Traditions of Violence in Chinese Religion

Tracing the persistence of violence by and against religious groups and individuals over a thousand-year period, while illuminating in itself, also raises questions about persistence, and in particular about the factors fuelling the constant repetition of violent behaviour.

By the middle of the first millennium ce we can see that the parts of East Asia that used writing in the form of Chinese had inherited substantial literary traditions describing their dealings with the unseen world, together with who knows what oral traditions on the same topic that will forever lie entirely beyond our knowledge, save through such traces of them as may perhaps be reflected in the remains of material culture. Two of the elements in the written tradition had, moreover, recently achieved a coherence that ensured that their records were subject to preservation and transmission as distinct bodies of knowledge, and these we now know as Buddhism and Daoism. The former allows us to see the extent to which the area in question was affected by developments in other parts of Asia, whereas the latter, since it drew on the accumulated lore of earlier phases within the Chinese world itself, offers evidence of the prevailing views of violence in the realms of the unseen. In both cases the religious literature considered canonical further provided normative descriptions that, together with representations in religious iconography, established for later ages at least to some degree the acceptability or otherwise of forms of violence for adherents of these traditions. Depictions of warrior gods or guardian deities capable of crushing demons did not necessarily provide role models for the conduct of the believer, but when others were demonised this may even so have had the potential for encouraging violent actions.

The texts of medieval Daoism, and the sources reflecting the earlier history on which they drew, make it quite clear that whatever the actual incidence of collective and individual violence in the world of the everyday, the unseen world was seen as riven with conflict in ways that could readily spill into and add to our immediate experience of suffering. The insurrectionary armies that had crippled the power of the house of Han, the only stable unified imperial dynasty the Chinese world had seen, in the second century ce, had consisted of ‘ghost soldiers', self-consciously identified as agents of unseen powers, and the scriptures that in the fourth century formed one of the nuclei of the future Daoist canon are equally full of ghost armies and ghost generals, their ranks now swollen by the spirits of those who had perished in the warfare of the entire era of collapse and political division.

At the same time the violence inflicted on more prominent officials in the course of these centuries resulted in judicial consequences in the unseen world for their descendants, with the ghosts of the unjustly killed capable of securing retribution in the form of inflicting illness on the living.¹ No wonder that the youngest adherents of Daoism received not a baptismal certificate but a document specifying to potential malevolent spirits the ranks of the unseen generals upon whose authority they could call, and they hoped in time to accumulate more such military forces to their name.^{^[656]} ^{^[657]} This is not to deny that the celestial bureaucracy of Daoism also contained civil officials, but simply to point out that the military, violent side of the world unseen was of the most immediate interest to ordinary believers. And the future was by no means necessarily bright, for apocalyptic visions in some texts threatened this world with an invasion of yet more terrible demon armies, composed of troops of non-Chinese origin.

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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

Traditions of Violence in Chinese Religion

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