Mani in China II: At the Temple

My hunt for the last remaining temple of the Manichaeans began in late July, from a hostel near the river and the old marked district of Quanzhou. Skipping breakfast (a hassle to arrange) I began my first stretch of walking, trying to find a taxi to get me to the correct bus-station. Doubt started to seep in after the tenth taxi roared by without slowing down. But at a small bus stop along the road I found a group of teenagers who decided to take me on as a surrogate child. With the help of their smart-phones, and a crucial piece of paper with the place-names in Chinese letters I had received from the hostelier the day before, we managed to sort out my intended destination. At first they tried to help me with the taxi-chase, but with the same dismal result. When a bus finally arrived they signalled for me to follow them on; and after ten minutes one of the girls got off, again signalling for me to follow. She then guided me through a crowd to the long-distance bus station, cheerily dragging me all the way to the Counter, where I bought a ticket for "Anhai" and asked the driver to let me off at "Cao'ansi". Communication was the usual: hand & head gestures, and the piece of paper. After a rather uneventful bus-ride out of town - though I couldn't really tell where the city stopped and the suburb began - I was let off on my own at the side of the high-way, in front of a long, empty and dusty road. A sign next to what looked like a pallet workshop had a temple on it and pointed down the road. Of course. I began my trek. The area looked rather poverty-stricken. In the distance I could see green hills.

I continued to walk in a straight line from the starting point, somewhat bewildered, meeting no further signs to point the way. I crossed another high-way. Having walked for about half an hour I finally passed someone, a man who rested in the shade of a tree, and tried to ask him for directions. He shook his head and waved me on. But after another twenty minutes, just as I was pondering whether I had taken a wrong turn (or rather, not taken a right one), I found a sign which said "Grass Temple," in the midst of a deserted intersection and next to a car wash. As it turned out it was also right next to the temple grounds, walled off from intruders and hidden by trees. Entering through the gate I came into a peaceful garden, violently green compared to the grey road I had been following so far.

Manichaeism is first attested in this area around the middle of the 9th century, as related in part I, and its adherents became a widely dispersed if often hard-pressed minority. Chinese scholarly works, official accounts, an even some poetry, show the vibrancy of the movement in the Medieval Age, along with inscriptions recorded in Quanzhou itself. Somewhat surprisingly, an inscription attest to a (probably brief) period of close administrative relations between Manichaeans and Christians in the area. Quanzhou was a cosmopolitan city, visited by among others Marco Polo, and housed adherents of both Islam and Nestorian Christianity at the time. Such cooperation would have been entirely in its spirit. However, through persecution and competition Manichaeism finally went into decline in this region as well. The last description of a living Manichaean temple and its adherents was given around 1600, by the Ming-scholar Ho Ch'iao-yüan: "On the ridge slope back of the [Huabiao] hill is a rustic shrine dating from the Yüan period [13th-14th century]. There reverence is paid to Buddha Mani. The Buddha Mani has for name 'Brilliant Buddha Mo-mo-ni'. He came from Su-lin [Assyria] and is also a Buddha, having the name 'Envoy of the Great Light, Complete in Knowledge'." Ch'iao-yüan also notes that: "At present those among the people who follow its practices use formulas of incantation called 'The Master's Prescription', (but) they are not much in evidence."
(translation by S. N. C. Lieu. See Lieu 1998, Manichaeism in Central Asia and China, pp. 194-95)

 

The shrine was rediscovered in the 1930s by Chinese scholars. By then it had probably long been empty of Manichaean activity. Instead it had become a Buddhist sanctuary, renovated by an entrepreneuring preacher. There were however still indications of its previous occupants; most strikingly a statue of "Mo-ni, Buddha of Light". The statue resembles traditional Buddha-statues at a first glance, but bears several unusual features that testify to its Manichaean provenance: straight hair, the hint of a beard (the rest of it possibly shaved off by Buddhists), a fleshy jowl, arched eyebrows, hands resting on the abdomen, and a double-knot in its garment. The statue proved a boon not only for being one of the very few pictorial representations of Mani we possess, but also because it has allowed for the identification of further Manichaean material. Only a few years ago, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, a painting in possession of a Japanese Buddhist monastery was shown to contain elements that pointed towards a Christian background. It was thus first taken to be of "the Church of the East" (the Nestorian Church), but has later been recognized as a Manichaean work. Though in the possession of a Japanese temple, the painting is of Chinese extraction, that is to say, from Fujian province.



Arriving, I got a glimpse of some monks disappearing into the temple. I looked around a bit before I walked up the stairs to the ridge on which temple-building was situated, past an outdoor-shrine to a deity I couldn't identify, and the incense-burner on the terrace, and peered into the entrance, where I finally got a look at the Mani-statue. Naturally, some disappointment was inevitable. The statue was shielded by a glass-cage, and besides another small shrine, there was little else to see. The roof was decorated with colorful swastika-banners. Music rattled from a small cd-player. An old lady watched over the divinities. While it seemed she was supposed to sell trinkets, she chose to consistently ignore my presence, for which I was grateful. The stark contrast between the dark interior, and the intense light that penetrated through the open entrance, made photographing pointless. I went outside again.

Then I wandered for a while beneath the green. The garden was very much in the Chinese tradition, with a clear lay-out, paved paths, and a small pond with a stream and a bridge. A door was hidden in the wall beneath the shrine itself. On a cliff next to the temple-building some Chinese symbols were written in blood red letters; I knew from my readings that they listed important Manichaean virtues. A stone-stairway led past the temple, through a small glenn, past another cliff-inscription, and to a new set of stairs - presumably leading up to the Huabiao-hilltop. I decided to follow it for a while. But after maybe half an hour of slow climbing and exploration, I suddenly felt the pangs of uneaten food. Without meaning to, although very much in the Manichaean spirit, I had yet to eat anything that day - and worse, yet to drink. I descended and rested for a while in the garden, next to a large solitary tree. While dozing off I tried to imagine how this place, half a millennium earlier, might still have been a focal point for nearby Manichaeans; a place for festivals and nightly vigils, as well as daily offerings - how it might have looked clad with lanterns and ribbons, while white-robed monks recited the Master's Prescription and chanted the light-particles of the soul up to the Moon Palace, where they rested before they travelled on to the divine Gardens of Light.

Then I arose and hitched a ride back.

New publication: Early Christianity in East Africa and Red Sea/Indian Ocean Commerce

I've got a new article out in a special volume of African Archaeological Review, on Africa and the Indian Ocean. Inspired in particular by Rodney Stark's work on early Christianity, and Michael Mann's on social power networks, the article makes use of social network perspectives in order to understand how religions spread into new regions, and how the process of conversion might have taken place. In my opinion the network perspective adds value, by reconciling our literary and archaeological sources with modern sociological models of conversion, and by showing how networks of ideology, trade and political power interact.

Abstract:
The ancient East African kingdom of Aksum gradually adopted Christianity from the early- to mid-fourth-century reign of Ezana onwards. The well-known narrative of the late Roman church-historian Rufinus relates a top-down process of conversion, starting with the ruler himself. The report, corroborated by the adoption of Christian symbolism on Ezana’s late coinage, and monotheistic as well as overtly Christian references in royal inscriptions, is generally considered trustworthy. While not challenging the significance of charismatic and powerful individuals, this article argues that Christianity was present in the region before Ezana, and that the introduction of Christianity should be situated within the context of early Red Sea/Indian Ocean commerce. Trade was the carrier of ideological impulses from communities in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean worlds and created the social infrastructure that expatriate believers, early converts, and later, church officials and local elites could draw upon.

The article is open access, and can be downloaded from the journal website. It is published online first, and volume and page numbers will be added when the printed version is out.

The social in the past, some reflexions

I'm just back from a four-day workshop with colleagues at the Centre for Advanced Study, Norwegian Academy of Sciences, where both Håkon and I take part in the project Local Dynamics of Globalisation in the pre-modern Levant, which is housed at the centre for this Academic Year. Our workshop was called The Social in the Past. Things, Networks, and Texts: A Material Approach to the Pre-Modern (description and program). Speakers came from a range of disciplines, including theology, religion, anthropology, archaeology, history, and cultural studies, but the unifying interest was in how we can move from our things and text – the material that we are all interested in and the signs that have come down to us from the past – to understanding the social associations between these things, texts and the people who made and used them. The workshop was way too varied and rich for me to do justice to all of it in a short blog post, nevertheless I'd like to put down a few points that relate to networks, which is of course my main interest in this, that we discussed in the first session, and that I continued to think about during and after the workshop.

Our keynote was Professor Ian Hodder from Stanford University. Hodder spoke about his work at Neolithic Çatalhöyük  in present-day Turkey, one of the earliest (complex?) societies we know of, taking his recent book Entangled as his point of departure. Neolithic people, of course, produced no texts, and we rely solely on things, in a wide sense of the word, when we try to understand their social world. Hodder showed us how things are associated with things and also reveal interaction with people, for instance clay and temper are obtained – balls are formed – balls are fired – then stored – then heated in oven – placed hot in a basket – meat is cooked – broken balls are discarded and so on. Reconstructing relationships of contingence and dependence, leading to reliance and dependency, he drew what he called tanglegrams, showing how things at the site related to each other, and in some cases led to what he characterised as entrapment, resembling the economic term of path-dependence.

Hodder also shared examples of his ongoing cooperation with network analyst and archaeologist Angus Mol (Leiden), using the same dataset of thing-thing relations from Çatalhöyük in a computer based network analysis. Hodder argued that the tanglegram is different from network analyst in the sense that the network consists of dyads, whereas the entanglegram highlights chains.

To me both methods represent ways of approaching networks. I think we need to do both. The tanglegram takes the thing as the point of departure, and tries to see how it associates to other things (or to human agents), following these associations creates entangled chains, that very well demonstrates the complexity that Hodder underlines. Network analysis looks at the whole structure (to the extent that we know it), and let's us ask how the things and the associations between them fit into that structure. It is true that it is an agglomeration of dyads, but series of dyads are also chains (or rather networks), and if we combine the quantitative analysis with a qualitative one, we could trace associations in much the same way. One advantage of network analysis might be that it could enable us to identify which parts of the network offer themselves, and are in need of qualitative analysis.

These points illustrate what we are grappling with. During the workshop we discussed a number of theories, including those of Latour, Bordieu, Foucault, Braudel, Michael Mann, and Robert Redfield, and how they allow us to see the past through different lenses. Although I, as others, have my favourites, they all offer perspectives that allow us to interpret the relationship between things, texts and people. What I often miss are the models that enable us to make our assumptions explicit, and to test them. The tanglegram and network analysis are two examples of how one can develop or borrow models that make sense of some aspects of the data, but inevitably obscure or leave out others.

Is it rewarding for scholars of the ancient world to engage consciously with theory and model building. To me the answer is a clear yes. Our sources don't speak for themselves. Theoretical perspectives allow us to situate our data in a wider context, models allow us to test our assumptions.

New publications

Ancient West & East 13 / 2014 / Textile trade and Distribution in Antiquity, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe (ed.) 2014

As I got back from fall-break, the print versions of our two latest publications, one article and one book chapter, were on my desk. Call me old-school, but I enjoy holding the book in my hands, and book chapters are really best read in context with the rest of the volume.

Eivind Heldaas Seland (2014) Caravans, Smugglers and Trading Fairs: Organizing Textile Trade on the Syrian Frontier. Pages 83-90 in Kerstin Droß-Krüpe (ed.), Textile Trade and Distribution in Antiquity. Harrassowitz Verlag.

Eivind Heldaas Seland (2014) The  organisation of the Palmyrene caravan trade. Ancient West and East 13, pp. 197-211. doi:10.2143/AWE.13.0.3038738.

As a word of warning to Network Analysis enthusiasts, there is nothing of that in these articles, both, however, address how networks operated, and how we can approach this by means of modern models, in this case New Institutional Economics.

The AWE article is available online, the book chapter unfortunately not. Also, it was not possible to publish these open access. Preprints should appear in Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA) in time (they are not there yet). Meanwhile, drop me a line if your library does not have these and you require an offprint.

SAMKUL conference 2014

Networks in the Roman Near East is funded by the Research Council of Norway's SAMKUL initiative, which brings together 24 projects from the humanities and social sciences, addressing societal development and social change. This years open SAMKUL conference, in Trondheim on November 3rd,  addresses the technology, politics and culture of food, and boasts some really interesting keynotes addressing food from the Roman period until today. Follow the link for program and registration.

Workshop: Networks and interaction in the Red Sea

Together with colleagues from the research group "Ancient History, Culture and Religion", and the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, both University of Bergen, we are hosting an informal one-day workshop on the history and archaeology of the Red Sea in the pre-islamic and early Islamic period, bringing together scholars from Bergen with some really exiting international guests in order to discuss work in progress. The workshop is open to the public.

Networks and interaction: The Red Sea Region in history and archaeology

University of Bergen
Department of archaeology, history, cultural studies and religion
Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

Sep 18 2014

Venue: Jekteviksbakken 31, Seminarrom 240 (Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies)


The Red Sea connects the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean, and has served as a corridor of exchange at least since the second millennium BCE. The sea, however, has also always been an arena of commercial, religious and military interaction between the people living along its coasts and in its hinterlands. This workshop brings together contributions addressing the Red Sea and the neighbouring regions in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods, with the aim of transcending traditional scholarly divides based on period, region, and discipline, by focusing on the common relationship with the sea.

09.00: Welcome

09.15: Vasileios Christides, Institute for Graeco-Oriental and African Studies (IGOAS): The Countries around the Red Sea in the Hagiographic Works.

10.00: Randi Haaland, University of Bergen: Meroitic Empire Sudan; cultural influences and trade in an Indian Ocean context.

10.45: Coffee

11.00: Alexandros Tsakos, University of Bergen: Christian Nubia and the Red Sea.

11.45: Richard Holton Pierce, University of Bergen: Pharaonic Egypt and the Red Sea

12.30:  Lunch

13.30: Zbigniew Fiema, University of Helsinki: To Hegra by Land - New Investigations

14.15: Kristoffer Damgaard, University of Copenhagen: Political Imperialism or Mercantile Expansionism? An archaeological assessment of Islam’s osmosis into Northeast Africa (7th – 10th cent. CE)

15.00: Kasper Grønlund Evers, University of Copenhagen: ‘No Man Is an Island’ — the role of networks, diasporas and associations in the organisation of long-distance trade passing through the Red Sea, 1st–3rd cent. CE

15.45: Coffee

16.00: Michaela Reinfeld, Phillips University, Marburg: Written Sources, Facts and Rumors. The Underwater Archaeology Project of the University of Marburg

16.45: Eivind Heldaas Seland, University of Bergen: Routes, circuits, itineraries: A network analysis of the Periplus Maris Erythraei.


19.30: Dinner (by invitation)


Organizing committee: Anne K. Bang, Alexandros Tsakos, Eivind Heldaas Seland.

Mani in China I: A Very Brief History

This July I finally had the opportunity to travel to China, and to experience a country which I have read much about but never previously visited. The stay was somewhat short - I only had two and a half weeks - and hectic - it included visits to five different cities, - which meant I only got to witness a small fraction of a fraction of the great equation that is China. But I did manage to fulfill one of the goals I set out with: a visit to the world's last remaining Manichaean temple. It lies nested in a hillside at the outskirts of Quanzhou, a city long known in the west as Zaiton and one of the most important ports of China, eulogized by among others Marco Polo. The temple was built in the 13th or 14th century when China was ruled by Kublai Khan's Mongol dynasty (the Yuan) and thus about contemporaneously with Polo's stay. It seems in fact clear from his narration that Polo met with Manichaeans in Quanzhou, perhaps the very same who made use of the temple.

Before I describe my own visit to the site, which will be published in part II of this post (now available here) , I want to give an account of the Manichaeans of China, a largely forgotten chapter in the history of religions - so much so that even specialists long doubted claims of their existence. Finds in the early 20th century from western China, and subsequent research on other Chinese sources, decided the issue. It has revealed a Manichaean presence here that lasted at least a thousand years, and one that included a flourishing indigenous Chinese Manichaean community.


The initial spread
Recent evidence point to the existance of Manichaeans among the Western traders in China already in the 6th century CE. These communites consisted of Sogdians, a people who controlled much of the trade between China and the Sasanid or Persian Empire, many of whom had been converted to Manichaeism by the early missionary work of Mani's apostles (see a previous blogpost). The first chronicled presence is that of a mu-che (a Manichaean Teacher, one of their most important clergy officials) that preached in China during the mid-7th century, although little more is known of his activity. The first official - that is, court-registered - preacher was a diciple of this mu-che, a man named Mihr Ormuzd and designated as fú-to-tàn ("Attendant of the Law"; a Manichaean bishop), who visited empress Wu in 697 CE bringing with him a book named "The book of the two Principles". Twenty years later, in 719, the king of Tokharistan (present-day northern Afghanistan and Tajikistan) recommended a great mu-che and astrologist to the Chinese court, and he seems to have been the first to ask for permission to build a Manichaean temple in the country.

Their welcome was however a chilly one. Chinese government officials were constantly wary of the new religion, which also had to contend with hostile reactions from certain Buddhist authorities. In 732 an imperial decree warned: "The doctrine of Mòní is entirely a perverse belief. Falsely they profess Buddhism. But since it is the religion of the teachers of the western Hú-people and others, and since its disciples are to be found among themselves, they shall not be judged criminals." In other words, the religion could be tolerated - as long as it was influential among the Western barbarians only and did not try to reach out to Chinese people. The fact that the government felt it necessary to issue this warning does point to a degree of missionary propagation. With the conversion of an Uygur khagan (khan) visiting China in the 760s, the Manichaeans received more clout in their dealings with China, due to the temporary alliance between the empire and the Uygurs. Manichaean clergy were used as representatives from the Uygur khagan to the Chinese emperor, and they were allowed seven temples in China proper, amongst them in the capitals Chang'an and Luoyang.
 

 

 

A Move to the South

But the alliance did not last. With the collapse of Uygur power after defeat at the hands of a Kirghiz army, the Chinese government decided to get rid of the Manichaeans. In the 840s, it waged a campaign against various Western religions; first Manichaeism in 843, then Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity and Zoroastrianism in 845. The official Manichaean temples were closed, and Manichaean priests were shaved and dressed as Buddhist shamans before they were executed. The remaining clergy was either exiled to Uygur Territory, or fled to other parts of China. A certain priest named Hulu in the sources escaped the persecution, and found a safe haven - and especially fruitful missionary soil - in the southern coastal province of Fujian and its neighbours. It seems likely that he would have fled to a part of the country were he could already expect to find some support, but the presence of Manichaeans here before his arrival is undocumented. Certainly the religion flourished along the Southern coast in the subsequent centuries.

However, rumblings among Chinese officials and Buddhist writers were often heard. Instances of violence were blamed on Manichaeans especially from the early 12th century onwards, as in the case of the Fang La-rebellion in the 1120-21. In the medieval period Manichaeans were often labelled "vegetarian devil-worshippers", a designation that was later extended to Buddhist sectarian or lay groups that government officials deemed troublesome. The Manichaeans attempted to adapt themselves to more indigenous Chinese religious traditions, and seem to have drawn many supporters who thought of the religion as a kind of Taoism. Seeking legitimacy, one of their writings was for a time accepted into the Taoist scriptural kanon. Despite these attempts, harsh laws were put into place against the group, and they were often suspected of formenting unrest. Yet there was also a high level of co-existance, especially in such cosmopolitan centres as Quanzhou. A curious, though little understood, connection existed at the official level between the Manichaeans and the recently arrived Nestorian Christians of Quanzhou.
 

Decline
After the fall of the comparatively religious pluralistic Yuan dynasty in 1368, Manichaeism began to face more active hostility from the Ming-emperors. A major persecution broke out at the beginning of their reign. The Chinese name for Manichaeism was ming-chiao, "Light sect", and the newly proclaimed emperor Zhu Yuanzhang did not like the Association of the sect with his dynasty. The sect was forbidden on penalty of death in 1370, along with a few other "dangerous sects" such as the lay White Lotus-movement. This renewed persecution will certainly have contributed to the religion's disappearance. But there were, as we shall see, still Manichaeans around at the turn of the 17th century.


Further reading

Grenet, F.  2007, "Religious Diversity among Sogdian Merchants in Sixth-Century China" in Comparative studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Vol. 27 nr.2, pp. 463-78

Haar, ter B. J. 1999 (1992), The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press

Lieu, S.N.C. 1998, Manichaeism in Central Asia and China. Leiden: Brill Publishing

See also: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/chinese-turkestan-vii