by John Keay
DAO AND THE CELESTIAL MASTERS
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms begins with one of the most-quoted aphorisms in China’s history: ‘the empire long united, must divide: long divided, must unite’. A thousand pages (in translation) later it ends, give or take a paragraph, with the same phrasing reversed: ‘the empire long divided, must unite; long united, must divide’. So it had; so it would. Long united under the Han, it had divided; long divided under the Three Kingdoms, it must unite. In 263 Liu Bei’s Shu, or Han-Shu, dynasty was finally conquered by the Cao family’s Wei dynasty. Two years later the Wei were themselves toppled by Sima Yan, a power-broker whose family had been pillars of Wei since Cao Cao’s day. And in 280 this Sima Yan’s new Jin dynasty finally extinguished the Sun family’s Wu dynasty in the south. China was again united.
But not, in this case, long united. As rulers of all China, the Sima family’s Jin (or ‘Western Jin’) dynasty scarcely outlasted the one-man Xin dynasty of the much-maligned Wang Mang in the early first century. Within a decade it was overtaken by civil war and invasion, and within a generation the Jin had been driven from Luoyang (311), then Chang’an (316), into prolonged exile south of the Yangzi. There they would reign (317–420) as the ‘Eastern Jin’, their capital at Jiankang (Nanjing) being east, as well as south, of Luoyang and Chang’an.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by ending on an upbeat note of unity restored by the Jin in 280, thus gives a highly misleading impression. Successful reintegration was still three centuries away. The ‘Period of Disunion’, having begun with the empire’s tripartite division into the Three Kingdoms, would in fact grow more disunited. The long-lasting ‘South–North’ (Nan–Bei) division of the country would find the south (with its ‘Six Dynasties’) and the north (with its ‘Sixteen Kingdoms’, then its ‘Five Northern Dynasties’) themselves subject to fragmentation and frequent dynastic change. For a kaleidoscope of kingdoms within an erst-while empire, not even medieval Europe would surpass post-Han China.
Through this taxing era, the student of imperial affairs, instead of grappling with a quickfire succession of emperors, does well to keep track of whole dynasties. Sheer frustration with its ephemeral polities, plus an understandable reticence on the part of those committed to the primacy of an indivisible Chinese state, have led to the period being dismissed as the equivalent of Europe’s ‘Dark Ages’. Just as the grandeur that was Rome gave way to barbarian invasion, political fragmentation, religious superstition and a decline in urban life, so seemingly did the might that was Han. But the dates do not quite coincide: China’s eclipse was ending when Europe’s much longer occlusion was just beginning. And for China, if not for western Europe, division and incursion proved culturally and socially stimulating rather than stultifying.
It had happened before. Endemic strife in the ‘Spring and Autumn’ and ‘Warring States’ periods had excited the speculation and created the opportunities that in retrospect had transformed that era of instability and division into a golden age. It was, after all, the time-frame of Confucius, Mozi, Laozi and ‘the hundred schools of thought’, of exuberant grave goods, big bronze bells and the plaintive songs of Chu. Subsequent stability and cohesion under the Qin and Former Han had been productive of public works (roads, palaces, walls, irrigation, reclamation and colonisation schemes), plus much fine, if orthodox, scholarship. But bureaucratic rule and unchallenged sovereignty had been no guarantee of creative excellence or devotional innovation. Now, once again, supposedly negative factors such as political disarray and social dislocation proved more effective catalysts. Far from ‘dark’, the post-Han age of disunion is illumined by dazzling literary achievements, by the emergence of Daoism as an indigenous counterpoint to Confucian orthodoxy, and by the adoption of Buddhism, the greatest religio-cultural import in the history of pre-modern China. The resulting syntheses, accommodated and encouraged within a reunited empire, would largely account for the never surpassed magnificence of the imperial Tang (traditionally 618–907).
Han-period verses, known as fu, read like nothing so much as rollicking catalogues. Virtuoso exercises in vocabulary, and often concerned with the natural world, they may actually have been intended for lexicographical reference. Commissioned and adjudged by the court, fu exalted the emperor and idealised imperial set-pieces – palaces, parks, receptions, hunts – with few concessions to any harsher reality. Though they gratified dynastic pride and served educational and propaganda purposes, they left little scope for personal expression. This changed with the fall of the Han. The transitional period (c. 190–220) had witnessed an unprecedented burst of literary activity which was sustained during the rest of the Three Kingdoms period and on into that of the Six (southern) Dynasties. Fu became more expressive, and with the development of new forms in both prose and poetry, especially the verses known as shih, ‘literature as literature came into its own’.7 Without entirely renouncing didactic and dynastic responsibilities, writers looked on the past anew and began to convey a sense of their own troubled time and of their responses to it. Escaping from Chang’an after the murder of Dong Zhuo (the warlord who had intercepted the young Han princes and then swapped one for the other), Wang Can wrote a poem called ‘Seven Sadnesses’.
Once out the gate, nothing to see,
Just white bones covering the plain,
A starving woman on the road
Embraces a child and abandons it in the grass.8
In this extract the poet achieves his effect by zooming, like a camera, from the wide-angle devastation to the close-focus tragedy; pathos lies in the sharpening detail: so does the bite of criticism. Writers were beginning to respond to their own need for expression rather than to the eulogistic requirements of imperial patrons. Aesthetic considerations were prevailing over mere verbal exhibitionism.
‘Literature is indeed the great profession by which the state is governed, the magnificent action that leads to immortality . . . Life and glory last only a limited time, unlike literature which lasts forever.’9 So wrote not some slighted versifier but Wei Wendi, the emperor himself, this being the title taken by Cao Pi after Han Xiandi abdicated in his favour. As literary patrons, the Cao family collected existing texts and commissioned compilations of them. A new penal code that digested the juridical pronouncements of the Han and anticipated major legal compilations under the Jin and Tang should perhaps be seen in this context – though it also served to assert the always draconian punishments that awaited the malefactor. Such compilatory work was often of a more literary nature, and Cao Cao and Cao Pi were themselves notable writers. The latter is best known for his prose criticism. Bemoaning the loss of literary colleagues in an epidemic of 217, he undertook to edit their collected works and, in so doing, aired the idea of qi, in the sense of an individual’s inspiration and style, as something innate and quite distinct from talent. Both Caos also penned poems of their own. Cao Cao preferred contemporary themes in which he expressed sympathy for the plight of the Han, as in the allusively titled ‘Dew on the Shallots’. Cao Pi famously wrote rhapsodies in which his voice is that of a maiden bemoaning the absence of her lover, possibly also in reference to the fallen Han. Both were upstaged by another member of the family, the prolific and influential Cao Zhi, who is sometimes rated among China’s greatest poets.
The warmth of Cao (or Wei) sentiment for the Han, and the unusually bloodless nature of the dynastic changeover, are worth noting. Cao Pi and his advisers had given much thought to the legitimisation and staging of the dynastic transition. A stele, of which there survive some fragments as well as rubbings of the original text, was inscribed to mark the occasion; and the manifestations and precedents cited on it would provide something of a charter for the upstart dynasties that followed.
Although Cao Cao, as effective regent for Han Xiandi, had invoked the tutelary examples of Huo Guang and the Duke of Zhou, Cao Pi, in replacing Han Xiandi, obviously needed a different frame of legitimising references. According to those who supposedly bombarded
him with pleas to accept the Mandate, the situation little resembled that under the Former Zhou (when the grand old Duke of Zhou had exercised power without coveting the emperorship) but closely paralleled that under the remoter, not to say mythical, Five Emperors with whom the whole dynastic pedigree had supposedly begun.
In those far-off days the succession had passed not from father to son in lineal descent but from one imperial incumbent to the next on the basis of merit. When an emperor recognised someone of manifestly superior virtue, he simply and selflessly abdicated in his favour. Clearly this was just the principle required to legitimise Cao Pi’s elevation. Yet since only the last of the Five Emperors had contravened the practice to name his son as his successor and so found his own dynasty (the Xia), it boded ill for Cao Pi’s descendants; on identical grounds – virtue over birth – the Sima family would overthrow the Cao’s Wei dynasty to found their own Jin dynasty; and subsequent regimes in both the north and south would follow this example. The idea that the Mandate belonged to the meritorious proved inherently destabilising.
An additional feature of Cao Pi’s stele inscription is its citing of neorevelatory texts and other unconventional data – omens, divinations and predictions – that were outside the Confucian tradition. All have been identified as Daoist, so making the accession of Cao Pi and his Wei dynasty what one writer calls ‘the first in a long tradition [involving the] Daoist legitimation of emperors’.10 In the late second and early third centuries Daoism was at last emerging as a distinct ‘persuasion’. A Daoist canon was being collated and Daoist leaders, like those of the Yellow Turbans, attracted vast followings. Although the 184 revolt of the Yellow Turbans had been speedily suppressed, erstwhile adherents played an important role in the strife of the Three Kingdoms period with one group in particular establishing a martial theocracy in Hanzhong on the mountainous north-east border of Sichuan. There, as ‘the Celestial Masters’ or ‘Five Pecks’ movement (each household contributed five pecks of grain to the common good), they held out for several decades; and when in 215 they finally succumbed to Cao Cao, it was on terms so agreeable that a Wei–Daoist accommodation has been inferred. Most members of the sect removed en masse to the more favoured Xu, where their leaders were rewarded with fiefs and titles. They then obligingly revealed arcane communications and texts that foretold how the next emperor would be ‘a princeling of Wei’. And thus Cao Pi, being just such a one, finally overcame his feigned scruples and assumed the emperorship.
In an age that was as notable for natural calamities as political upheavals, the great reassurance of supernatural intercourse and esoteric revelations is understandable. At a popular level the Celestial Masters plied their followers with medicinal cures and offered various forms of psychological encouragement, plus a degree of social welfare and gender equality, and the ultimate promise of taiping or ‘heavenly peace’. At a higher level, Daoist ‘science’ tickled aristocratic fancies with alchemical experiments and with potions and exercises designed to ensure longevity or transcendence. And at the dynastic level Daoist revelations and predictions augmented those of court astrologers and calendrists as a source of legitimisation; highly regarded, carefully studied and easily manipulated, such forecasts ‘served a function not entirely different from that of economic indicators in a modern nation [state]’, suggests one authority.11
Daoism in operation was pervasive and obvious. However, defining Daoism is not so easy. One writer has described it as a religion that is ‘not afraid of incoherence’. Loosely the term has sometimes been applied to almost any indigenous practice or doctrine not obviously either Confucian or Buddhist. In this catch-all sense Daoists could be followers of shamans, miracle-workers and mediums, subscribers to any of a myriad of local cults, practitioners of various physical, psychic and sexual disciplines, political and social renunciates in general, anyone who cultivated the Laozi’s state of wuwei (non-action), members of martial arts fraternities, and/or supporters of just about any movement of social protest with a millenarianist agenda. Admittedly this is not very helpful. Buddhists would also be associated with many of these practices. Moreover the simple formula ‘Daoist = non-Confucian + non-Buddhist’ may in fact be misleading, since the very terms imply a degree of confessional exclusivity and personal commitment which, though familiar enough to anyone imbued with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, was yet quite alien to Chinese thought.
In China no doctrine, revelation or mode of conduct was credited with a monopoly of truth, nor was any accounted complete in itself, for the simple reason that none was that clearly defined. Confucians (ru) had always dabbled in Daoist practices; indeed, in the post-Han period Confucian studies became heavily influenced by both Daoist and Buddhist texts. Daoists in turn usually subscribed to the core Confucian values, while Daoist communities became deeply indebted to Buddhism for such organisational features as a clergy and institutionalised monasticism. Scholarly debate might rage between the ‘schools’, but it was not unusual for the participants in their personal lives to combine elements of all three ‘religions’. Discrimination and strife, when they occurred, owed little to doctrinal differences and were invariably prompted by economic or political considerations.
If, as a recent exponent claims, Daoists are best characterised as those ‘who agreed that they should refine and transform themselves to attain full integration with life’s deepest realities’, then ‘it was not until about [AD] 500 that certain people began to become “Daoists” in a coherent social sense’. Only then did there emerge communities self-consciously dedicated to such a lofty pursuit.12 But the concept – or enigma – that was dao itself was much older; and it usually connoted not a school of thought but a state of transcendent integration or some approach conducive to attaining it. Though invariably translated into English as ‘the Way’, it has been suggested that, but for Charles Wesley, a more helpful rendering of dao would be as ‘the Method’, and so Daoism as ‘Methodism’.
As ever in China, the decisive development is to be found in the written tradition. By the third century the core Daoist texts, especially the Laozi (or Daodejing) and the Zhuangzi, had been around for hundreds of years and appeared heavily corrupted. It was the work of collating, editing and reinterpreting them, of adding substantially to this corpus, and of compiling the first comprehensive canon of Daoist texts, which was undertaken in the third to sixth centuries. This, plus the disturbed conditions of the age, stimulated new Daoist schools of thought and contributed to the dissemination of Daoist teachings. When the Jin court fled south in 317, Daoist scholarship went with it, with more Daoists accompanying a later Jin exodus from Sichuan. In the aristocratic ambience of the southern dynasties, Daoism flourished. In the Hangzhou region of Zhejiang in 399 it inspired another Celestial Masters revolt, born like that of the Yellow Turbans out of popular discontent and suppressed just as bloodily. But twenty years later it was a general who had been hailed as a Daoist messiah who overthrew the Jin to found the Liu Song (420–479), the third of the south’s Six Dynasties. At about the same time, in the north, a Daoist Celestial Master gained such an ascendancy over an emperor of the Northern Wei dynasty (389–535, and not to be confused with Cao Pi’s earlier Wei) that his rule has been dubbed ‘a Daoist theocracy’.13
Thanks to the efforts of scholars during the centuries of disunion, Daoism won a degree of doctrinal cohesion, academic respectability and institutional substance. Court and aristocratic circles endorsed it; Xiongnu and Xianbei warlords found in it, as they did in Buddhism, shamanic elements more agreeable to their own devotional traditions; and as a vehicle of social protest it retained its grassroots appeal and its explosive potential. Daoism had finally ‘become a visible presence in Chinese history and society’, both all-pervasive and long-abiding.14 Indeed, the textual work on Daoism continues even today, spurred on by new discoveries such as fragments of the first Daoist canon found at Dunhuang in the early twentieth century and the bamboo texts of the Laozi subsequently unearthed at Mawangdui.
ENTER THE ENLIGHTENED ONE
While Daoism profited from its indigenous credentials, it would be wrong to infer that Buddhism must therefore have been handicapped by its foreign provenance. Objections would certainly be raised on this score and the superiority of Chinese culture frequently reasserted. But the sensational spread of Buddhism in the third to sixth centuries – the ‘Period of Disunion’ – utterly belies the idea of Chinese civilisation being unreceptive to extraneous ideas. If Daoism then prospered, Buddhism triumphed. China became a Buddhist country and would remain so for centuries, its Buddhist community outnumbering even India’s. Monasteries by the thousand dotted the cities; rock-cut shrines, tiered stupas (‘pagodas’) and colossal Buddha figures graced the countryside. Society and the visual arts were transformed; commercial and cultural intercourse with the rest of Asia flourished. From Xinjiang to Shandong and Guangdong wealth and manpower were lavished on devotional endowments, and wherever peace prevailed, robed monks and nuns mingled with the gowned scholars of Confucian orthodoxy. Notions of enlightenment, compassion and the sanctity of life softened learned discourse, if not political ambitions. The drone of prayer, borne on the breeze, consoled an age made frantic by the staccato clash of arms.
Yet the process of introduction and naturalisation was slow and fraught. The Buddha had lived and taught in northern India around the fifth century BC, but not until 500 years later does a recognisable reference to him surface in Chinese history. A Han prince, who had been enfeoffed as the nominal king of Chu by Han Guang Wudi, founder of the Later Han, is described in the Houhanshu (‘History of the Later Han’) as ‘fasting and performing sacrfices to the Buddha’; the year was AD 65, the place Pengcheng (Xiang Yu’s one-time capital in Jiangsu), and the prince a Daoist devotee. At the time the Buddha seems to have been revered, along with Laozi, as a co-opted member of the Daoist pantheon rather than as the embodiment of an alternative doctrinal ‘Way’. There is no mention of the enormous body of literature – devotional, metaphysical and organisational – that 500 years of Buddhism in south Asia had generated. And Pengcheng being on a trade route that leads to Luoyang not from central Asia but from the China coast, it is possible that the cult had reached the Later Han empire by sea. Buddhist communities were already established in south-east Asia; and the Buddhist symbols (lotus flowers, elephants, etc.) found among the second-century relief carvings at Kongwangshan on the seaboard of Jiangsu appear to substantiate this routing.
