by John Keay
Half a century later a travelling official, who was also a noted poet, described an evening of revelry at Chang’an, the erstwhile Han capital. It included a performance by some gorgeously attired dancing girls who quite bewitched the assembled company. ‘One look at them would make one surrender a city,’ raved the poet-official; you couldn’t help but be captivated; not even someone ‘as upright as a Buddhist Sramana’, he wrote, could be immune.15 A sramana being a resident of an asrama (ashram), this seems to be one of the first references to Buddhist monasticism in China. By the beginning of the second century Buddhism was evidently recognised in China as a distinct and somewhat other-worldly religion; a few key terms, such as sramana, had made the transition from their original Sanskritic language into Chinese; and in Chang’an, and probably Luoyang and other cities, Buddhist communities were already established.
By the end of the second century, worship of the Buddha at richly endowed provincial centres is attested – and a clue to the popularity of the new cult afforded – by a reference in the Standard History of the Three Kingdoms period. There it appears that in c. 193 a man called Zhai Rong was put in charge of grain shipments in central Jiangsu, and instead of remitting the revenues from this lucrative assignment, appropriated them to set up a Buddhist community. He may have been a sincere seeker of enlightenment, but from the embarrassed disclaimers of later times it seems more likely that he belonged in such disreputable company as contemporaries like Ox-Horn Yang and Poison Yu. A vast ‘temple’ – which from mention of its layered ‘umbrella’ finial may have been a stupa – was erected, monastic buildings capable of accommodating 3,000 monks were attached, and a gilded statue of the Buddha was arrayed in silks and brocades and occasionally given a ritual bath. Buddhist adherents from far and wide were summoned to the site; others were simply drawn there by Zhai Rong’s offer of exemption from corvée in return for attendance.
Whenever the bathing of the Buddha was to be performed, [Zhai Rong] always had great quantities of wine and food set out, and mats were spread along the road for a distance of [several kilometres]. To enjoy the spectacle and the fare, some ten thousand came and the expense ran to millions [of cash].16
All of which, while ostensibly admirable (if ill informed about Buddhist strictures on alcohol), had the desired effect. Zhai Rong acquired a large and devoted following that, stiffened with troops, would support his subsequent and mercifully brief career as a murderous warlord. ‘For obvious reasons,’ writes Erik Zurcher, author of the seminal work on the Buddhist ‘conquest’ of China, ‘Zhai Rong never became the ideal prototype of the liberal donor . . . [and] in Buddhist sources he is practically never referred to.’17
Meanwhile a trickle of Buddhist texts had begun appearing in Chinese translation. The challenge of translating abstract and often esoteric terms from an alphabetic, grammatically complex and highly inflected language like Sanskrit into the letter-less, uninflected and starkly concise written language of China posed almost insuperable problems. Christian missionaries would encounter something similar when trying to convey to Chinese catechumens the mysteries of, say, the Trinity or transubstantiation. Key ideas like ‘dharma’ and ‘nirvana’, which the Indic world took for granted, were hard for the Chinese to fathom, though Daoism sometimes provided a solution, albeit at some damage to the original. Thus wuwei, for instance, was used for ‘nirvana’, and dao not only for ‘enlightenment’ but also for ‘dharma’ and even ‘yoga’. Other ideas, such as monastic celibacy and reincarnation, were simply offensive to a society in which procreation was seen as a moral duty and ancestors were cherished as spirits immune from the hazard of rebirth. While Confucianism harped on the individual’s duty to family and state, Buddhism signposted a path to salvation that neatly bypassed both.
Additionally the first texts to reach China were not necessarily the most revealing; nor were the missionaries who endeavoured to expound them always any better equipped intellectually than they were linguistically. That the main missionary drive came overland from India and the central Asian states by way of the silk routes is certain. Trade with the west had not been diminished by the Later Han’s retraction from the Western Regions. Moreover archaeology is positively eloquent in the matter, with a long trail of Buddhist sites, inscriptions, sculptures, documentational hoards and paintings extending from north-west India round or through the western Himalaya and then from Parthia, Afghanistan and Sogdiana (Samarkand) to Xinjiang, Gansu and Luoyang. In the second half of the second century, the ten missionaries known to have been operating in the Jin capital at Luoyang comprised two Parthians, two Sogdians, three Indians and three Yuezhi (from Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan, where the Yuezhi were known as Kushans).
Buddhism and long-distance commerce went hand in hand. In India merchants had derived encouragement from the Buddhist disregard of caste strictures on the freedom of movement; in China the Confucian contempt for traders and commerce in general disposed the mercantile classes towards Buddhism as a respectable alternative. In both countries, the merchant community reciprocated, proving generous benefactors as well as extending hospitality and protection to missionaries. Zhai Rong’s stupa-cum-monastery in Jiangsu sounds remarkably like the slightly older complex at Sanchi (near Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh), whose inscriptions actually record the names of its merchant donors. More certainly the remarkable fourth-century cave paintings at Kizil (near Kuqa in Xinjiang) mimic those of Ajanta (in Maharashtra on the road to India’s west coast) and include a telling scene of the Buddha lighting the way for a one-man caravan. Produced by the same quasi-fresco technique and probably contemporary, the narrative scenes and interlocking designs at Kizil and Ajanta, though half a continent apart, are thought to be the work of artists who were either from the same school or in possession of a common crib.18
Buddhism, with its itinerant imagery (‘the Wheel’ of dharma, the ‘Eightfold Path’, the Middle ‘Way’), was on the march again. During the first to third centuries – and especially under the patronage of the Yuezhi/Kushan rulers whose empire extended from India and Afghanistan to Khotan in southern Xinjiang – the proselytising impetus of Ashoka’s age resumed. Ashoka had convened the First Buddhist Council in the third century BC; some time in the second century AD the Kushan emperor Kanishka convened the fourth; and it was in the course of its deliberations that doctrinal differences led to the schism between what would become known as the Mahayana and Theravada (or Hinayana) schools.
The dispute intrigued China’s Buddhist scholars, and both schools were initially represented there. But throughout the regions north of the Himalayas it was the more accessible Mahayanist teachings which eventually prevailed. Mahayanists offered better odds on achieving Enlightenment; even the laity stood a chance. Additionally they laid great stress on devotional aids, including depictions of the Buddha and scenes from his life-story; often executed in stone and influenced by Hellenistic models, these typified the Indo-Asian style known as Gandhara that inspired China’s Buddhist iconography. And crucially, Mahayanists deified not only the Buddha himself but a host of other Enlightened Ones, known as Bodhisattva (in Chinese busa), who included Amitabha (‘the Buddha of the Western Paradise’ to the Chinese), Avaloketiswara (who changed sex to become the female ‘Guanyin’ in China) and Maitreya (the Chinese ‘Miluo’, or ‘Future Buddha’). All such Bodhisattva having postponed their nirvana, they were available to help the seeker along the Way; the teachings and mythologies attributed to them – penances undertaken, powers obtained and wonders worked – formed a substantial part of both the textual corpus and the missionary’s arsenal; and the ceremonies and rituals appropriate to their worship served as a focus of popular devotion.
By the year 311, when the Jin fled Luoyang before a Xiongnu onslaught, there and in Chang’an some 180 Buddhist establishments were reportedly flourishing and there were nearly four thousand monks. Early communities in the provinces, such as Zhai Rong’s in Jiangsu, had been joined by others as far afield as Vietnam, where the
overland Buddhist acharya (disciple) from north India and central Asia met the seaborne apostolate coming from peninsular India and Sri Lanka via south-east Asia. In the Yangzi region, under the patronage of Sun Quan and his successor in the ‘Three Kingdoms’ state of Wu, Indian and Yuezhi missions had won both scholarly acceptance and aristocratic attention. At the Wu, and then Eastern Jin, capital of Jiankang (later Nanjing) silk exports and an inward trade in the exotic produce of south-east Asia sustained a lavish lifestyle and a hothouse intellectual climate. The city would retain its fame as a centre of the loftiest and most speculative Buddhist and Daoist debate throughout the ‘Six (southern) Dynasties’ period.
Everywhere the quality of translations had greatly improved. This was thanks in large part to the labours of Dharmaraksha (c. 230–307). The son of a Yuezhi merchant domiciled in Dunhuang (Gansu), Dharmaraksha had received a Chinese education and, proving a consummate linguist, had undertaken the translation of over 150 Buddhist texts; according to his biographer, ‘he contributed more than anyone else to the conversion of China to Buddhism’.19 Chinese scholars were now alert to a literary and speculative tradition that for its richness and prolixity rivalled their own.
Following a brief reassertion of suzerainty over the rulers of Xinjiang by the first (Western) Jin emperor, religious traffic on the Silk Road had become a two-way affair with Chinese Buddhists – Dharmaraksha among them – heading for Khotan, Kashmir and beyond in search of texts, relics and spiritual guidance. Meanwhile the stupa – originally a reliquary mound that had become Buddhism’s most characteristic monument and which in India was typically a hemispherical dome atop a low pedestal – had in China begun to shoot upwards, incorporating the tiled eaves and multiple storeys of the indigenous architectural tradition to assume the tiered and tapered profile of the classic ‘pagoda’.
By the fourth century, then, Buddhism had cast its slender shadow across the land. But it had yet to overlay every rural fortress and hilltop hermitage. The ‘Way’ of the Laozi and the ‘Eightfold Path’ of the Buddha were not yet so nearly indistinguishable as to raise the question of which had ‘conquered’ which. And Buddhism had still to forge a relationship with the secular power that would elevate it into, if not a state religion, then a religion of state. For that, it would be indebted to other waves of alien ‘conquest’, as inarticulate and confrontational as the acharya’s were literate and accommodating.
INTO THE ABYSS
For sheer immediacy, plus a touching glimpse of one man’s dismay in the face of overwhelming historical events, nothing can beat the letter written from somewhere in northern China in the year 313 by a foreigner called Nanai Vandak. The letter is on paper, one of the earliest examples of its use for correspondence. With other mail, and still in the postbag in which it had been abandoned some sixteen centuries earlier, it was acquired in 1907 by the archaeological explorer Aurel Stein while he was controversially uplifting ancient scrolls by the donkey-load from the caves of Dunhuang. How the postbag had come to be parted from its postman in the first place is not known; nor is it certain to where the letter was addressed. But from its tone and content it is assumed that Nanai Vandak was a commercial representative, probably a Sogdian or Persian, they being major contractors in the overland silk trade; and that the letter was in the nature of a report to his superior, perhaps in Samarkand. The year of its writing, 313, is the crucial part. Nanai Vandak had news from China of no small importance. The Jin capital of Luoyang had for some time been under intermittent siege, many of its defenders had deserted, and those who remained had little to eat. But more than a year after the event, the writer’s disbelief at the city’s ultimate fate was still almost palpable.
. . . And, Sir, the last Emperor – so they say – fled from [Luoyang] because of the famine. And his fortified residence burnt down, and the town was [destroyed]. So [Luoyang] is no more, [Yeh] is no more! . . . They pillaged up to N’ymn’ymh and up to Ngap, these Xiongnu who yesterday had been the Emperor’s property! . . . And, Sir, if I wrote you all the details of how China fared, it would be [a catalogue] of debts and woe. You will have no wealth from here . . .20
Though evidently not an eyewitness to all these events – and though his account still perplexes posterity with its rendering of Chinese place-names – Nanai Vandak had gauged the scale of the disaster well. With the flight of the Jin court and the destruction of Luoyang by the Xiongnu, 500 years of Chinese empire had come to an end. It was one of history’s more emphatic breaks. Arthur Waley, the great twentieth-century sinologist and translator, likened the fall of Luoyang in 311 to the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410;21 Erik Zurcher, following the Franco-Hungarian orientalist Etienne Balazs, simply dubbed its perpetrator ‘the Attila of Chinese history’ – a tag of no mean consequence considering the number of contemporary contenders.22
Luoyang had of course been sacked before, yet rebuilt. The Later Han were long gone, yet Wei and then Jin had risen from their ashes; indeed, it was the Jin who had briefly ‘united the empire long divided’. But now it was different. The victors were Xiongnu, not Chinese, their apparent aim being to despoil China, not reconstruct it. In 311 the world’s second-largest city had been laid waste, and its oldest empire terminated, by a horde of unlettered tent-dwellers.
Arguably the Jin had brought the catastrophe on themselves. Their fragile reunification after the Three Kingdoms period had been achieved at a high cost to central authority. Kinsmen had been rewarded with military commands over semi-autonomous districts; and when Sima Yan, founder of the dynasty, had died in 290, these royal princelings had predictably vied for control of his successors. The so-called ‘War of the Eight Princes’ (290–311) had served to thin the ranks of the Jin contenders while devastating the empire for which they contended. Fierce competition for military recruits snatched the farmer from his fields and the herdsman from his herds. Serviceable cattle and available food-stocks were commandeered by military provisioners. Seed went unsown, grass ungrazed, coin unminted, taxes unpaid.
In their desperation, thousands took to crime, tens of thousands took to the hills, hundreds of thousands just took to the road. The press of vagrants and migrants then destabilised the provinces through which they straggled; government collapsed; locality warred with locality. The formulaic phrasing used in the Standard Histories may for once have had some substance: ‘the rivers filled with floating corpses, bleached bones covered the fields’, says the Jin History. ‘There was much cannibalism. Famine and pestilence went hand in hand.’23
Fortune favoured those whose roving habits, social organisation and sense of a distinct identity, not to mention their equestrian skills and horses, could most readily be translated to military advantage. Xiongnu, Xianbei, Qiang and other tribal groupings who were already settled within the empire were sought as auxiliaries, and whether willingly recruited or driven to take up arms by the recruiters were well represented among the contending forces. Other tribal confederations from beyond the northern frontier, drawn into the fray as allies, stayed on as predators. All the frontier peoples had grievances of their own, not least that of diminished status. Once honoured guests and respected allies of the Han, they had gradually been demoted to what Nanai Vandak calls ‘the property’ of the Jin. ‘From being princes and nobles we have descended to the same level as ordinary registered households of commoners,’ complained one Xiongnu leader.24 The good old days of massive Han subsidies were fondly recalled; and it was a descendant of one of the ancient ‘peace-through-kinship’ unions between a shanyu and a Han princess who led the advance on Luoyang in 310.
This Liu Yuan, though unquestionably a Xiongnu, had adopted the name (Liu) of the imperial Han and actually designated himself ‘king of Han’. Like that other latter-day ‘king of Han’, Liu Bei of the ‘Three Kingdoms’ period, he hoped to use the connection to rally support from contemptuous Chinese subjects. But he died before his mainly Xiongnu forces could take Luoyang. The honours fell to his successor, Liu Cong, ‘the Chinese Attila
’. Ten thousand defenders are said to have been slaughtered in the final assault, a modest figure by Chinese standards which may reflect earlier desertions. If the descriptions of a city already choked with dead bodies are to be believed, Liu Cong’s incendiarists may even have done it a favour.
Chang’an soon shared Luoyang’s fate – twice. Meanwhile the Jin emperor was captured and later killed. So was his successor. That left Sima Rui, a distant cousin stationed on the far-off Yangzi, to claim the emperorship and revive the dynasty. He did so, albeit only in the south, as founder of the Eastern Jin, and was there soon joined by at least a million, perhaps several million, who fled from the north to escape the mounting chaos. Aristocratic émigrés joined destitute refugees in the mass exodus. Entire districts upped sticks, followed their local leaders south, and there settled under the same district administration with the same name. Though there would be friction with both prior settlers in the south and with the region’s indigenous peoples, northerners would provide the southern court with its most distinguished scholars, its later dynasts and its most effective, if not entirely reliable, troops. In a strictly demographic sense, there was thus some substance to the southern dynasties’ claim to be the heirs of Han. Hopes of returning north never flagged; and at court, standards of conduct, scholarship and ritual were zealously maintained against just such a day.