Religion and Rebellion in China after Antiquity

Given the level of violence that had come to characterise scripture, the repeated outbreaks of armed rebellion by religious groups from late antiquity onward are not in themselves difficult to understand, even when the precise nature of the ideas animating these uprisings is sometimes subject to debate.

For the association between rebellion and religious leaders had already had and was to continue to have a very long history in China. This phenomenon has prompted much discussion, especially by scholars interested in popular resistance to authority, and not all would see popular belief even in the arrival of new ages as inherently a challenge to the existing order. The association was frequent enough, however, that governments generally took no chances and extirpated any sect they deemed possibly tinged with such beliefs, thereby perhaps precipitating pre-emptive acts of defiance from those who expected persecution in any case. Already in the sixth century, however, it is possible to see that an association between violence and religion did not have to hinge on eschatological beliefs of any kind. In the middle of the sixth century the explicitly pro-Buddhist dynasty of the Liang collapsed with remarkable suddenness after apparently instituting a stable peace in the area that had lasted several decades, and in the internecine warfare that followed the mid-Yangzi region saw the emergence of a powerful military leader probably of non-Chinese origin who adopted a semi-clerical Buddhist persona. It may be that the cohesive potential of new, more universal Buddhist beliefs allowed hill peoples to compete militarily with the Chinese of the plains, in like fashion to rebel groups in the uplands of Burma in the late twentieth century asserting a Christian identity.^{[665] [666] [667]} Certainly one late seventh­century revolt of a non-Chinese group seems to have involved a Buddhist element.