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Chinese Millenarian Traditions: The Formative Age
DAVID OWNBY
TESTING THE WATERS OF FIELDWORK after years in musty archives, I ventured into the
North China countryside in 1993, researching a Republican-period sect that had
rebelled against both Nationalist and Communist authorities from the 1920s
through the 1950s. I was astonished to find that the group-part of the revival of
popular religion and popular culture in post-Mao China-was alive and well,
holding temple fairs, exorcising illnesses, copying and circulating scriptures.
Apocalyptic prophecies, cast in wholly traditional idiom, figured prominently in
these scriptures, alongside stories of the paranormal powers of the tradition's
founders and fundamentalist calls to strengthen village morality. I This discovery
was striking for two reasons. First, it suggests that fifteen years after the
introduction of Deng Xiaoping's "market-Leninism," fifty years after the Communist revolution, a century and a half after the Opium War, these apocalyptic symbols
remain relevant, at least to part of China's rural population. Second, the juxtaposition of apocalyptic prophecy with calls to strengthen "family values" suggests that
we might want to rethink our notions about the Chinese millenarian tradition and
its relationship to "mainstream" Chinese culture.
Of course, many AHR readers may have few notions about the Chinese
millenarian tradition to rethink. Traditionally, Western historians of Chinese
apocalyptic movements have tended to highlight the catalytic role of foreign
religions, be it in the many cases inspired by Maitreya, the future Buddha, or in the
most famous instance: the Christian-influenced nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion. More recent scholarship has focused instead on indigenous Chinese sources of
apocalyptic beliefs but has often presented such discourses and the groups that
embraced them as self-conscious dissenters from the mainstream." The source of
In addition to the editors and anonymous readers of the AHR, I would like to thank Kenneth Dean,
Blaine Gaustad. Barend tcr Haar, and Michael Szonyi for their assistance in the preparation of this
essay. A longer version of this essay was presented at the Sawyer Seminar "Millennium and
Millennialism: Motifs and Movements," at Yale University in November 1998. I would like to thank
Jonathan Spence and Annping Chin. discussants, as well as the members of the seminar, for their
comments.
I For a translation of these scriptures, see David Ownby, "Scriptures of the Way of the Temple of
the Heavenly Immortals." Chinese Studies in History 29, no. 3 (1996): 1-101. Several Chinese scholars,
among them Qin Baoqi, of the Qing History Institute of People's University, and Song Jun, of the
Academy of Social Sciences, arc collecting similar scriptures, and have assured me that the references
I found to the apocalypse arc by no means unique,
2 An excellent example of this scholarship is Daniel L. Overmyer, "Alternatives: Popular Religious
Sects in Chinese Society," Modern China 7 (1981): 153-90.
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both characterizations lies in a major perceived difference between Western and
Chinese millenarianism: while both secular and religious authorities in the West
disdain-and fear-apocalyptic Christian "sects," they nonetheless acknowledge
the tradition on which the sects draw, even as they insist that the sects have
distorted the common tradition. In China, the "secular" tradition of high Confucianism long identified, in China as in the West, as mainstream would seem at first
glance to have few common roots with the eruptions of Buddhist, Daoist, or
Christian millennial ferment that have punctuated Chinese history. The point of
this essay is to suggest that many strains of the several Chinese millenarian
traditions might be better viewed neither as foreign-inspired turmoil nor as
self-conscious efforts to seek out alternatives but rather as fundamentalist or
populist reactions from within some of the many strains of Chinese culture.
Why might one think so? First, recent research on a variety of millenarian
movements in China's late imperial and modern periods suggests that certain
beliefs and symbols associated with these movements were widely diffused, and that
they may have shared common base elements despite important differences in
surface orientation. For example, recent studies of the White Lotus folk Buddhist
tradition, a major source of millenarian ideas and movements in China from the
Ming period (1368-1644) to the present, have illustrated that the groups and beliefs
associated with the White Lotus were more widespread in time and space than
originally thought.' For instance, we have found evidence of groups who borrowed
elements from both the White Lotus tradition and from the Triads, the South
Chinese secret societies long thought to trace their roots to ethno-political
opposition to the Manchus, suggesting that both traditions were more flexible than
previously believed.' The most recent research on the Triads, moreover, traces their
origins to a "dernonological messianic paradigm," which Triad founders adopted
from oral apocalyptic traditions.> Even the Taiping Rebellion, once thought to be
an exemplary illustration of the explosive power of Christianity loosed from
constraints of the Christian church and Western institutions, is now interpreted
through the lens of Chinese popular religion." Although no one has yet brought
3 Classic English-language sources on the White Lotus are Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in
China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven, Conn., 1976); and Daniel L. Overmyer, Folk
Buddhist Religion: Dissenting Sects in Late Traditional China (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), which remain
valuable. To these should be added Barend J. ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious
History (Leiden, 1992), although the point of Haar's work is to illustrate that there was in fact no
self-conscious "White Lotus tradition" outside the paranoid imagination of the Chinese imperial state.
r find Haar's argument persuasive but continue to use "White Lotus" until scholars in the field can
agree on a suitable substitute. The extent of the complex of Northern Chinese popular religious
networks, of which "White Lotus" groups were a part, is illustrated by much recent Chinese literature,
for example Ma Xisha and Han Bingfang's massive Chinese Popular Religion [Zhongguo minjian
zongjiaoshi] (Shanghai, 1992).
4 See David Ownby, "The Heaven and Earth Society as Popular Religion," Journal ofAsian Studies
54, no. 4 (1995): 1023-46; Zhou Yumin and Shao Yong, History of China's Secret Societies [Zhongguo
banghui shi] (Shanghai, 1993),96-121.
5 Barend J. ter Haar, Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads: Creating an Identity (Leiden, 1998),
particularly chaps. 6 and 7.
" For a brilliant essay on the Christian influence, see Philip A. Kuhn, "Origins of the Taiping Vision:
Cross Cultural Dimensions of a Chinese Rebellion," Comparative Studies in Society and History 19, no.
3 (1977): 350-66. Important reinterpretations stressing the importance of popular religion include
Rudolf G. Wagner, Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion
(Berkeley, Calif., 1982); Robert P. Weller, Resistance, Chaos and Control in China (Seattle, 1994),
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these recent reinterpretations together in a careful manner, it seems highly likely
that once we do so, we will find shared core elements.
Second, another body of recent research, this time on China's early medieval
period (roughly, 200-600 CE) allows us to identify this period as the formative age
of China's millenarian traditions and the likely source of many of the elements we
find in the late imperial and modern millenarian movements. The early medieval
period, the focus of this essay, was an apocalyptic age par excellence, marked by
wars, foreign invasions, famines, epidemics, and-unsurprisingly-apocalyptic
prophecies and rebellions, framed and fueled by the contemporaneous religious
revolution in which both Daoism (often written "Taoism") and Buddhism rose to
prominence. Unlike the late imperial and modern periods, when, with rare
exceptions, apocalyptic ideas circulated only among the non-elite or the marginally
literate, the early medieval discourse touched emperor and cultural elite, as well as
ordinary believers. Examination of the formative period will thus lend precision to
my characterization of millenarian discourse as a fundamentalist or populist
reaction.
Few scholars of late imperial or modern Chinese popular movements have
afforded much attention to this period. Most of us have labored, directly or
indirectly, to link popular movements to the great Communist revolution of the
mid-twentieth century, a task that does not seem to require such a "great leap
backward." Moreover, the scholarship on the early medieval period is written in a
Sinological voice with which many North American modernists are unfamiliar.
However, as secret societies and popular religious groups preaching apocalyptic
messages emerge to fill the void left by the Chinese Communists' retreat from the
front lines of social engagement, an understanding of the roots of China's
millenarian experience becomes important even for students of modern China and
perhaps the modern world in general. Although a specialist in early medieval China
would write a very different essay, I hope the one that follows will begin to make
the formative period of Chinese millenarianism available to nonspecialists.
THE EARLY MEDIEVAL PERIOD, when the diverse elements that constitute the Chinese
apocalyptic coalesced for the first time, was a four-centuries-long interregnum
(known as the Period of Division, the Six Kingdoms Period, and the Period of the
Northern and Southern Dynasties) between two great, long-lived Chinese empires,
the Han (202 BCE-220 CE) and the Tang (618-906).7 But if "interregnum" suggests
a return to business as usual, it is hardly appropriate: the political, social, and
cultural crises triggered by the collapse and fall of the Han were as profound as
chaps. 3-6; and Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (New York,
1996).
7 There is at present no authoritative single-volume introduction to the early medieval period in any
Western language. Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China (Berkeley, Calif., 1950), remains valuable, as
do several essays in Etienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy (New Haven, Conn., 1964).
Charles Holcombe, In the Shadow of the Han: Literati Thought and Society at the Beginning of the
Southern Dynasties (Honolulu, 1994), is a useful overview, based on recent Chinese and Japanese
sources.
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those that have accompanied China's confrontation with the West in the modern
era. Politically, China had no unified central government for more than four
hundred years. North China fell prey to repeated invasions and occupations at the
hands of nomadic peoples from the north and northwest, who founded a series of
shorter or longer-lived dynasties. The Chinese heirs to the Han throne fled south of
the Yangzi River, where they set up a series of short-lived, unstable regimes. Many
of these states, weak and at risk, increased the tax burden on the rural population.
Rebellions were frequent. Foreign invasion, civil war, and rebellion had demographic consequences-famines and epidemics as well as large-scale and frequent
displacements of the population.
Wars and population movement also had cultural dimensions. The non-Chinese
conquerors from the north brought their own culture as well as serving as a conduit
for the large-scale importation of Buddhism. The Chinese, as they fled south, came
into increased contact with what are now considered "minority ethnic groups" but
which were at that point full-fledged residents of the areas. Indeed, the entire
period, despite or perhaps because of the movement, uncertainty, and cultural
conflict that characterized it, was also an era of great cultural experimentation and
creativity. The emergence of Buddhism and Daoism as institutionalized religions is
only one part of this cultural creativity-albeit an extremely important one-but
since Daoism and Buddhism supplied much of the vocabulary for the apocalyptic
discourse of the period, I will examine the story of the apocalypse through the lens
of the social history of religion, giving only passing mention to the other elements
that should be included in a comprehensive study of early medieval Chinese
millenarianism.
Yet I can only begin to do justice to the remarkable wealth of recent research on
the social history of early medieval Chinese religion. Over the past few decades,
scholars have fundamentally transformed our understanding of the early history of
Daoism, and have launched the study of early medieval Buddhism in important new
directions as well. Once thought of as an alternative, mystical tradition in which
Confucians sought refuge from the pressures of office, Daoism is now more often
than not depicted as China's indigenous higher religion." Scholars can begin to
write the theological, ecclesiastical, and social history of early medieval Daoism in
a way that would have been impossible thirty years ago. Buddhism, which entered
China at the beginning of the period under examination and left its richest written
record anywhere in the Chinese language, has been extensively studied. However,
much older scholarship has focused on Buddhism rather than China, seeking to
judge the accuracy of the translation (in both literal and symbolic sense) of the faith
from Indian to Chinese soil, a process that has privileged those texts that seem to
have best preserved their original Indian nature. There exists, however, a huge body
of Buddhist literature, composed (rather than translated) in Chinese in China,
K This reevaluation began with the posthumous publication of Henri Maspcros research. in
Melanges posthumes sur les religions et l'histoire de la Chine (Paris, 1(50). In English. see Maspero,
Taoism and Chinese Religion (Amherst, Mass" 1(81), Isabelle Robinets Taoism: Growth of 0 Religion
(Stanford, Calif., 1997) provides a detailed survey of the development of the Daoist religion. Steven
Bokenkarnp's Early Daoist Scriptures (Berkeley, Calif., 19(7) is an essential companion volume. Anna
K. Seidel, "Chronicle of Taoist Studies in the West, 1950-1990," Cahiers dcxtreme-Asic 5 (19H9):
223~347, is an essential historiographic guide,
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examples of which were often expunged from the canon and dismissed as
"apocrypha" by medieval Chinese Buddhists and later scholars alike.? Happily,
these sources present a rich vein of information on early medieval apocalyptic
discourse. In the following synthesis, based almost entirely on secondary literature,
I take pains to recount the histories of early medieval Daoist and Buddhist
millenarianism in two voices, that of the elite, who sought to build and defend an
orthodoxy, and that of the more peripheral or popular, who saw in apocalyptic
symbols powerful expressions of both rage and promise.
IF AN EARLIER GENERATION OF DAOIST SCHOLARSHIP began with Laozi and Zhuangzi,
classic figures from China's axial age, today's scholars more often than not take
Zhang Daoling as their point of departure. 10 Zhang was a faith healer, visionary,
and religious innovator who founded a Daoist church-the Way of the Celestial
Masters-in western China during the waning years of the Han dynasty, following
a religious vision he experienced in 142 CEo The church functioned as a genuine
theocracy, filling the void created by the fall of the Han and enrolling hundreds of
thousands of members over several decades. The church lost its theocratic character
in the third century when its leaders responded to a call from a Han successor
regime to establish a mutually beneficial alliance between church and state.
Thereafter, the influence of the Celestial Masters began to spread throughout
China and to compete with Buddhism and with popular cults for the allegiance of
both elites and masses.
The spread of Celestial Masters Daoism toward the south sparked two waves of
revelation, which produced much of the corpus of scripture necessary to any
institutionalized religion. The first wave, known as the Shangqing ("upper purity")
texts, occurred between 365 and 370 in the milieu of the wealthy southern
aristocracy, and was to some extent a reaction, from within a common tradition,
against northern Celestial Masters' attempts to define and impose a new orthodoxy.!' From a social perspective, Shangqing texts, written by and for a consciously
elitist social class, replace much of the communal, ecclesiastical orientation of the
original Celestial Masters with an intellectualized, interiorized approach, even
while maintaining a common religious vocahulary. The second wave, known as the
Lingbao ("precious jewels") texts, again a product of the leisured southern
aristocracy, appeared at the turn of the fifth century and represented a renewed
4 See Michel Strickrnann, Mantras et mandarins: Le bouddhisme tantrique en Chine (Paris, 1996); and
Robert Buswell, Jr., cd., Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha (Honolulu, 1990).
III For an introduction to Zhang Daoling and the Celestial Masters, see Robinet, Taoism: Growth of
a Religion, 53-77; and Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 1-6. 29-185. Terry F. Kleeman, Great
Perjection: Religion and Ethnicitv in a Chinese Millennial Kingdom (Honolulu, 1998), offers an
interesting view of this region and period as well, focusing on the Lis, a family of Ba ethnicity in Eastern
Sichuan, who were early followers of the Celestial Masters and who established their own independent
state, as did the Zhangs.
liOn the Shangqing revelations, see Michel Strickrnann, "The Mao-shan Revelations: Taoism and
the Aristocracy:' T'oung-pao 63 (1977): 1-64; Strickmann. Le taotsme du Mao Chan: Chronique d'une
revelation (Paris, 198 I); Isabelle Robinct, Taoist Meditation: The Mao-shan Tradition of Great Purity
(Albany, N. Y., 1993); Robinet, La revelation du Shangqing dans l'histoire du taoisme (Paris, 1984); and
Robinet, Taoism: Growth of a Religion. 114-48.
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focus on church building-attracting members and regulating their activities.'?
Lingbao texts incorporate extensive, if not always sophisticated, borrowings from
Buddhism, including the Buddhist emphasis on universal salvation. Lingbao texts
also focus on ritual, and they succeeded in establishing the basic contours of the
Daoist liturgy as practiced down to the present day. Efforts to bring order to the
texts produced by these revelations, as well as to earlier texts claimed by the Daoist
church, continued throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, producing an initial
organization of the Daoist pantheon, as well as the first version of the Daoist canon,
the massive work whose recent study is the basis for much of this overview.!Church building and reform continued as well, representing the social mission of
the Daoist church, though as will be explained below, such efforts had mixed results.
References to the apocalypse are found throughout the period and across the
entire range of the Daoist experience, even if the central focus of the original
Celestial Masters church was not millenarian. Believers were offered membership
in a new community through the agency of the church and were guided toward
physical well-being and perhaps even immortality through confession of sins in
conformity with church directives. Nonetheless, the movement did not want for
apocalyptic undertones. Church founder Zhang Daoling's original vision was of
Laozi, depicted in Daoist texts of the Han and Six Dynasties periods as a god who
descends, messiah-like, at various critical points in China's history, generally to
assist a sage-king to found a new dynasty. The crisis of the Han decline was
described as a fall from a past golden age ("high antiquity") to the current
disheartening state ("low antiquity"), an era when the "stale emanations of the six
heavens" had supplanted the originally pure heavenly breaths.t- Celestial Masters
adepts were characterized as "seed people," a Daoist elect saved through the good
works of the Celestial Masters church, who would in turn repopulate a new world
purged by the disasters of the "stale breaths." If the primary emphasis among early
Celestial Masters was on church building and religious practice, it is nonetheless
obVIOUS that the elements of discourse were in place to permit an evolution toward
a more stridently apocalyptic stance.
Apocalyptic references are more abundant in the Shangqing and Lingbao
scriptures (in part, simply because there are vastly more texts attached to these
currents), although it is often difficult to sort out precisely what is intended by
passages taken from their texts, or to situate the implications of these passages in
their broader theological or ecclesiastical contexts. Texts from both traditions,
which, again, represent efforts to elaborate the Celestial Masters legacy from
within, contain many prophecies of cyclical world renewal, the end of the present
cycle to be marked by disasters (fire, flood, illness); both sets of scriptures likewise
provide concrete dates for the end of the current world, calculated according to the
12 On the Lingbao revelations. see Robinet, Taoism: Growth of a Religion, 149-83; Bokenkamp, Early
Daoist Scriptures, 373-438; and Steven Bokenkamp, "Sources of the Ling-Pao Scriptures," in Michel
Strickmann, ed., Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R. A. Stein II (Brussels, 1983), 434-86.
'3 See Ofuchi Ninji, "The Formation of the Taoist Canon," in Holmes Welch and Anna Seidel, eds.,
Facets of Taoism (New Haven, Conn., 1979),253-68.
'4 See Rolf A. Stein, "Religious Taoism and Popular Religion from the Second to the Seventh
Centuries," in Welch and Seidel, Facets of Taoism, 65.
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cyclic, sexagenary, Chinese calendar.'> Lingbao texts, for example, gave such dates
as 382 or 442 cs, and historical records lead us to believe that traumatized groups
did indeed await the end of the world on those dates." Many texts evoke as well
mysterious beings who intervene to judge and save humankind, or more precisely,
a select few. The most frequently mentioned of these figures is Li Hong, the name
given in texts of this period to Laozi in his messianic posture, who would appear to
secure the salvation of the seed people."? It is clear that the apocalyptic vocabulary
of the original Celestial Masters has been adopted and enlarged.
Yet, once again, these apocalyptic references often seem to be rhetorical nods,
presumably to an audience believed by the texts' authors to be receptive, and to
have been phrased in such a way as to reduce the explosive potential of such images.
Lingbao scriptures, for example, on occasion are presented as mantic texts, to be
chanted so as to ward off the disasters associated with the apocalypse:
Whenever the cycles of heaven and earth come to their end, you should practice retreats,
presenting incense and reciting this scripture ... When the ruler of the kingdom meets with
disaster and the rebellious take up arms in the four quarters, you should practice retreats,
presenting incense and reciting this scripture . " When pestilential diseases spread and
mortals die or fall ill you should also practice retreats, presenting incense and reciting this
scripture. IX
The tone of this passage is certainly consistent with the Lingbao effort to provide
universal salvation, but the force of the apocalypse is somehow diminished if it can
be averted through chanting.
Shangqing scriptures preserve their elitist orientation even in their most apocalyptic mode, which gives yet another interesting spin on their eschatological vision.
The "seed people," for example, are often defined in Shangqing texts as "Those
born with azure bones, who therefore are possessed with supernatural powers and
may join with the Perfected."!" Similarly, while Shangqing texts hold out the
promise of salvation to all who physically possess the scriptures, they quickly add
that texts were to be transmitted "no more than three times every seven hundred
years," and adepts were warned not to "reveal the existence of this text to the
untrustworthy corpses."20
Upon reflection, it may not be surprising that the Daoist establishment during
this period was ambivalent about its own millenarian message. Both Shangqing and
Lingbao revelations can be seen as top-down visions animated by the ultimate
desire to reform and channel a powerful but uncodified socio-religious movement
(the Celestial Masters and its similar, associated forms). The immediate problem
facing church leaders appears to have been one of control rather than mobilization.
From the point of view of church organization, apocalyptic fears, while useful in
See Nathan Sivin, "Chinese Conceptions of Time," Earlham Review 1 (1966): 82-92.
Robinet, Taoism: Growth of a Religion, 162.
17 On Li Hong, see Anna K. Seidel, "The Image of the Perfect Ruler in Early Taoist Messianism:
Lao-tzu and Li Hong," History of Religions 9, nos. 2-3 (1969-70): 216-47; and Seidel, "Taoist
Messianism," Numen 31, no. 2 (1984): 161-74.
IS Cited in Bokenkarnp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 429.
19 Cited in Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 349.
20 Cited in Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 351-52.
15
II>
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drawing people toward the church, surely risked at the same time pushing the
church toward close association with a dangerous eschatology.
Why, then, include apocalyptic messages at all? One major Western scholar of
the period, noting that the elites associated with both Shangqing and Lingbao texts
were southern aristocrats under siege of a sort by northern Celestial Masters, has
interpreted their apocalyptic tone as the expression of a form of relative deprivation.>' Looking outside the elite Daoist tradition to more peripheral texts and
movements, it seems equally likely that these were the source of the pressure to
include apocalyptic messages in orthodox texts. To fail to do so would have been to
lose credibility.
Indeed, in the larger Daoist (or proto-Daoist) context, the apocalyptic stance of
the Celestial Masters and its later systematizers appears quite tame. Let us start by
examining certain events occurring around the time of the original Celestial
Masters movement. First and most spectacular was the huge rebellion associated
with the Way of the Great Peace (also known as the Yellow Turbans, for their
headgearj.F This uprising, which exploded in 184 CE in eastern China (the modern
Shandong-Henan region), built on decades of simmering discontent and abortive
movements and clearly shared many elements with the Celestial Masters (indeed,
the two are often confused in traditional accounts). Zhang Jue, leader of the
rebellion, was, like Zhang Daoling, a faith healer, and he ordered his followers to
confess their sins as did the Celestial Masters. Zhang apparently also sought to
build a theocratic organization like that of Zhang Daoling and his descendants. The
god worshiped by the rebels was the Yellow Emperor, a mythical figure who had
become closely identified over the course of the Han Dynasty with Laozi, both of
whom were worshiped in popular as well as elite cults.P The rebels seem to have
drawn inspiration from the Classic of Great Peace, a revealed text that had
circulated for decades under a variety of titles, generally intended for the
edification of the emperor. Certain elements of this text are found in Celestial
Masters' writings as wcll.>' Like later Daoist texts, the rebels calculated a precise
date for the arrival of the apocalypse-the jiazi year (184), the first year of a
sexegenary cycle. The graphs for the two characters jia and zi were omnipresent in
the regions where the rebels held sway, traced in white clay as testimony to
believers' faith in the imminent millennial renewal." The main difference is that,
21 See Michel Strickrnann, "On the Alchemy of Tao Hung-ching," in Welch and Seidel, Facets of
Daoism, 11\6-1\7. Seidel endorses this view in "Taoist Messianism," 172.
22 Major sources on this rebellion include Howard S. Levy, "Yellow Turban Religion and Rebellion
at the end of the Han," Journal of the American Oriental Society 76, no. 4 (1956): 214-27; Paul Michaud,
"The Yellow Turbans," Monumenta Serica 17 (1958): 47-116; Rolf A. Stein, "Rernarques sur les
mouvements du taoisme politico-religieux au n- siecle ap. J.c.," T'oung-pao 50 (1963): 1-78.
2.1 The cult was called Huang-Lao Daoism. For an introduction, see Robin D. S. Yates, Five Lost
Classics: Tao, Huang-Lao, and Yin-Yang in Han China (New York, 1997).
24 On the Classic of Great Peace, see Max Kaltenrnark, "The Ideology of the T'ai-p'ing ching." in
Welch and Seidel, Facets of Taoism, 19-52; Barbara Kandel, Taiping ling: The Origin and Transmission
of the 'Scripture on General Welfare'-The History of an Unofficial Text (Hamburg, 1979); B. J.
Mansvelt-Beck, "The Date of the Taiping Jing," T'oung-pao 66, nos. 4-5 (191\0): 149-82; Jens Petersen,
"The Early Traditions Relating to the Han Dynasty Transmission of the Taiping jing, " Parts 1 and 2,
Acra Orientalia 50 (191\9): 133-71; and 51 (1990): 173-216; Petersen, "The Anti-Messianism of the
Taiping jing," Studies in Central and East Asian Religions 3 (1990): 1-41.
25 Levy, "Yellow Turban Religion," 214.
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while the Celestial Masters built a church, the Great Peace rebels built an army and
mounted an explicit if unsuccessful challenge to Han authority.
Another contemporary document is equally revealing of the broader milieu in
which the Celestial Masters built their church. This is the Classic of the Transformations of Laozi, a text that appears to have been produced by a Sichuan religious
group in some sense competing with the Zhang family Celestial Masters." The text
clearly emerges from the same common sources of inspiration that animate both the
Celestial Masters and the Great Peace rebels: Laozi is worshiped as a god who
intervenes in the world; believers are to confess their sins; some passages of the text
seem to have been inspired by the Classic of Great Peace. Yet the differences are as
important as the similarities. In the Classic of the Transformations, Laozi speaks in
the first person, delivering sermons hot to a sage-king but to the people, in direct
and unambiguous language:
Come quickly and join me ... and you will be saved from danger ... The people are
suffering, and illness is at its extreme. The starving are everywhere. I will change destiny. I
will shake the reign of the Han ... I have manifested myself many times for the sake of
salvation ... Few are those who understand me; many are those who disapprove of me.??
To all appearances, we have here a messiah in a form the mass of people can readily
identify with, seemingly unencumbered by ecclesiastical organizations or considerations, his message not easily reducible to symbolic calls for meditation and
visualization.
Over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, as elites labored to define and
elaborate the orthodox Daoist tradition, popular movements and texts of less elite
provenance kept this genuinely messianic voice very much alive. Repeated rebellions in the name of Li Hong (whom rebel leaders occasionally claimed to embody)
occurred throughout this period, alongside other uprisings that repeat many of the
same millenarian themes without necessarily calling on the figure of Li Hong.>
Texts, such as the Spirit Spells of the Abyss, appearing with great frequency from the
end of the fourth century forward (the Shangqing and Lingbao revelations occurred
toward the end of the fourth century as well) describe the scenario in gruesome, if
repetitive, detail: armies of demons, the spirits of the dead, have proliferated due
to generalized moral decay and are attacking the world through a huge variety of
disasters. The ultimate outcome is the end of the world, to be marked by a flood in
a year to be specified by prophecy. Eight years later, Li Hong will descend to save
the faithful seed people, who will live thereafter in the paradise of Great Peace.??
In this paradise, one sowing will yield nine harvests, and the human life span will be
2" See Anna K. Seidel, La divinisation de Lao Tscu dans Ie taoisme des Han (Paris, 1969); and Seidel,
"Taoist Messianism."
27 Quoted in Seidel, La divinisation de Lao Tseu, 69.
2~ On these rebellions, see Seidel. "Image of the Perfect Ruler in Early Taoist Messianism," 231 and
following; Werner Eichhorn, "Description of the Rebellion of Sun En and Earlier Taoist Rebellions,"
Mitteilungen des Instituts Fir Orientforschung 2, nos. 2 and 3 (1954): 25-53 and 463-76. On rebellions in
general during the period, see William Crowell, "Social Unrest and Rebellion in Jiangnan during the
Six Dynasties," Modern China 9 (July 1983).
2" See Christine Mollier, Une apocalvpse taoiste du Vt' siecle: Le livre des mean/a/IOns divines des
grottes abyssales (Paris, 1990), 18.
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extended to three thousand years." It is clear that although elite and popular
movements and texts share a common millenarian vocabulary, the discourse is more
often at the center of the popular versions and toward the periphery in elite
versions. (One should hasten to add nonetheless that popular Daoist discourse was
certainly not limited to millenarian concerns.)
Indeed, the stakes were high in this "dialogue," as illustrated by the career of Kou
Qianzhi (363-448), a Chinese aristocrat who fashioned a version of state Daoism
under the northern Tuoba Wei dynasty (386-534) in the early fifth century." Kou
was visited twice by the god Laozi, and received the title of "Celestial Master" from
the non-Chinese court, empowering him to exercise control over the religious
affairs of the dynasty. The Wei subsequently became the first officially Daoist state
in Chinese history, Daoist priests actually confirming the emperors in office through
the sixth century. Kou's efforts to clean up Daoist practices at the popular level met
with frustration. Kou wrote that while Laozi would indeed descend into the world
"to effect the transformation of Heaven and Earth," he (Laozi) had no patience
with the frauds who called themselves Li Hong and claimed allegiance with him:
Those fools who are deceitful without end and have all taken to disloyalty, this assembly of
run-away criminals, serfs and slaves, [who] falsely call themselves Li Hong! To think that my
person would mingle with this vulgar, stinking flesh, with these slaves, dogs, and goblins and
act the part of one of these evil rebels. These villainous impostors of today spout heresies
and destroy the orthodox writings.v
Kou Qianzhi was not the only one to vent his anger at the shenanigans of
lower-level believers and even priests. As early as the mid-third century, a Celestial
Masters text addresses a Daoist church in crisis, changed and weakened by the
displacement of church members from their original home in the west and their
dispersal throughout many regions of China. The author (supposedly Zhang Lu,
grandson of Zhang Daoling, speaking perhaps through a medium) berates his
audience:
But you, in your study of the Good, have missed the basis. You do not accept the words of
the scriptures, but rather instruct one another in deviant views, drawing near to the false and
discarding the true ... I [once] recorded all of this in a short paper containing miscellaneous
remarks on deviant texts, ordering that all such texts be eradicated. But the [local church
officials] were ineffectual and their underlings hid the [deviant] texts away so that today they
not only survive but are frequently put into practice. At present those with little learning
delight in frivolous talk. They point to the false, calling it true."
Two centuries later, Lu Xiujing (406-77), one of the main figures in the systematization of early medieval Daoism, makes similar, if even more damning charges,
noting in his jeremiad against corrupt and ignorant popular practices,
311 See Richard Shek, "Chinese Millenarian Movements," in Mircea Eliade, editor in chief, The
Encyclopedia of Religion (New York, 1987),534.
J I See Richard Mather, "K'ou Ch'ien-chih and the Taoist Theocracy at the Northern Wci Court," in
Welch and Seidel, Facets of Taoism, 103-22.
32 Quoted in Seidel, "Image of the Perfect Ruler," 242.
JJ Quoted in Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 176.
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Recently, the scriptures have been scattered, so that the counterfeit has become mixed with
the true ... Sometimes there were fabricated prefaces and explanations; in others chapters
were reversed, sentences and sections added, and [new] charts and talismans created ...
Comparing these false [texts] with the excellence [of the true texts], it seemed as if they were
written by madmen-persons lacking the inner qualities to reach the mysterious and without
any desire to seek out the Perfected-who had written [these texts based on] what they were
able to spy out [of the original scriptures], falsely taking on the name of "Daoist" in their
greedy search for incorne.>'
As these quotes illustrate, the Daoist establishment defined itself in opposition to
the practices of popular religion, even if Western studies of modern Daoism have,
until recently, tended to confuse the two. At the same time, in the early medieval
period as in later eras, Daoism absorbed elements from popular cults even while
attempting to reform them."
THE OTHER HALF of the early medieval religious revolution in China was the
introduction and Sinicization of Buddhism.> Although Buddhism was not to reach
the summit of its influence in China until the early Tang, it began to have a major
impact on Chinese society during the long Period of Division, filling the vacuum
created by the perceived failure of Confucian institutions and offering both moral
and institutional solutions to the specific dilemmas of a chaotic and insecure age.
Buddhism competed with Daoism at both the elite and popular level and attempted
to build a church where none hefore existed. Its history during this period parallels
that of Daoism in many ways. Indeed, Buddhist clerical elites borrowed certain
Daoist practices even while criticizing others (Daoists borrowed just as frequently
from the Buddhists), and at the popular level, local cults and believers drew freely
from both.>?
Still, one should not overdraw the parallels. One important difference is
institutional: the Buddhist establishment, through its monasteries, became immensely wealthy over the course of this period, and as such evoked a fundamentalist
protest (which often took on millenarian dimensions) on the part of believers who
saw in this an abandonment of the basic Buddhist mission. The Daoist establishQuoted in Bokenkarnp, Early Duoist Scriptures, 379.
On the fruitfully ambiguous relationship between Daoism and local cults, see Miyakawa Hisayuki,
"Local Cults around Mount Lu at the Time of Sun En's Rebellion," in Welch and Seidel, Facets of
Taoism, 83-102; Peter Nickerson, "Shamans, Demons, Diviners, and Taoists: Conflict and Assimilation
in Medieval Chinese Ritual Practice (c. A.D. 100-1000)," Taoist Resources 5, no. 1 (1994): 41-66; Rolf
A. Stein, "Religious Taoism and Popular Religion from the Second to the Seventh Centuries," in Welch
and Seidel, Facets of Taoism, 53-81.
Jr, Among the basic sources on the introduction of Buddhism into China are Erik Zurcher, The
Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China (Leiden,
1959); Kenneth Ch'en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey (1964; Princeton, N.J., 1972); Zenryu
Tsukamoto, A History of Early Chinese Buddhism: From Its Introduction to the Death of Hut-yuan
(Tokyo, 1985); Arthur F. Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History (1959; Stanford, Calif., 1971). Somewhat
more topical, yet still essential, are Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton,
1988); and Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese
Buddhism (Honolulu, 1994).
37 For debates at the elite level. see Livia Kohn, Laughing at the Tao: Debates among Buddhists and
Taoists in Medieval China (Princeton, N.J., 1995). See also Erik Zurcher, "Buddhist Influence on Early
Taoism," T'oung-pao 66 (1977): 84-147.
34
35
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ment was aristocratic and elitist, and on occasion it drew resentful protests fired by
populist anger, but it did not offer quite the same target. Another important
difference is situated at the textual level. Daoist elites, when they composed the
texts that would comprise the orthodox canon, were necessarily conscious of the
apocalyptic atmosphere of their society, and such consciousness is expressed in
their writings. The Buddhist elite were as concerned as their Daoist counterparts
with heterodoxy, misinterpretation of the dharma (the Buddhist law), and popular
movements that challenged monastic control, and they did all within their power to
contain such challenges. But textual production for the Buddhist clerical elite was
a process of translation of known truths rather than revelation of new ones (even
if translation is always creative and never exact, and many new truths were created
in the challenging project of translationj.v' Consequently, the apocalyptic discourse
on the Buddhist side was differently configured. Millenarian pressures came almost
exclusively from below, as lower-level priests and believers developed new readings
and applications of Indian symbols that had not been apocalyptic in Indian settings.
The Buddhist clerical elite responded by insisting on the "correct" interpretations.
For the purposes of this essay, this means that I will not trace the doctrinal history
of early Buddhism as elaborated by the clerical establishment but will focus instead
on the "creative misunderstanding" of Buddhism developed from below.
This creative misunderstanding grew quite logically out of elements introduced to
China by Indian or Serindian Buddhism."? On the surface, Indian Buddhism seems
to offer a rich wellspring of millenarian beliefs. The Indian tradition (pre-Buddhist
as well as Buddhist) conceives of time and history as cyclical, the universe
alternating between periods of "manifestation" and "nothingness," with the periods
themselves further divided into phases known as kalpas, which contain yet further
sub-periods of evolution and devolution. One typical statement of this vision notes
that world conditions attain a summit at the beginning of each period of
"manifestation": people live to be 80,000 years old, everyone is well fed, and the
world is at peace. Over time, the pendulum swings in the other direction, so that life
spans shrink to a mere ten years, and even these brief lives are plagued by disasters
and end in warfare, after which point a period of nothingness ensues before the
cycle recommences in the other direction.s? Only the very highest heavens are
immune from this cyclic decay and renewal, and are spared so as to permit the
rebirth of all sentient beings and their reappearance in the new period of
"manifestation."
Another seemingly promising element in the Indian Buddhist tradition is the
widely accepted belief that the dharma-indeed, Buddhism itself-would eventually disappear after a period of decay beginning with the death of the historical
founder of Buddhism, Sakyamuni. The indeterminacy of this period was a powerful
force behind much Buddhist prophecy, particularly as Buddhism continued to
3H There are of course limits to this generalization. See Robert F. Campany, "Buddhist Revelation
and Taoist Translation in Early Medieval China," Taoist Resources 4, no. 1 (1993): 1-30.
39 This section closely follows Erik Zurcher, "'Prince Moonlight': Messianism and Eschatology in
Early Medieval Chinese Buddhism," T'oung-pao 86, nos. 1-3 (1982): 6 and following.
40 Jan Nattier, "The Meanings of the Maitreya Myth," in Alan Sponberg and Helen Hardacre, eds.,
Maitreya: The Future Buddha (Cambridge, 1988), 27.
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prosper, outliving the earliest prophecies that the faith would disappear five
hundred years after Sakyamuni's death.
The image of Maitreya, the future Buddha, who would reign in the distant future
over a world of peace and harmony, is yet another element with obvious apocalyptic
overtones. The very role of Boddhisattvas-enlightened ones who renounce
achievement of individual salvation in order to return to the world and save
others-seems on the surface to possess considerable millenarian utility as a
messianic symbol. This is all the more true given the tradition of tathagata, in which
early kings were seen to embody the salvationist posture of the Boddhisattva. One
might add that the paradises associated with numerous Boddhisattvas could easily
be invoked in a millenarian context as well.
Despite this obvious potential, Buddhism did not gel as a millenarian force prior
to its arrival in China. The cosmic cycles were taken to function independently of
Buddhist concerns, and prophecies concerning the decline and disappearance of the
dharma did not take the cosmic cycles into account. To the extent that a "cause" for
the disappearance of the faith is identified, it seems to lie in internal divisions within
the Buddhist monastic community (the samgha), although foreign invasion is
sometimes cited as well. In any case, most of the prophecies concern the end of
Buddhism rather than the end of the world. Recent research has revealed that the
most clearly apocalyptic formulation of this prophecy, the "three stages" schema of
Buddhist decline, in which the "true dharma" is followed by the "counterfeit
dharma" and finally the "end of the dharma," originated in China."
In short, it seems clear that China fashioned a Buddhist apocalyptic, rather than
the other way round. Evidence of this, as in the case of Daoism, is found in
millenarian rebellions as well as "heterodox" texts, both of which begin to appear
in our sources from the fifth century on. Northern China witnessed most of the
rebellious activity: there were some ten "Buddhist-inspired uprisings" in the fifth
and early sixth centuries, in which unsanctioned monks, claiming to incarnate or to
represent the Maitreya, led believers to rise up against both church and state.F
Responding to one of these uprisings in 445, the emperor of one of the northern
conquest states (the Wei) ordered that all Buddhist monks in the empire be killed
and all Buddhist buildings, images, and books destroyed.v' The decree was not
carried out on this scale, but it suggests nonetheless the fear such incidents evoked.
The Buddhist apocalyptic literature of this period is even more revealing.
Representative "apocryphal" texts, such as the Consecration Sutra, the Sutra of the
White Lotus of Compassion, and the Sutra of the Extinction of the Dharma.": discuss
the imminent end of the dharma, which was a preoccupation of Buddhism in
general throughout the Period of Division. Clerical elites tried to push this
"imminent end" far into the future, and even in compromises like the Pure Land
41 See Jan Nattier, Once Upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (Berkeley,
Calif., 1991), 119-29.
42 See Kenneth Chen, "On Some Factors Responsible for the Anti-Buddhist Persecution under the
Pei-ch'ao," Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 17 (1954): 271; Kahn, Laughing at the Dao, 23.
4.1 Paul Dernieville, "Philosophy and Religion from Han to Sui," in Michael Loewe and Denis C.
Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China. Vol. I: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 22/ B.C.-220 A.D.
(Cambridge, 1986),855.
44 These are all discussed in Strickrnann, Mantras et mandarins.
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sect, believers insisted that Amitabha, who ruled over the Western Paradise, had
received a special dispensation that permitted his efficacy to endure for yet another
one hundred years. Pure Land believers thus continued to chant the name of
Amitabha and to dream of their eventual salvation in his paradise, despite their
conviction that the end was near." "Apocryphal" texts, however, focused on the
prophetic disasters that announced the beginning of the end. The texts are full of
dire warnings and frightening descriptions of the disasters and suffering that would
attend the end and afflict all but the small elite of faithful.
To cite a specific example, the Sutra of the Extinction of the Dharma argued that,
in the era following the death of Sakyamuni, a new type of devilish monk, bent on
penetrating the Buddhist community in order to destroy the dharma, would appear.
Such monks would bring the monasteries to ruin through their commercial
activities, which amounted to selling off church patrimony for personal gain.
Populist anger, fueled by lay indignation at the wealth and corruption of the
monastic establishment, runs through this and other scriptures: "[In the final days]
monks will take pleasure in beautiful garments and indulge in gambling ... Monks
will take concubines ... Monks and nuns will sin together, and if they have children,
the sons will become monks and the daughters nuns."46 As the final period of the
dharma approached, there would be flood and droughts, destroying all harvests.
Epidemics would ravage the population. Local officials were to become increasingly
dishonest and greedy. And then the familiar scenario of the end appears: days and
nights would become shorter. Human life would shrink by the same measure, the
men having white hair at forty-although women were to grow older as men's life
spans reduced. Rich and poor alike would be devoured by fish on the occasion of
further floods. Then Prince Moonlight (a messianic Boddhisattva celebrated in
several popular apocryphal texts; more on him below) would come to reign for
fifty-two years as Buddhist king. At the end of this period, two of the fundamental
Mahayana sutras would disappear, followed by the complete disappearance of the
twelve classes of Buddhist writings. The characters themselves would simply
evaporate from the pages, and the texts would cease to exist. The robes of all monks
would turn white, and they would return to lay status. Buddhism would disappear
completely.
A concrete example of such eschatological convictions in action is the case of the
Three Stages sect, founded in the late sixth century in North China. The
ecclesiastical relationship of this sect to the Buddhist establishment is not altogether clear, although its radical teachings certainly suggest an anti-monastic,
thoroughly lay orientation. Their response to the imminent end of the faith, for
example, can only be described as radical: they "declared the bankruptcy of
received Buddhism and called for a new form of religion to rescue men from the
world of error and sin."47 The basis of this diagnosis, as well as of the new religious
vision, was the notion that Buddhism as an institution and as a religion had lost, in
the final age of the dharma, its capacity to make valid distinctions and value
On the Pure Land school, see Ch'en, Buddhism ill China. 338-50.
in Strickmann, Mantras et mandarins, 100.
47 Mark Edward Lewis, "The Suppression of the Three Stages Sect: Apocrypha as a Political Issue,"
in Buswell, Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha, 213.
45
4" Quoted
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judgments. Everything in existence shared the Buddha-nature, and everything in
existence was thus worthy of reverence. In practice, this conviction meant less
reverence paid to the gods, texts, institutions, and clergy of the existing Buddhist
establishment-sure evidence of the thoroughly populist orientation of the Three
Stages school. The school decried the separation between lay and clergy, as well as
that between the buddhas and the gods of other Chinese religions. Daoist gods and
the demons summoned by the shamans of popular religion, even the evil spirits,
were on a par with the buddhas and demanded respect and reverence. Salvation was
to be found only among lay people, and the founding master taught only lay
audiences. Another aspect of this distrust of the monastic establishment was the
sect's radical distrust of the canon or even of teaching in general. Sect members
argued that the age of "erudition" had passed and that the "model of the perfect
spiritual master was a mute monk who could not understand the meaning of texts.
One who through study came to understand the needs of his own age could only
hope to imitate this 'mute sheep,''' opening his mouth only to eat.:"
Despite the obvious populist, anti-establishment bias of the Three Stages school,
it maintained an ambiguous relationship with the monastic establishment, suggesting the influence of this bottom-up movement. The group called for salvation
through giving-as did the Buddhist establishment in general-but gifts to the
Three Stages sect went to the foundation of an "Inexhaustible Treasury," designed
to support the poor rather than the monasteries (although monasteries administered the treasuries ).49 Nor was the Chinese state uniformly hostile to the Three
Stages school. Indeed, the group was actively suppressed only by those emperors (or
empresses) who chose to align themselves with the orthodox Buddhist establishment, as happened twice under the Tang, resulting finally in the group's suppression
in the eighth century under Tang Xuanzong (r. 712-56), who assumed the role of
a Boddhisattva and thus was not taken by the teachings of the school. Until this
point, and despite periodic bouts of suppression, the sect dominated several
monasteries in the capital and was well known throughout much of the empire for
its charitable work. Monks associated with the school composed texts that
circulated widely.>"
Most millenarian Buddhist groups, however, were not so well organized and had
even more attenuated relations with the mainstream Buddhist establishment.
Indeed, many millenarian "Buddhist" groups were not thoroughly Buddhist at all
but represented a brico/age of Buddhist, Daoist, and popular religious elements,
which once again illustrates the crucial role of the Chinese context in fashioning a
Buddhist eschatology. This is particularly obvious in texts treating the messianic
Boddhisattva Prince Moonlight, as well as the King of Light, another popular
messianic figure, where the central characters and themes were drawn from
Maitreyan Buddhism, while the larger grammar of the text was supplied by the
Daoist tradition. The cult of Prince Moonlight peaked in the sixth century, building
on the more general wave of Maitreyan belief growing in China since the fourth
century. This was an "alternative" or a variation on more orthodox Maitreyan
4" Lewis, "Suppression of the Three Stages," 223.
49
50
Lewis, "Suppression of the Three Stages," 218-19.
Lewis, "Suppression of the Three Stages," 227.
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belief, which stressed the eventual ascent of believers. In the Prince Moonlight cult,
by contrast, Maitreya descends to carry out the salvation of the beleaguered
faithful.
This alternative cult came to be quite widespread from the sixth century on,
generating texts such as The Scripture of the Monk Shuluo and the Scripture of the
Realization of Understanding Preached by the Boddhisattva Samantabhadra>' In
both, the central narrative involves a visit to Prince Moonlight at his abode on
Penglai-the Daoist isle of immortality-where he describes the impending
disasters and reveals the means to achieve salvation. The narrative is suffused with
Daoist elements, most notably the depiction of the imminent end of the world as a
cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, as well as the post-battle
judgment, when a small number of the elect (84,000 or 87,000) will be rescued and
brought to a safe place to await the final destruction and subsequent recreation of
the world. As further evidence of the cross-fertilization, the prophetic calculations
in these texts concerning the date of Prince Moonlight's arrive at the same date as
calculated in other, popular Daoist scriptures, for the arrival of the messiah Li
Hong. As the major scholar of these texts concludes:
From the fourth century of our era, we ean observe the formation of a Buddho-[T]aoist
eschatology, in which the main actions ... are of Buddhist origin, and in which conceptual,
stylistic, and terminological elements are largely borrowed from popular Mahayana ...
[Nonetheless] it was the Taoist vision that provided the model for the structure as a whole.
It was the Taoist vision that provided a coherent complex of eschatological expectations into
which all these disconnected Buddhist themes became incorporated and welded into an
integrated whole, and it was also Taoism that filled some essential gaps by providing the
materials for which there was no Buddhist counterpart: the apocalyptic battle, the judgment,
and the creation of an ideal world.v
The Prince Moonlight cult illustrates that, by the sixth century, Daoism and
Buddhism had largely fused in the popular mentality, providing a potent mix of
symbols and discourses that was to nourish Chinese millenarian thought down to
the present day.
IF THE IDENTIFICATION OF A "Buddho-Daoist eschatology" helps us understand the
roots of popular millenarianism in early medieval China and the dynamics of its
creation, it at the same time obscures what would surely have been important
differences among competing versions of the apocalypse. Indeed, this essay has only
been able to hint at the regional, historical, and doctrinal variations within the
larger millenarian discourse in hopes of illustrating the more general point that the
discourse is best understood as a fundamentalist or populist reaction against and
from within the mainstream. The fundamentalist aspects of the reaction are most
clearly seen in the Buddhist protests against the wealth and the corruption of the
monastic community and the condemnation of the church for having abandoned its
own mission of self-abnegation and transcendence. The populist character of much
o[ See Zurcher, "<Prince Moonlight,'" I-59.
,2 Zurcher, "'Prince Moonlight,'" 10.
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of the apocalyptic discourse is obvious: lower-level monks, priests, and uncertified
religious specialists composed and preached the "apocryphal" texts discussed
above; the same group has been identified as providing the leadership for many of
the millenarian rebellions of the period; other rebels appear to have adopted the
vocabulary of the apocalyptic discourse for purposes of mobilization, again
suggesting the mass character of much of early medieval Chinese millenarianism.
Of course, neither fundamentalism nor populism is an unusual feature of
millenarian movements in general. Many apocalyptic Christian movements, from
medieval times to the present day, could surely be described in such terms. The
more important point, in the Chinese case, is the shared character of millenarian
discourse during the early medieval period, the fact that the "mainstream" was
open and fluid enough to permit the circulation of a variety of apocalyptic currents
between both elites and masses. Indeed, the "heterodox" and "orthodox" labels
employed throughout this essay are largely anachronistic; I have borrowed them
from later Chinese Confucian commentaries. The early Daoist church, by contrast,
certainly saw itself as neither "heterodox" nor "populist" ("fundamentalist" might
fit, however): its goal was nothing less than to "recreat]e] on a spiritual level the lost
cosmic unity of the Han order. "53 In canonical Daoist texts, Laozi's messianic
'descents had always served the interests of the state. Indeed, he usually descended
to advise a new emperor. The bureaucracy of the Celestial Masters church was
modeled on that of the Han state. Even the Great Peace rebels drew inspiration
from a text that, in one guise or another, had been written for and read by the Han
emperors. Emperors throughout the Period of Division-and later-fully understood Daoist pretensions to have preserved and developed the core elements of
traditional elite Chinese culture. Tang emperors, for example, not only exploited
the fact that they shared a common surname (Li) with Laozi, thus permitting them
to claim to share in the charisma of Li Hong the messiah (or at least to suggest their
supernatural origins) but also, at certain periods, tested aspiring civil servants on
their knowledge of Daoist rather than Confucian texts.>' Buddhism was equally
useful to emperors and ministers of state. Indeed, it was state support for and
patronage of Buddhism (at the outset. particularly on the part of the foreign
conquest regimes in North China) that permitted the relatively rapid development
of Buddhist institutions and the spread of the faith. These rulers saw in Buddhism
both a source of miraculous power and prophecy and a means of legitimizing their
rule by drawing on strains of Buddhist political thought permitting the identification
of king and Buddha" Such uses of Buddhism outlived the Period of Division as
well. The rulers of the Sui, the short-lived dynasty (581-618) that unified China in
preparation for the more enduring glories of Tang, used their patronage of
Buddhism as a tool of reunification, and many Tang emperors chose the posture of
0.' Patricia 1:3. Ebrey and Peter N. Gregory, "The Religious and Historical Landscape," in Ebrey and
Gregory, cds.. Religion and Society in rang and Sung China (Honolulu, 1993),23. See also Anna K.
Seidel, "Imperial Treasures and Taoist Sacraments: Taoist Roots in the Apocrypha," in Strickmann,
Tantric and Taoist Studies. 291-371.
0-1 Timothy Barrett. Taoism under the Tang (London. 1996),61 and following. See also Stephen R.
Bokcnkarnp, "Time after Time: Taoist Apocalyptic IIistory and the Founding of the Tang Dynasty,"
Asia Major. 3d se r., 7. no. I (1994): 59-88.
00 Sec Charles Orzech. "The Scripture on Perfect Wisdom for Humane Kings Who Wish to Protect
Their States." in Donald S. Lopez. Chinese Religions in Practice (Princeton, N.J., 1996),372-80.
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Buddhist Boddhisattva over that of Daoist sage-king. The famous Tang empress Wu
Zetian (r. 690-705) made use of the King of Light tradition, mentioned above, for
political purposes. 56
Had this situation endured, China's millenarian history might have more closely
resembled that of the Christian West, in the sense that a common eschatological
discourse might have framed different and changing understandings of shared
concepts and images. Instead, beginning already from the second half of the Tang
dynasty, the imperial apparatus chose to embrace Confucianism, which sought to
imbue emperors with a less dangerous charisma: the Confucian "son of heaven"
may have been semi-divine, but the state cult had little to say about salvation or the
end of time. This posture was confirmed during the Song, in the Neo-Confucian
revival, and largely continued through Ming and Qing times. At a formal level, then,
the political and cultural elite ceased to participate in the shared discourse of the
Period of Division.
Then again, nothing is ever really lost. Individual emperors and literati could be
fervent practitioners of Buddhism and/or Daoism, regardless of the demands of
Confucian orthodoxy, and some strains of Neo-Confucianism drew genuine-as
opposed to formal-inspiration from Buddhism and Daoism. Indeed, I have long
wondered if the vehemence of the language of many Qing imperial edicts against
popular religion was not prompted in part by a private fear that, despite its
"perversity," the apocalyptic evocations of popular religion might contain a kernel
of truth. At the popular level, the "Buddho-Daoist eschatology" clearly lived on
into the late imperial period, most obviously, perhaps, in the groups associated with
what we have called the White Lotus, but circulating widely in lesser known oral
traditions. 57 Moreover, the scriptures of the White Lotus groups are suffused with
a sense of exile and a longing to return to one's "original home." The foundation
myths of the Triads and of certain White Lotus groups share a common "fall from
grace" motif, in which an original alliance with the emperor and state turns SOUr. 58
Might we not see in such elements a lament for a lost unity of purpose, a
fundamentalist call for a return to a distant harmony?
50 See
(Naples,
57 See
5X See
Antonio Forte, Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End of the Seventh Century
1976).
Haar, Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads.
Haar, Ritual and Mythology of the Chinese Triads, 390-400.
David Ownby is an associate professor of history at the Universite de Montreal.
He has worked extensively on the history of Chinese secret societies, his major
publications including Secret Societies Reconsidered: Studies of Early Modern
Social Organization in China and Southeast Asia (1993), which he co-edited with
Mary Somers Heidhues, and Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in Early and
Mid-Qing China: The Formation of a Tradition (1996). More recently, his
interests have turned toward the study of the history of Chinese popular
religion. He is currently preparing, with Chinese and Canadian collaborators,
a comparison of the histories of millenarian movements in China and the West.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
DECEMBER
1999