Hungli's view of the Buddhist clergy was colored by prudish NeoConfucian attitudes toward sex. Of course, the clergy's own internal regulations required chastity, and the Ch'ing Code prescribed special penalties for monks who lured married women into adultery. Yet clerical fornication seems to have evoked from Hungli a particular loathing and vindictiveness. In 1768 a monk near Nanking was accused of having sexual relations with several married peasant women. Governor-general G'aojin noted that the Nanking area "easily harbors criminal monks (chien-seng)," because there were so many clerical establishments that it was hard to keep track of them all. Accordingly, G'aojin had his county officials keep alert for bad clerical behavior. Authorities near Nanking discovered that the present culprit, a "depraved monk," had been engaging in such conduct for years and had even bribed a local headman not to report it. He had also amassed considerable wealth by renting out plots of his monastery's land to tenants. "For such a depraved monk to amass wealth and flout the law at will [through sexual misconduct] is a great injury to the morals of the community," wrote G'aojin. The ordinary penalties in the Ch'ing Code seemed insufficient for this culprit, who should, he recommended, he sent to Ili to serve as a slave in the military colonies. Hungli replied that even such a penalty would be "too light." "Such depraved and evil monks have long injured local morals." The culprit should be "beaten to death immediately in order to make manifest Our punishments. How can he deserve anything more lenient?" G'aojin replied that he was indeed to blame for recommending too light a sentence. Not only would the criminal be beaten to death, but it would be done in the presence of all the monks of Nanking, as a warning to them all. Two-thirds of the monastery's property was to be confiscated.45
This bloody one-upsmanship between Hungli and his imperial inlaw suggests that monk-bashing was a source of moral satisfaction for rulers who considered the clergy to be mostly hypocrites and corrupters of the community. Such expectations of clerical behavior made it plausible to connect them with other harmful and immoral activities, such as sorcery. Aggravated by officials' alarm over what they perceived to be an alarming growth of the clerical underclass, described in Chapter 2, these imperial fears of the clergy were made to order for a nationwide sorcerer-hunt. Along with beggars, the clergy, particularly those in small temples or out on the road, were among China's most vulnerable groups, with no protection forthcoming from kin or community. But why were the general public such avid participants in the persecution of 1768?
Clergy, Beggars, and the Common Man
In view of the prominent place of Buddhist monks among sorcery suspects in the 1768 scare, it is somewhat surprising that the two major eighteenth-century collections of supernatural tales (by P'u Sung-ling and Yuan Mei) picture the Buddhist clergy as relatively benign. Sorcery aplenty is attributed to Taoists, such as the homicidal Taoist beggar depicted at the beginning of this chapter. By contrast, Buddhists are attacked mainly for hypocrisy or for immorality (particularly sexual license-a theme common in European anticlericalism). The phrase "sorcerous Taoists and licentious Buddhists" (yaotao yin-seng) sums up the difference.46 We shall have to look beneath the level of elite story-writers to discover a plausible source for popular fears of monks.''
In a society fearful of strangers, several aspects of monks' lives seem to have placed them in harm's way. One is the long, sometimes permanent condition of being a novice: the period between taking the tonsure ("leaving the family"-ch'u-chia) and receiving ordination. Although being ordained required a long period of study under a master (a senior monk) and generally had to he completed in one of the elite "public monasteries," becoming a novice was relatively easy and informal. The subject pronounced his intention of renouncing lay life, had his head shaved by his tonsure-master (the "master" or shih-fu who would now be responsible for his training), and began to observe the "ten prohibitions" (chastity, vegetarianism, and so on). Having left his own family, he now acquired a monastic "family," in which his master served as a surrogate parent and his fellow novices as brothers. A very large proportion of monks were brought up in the monastic life from adolescence. Their training generally took place in small "hereditary" temples: those run by monastic "families" and passed down from one generation to the next. Only years later, if at all, was a monk ordained at one of the large "public" monasteries.
In the meantime the novice was part of a large intermediate stratum of the unordained, a stratum easily entered and indeed easily exited. Although classified by the state (and by society at large) as a "monk" (seng), he was forbidden to reside in any of the large, elite monasteries. Such "monks" probably constituted the majority of the Buddhist clergy, and most soulstealing suspects (including two of the Hsiao-shan monks; see Chapter i) were in fact of this group. The government's suspicions centered on such men, and it would not be surprising to find that popular fears ran along the same channels: these were men in limbo, neither of the orthodox family system nor of the certified clerical elite. This fact should lead us to question the usefulness of the designation "monk," which was used in government documents to describe virtually anyone with a robe and a shaved head, whatever his state of religious commitment or education. Many of these men, or perhaps even most of them, were not unambiguously in any of the approved categories that gave bureaucrats the reassuring idea that they had society under control.
Rootlessness was another suspicious mark of the novice. Once tonsured, he was often cast into the life of the road. The search for religious instruction, or a pilgrimage to pay respects to the grave of an "ancestor" of his monastic family, were common reasons for travel. Another, perhaps the most common, was begging: small temples commonly lacked enough land endowment to support their inhabitants, and lacking adequate donations or fees from requiem masses, begging was the only way out. Monastic begging was not universally approved (some monasteries forbade it), and attitudes toward mendicant monks were sometimes not much different from those toward beggars in general."Nevertheless, eighteenth-century documents show that begging monks were everywhere to be seen.
Popular attitudes toward monks were probably conditioned by both of these situations: the ambiguous status of the novices (of the sangha but not really in it), and by the general ambivalence toward begging (an occupation of the rootless and shiftless, yet somehow sanctified by the holy poverty of the clergy). Toward Taoist priests, popular attitudes were probably more unreservedly fearful.
Taoist practitioners were conventionally associated with various forms of magic (alchemy, exorcism, and the search for immortality). This made them logical suspects when the "evil arts" were at issue. Although their normal community functions were such benign practices as healing-exorcism, their demonic role in fiction suggests that magical arts were considered to be turned readily to evil uses.49 Buddhist monks, whose main community function was assisting the souls of the departed through the underworld, were not sorcerers in quite the same sense, which may explain their relative benignity in popular stories. Yet we may wonder whether, in the popular mind, the various sorts of ritual specialists were as sharply distinguished when they were strangers to the community. Wandering Buddhist monks might have seemed unpredictable and inscrutable, for example, when compared with monks based in a local temple whom everyone saw at neighborhood funerals. And it takes little imagination to perceive the menace of a "wandering Taoist." Local ritual specialists were comparatively "safe," in that their community roles were known. Indeed the neighborhood exorcist probably seemed about as threatening as the family doctor. But outsiders were another matter. To them might reasonably attach more general suspicions about people with special ritual powers.
Where commoners might fear ritual specialists for their magic, gentry scorned them for their shiftlessness. A collection of lineage homilies from Chekiang points out that every occupation has its "principle of livelihood" (sheng-li), whether scholar, farmer, artisan, or merchant. "But then there are those lazy, idle drifters who wander about as Buddhist monks, Taoist priests, vagrants, or ruffians
, who are registered in no native place. These people are not living according to any principle of livelihood. There is no `principle' for living without a principle of livelihood, just stealing a living from Heaven and Earth."50
The taint of death pollution. An authority on Cantonese society writes that funerary priests (in this case, roughly speaking, Taoist) bear a definite social stigma "because of the nature of their work," rather like morticians in our own society. "Their neighbors ... are never completely comfortable in their presence." The reason is the death pollution that is thought to adhere to their bodies. Even though these priests "make every effort to avoid direct contact with the corpse or with the coffin," they cannot wholly dissociate themselves from the dangerously polluting aspect of their profession.5' Ritual specialists in the community make their living particularly at funerals, a job that puts them continually near the coffins of the newly dead. We have, as yet, no confirmation that fear of death pollution, so evident in South China, contributed to popular ambivalence toward the clergy in the rest of the country, but we cannot rule it out.
The sorcerer as outsider. The mix of reverence and fear in which commoners held ritual specialists is especially meaningful in the light of the clerical underclass of late imperial times. Wanderers with special spiritual powers were a unique sort of danger, and perhaps (given Min 0-yuan's account) an increasingly visible one by the mideighteenth century. Studies of other cultures suggest that sorcery is often imputed to outsiders: Alan Macfarlane notes, on the basis of African and English data, that "men who wander about the country" are natural targets of sorcery accusations.52 Sorcery, which (unlike witchcraft) involves no innate powers but merely the manipulation of magic techniques, is essentially impersonal: the evil done is more like vandalism than vendetta. The absence of community ties therefore would make wandering mendicants (whether clerical or lay) logical suspects. Though they would lack a personal motive, they would also lack social inhibitions and community responsibilities. Add to this the xenophobia of the peasant villager toward outsiders of any sort, and sorcery is quite a reasonable fear.53
In Chinese popular religion, the pervasive fear of aliens is expressed in the serious ritual business of propitiating "ghosts" (kuei). These are conceived as unattached spirits who lack the family ties that would otherwise provide the sacrifices that would ease their distress and dispel their rancor. Dangerous social and political marginality in the yang or temporal world is closely associated with dangerous spiritual marginality (ghostliness) in the yin or shadow world.54
In the cases of 1768, foreignness was nearly always a detonator of soulstealing panic. It was often noticed, at first contact, as linguistic difference, by which strangers were instantly marked. Here the contrast with shamanism could not be sharper. In Cantonese communities, for example, shamans must be well-established members of the community in order to perform their job, which is to hold at bay the malevolent spirits of the discontented dead: a task that requires intimate knowledge of village social relationships.55 It appears that "good" or "safe" ritual specialists (community priests, shamans) must be community members, whereas "bad" or "dangerous" ones (sorcerers) cannot be. If so, it is likely either that fear naturally attaches to aliens, or that sorcery accusations within the community would be so harmful to social relations that they cannot be permitted-or perhaps even conceived of. Hence it is upon the stranger that suspicion must fall.56
The Social Terrorism of Beggars
In one respect, mendicant clergy were more vulnerable to sorcery charges than were lay beggars. Those who make a profession of communicating with the spirit world can readily be imagined to have ways of making spirit forces serve their personal ends: the very stuff of sorcery. Nevertheless, sorcery charges were also leveled at many lay beggars during the soulstealing panic. Most often they were merely doing the legwork for evil monks (going about clipping queues for them). Fear of beggars, however, had nothing to do with mastery of ritual "techniques." Quite the opposite: it was their ritual invulnerability that made them dangerous.
Monks and beggars were the poorest and most defenseless groups in Chinese society. They were supported by no influential kinsmen, they had little or no economic reserves. Monks, as we have seen, had such important functions in community ritual that they could not be dispensed with. But how were beggars able to persist in their way of life despite public scorn and loathing? The reason seems to be that, however helpless in the respectable social world, they had the power to make the public fear them. People had two reasons to fear beggars: "contamination" and "ritual sabotage," which are in fact closely related.
Contamination. Dread of contamination enabled a beggar to make people pay to keep him at a distance. What all observers agree was a carefully cultivated (and conventional) filthy and ragged appearance-the beggars' uniform, as it were-may have excited pity, but also stirred revulsion; people shunned a beggar's touch. This practical concern to avoid diseases (such as running sores, which beggars ostentatiously displayed) was closely joined to a fear of spiritual pollution. The death of a beggar on one's premises could have "drastic cosmological implications," because his ghost would then have to be exorcised at some expense and with dubious effect.'' The job of pallbearers, conventionally allotted to beggars, also tainted them with death pollution, which was good to stay away from. To be "touched" for money by such people was preferable to being touched physically.
Ritual sabotage. Here we are cutting close to the core of soulstealing fear. Where was respectable society most vulnerable to attack? All the riches and connections in the world were no protection from being bullied by men who had nothing to lose. Hence it is no surprise that weddings and funerals were occasions of customary payoffs to beggars. Failure to give the beggars their due could (and sometimes did) result in gangs of ragged and filthy people barging into the festivities, their very presence embarrassing the hosts and, much worse, ruining the efficacy of the ritual. The clanger was had enough at weddings but could be ritually fatal at funerals: one nineteenth-century account tells of angry beggars actually jumping into a grave to prevent a burial from proceeding.I' People were vulnerable to such terrorism because they felt their defenses against supernatural forces to be so tenuous, and the battle between beneficent and hostile spirits so evenly drawn. As we have seen, the nexus between body and soul was another danger point that was vulnerable to attack by malevolent forces. In this situation, social outcasts gained a peculiar power, precisely because they themselves were already so polluted or so unlucky that they seemed to care neither for social "face" nor for cosmological fortune. The mere "touch" of the queue- or lapel-clipping beggar was enough to awaken fears of lethal pollution. By extension, a beggar's anger was cause for alarm because his polluted nature was entirely compatible with magical terrorism. The beggar's curse at one who refused alms carried more than mere rhetorical force.
Our exploration of Chinese sorcery reveals two related structures of fear, both of which involve the fragility of a spiritual-corporeal link. The popular fear was of soul-loss: the delicacy of the bond between soul and body meant that agencies either natural or supernatural could sever it. Dreams and disease were dangers to the stability of this link, as was of course malevolent magic. The imperial fear related not to the individual but to the collectivity. The integrity and durability of Heaven's Mandate required recurrent confirmation through the imperial rites. It could be severed by natural agents (the cosmological forces visible only in nature's disasters and omens), as well as by turbulent men who wished the state ill. Such men's communication with spirits was both stoutly denied and sternly prohibited. The way imperial dignitaries scoffed at any spirit-link except their own confirmed a deeply founded anxiety about the longevity of their own mandate. For commoners, the sorcerer's magic menaced the vulnerable link between body and soul. For the imperial elite, it imperiled the tenuous link with heavenly powers. What bred such fears at both the top and the bottom of the social scale, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, is wo
rth considering after we have pursued the soulstealing story further. Against the soulstealing evil the Throne is now about to mount a national campaign, in the course of which the link between sorcery and politics will become plainer.
CHAPTER 6
The Campaign
in the Provinces
A nationwide prosecution of sorcery ignited a struggle between the emperor and his provincial officials, a struggle no less intense because it was well disguised. The fuel for this smouldering combat lay in the system of official accountability: failure to catch a criminal was punishable through the system of sanctions run by the Board of Civil Office in Peking. An official's supervisor was supposed to impeach him for bad performance, and failure to impeach was itself ground for impeachment by higher levels. On the exalted stratum of provincial governors-general and governors, administrative failure was taken as a breach of the monarch's personal trust.
Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 Page 13