Violence against the Self, State Violence and Interpersonal Violence
Meanwhile the period of intensified doubts and regrets that marked the late sixth century also brought into sharper focus existing Chinese traditions of self-inflicted violence within religious contexts.
The most spectacular of these, already well attested in Buddhism, was the practice of self-immolation, often a public, fiery spectacle. But ritualised forms of self-harm in both Buddhism and Daoism that seem to have literally involved ‘beating oneself up' also appear in religious literature, and would appear to have become an entirely accepted form of behaviour, mentioned in passing in popular materials.11 This particular ritual seems to have disappeared eventually, though self-inflicted violence remained an important element in later religious practice. In fact the practice of austerities including forms of selfmutilation are already depicted frequently in Buddhist and Daoist sources of this period.The justifications for collective violence contained within the Buddhist tradition could also be co-opted by power holders in the mainstream of Chinese society, who were happy to adapt to their ideological needs the concept of the Wheel-Turning King, or Cakravartin. The narrative of Buddhist kingship related to this term that became established in China in the sixth century included in its scope the renunciation of violence, but only after a career of bloody conquest - a convention of particular value to the reunifier of China, Emperor Wendi of the Sui dynasty, that derived from the historical career of the Indian ruler Asoka.12
On occasion China's ruling warriors could moreover draw on the efforts of military forces composed of fighting monks. The most celebrated of these were the monks of the Shaolin Monastery at Songshan in Henan who in 621 assisted the founders of the Tang dynasty in dealing with rivals, thereby establishing an officially recognised tradition of martial arts which flourishes there in its modern forms even today.
While such direct involvement in warfare may have been unusual, the history of Buddhist monasticism in Asia includes a fair number of examples of communities of monks employing clerical or semi-clerical enforcers to protect their material interests in the face of the violence of frequent small-scale banditry. At the same time even the most eminent leaders of the clergy, both Buddhist and Daoist, were expected not only to offer up prayers but also to employ the supernatural powers attributed to them to confound any armies launched against their royal patrons, and seem to have been quite happy to do so.[668] [669] [670]The exercise of the power to harm through the control of unseen forces was at a personal level apparently seen as more the province of Daoist priests, and it was collusion between such figures and members of the imperial harem, where competition for influence over the emperor was often intense, that was always very vigilantly policed, though accusations of sorcery did sometimes rebound on the accusers.14 The military culture of the eighth century and later included its own ritual observances, which according to some sources stipulated the practice of human sacrifice, though actual records of the stipulation ever having been carried out do not appear in the historical record. 15 The existence of such sources does however help to explain the occasional outbreaks of panics in China sparked by rumours that government agents were out looking for human victims. Apparent manuscript descriptions, too, of human sacrifice within the antinomian world of Tantric texts in Tibetan have been recovered from tenth-century China, but though these materials provide ample testimony for the violent imagery that reached East Asia especially from the eighth century onwards as a result of the rise of this form of Buddhism, there is nothing to show that the manuscript in question prompted any actual homicides in the Chinese world, or indeed anywhere. In Chinese materials themselves, moreover, we find by this point no more than an account of recently converted anthropophagous monsters being ingeniously provided by the Buddha with a short-term means of continuing to feast on post-mortem human hearts.[671]