Religion and Violence among the People
But this signing up of doubtful popular gods on the side of law and order was not the only process at work during this period. We also find one Buddhist figure of Indian origin to some extent supplanted by a local avatar understood in terms of popular religion as a deity drawing her power from her violent death, in this case at the hands of her father.[685] The state did not have it completely within its power to civilise the religious conceptions of its subjects, who often continued to favour gods who were at the very least disruptive of good order.
Tantric Buddhism in particular allowed scope for the introduction of fierce deities who were taken up by the populace as embodiments of Chinese understandings of violence, and especially the potential for violence within the family.Religious imagery in general continued to include scenes of supernatural violence, too. Though most Song painting seems to embody qualities of unbroken serenity, a closer look reveals religious themes featuring as before the wild attacks of demon hordes on the unassailable Buddha. The violence of these materials, however, pales by comparison to those on display in cliff sculptures of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, which preserve in graphic detail the tortures of hell, drawing on the type of imagery already attested in tenth-century manuscripts and some earlier sculpture of the same date, but now presenting it unsparingly in three dimensions. Violent religious imagery was, furthermore, in all probability much more widely diffused thanks to the creation of printed ephemera, such as those depicting the immortal Zhong Kui subduing a demon by gouging out its eyes - such apotropaic prints derived from earlier painting from this period onwards seem to have been put on display very widely.[686]