State Persecution of Buddhism and Religion in a Collapsing State

Rather, for members of the Buddhist clergy it was the potential violence of the state that was plainly the main worry for them, even if forced laicisation only entailed ejection from the stable world of the monastic economy rather than instant death.

A second major persecution of Buddhism had been carried out in north China in the late sixth century prior to reunification, involving such a high figure - 3 million - for persons returned to lay life that some have supposed that this represents the extension of state control over the broader manpower formerly under the command of the monasteries.^{^[672]} At all events an upheaval on this scale left a profound sense of unease, visible in anecdotes concerning Buddhist monks from the late eighth century, who patently live in fear of the authorities: it is surely significant that state agents in one such source are characterised as ‘demons'.^{^[673]} ^{^[674]} Since moreover legal process in premodern China routinely involved violence in the form of beatings, it comes as no surprise either to find that an awareness of the punishments of the law entered the Chinese Buddhist consciousness during this period.1⁹

When the axe eventually fell on Buddhism in the 840s, the effects - save in one or two outlying areas beyond the effective control of central government - were empire-wide and utterly devastating. The seriousness of the impending persecution was already underlined in 843, when the reigning emperor is said by contemporary and later sources to have killed all the priests of the foreign religion of Manichaeism present in China; the same year 300 Buddhist monks who had attempted to conceal the fact that they were not properly registered with the authorities were executed too, and further such executions followed in the next year.

In 845 the full-scale dissolution of the monasteries turned loose large numbers of now destitute monks, who in some cases resorted to brigandage and even murder. But with the death of the persecuting emperor, the year after that saw a complete reversal of policy, and the execution of those Taoist priests who had encouraged the suppression of their rivals. Any return to the previous normality, however, seems to have been slow, and was in any case overtaken in the 880s by rebellions signalling not simply the collapse of the dynasty but also the extinction of the entire aristocratic social order that had endured for centuries, thus removing a group that had provided important patronage for monastic forms of religion. Now our sources suggest that Daoists too, whose religion had been supported as the family cult of the ruling house, felt a new vulnerability: only a miracle is said to have saved the birthplace of Laozi, the alleged dynastic ancestor and founder of the religion, from destruction by rebel troops, while some leaders in this tradition seem to have preferred employment by the independent generals who were now busy carving out their own territories as the dynasty entered its death throes, though sometimes both general and magus came to violent ends even before the murder of the last emperor in the Tang line.^{^[675]}

For the tenth century our transmitted sources, much edited and often concerned to emphasise norms over realities, are augmented by a store of manuscripts from Dunhuang in the far north-west, some of them written long before they were eventually concealed at the start of the following century. It is here that we find Buddhist texts excluded from the transmitted canon that show how, even by the time of their composition in the sixth century, Daoist notions of violent apocalypse had been absorbed by Chinese Buddhist writers; one or two composed at a point much closer to the end of the tenth century clearly maintain this negative outlook as well, though given the violence of the age it is mildly surprising not to find more accounts of desperate peasants greeting the arrival of a self-proclaimed messianic deliverer than we might expect, even if one rising of 920 has attracted some attention for reasons that will be explained below. The presence of violently eschatological literature in a monastic centre never marked by any form of popular rising, even though by the tenth century it had been through foreign conquest and eventual liberation, suggests that such texts were far from marginal, and were in fact very widely diffused.^{^[676]} We also encounter less unexpectedly illustrated materials used in popular education wherein the magical power of the Buddha's immediate acolytes to quell demons is emphasised.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

State Persecution of Buddhism and Religion in a Collapsing State

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