Buddhist Warfare

by Michael Jerryson

  Nevertheless, the exemption from civic duties, principally military service, attracted among the clergy ranks a group of retractors who were escaping their military service. In the beginning of the Tang dynasty, approximately 621–626, this burgeoning dynasty was in mid-military expansion. The famous Fou Yi, in his anti-Buddhist memoirs, scolded Buddhist clergy not only for being sworn to celibacy (which diminished future available manpower), but especially for dodging military service in favor of its special status.42 In addition, he proposed the marrying of monks and nuns and the massive enlistment of the empire’s entire clergy, which he said would have generated no less than six armies.43 Again a century later, circa 706, another critic of Buddhism, Li Xiao, expressed criticism in these terms:

  The national defense depends on those required to fulfill civic duties. If all of these citizens became monks, and if all the soldiers went into religion as a profession, how will military campaigns be assured success? And who will pay the taxes?44

  During the Tang dynasty, the same antiphon returns chronically under the pen[s] of statesmen. However neither in their diatribes nor in the retorts of either the Buddhists or their supporters, was the moral or religious argument condemning war (found in Buddhist doctrine) invoked.45 Much to the contrary, and it is biting to state this, at the end of the Tang dynasty militarism had broken down internally; with the weakened central power, the soldiers recruited by the statesmen of the provinces threatened the dynasty.

  In the Confucian bureaucrats’ missives, the Buddhist parasites are seen associated with the factious military. A writer from the period, Yuan Tchen (779–831), a friend of the poet Po Kiu-yi, did not hesitate to put the two in the same category:

  Far from cultivating purity which eliminates luxury and renounces the world, Buddhists take advantage of their preferential treatment thanks to which they balk at civic duties and shirk pain and suffering. On the other hand, soldiers, far from demonstrating bravery, jumping on their tank, deploying their military force, exhibit an arrogance that makes them commit acts of violence indiscriminately and to mistreat civic administrative personnel. And so, nine out of ten men in the empire are parasites with neither hearth nor home.46

  Then, in the first half of the ninth century, the Emperor Wen-tsong declared to his cabinet:

  Not long ago there were three consumers for the production of one farmer; now we must add to that a Buddhist monk and a soldier. But it is especially the monks who bring nothing but unhappiness to my people.47

  At the end of the eighth century, there was collusion among the eunuchs of the imperial guard (sworn enemies of the Confucian hierarchy) and the Buddhists under their control. This collusion ranged within the scope of imperial metropolis and possibly further. It contributed gravely to compromising the church and to preparing for the great proscription of 845. This proscription marked the triumph of the state over the church, a triumph from which Buddhism in China has never been able to recover; collectively this assured the state’s upper hand on the central military power and on the Buddhist church.48

  If Buddhism had played a role in the deterioration of the Chinese empire at the end of the Tang dynasty, a deterioration that would have opened the door to new barbarian invasions, it seems to have had only an economic and social impact. Its pacifistic doctrines had no bearing on historical texts and were of no influence in the empire’s demise. It goes without saying that these historical texts emanated from civil servants who saw the church only from the state’s and from the Confucian perspective; they were keen on attaching only self-interested, sordid motives to Buddhist draft dodgers. Even in Buddhist texts, rarely to my knowledge, are there references to ideological conflicts. One such case was that of an officer from the Leang dynasty, who was descended from a long lineage of civil servants. In 536, at the age of twenty, as he was about to leave for war in the northwest, he deserted the army to enter religion, invoking the Lao-tzu quote on “arms, these instruments of destruction,” which prevent us from ever attaining enlightenment.49

  In his piece against Buddhism, Fou Yi mentioned more than ten Buddhist monk uprisings against the secular authority “since antiquity”;50 the details of these events unfortunately have been lost.51 Although in China they never became noted (as they did in Japan), essential historical facts, the seditions, insurrections, or uprisings directed, fomented, or inspired by the Buddhists were never lacking throughout history. As was also the case in Japan, these periods seem to coincide with the breakdown of a centralized government. Whether or not religion has been incorporated within a societal feudal system, whenever the centralized power relaxes its control the same actions occur. We see monks from the community either forming armed gangs or leading a peasant uprising, often while partly connected to factious nobility, or to local government officials lacking autonomy.

  One of these periods occurred during the reign of the Turkish Mongol Wei Tabgatch, whose dynasty was in control in northern China from 386 to 534. Tabgatch was the third emperor from this dynasty under which Buddhism was to know various fortunes. In 445, the Emperor T’ai-wou infiltrated Tch’angngan to suppress an uprising that for appearance’s sake had nothing to do with Buddhism. However, in a convent he discovered a large quantity of bows and arrows, and spears and shields, that local government officials and statesmen of the region had stored there.52 Concluding that these objects had nothing to do with Buddhism, he suspected the monks were collaborating with the rebels. In any case, he had the Tch’ang-ngan clergy put to death and had all Buddhist icons destroyed. This was a tactical stance he maintained for the duration of his empire.53 This marked the first of the four Buddhist persecutions that are traditionally enumerated in the history of Chinese Buddhism. Without a doubt the Emperor T’ai-wou erred in mistrusting the Tch’ang-ngan monks.

  During the Tabgatch Empire throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, Buddhist-inspired revolts increased in number. In his work on Buddhism in this period, M. Tsukamoto Zenry counts no less than six between the years 402 and 517.54 In 515, the monk Faqing commanded the last and most typical uprising. This occurred in what is now the province of Ho-pei, where the population number at that time was very dense. It was a characteristic uprising; according to M. Tsukamoto it was due principally to the continual warfare that had ravaged the region, to the Tabgatch dynasty’s recruits against the Leang Chinese dynasty, to the barbaric acts that the central administration ordered the Tabgatch prefects to commit, and to the sumptuary ventures involving the court and the Buddhism-obsessed Tabgatch nobility.

  The court and the Tabgatch nobility raised taxes and increased the amount of civic duties owed them by the people. We can undoubtedly add to this, without risking anachronism, the Chinese reaction to the barbarians. Faqing took the title of “Great Vehicle,” and declared the arrival of the new Buddha. His lieutenant was a Chinese aristocrat and a friend of the people, to whom he granted the titles “King Who Pacifies the Land of the Han, Commander of the Demon-Vanquishing Army, Tenth-Stage Bodhisattva” (there are ten successive “stages,” in Sanskrit vihra, in the spiritual hierarchy of the bodhisattva). Faqing had under his command more than fifty thousand men who do not seem to have been monks. When a soldier killed a man, he earned the title of first-stage bodhisattva. The more he killed, the more he went up the echelon toward sainthood; with the tenth killing he advanced to the tenth stage. Murder was a charitable act in the crusade against Mra; the insurgents were given an alcoholic drug that made them crazy to such an extent that fathers and sons, older and younger brothers no longer recognized one another and didn’t think twice before killing each other; “the only thing that mattered was killing.”55 The recruits had to have been illiterate peasants who became crazed by such ideas. They were convinced that they were killing for a “new Buddha,” which they seemingly identified as the messiah Maitreya, the cult of which was booming in China. The texts do not specify precisely if Faqing referred to himself as the Buddhist bodhisattva Maitreya, one of his precursors, or one of those universal so
vereigns who accompanied his arrival.56 Faqing married a nun named Houeihouei. We know that at this time, most notably in Serindia, monastic celibacy was not observed. This shift did not spare conventional Buddhism, now completely under the control of the government of the Wei [and] ensconced in the hierarchy. The monasteries had been ravaged. The ecclesiastic authorities were sponsored by the government. The regular clergy, which was placed under its control and its protection, was decimated and sacred texts and icons were burned: “A new Buddha has come to the world, to conquer the old Mra(s)!” The Wei needed to assemble an army of a hundred thousand foot-soldiers and cavalrymen against those crazed armed men. The army was placed under the command of a Tabgatch prince who also devastated the region. Faqing and his nun were decapitated. Their lay lieutenant was publicly executed on the capital steps. The carnage was only finally suppressed in 517.57

  Most of the other Buddhist revolts at this time were quite similar. They involved peasant insurgences not only against the authority of the state but also against the authority of the officiating church. The Maitreyan messianism, the belief connected to the advent of a “Son of God” or to a utopian cakravartin, fueled the rebels.58 They do not seem to have been recruited directly from the clergy or even from an unorthodox clergy, but rather from the peasantry at the instigation of an inspired monk who claimed to be the incarnation or the precursor of the bodhisattva Maitreya, or that he’s the originator of a dynasty destined to establish the Great Peace on Earth and the reign of the Real Law.

  These are aspects found in many of the armed revolts that Buddhism must have been provoking in China for centuries. Here are a few random examples, taken from various texts.59 At the beginning of the Tang dynasty, in one of his memorials from 621–626, Fou Yi let it be known that in his time there were monks so inclined to rebel. He added that, if the barbarians were threatening China and debasing themselves with the two hundred thousand monks and nuns of the empire in order to “conquer the hearts of men,” this would result in a crisis which should be guarded against.60 Was he possibly alluding to a military threat presented by the clergy?

  These were troubled times, as was each change of dynasty; the Tang had just recently taken power and their regime was already under threat. The fall of the Sui (581–617), in which the Buddhists had assuredly played a role, had been marked by chaos even though this dynasty had ardently protected them. The officiating clergy seem to have supported the Sui dynasty against the Tang dynasty. In 613 two uprisings are noted. One took place in Tang-hien (present-day Ho-pei), where every five years a certain layperson named Song Zixian, who “excelled in black magic and knew how to metamorphose into the Buddha,” took advantage to recruit troops at these large Buddhist gatherings celebrating the advent of the bodhisattva Maitreya.61 The other uprising was in Fufeng prefecture, near Tch’ang-ngan, where a monk named Xiang Haiming, who also claimed to be an incarnation of the bodhisattva Maitreya, took the title of emperor and the name “The White Raven.” He acquired followers in the tens of thousands up to the highest classes from the capital. They even had to send an entire expedition out against him.62

  At the beginning of 619, shortly after the ascension of the Tang dynasty, a banquet was organized in Houai-jong (present-day Chahar), not far from Peking in the northwest. It was during this Buddhist banquet, organized by the local magistrate and with many in attendance that five thousand monks under the command of the monk Kao T’an-cheng, revolted.63 They massacred the local magistrate and his military colleague[s]. The monk prepared to repeat the heroic deeds of the rebel monk Faqing of the Wei dynasty. Similarly, he declared himself emperor with the same title of “Great Vehicle,” bestowed on a nun the title of “Empress Yashodhara” (this was the name of the Buddha’s wife, who became a nun after bodhi or enlightenment), and decreed the inauguration of an era named “The Wheel of Dharma.” He then formed an alliance with Kao K’ai-tao, a general in the region who turned to crime and took the title of the prince of Yen. Soon this henchman turned against the Buddhist “emperor” and assassinated him ignominiously.64

  At this time, the founder of the Tang dynasty, Li Che-min (then the prince of Ts’in), was dealing with more serious insurgencies, one of which was in Ho-nan, commanded by the veritable general Wang Che-tch’ong, who had taken the title of prince of Tcheng, and who aspired to the empire. Wang Chetch’ong surrendered on June 4, 621. The following day Li Che-min invaded Lo-yang, the capital of the Sui. He had the palace destroyed, the capital’s principal edifice as well as the main door to the palace confines and the one to the imperial city.65 Additionally, and in our opinion of much more significance, he decreed the elimination of every Buddhist monastery and the secularization of every monk and nun in Lo-yang. The only exception was the thirty monks and thirty nuns particularly renowned for their virtues.66 This tactical measure can clearly be understood, not as hostility against Buddhism in principle, but as a fundamental distrust that the Lo-yang clergy must have inspired. They were most likely aligned with the Sui in the dynastic conflict. Even outside Lo-yang, there were other instances of the Buddhist clergy opposing the Tang dynasty’s endeavors. When, in 619 the “rebel” general Lieou Wou-tcheou infiltrated the Kiai prefecture in the Chan-si, he scaled the surrounding wall with the use of Buddhist prayer flags that the monk Tao-teng hung out for him.67 In 621, a character from the Sui prefecture in the Chen-si and a “maleficent monk” named Tche-kiue together wove a plot against the Tang dynasty.68

  No doubt Fou Yi was alluding to these sorts of factions in his memoir. They no longer had anything to do with peasant insurrections. They were more likely the result of Buddhists’ involvement in the political battles of the times.

  Epigraphy fills us in on another of Buddhism’s involvements which, as far as I know, is not documented in any historical text. The monastery of the woods near the Shaoshi peak, on the Song-chan or central peak in the province of Ho-nan, not far from Lo-yang, is known among all the Buddhist monasteries in China as one of the original locales of the Dhyna school. This is where, in the fifth and sixth centuries, Bodhidharma stayed and practiced “mural contemplation” for nine years; it subsequently became a center for the art of boxing. We know that the Boxers who rose up against foreigners at the end of the nineteenth century, and besieged the Peking delegation in 1900, were part of a secret society with more or less Buddhist origins. And yet, Chao-lin sseu, the monastery in the woods near the Shaoshi peak, houses an inscription from the Tang dynasty with a reproduction of Li Shemin’s signature, believed to be actually by the engraver.69 It was a message left by the prince of Ts’in, the future Taizong (627–649). He left it for the community of Chao-lin, its eldest member, its superior, and also its military and civic leaders who, along with the monks, were obviously found to be involved in the affair, the subject of Li Shemin’s message. This message is dated the thirtieth day of the fourth moon, which can only be May 26, 621. In it, Li Shemin disparages the unrest afflicting the world; anarchy and disharmony are compromising even the existence of Buddhism. This message glorifies the huge undertaking of the pacification of the Tang dynasty and faults Wang Che-tch’ong, the rebel general who the message urges its addressees to catch. The message also praises the addressees for all they already know how to do for the good cause, and promises them abundant rewards in exchange for their services.

  On June 4, 621, as noted above, Wang Che-tch’ong surrendered to Li Shimin, who was invading Lo-yang. Li Shimin did not wait long to extensively reward the Chao-lin sseu monks. They were truly gifted in knowing exactly when to side with the Tang dynasty and, seemingly before his victory, had regained control over a strategic point known as the Cypress Valley Estate, located fifty li northwest of Chao-lin sseu. This is where Wang Che-tch’ong’s troops must have set up camp. Immediately after his victory, Li Shimin gave them 1,000 pieces of silk fabric. Then, in 624, he exempted them from the general method of Buddhist clergy secularization and from [the payment on] taxable goods that he decreed in 621 or in 622.70 In the end, in
625, he granted them forty k’ing (some five hundred acres) of land located in the Cypress Valley Estate. It was designed to be a private prefecture with a water-mill for the Chao-lin sseu (exempt from taxes). Further, in order to acknowledge their good conduct in Cypress Valley and also the land they had taken during the Lo-yang invasion in 621,71 the monks were awarded official titles. This leaves us with no doubt as to their abilities as soldiers. T’an-tsong, who stormed the Cypress Valley Estate, was named great general, as was the elder of Chao-lin sseu, Chanhou, his superior, Tche-ts’ao, and his acting-general, Houei-tch’ang.72 What’s more, they seem to have refused these titles, which hardly went with religious status. Without them, they were not any less illustrious in history; they were examples of military merit which Chao-lin sseu acquired in the centuries that followed, as we will see below.73

  Around the end of the Tang dynasty, when the dynasty was beginning to falter, government officials were inciting unrest on all sides to arrogate regional power. Another monk from the Song-chan monastery (we are not told if this is an offshoot of the Chao-lin sseu or not), Yuan-tsing, played a key role in overthrowing the imperial palace of Lo-yang in 815.74 His accomplice was Li Che-tao, who was of Korean descent; his grandfather Li Tcheng-ki had enlisted in China’s army as a general and become a naturalized citizen in 778. As a military commander in Chan-tong, he carved out a vast territory which he controlled nearly autonomously and which afterward his son Li Na took over, followed by his grandson Li Che-kou. These last two finished by openly rebelling against the central government. Meanwhile, Li Che-kou’s younger brother, Li Che-tao, had inherited just as much power. In most of their activities and official titles, the imperial court of the Tang dynasty continuously affirmed Li Che-tao’s power. Nevertheless, he kept close guard over his independent sovereignty, especially on his subordinates whose wives and children he kept hostage, and whom he put to death at the slightest sign of defection or conspiring with the central authority.