Violence and Religion in China Reconsidered: Who Were the Demons?
Yet the narrative of the ten centuries during which organised Chinese clergy attached to a canonically defined Buddhism and Daoism had been in existence does point to some clear differences from the European experience.
At no time, for example, do we find crusades mounted against unbelievers or inquisitions imposing specific beliefs. The persecutions of Buddhism were aimed at the enforced laicisation of the monastic community. This altered the fiscal relationship of monks to the state, and if this was resisted punishment seems to have been brutal, but no attempt was made to ban their beliefs. Likewise any sign that a belief in the coming ofMaitreya implied a challenge to prevailing authority provoked ruthless suppression of the believers, but the notion of a forthcoming appearance by Maitreya was not in itself targeted for eradication; indeed, at least one ruler co-opted the notion to bolster her own imperial legitimacy.[694] The state required orthodoxy of Buddhists and Daoists, but only enforced this when its own interests were threatened; in the first instance, moreover, such enforcement was aimed at heterodox texts rather than individuals.[695] This order of priorities is spelled out instructively in the legal code of the Tang: to call down demons on another with intent to kill them could incur one to three years of penal servitude; to call down demons on the emperor or even to be an accessory in doing so resulted in execution.[696]The legal recognition of the existence of violent unseen entities who might cause harm to humans highlights the importance of demons to the outlook of the Chinese population during this span of history. However, it needs to be seen in conjunction with another aspect of the unseen world that was also important to Chinese perceptions of their situation.
Though hells might be seen as subterranean and heavens as located above our world, there was also a tendency to understand the unseen world as also existing in the same plane as ours. If one could make it to certain islands in the eastern seas, for example, one need never die.[697] If one travelled far enough westward, one would encounter a goddess.[698] A study of early attitudes towards the denizens of the dense subtropical forests of south China suggests that the very nature of their environment made it unlikely that they were human: they were animals, perhaps, or demonic spirits.[699] As for northern invaders, it was constantly stressed in later writing that the Mongol empire had arisen from out of a desert, again no fit place for human beings. In a work of 1366 it is said that because they were thus from beyond the world of light, that is why they used paper money, otherwise used by the Chinese themselves only for the dead.[700] Such a view would accord well with that taken of the Mongols by at least some Tibetans by this point.[701] That the Mongols were considered demons may explain the barbarities inflicted on them by the Red Turban rebels, though the rebels seem to have spared no one in their savagery anyhow.[702]In sum, the record shows that one of the main sources of violent behaviour in religious contexts and perhaps beyond was generated by the belief that any outsider - that is, anyone from a world unknown or unseen - might be a demon. Occasionally these unknown intruders might even be agents of the government, who came from a world very different from that inhabited by the ordinary peasantry. In any case, exposed to constant depictions of the demonic and of the need to crush any manifestation of the demonic even in human form with utter ruthlessness, the constraints that might operate in conflicts between fellow members of society could be and often were abandoned. In times of social collapse in particular, the moral teachings of China's sages bore little weight against the fears that dominated perceptions of the unseen world.
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