests rather than the religion itself.^{[754] [755]} Once the missionaries had been ejected, many Christian communities were left untouched, experiencing only occasional harassment by visiting officials. There was no mass purge of Chinese Catholics, and certainly nothing comparable to the enduring Tokugawa obsession with rooting out underground cells of hidden Christians. The reason for this difference lies both in the history of diverse ethnic religious communities in the sprawling polity and more fundamentally in the fact that while the larger and more confident Qing regime resented the arrogance of foreign missionaries, and was deeply concerned about continued Catholic disregard for the required practices of ancestor reverence, it viewed other aspects of Catholic teaching as just another form of what was generally called ‘foreign learning'. So long as its teachers could be kept under proper surveil­lance and control, the teaching of the ‘Lord of Heaven' (as the Jesuits had styled their Christian God) was not a threat to security.11