Violence in Religion
Violence in religious practice
When considering state policy towards religion, it is worth remembering that violence deeply pervaded the ideas and practices of religion itself.
Ritual settings employed a variety of violent acts and expressions: blood sacrifice to appease or entice deities, ritual punishment to exorcise demonic forces, selfmutilation to train the spirit or demonstrate moral resolve. These ritual expressions had developed alongside the canonical traditions, with euphe- mised and symbolic violence in many cases replacing earlier practices. Such was particularly the case in Japan, where blood sacrifice was tamed by a heightened sensitivity to the pollution of death. Most sects of East Asian Buddhism abhorred blood sacrifice, an influence that was sometimes felt more widely (in Japan, for example, the animal sacrifices to Confucius were often replaced with vegetable offerings). But over the long term the importance of ritual violence did not so much diminish as much as it evolved. The cresting wave of Chinese Confucianism accepted sacrifice, but the forces of political orthodoxy worked actively to ensure that blood was not spilled in the performance of dark magic or sacrifice to illicit deities.Blood sacrifice and ritual punishment had characterised China's earliest known religious practices and both remained vibrant parts of Daoist and shamanistic ritual. Exorcistic spells and rituals were a mainstay of ancient religious practice. A manuscript from second-century bce China recounts the number of specific measures to dispel demons: hurling ashes or dog faeces, yelling and ringing bells or beating the air with sticks and whips.[756] Over time, these techniques were elaborated into the demon-quelling practices of Daoism, some variations of which include not only the ritual use of weapons, such as swords and whips, but also bribes, threats and binding oaths written in blood.
Blood ritual was frequently combined with ecstatic possession by Korean and Mongolian shamans.Moralistic Confucian regimes of the new era came to view some of these traditions with disdain, but did not perceive them to be enough of a threat to ban them outright. Confucian misgivings about blood offerings did not lie in the act of killing - highest-level Confucian sacrifices traditionally included the slaughter of a cow, pig and goat - but rather in the dangerous implications of uncontrolled congress with the unruly forces of the unseen world. China had a long tradition of mirroring the forces of control and legality in the spirit realm, which it imagined as a highly bureaucratised celestial system that imposed order on a territorially demarcated terrain. Roving spirits were subjected to the rule of celestial officials. Like reformed bandits, those spirits who complied stood to be rewarded with promotion into the ranks of officialdom. The power of these concepts, as demonstrated by the role of prophylactic ritual and the political importance of the enforcer Thunder Gods, mirrored the bureaucratic order of the Chinese
Religion and Violence in East Asia imperial bureaucracy itself.13 However, while Daoist ritual masters retained a place in popular ritual and could be very influential as court prognosticators, their political influence gradually diminished over the course of the Ming and Qing, as did that of court shamans in Korea. Like political Buddhism in China and Korea, the decline of these specialised traditions represented more of a retreat than an expulsion.14
The didactic morality of Confucian ritual often demanded of some a certain amount of physical inconvenience, if not suffering. Mourning was meant to be a time of privation. As a demonstration of sincerity, the highest grades of mourning (as set forth in Ming law) required a three-year period of coarse food and clothing, and a complete denial of entertainment or physical luxury.
From this point it was a short step to physical self-harm as an expression of moral purpose. This tradition of ‘exceeding the rites', of extending the ritual requirements of personal piety to an extreme and often dangerous degree, was at once frowned upon and admired, and included elements such as baths in icy water or subsistence on grass. Moral self-violence also developed as a literary ideal. The Twenty-four Exemplars of Filial Piety (Ershisi xiao) famously depicts adult children serving their parents through such extreme acts as cooking their own flesh into medicine, but beyond this particular text, individual tales of especially sincere or harsh mourning, often culminating in the death of the mourner, were a well-worn motif in tales of filial piety, and no doubt in oral tradition as well.15Japan as well had a tradition of physical privation, but its focus was ascetic rather than moral. Buddhist monastic practice could be very physically demanding, and in the case of Zen, often featured strict masters who delivered a physical blow to a novice who lost concentration (e.g. by dozing off) during meditation. However, the purpose of these acts was less punishment and more a tool for focusing the mind, a metaphor for enlightenment itself as a violent, sudden awakening. The spartan monastic ideal (one that often deviated quite significantly from reality) itself merged well with the parallel tradition of harsh nature-based asceticism, as embodied in the practices of native religions such as Shugendo.
13 J. Lagerwey, China: A Religious State (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), pp. 63-93.
14 J. H. K. Haboush and M. Deuchler, Culture and the State in Late Choson Korea, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1999), p. 7.
15 K. N. Knapp, Selfless Offspring, Filial Children and Social Order in Early Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), pp. 137-63.
Moral Considerations
East Asian religious thought theologically explored the problems of violence itself - its moral meaning, necessity or justification, its role in cosmic cycles of destruction and rebirth, and its metaphysical existence as a universal phenomenon - and such ideas could not escape the influence of the many political and social changes of the period.
Confucian and Daoist schools of political thought explored the moral exercise of violence. Despite the differences among the two, these philosophies agreed that as a tool of statecraft, resort to violence was symptomatic of an unsustainable loss of moral authority by the ruler. Classic histories highlight the rise of violence in periods of dynastic decline, and the inescapably tragic fate of tyrannical rule. The moralist sage Mencius (approximately 385-312 bce) was the most direct in his belief that ‘the benevolent man has no enemy' (renzhe wudi), and that violence against a state, either by the people or by neighbours, was proof that the sovereign had acted against the will of Heaven. However, the rejection of state violence was not absolute. Times of instability called for a strong hand, and punishment (ba, a term that connoted both coercion and the threat if not act of violence) was an appropriate measure for subduing uncivilised people beyond the borders or the truly evil at home. Attitudes towards the necessity of violence shifted particularly during the Song dynasty (960-1279), a time when the northern borders of the country were threatened by and eventually overrun by Khitan and Jurchen invaders. Facing these challenges, scholars looked to China's own ancient past, idealising the vigorous action that strong rulers had taken to subdue the barbarians and unify the country. A theme of this scholarship, one that was echoed throughout the Ming, was the need to separate the ideal of government based on pure moral suasion from the practical need to tame the perversities of human nature.[757]A similar separation of ideals and practical governance shaped how violence was regarded within the political Buddhism prevalent in Korea and Japan. The ethical ideal of ahimsa, a prohibition against harming living beings, runs deep in Mahayana Buddhism, which views the use of violence as an act that imprints itself on the karma of the perpetrator. So stained, the violent individual becomes an incarnation of violence itself, a notion that is expressed in the beliefs about demons and ghosts who roam the underworld, unable to escape the transgressions of their own past.
However, just as with moral thought in China, Buddhism also developed theories of those circumstances in which violence was not only permissible but justified. The primary criterion for acceptable violence in Buddhism is the compassionate mind and intent of the wielder. One who injures or kills for a greater purpose, such as to pre-empt the action of one who is on the verge of committing an even greater atrocity, is free of any karmic burden. This legitimate use of violence is personified in the Tibetan-inspired tradition of wrathful deities, bodhisattvas who present a violent aspect in order to frighten the viewer into good behaviour, to ward off evil spirits or as a representation of the violent destruction of thoughts that impede enlightenment. For deities and humans alike, the duty to protect Buddhism itself supersedes all other considerations, a consideration that Chinese monks in the chaotic third and fourth centuries began to adapt into ideas about the necessary use of violence.[758] [759]A less embodied form of violence is inherent in the metaphysical exploration of universal birth and death, construction and destruction. Ideas of rise and decline were developed in early Daoist theories of cyclical time, as expressed in the interaction of yin and yang, the Five Phases (wuxing) and the Eight Trigrams (bagua). Such ideas laid a ready foundation for the reception of south and central Asian cosmologies, which were carried along with Buddhism to China in the first century ce. Especially when combined with other anxieties, this sense of cosmic foreboding could trigger unrest. Divisions in sacred time were easily interpreted as a natural point for universal rebirth and renewal, and thus of political turmoil in the human world. Calendric portents were closely observed inside and outside of the halls of power, and moments such as the repetition of the sixty-year Chinese calendar cycle were tied to religiously inspired rebellions as early as the second century. 18
Native Chinese cosmologies merged with the South Asian idea of kalpa (Ch. jie), phases of creation and renewal. These cycles of growth and decay affect the entire cosmos equally, and are felt widely in the human world: at their peak, lives are long, peaceful and meaningful; at their nadir, lives are short, violent and far from any of salvation. The idea of kalpic time was explicated in Buddhist scripture, and subject to all manner of numerological exploration.