by John Keay
This was in marked contrast to the dismal state of affairs in the north. There the ‘Sixteen Kingdoms’ period (traditionally 304–439) was under way. Of these sixteen kingdoms’ sixteen dynasties, some followed one another in an orderly chronological succession but most crowded abreast in a jostle of competing entities. The result of internecine squabbling and fragmentation among the rampaging tribes, all these regimes were fundamentally unstable, being incapable of reactivating the depleted administrations they had inherited, despised by their Chinese bureaucrats and subjects, and all too ready to resort to coercion.
Perhaps the most feared was the Jie or ‘Later Zhao’ dynasty of Shandong and Hebei. It was founded by a Xiongnu one-time slave and outlaw called Shi Le (r. 319–33). Shi Le, though he knew neither scruples nor letters, was yet a gentleman compared to Shi Hu (333–49), his successor. The reign of Shi Hu, charitably described as a psychopath, was ‘one of unprecedented terror’.25 On falling out with his own heir apparent, he is said to have had the young man killed along with his consort and their twenty-six children, and then to have had them all buried in the same coffin; their over two hundred retainers shared the same fate, though not the same coffin. To such monsters a doctrine enjoining non-violence and respect for life in all its forms should have been cause for ridicule, tending to rage. Yet it was under the patronage of precisely these Xiongnu tyrants that Buddhism in the north made its most dramatic strides.
Fotudeng, a missionary and miracle-worker from Kuqa (Kuche, Kucha) on the Silk Road who had once studied in Kashmir, reached the Yellow River in 310. Forseeing the outcome of the siege of Luoyang – he was also a seer – he secured an interview with Shi Le, then one of the city’s assailants. Since he knew ‘that Shi Le did not understand profound doctrines and would respect only magical powers as evidence of the potency of Buddhism’, Fotudeng filled his begging bowl with water and conjured from it a bright blue lotus.26 Greatly impressed, the Xiongnu leader, and later his blood-curdling successor, adopted Fotudeng as their ‘court-chaplain’ and took Buddhism as their cult. Fotudeng’s remarkable powers, rather than his teachings, were often called to the aid of the Shi family’s Later Zhao dynasty and were handsomely rewarded. Shi Le had his younger sons educated in a Buddhist establishment, while the unspeakable Shi Hu arrogated to himself the title ‘Crown Prince of the Buddha’. Mass conversions, an enormous following, and the foundation of some nine hundred monasteries, nunneries and temples are mentioned. From such dubious dealings with the secular power, Buddhism in north China acquired a popular base. In the words of Fotudeng’s biographer, the miracle-working monk ‘used the patronage of the Shi family to lay the foundations of a Buddhist church’.27
But whether Fotudeng was quite as doctrinally negligent, or the Later Zhao quite as easily impressed, as the records suggest is open to doubt. Fotudeng’s disciples would include some of Chinese Buddhism’s most outstanding scholars. When the Later Zhao kingdom fell apart in 349 – four princes were enthroned and murdered in that year alone – Fotudeng’s disciples fanned out across the north from Shandong to Sichuan and gravitated south as far as Guangdong. One of them, the monk Dao’an, became the greatest exponent, translator and organiser in the early history of Chinese Buddhism; and of his disciples several assisted Kumarajiva, another native of Kuqa, in the most ambitious of all translation projects in terms of quantity and fidelity. Yet all such luminaries continued to revere Fotudeng’s memory, which would suggest that he was more than a mere showman and miracle-worker.
As for the Xiongu, they certainly viewed Fotudeng as some superior kind of shaman whose skills as a doctor, rainmaker, seer and political analyst were worth cultivating. But as Shi Hu explained, they also appreciated the peculiar advantages of Buddhism. ‘Buddha, being a foreign [or outsiders’] god, is the very one we [as outsiders] should worship,’ he declared in the course of an edict urging Buddhist devotion;28 on similar grounds, Buddhism would be encouraged by later incomers such as the Mongols and Manchus. Additionally, its universalist message, extending the chance of release from suffering to all peoples regardless of race, gender or education, was in marked contrast to the narrow social remit of Confucianism. In effect Buddhism offered to semi-literate herdsmen a source of identity and legitimacy denied them by the lofty standards of Confucian scholarship; and by sidelining the precedent-bound rituals of the ru, it brought these alien rulers into direct touch with the less educated mass of their subjects, Chinese and non-Chinese, among whom northern Buddhism now found its greatest following.
Most of the ‘Sixteen Kingdoms’, though ruled by non-Chinese and dominated by their tribal followings, acknowledged the necessity of enlisting the support of the Chinese masses who constituted the majority of their subjects. To this end they paid lip-service to Han traditions, experimented with bureaucratic government and adopted illustrious dynastic names. As well as two Zhao dynasties, there were several Wei, Yan and even Qin dynasties. Based like its original namesake on Chang’an and the Wei valley, the first of these Qin dynasties (351–86) was an unlikely contender for power. Ethnically the latter-day Qin were Di, a tribe of semi-sedentary shepherds and goatherds from the Tibet/Sichuan frontier rather than full-blooded horse-and-camel-rearing nomads from the Mongolian steppe. They had no tradition of concerted action and were ‘governed by a rather large number of independent petty chiefs’.29 They nevertheless adopted the expansionist policies associated with the Qin of old; and partly thanks to a fragmented resistance that badly underestimated them, partly to intelligent accommodations with the more formidable Xiongnu and Xianbei, the Qin had by 381 successfully reunited all of northern China.
In the process Qin forces had seized Sichuan from the Eastern Jin and then threatened the north–south division of the country by advancing on the rest of the Eastern Jin empire in the Yangzi basin. The city of Xiangyang on the Han River was captured and Jiankang, the great southern capital, exposed. When the Jin retook Xiangyang, the Qin responded in emphatic fashion, fielding an incredible 270,000 cavalry and 600,000 infantry for a two-pronged advance on the south – one prong via Henan and the Huai River and the other via Sichuan and the middle Yangzi. But in 383, beside the Fei River, a tributary of the Huai, disaster struck the Qin. The eastern army suffered a mysterious but catastrophic defeat that effectively ended not only the whole offensive but Qin’s all-too-brief dominion.
This so-called battle at the Fei River, though less convincing than that at the Red Cliffs, is another of those north–south engagements credited with being decisive for the future of China. Qin’s bubble had been burst. The southern court at Jiankang (Nanjing) had survived its hour of peril and would linger on for another two centuries of cultivated discourse and confused politics. In 385 southern forces actually attempted their own reunification and reached the Yellow River before withdrawing. Over the next thirty years the Jiankang government was repeatedly rocked by insurrections, yet no northern dynasty sought to take advantage; and it was the same when in 420 the last Eastern Jin emperor conceded the Mandate to his general Liu Yu, founder of the southern Liu Song dynasty. While the 209 battle at the Red Cliffs had consigned the once united empire to being long divided, the 383 battle at the Fei River confirmed that long divided meant longer than a couple of centuries. ‘In the aftermath of the collapse of the Former Qin [so called because it was succeeded in the north-west by a Qiang kingdom that adopted the same dynastic name] the north was more politically fractured than it had been at any time since the fall of the Western Jin.’30
LUOYANG AGAIN
The details of the Fei River battle as relayed by the Standard Histories have been much debated. Suffice it to say that a combination of minor engagements seems to have culminated in a massive communications failure. The Qin forces misread their general’s cunning plan to lure the enemy across the river and took his failure to attack as evidence of a prior reverse of undisclosed magnitude. They therefore not only held their fire, as ordered, but withdrew. Retreat then turned to rout. The Qin thought they had
lost a battle that had not as yet been fought; and their imperfectly integrated associates and allies, putting self-preservation first, simply dispersed. The mighty force had not so much been defeated as dissolved.
The idea of ‘dissolution’ may be appropriate because, however unconvincing the details of the ‘battle’, water seems to have played a major part in it. Indeed, the Fei River affair may be taken to illustrate the widening gulf between military deployment as understood in the north and in the south. In the south nearly all warfare involved ships. Troops, mostly infantry, were moved by river, lake, canal or coast, and campaigns were planned around these lines of advance. Roads were few. The terrain was hostile to baggage trains, the malarial climate was lethal to men on the march, and both were bad for horses. Scarcer here than water buffalo, horses found the grazing unnutritious and the going treacherous. Breeding them, too, was problematic; offspring born anywhere south of the Yellow River were reckoned second rate, and most cavalry mounts had to be imported from the steppe. Thus the southern armies, while they could give a good account of themselves among the bamboo brakes and rushy waterways of their native land, were at a major disadvantage when they ventured on to the windswept plains.
It was the other way round in the north. There mounted warfare and draught transport were everything. From Shaanxi, Gansu and the steppes came the swiftest and sturdiest horses in Asia. Peoples like the Xiongnu and Xianbei rode from infancy. They herded and hunted from horseback, and with bow and blade they fought from horseback. Bloodstock remained the mainstay of their economy. The northern plains, no less than the adjoining steppes, were an equestrian arena.
But while the saddle was proverbially ‘the nomad’s throne’, as of the early fourth century the rider seems to have sat it more firmly. Saddles themselves became more substantially padded, were tailored to horse and rider, and were fitted with leg guards; the c. 300 introduction of the stirrup – one of those obscure inventions credited with changing the world – afforded the rider a much steadier platform from which to loose an arrow or launch a lance; and both riders and horses came to be encased in increasingly heavy body armour. Although the crossbow, with various refinements, remained the weapon of first choice, it was less effective against steel-plated knights on leather-padded steeds. A charge by this tank-like cavalry carried all before it and may partly account for the fortification in this period not only of royal residences but of rural homesteads and villages. Yet in the south such equestrian developments availed the invader not at all. Horses on boats were hard to manage; and in paddy fields and swamps the overladen panzers sank to a soggy standstill. One reason why the north–south division of the country lasted so long could simply be that neither party possessed the military means to overrun the other.
Evidence for the use of the stirrup and horse armour comes from contemporary paintings and figurines of helmet-hooded Xianbei on stiffly skirted chargers. It was fearsome offensives by just such troops of a Xianbei confederation from beyond the northern frontier which ended the ‘Sixteen Kingdoms’ free-for-all. The Tabgach (in Chinese ‘Tuoba’), the confederation’s main tribal component, first fell out with allies in the plains of the north-east. Following a row over a consignment of horses, the Xianbei swooped down to settle matters, and as ‘the Northern Wei’ (386–534), the Tabgach leadership then steadily eliminated Xiongnu, Qiang and other dynastic rivals. By 439, from their capital at Pingcheng (Datong in northern Shanxi), they had reunited all China above the Huai River.
The sway of this Tabgach/Tuoba ‘Northern Wei’ dynasty, the first and much the most important of the so-called ‘Five (northern) Dynasties’, would last nearly a century. Its four short-lived successors (making up the ‘Five Dynasties’ sequence) would then swiftly succumb to the Sui; and it was the Sui’s two emperors who, not before time, would ring down the curtain on the testing ‘Period of Disunion’ and usher in the great era of Tang. Another golden age was imminent; and lustre being long in the buffing, its harbingers may be sought among the Northern Wei.
In administering an empire – or half of one – the Northern Wei faced the same problems as their predecessors from the tribal world: basically it was a question of how to retain the loyalty and cohesion of forces that were substantially non-Chinese, while inducing subjects who were now overwhemingly Chinese to reactivate the administration, resettle the land and so restore the flow of foodstuffs, manpower and revenue. Positive discrimination helped to reassure the Xianbei population. Known as guoren (‘people of the [Tabgach] states’, or ‘compatriots’), they were treated as a ruling class with their own ranking system. They retained their native customs and language, enjoyed numerous privileges and tax exemptions, and had a monopoly of military appointments. Large numbers settled in the vicinity of the capital; others patrolled the northern frontier up to the Gobi desert, where a network of forts was built.
Ideally the guoren would be supplied and supported by the empire’s Han Chinese subjects. Labour of a servile nature was readily available; large numbers of enslaved captives and convicts were brought to the capital and used for public works, military supply and the cultivation of state lands. But it was not so easy to attract unenslaved, and so taxpaying, agriculturalists back to work on long-deserted holdings. The overall decline in population during the ‘Period of Disunion’ has been put as high as 30 per cent. Especially marked in the north, where emigration continued to take a heavy toll, depopulation induced victorious regimes ‘to place greater value on the control of persons than the control of territory’ and to treat cultivators as the spoils of war.31 Large numbers were indeed resettled, usually within reach of the capital; but many decamped at the slightest provocation, and as the pace of conquest slowed, so did the supply of new settlers. To increase the agricultural yield, the Northern Wei would have to devise inducements and incentives for the cultivator, including a permanent and equitable system of land tenure.
Vouchsafed a longer dominion than any of their post-Han predecessors, the Northern Wei had ample time to acclimatise politically and to experiment. As under previous regimes, Buddhism served as a source of legitimisation and as a bridge over the ethnic divide between non-Chinese and Chinese. But it was also harnessed more directly to the interests of the state. A branch of the bureaucracy took over the regulation of Buddhist affairs; and the difficulty of Buddhist clergy owing obedience to their monastic superiors rather than to the imperial authorities was overcome by elevating the emperor above the clergy as a titular Bodhisattva. A similar move in the south saw Wudi (r. 502–49) of the Liang dynasty, the last but one of the Six (southern) Dynasties, assume hybrid titles such as Huangdi Busa and Busa Tianzi (‘Imperial Bodhisattva’, ‘Buddhist Son of Heaven’).
Potential disloyalty, if not subversion, was only one of many criticisms voiced of Buddhism at the time, all being indicative of its now pervasive presence. With manpower in short supply the monasteries were especially vulnerable on the grounds that they provided a safe haven for idlers and tax-dodgers. Not only monks but all those who laboured on the vast monastic estates were exempt from taxation, conscription and corvée. So were the estates themselves, their produce and income going to support and enrich the clerical community and enhance its standing. State projects and revenues suffered as a result. The colossal Buddha figures and caves still extant at Yugang (near Pingcheng) and Lungmen (near Luoyang), for instance, were hewn from the rock by tens of thousands of labourers who might otherwise have been employed on works of public utility.
Such criticisms, and there were many others, had already surfaced in the south in 340 and 403. In the north they found favour with the Northern Wei emperor known as Tai-wudi (r. 424–52), who completed the dynasty’s conquests. Falling under the influence of a Daoist Celestial Master, the emperor was ceremonially installed as ‘the Perfect Lord of Great Peace [taiping]’ and presided over a veritable Daoist revolution in the inner circles of power. Buddhist monks and other leaders of popular cults were purged in 444 and, not for the last time, Buddhism its
elf was proscribed in 446. Although support for the move was forthcoming from the alienated Han gentry, all this was too much for the Xianbei military, who found their monopoly of high office threatened, and much too much for the emperor when he discovered that a Daoist-influenced rewriting of the dynasty’s history disparaged his nomadic ancestry. The proscription was accordingly relaxed around 450, repealed after Tai-wudi’s 452 assassination, and completely reversed when from 465 the formidable Dowager Empress Feng gradually took over the reins of power.
‘Few rulers in history have made more thoroughgoing attempts to change their subjects’ lives than did the dowager and her step-grandson Xiao-wendi,’ writes one authority.32 Not only was Buddhism reinstated, the dowager herself being a lavish patron, but in a series of decrees spread over thirty years the whole trajectory of the regime was reversed. The Xianbei were now to abandon their distinctive language, dress and customs, and through intermarriage and education to become sinicised. The Northern Wei, from representing a steppe hegemony over the northern plains, would pursue a northern plains dominion over the whole of China. And instead of autocratic military rule, a bureaucratic civilian government like that of the Early Han was to be encouraged, agriculture favoured and the ethnic divide between rulers and ruled bridged by the blending of Han and non-Han.