Political and Religious Transformation in East Asia

With the fall of the Han dynasty, China experienced a period of political disunity and a surge of new religious and cultural influences. In the first century CE, Han China was the largest state in the world, with as great a population as the Roman Empire had at its height. Its emperor extracted an annual income of millions of pounds of rice and bolts of cloth and conscripted millions of workers whose families paid tribute through their labor. Later Chinese regarded the end of the Han Empire as a disaster just as great as western Europeans regarded the end of the Roman Empire. In post-Han China, new influences arrived via the Silk Roads through contact with nomadic “barbarians” and the proselytizing of Buddhist monks, and new forms of Daoism responded to a changing society.

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The Wei Dynasty in Northern China

After the fall of the Han in 220 CE, several small kingdoms—at times as many as sixteen of them—competed for control. Civil wars raged for roughly three centuries, a time called the Six Dynasties period (220–589 CE), when no single state was able to conquer more than half of China’s territory. The most successful regime was that of the Tuoba, a people originally from Inner Mongolia. In 386 CE, the Tuoba founded the Northern Wei dynasty, which lasted 150 years and administered part of the Han territory. Although technically Mongolian “barbarians,” the Northern Wei had lived for generations within the Chinese orbit as tributary states.

The Northern Wei maintained many Chinese traditions of statecraft and court life: they taxed land and labor on the basis of a census, conferred official ranks and titles, practiced court rituals, preserved historical archives, and promoted classical learning and the use of classical Chinese for record keeping and political discourse. Though they were nomadic warriors, they adapted their large standing armies to city-based military technology, which required drafting huge numbers of workers to construct dikes, fortifications, canals, and walls.

A carved stone relief from the Longmen Caves shows Emperor Xiaowen walking in a formal procession with members of his court.
Emperor Xiaowen in Buddhist Procession Emperor Xiaowen’s son dutifully commissioned this massive carving (nearly 7 feet by 12 feet) of his father with his retinue in the Longmen Caves in Luoyang. This relief showing Xiaowen (fourth figure from the right) in procession to honor the Buddha was accompanied by another that depicted the empress in procession. Displayed at the entrance to a magnificent Buddhist cave temple, the reliefs are a testament to the Northern Wei’s adoption of Chinese aesthetics and their devotion to Buddhism in the early sixth century CE.

Among the challenges facing the Northern Wei rulers was the need to consolidate authority over their own highly competitive nomadic people. One strategy was to make their own government more “Chinese.” Under Emperor Xiaowen (r. 471–499 CE), for example, the Tuoba royal family adopted the Chinese family name of Yuan and required all court officials to speak Chinese and wear Chinese clothing. However, the Tuoba warrior families resisted these policies. Xiaowen also rebuilt the old Han imperial capital of Luoyang based on classical architectural models dating from the Han dynasty and made it the seat of his government.

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Wei rulers sought stronger relationships with the Han Chinese families of Luoyang that had not fled south. The Wei offered them political power as officials in the Wei bureaucracy as well as more land. For example, the Dowager Empress Fang (regent for Xiaowen 476–490 CE) attempted progressive land reforms that offered land to all young men—whether Han or Wei—who agreed to cultivate it. But even this plan failed to bridge the cultural divides between the “civilized” Han Chinese of Luoyang and the “barbarian” Tuoba Wei, because the latter showed no interest in farming.

Members of the Wei court supported Buddhist temples and monumental cave sites in an appeal to their Tuoba roots while also honoring Confucian traditions dating to the ancient Zhou period. But Emperor Xiaowen’s bid for unification was unsuccessful; his death cut short his efforts. Several decades of intense fighting among military rulers in the north followed, ultimately leading to the downfall of the Northern Wei dynasty.

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Changing Daoist Traditions

Daoism, a popular Chinese religion under the Han and a challenge to the Confucian state and its scholar-officials, lost its political edge and adapted to the new realities in this period of disunity. Two new traditions of Daoist thought flourished in this era of self-reflection. The first was organized and community oriented, and involved heavenly masters who as mortals guided local religious groups or parishes. Followers sought salvation through virtue, confession, and ceremonies, including a mystical initiation rite. The second Daoist tradition was more individualistic, attempting to reconcile Confucian classical learning with Daoist religious beliefs in the occult and magic. It used trance and meditation to control human physiology. Through such mental and physical efforts, a skilled practitioner could accumulate enough religious merit to prolong his life. The concept of religious merit and demerit in Daoist circles echoed the Buddhist notion of karmic retribution (the cosmic assessment of one’s acts in this life that determines one’s rebirth into a better or worse next life). For the Daoists, however, eternal life was the ultimate goal, and not the Buddhists’ ideal of release from the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Buddhism in China

Buddhism’s universalizing message appealed to many people living in the fragmented Chinese empire. By the third and fourth centuries CE, travelers from central Asia who had adopted Buddhism had become frequent visitors in the streets and temples of the competing capitals: Chang’an, Luoyang, and Nanjing. Spreading the faith required intermediaries, endowed with texts and explanations, to convey its message. Kumarajiva (344–413 CE), a renowned Buddhist scholar and missionary, was the right man, in the right place, at the right time to spread Buddhism in China—where it already coexisted with other faiths.

Kumarajiva’s influence on Chinese Buddhist thought was critical. Not only did he translate previously unknown Buddhist texts into Chinese, but he also clarified Buddhist terms and philosophical concepts. He and his disciples established a Mahayana branch known as Madhyamika (Middle Way) Buddhism, which used irony and paradox to show that reason was limited. For example, they contended that all reality was transient because nothing remained unchanged over time. They sought enlightenment by means of transcendental visions and spurned experiences in the material world of sights and sounds.

Kumarajiva represented the beginning of a profound cultural shift. After 300 CE, Buddhism began to expand in northwestern China, taking advantage of imperial disintegration and the decline of Daoism and state-sponsored Confucian classical learning. The Buddhists stressed devotional acts, such as daily prayers and mantras, which included seated meditations in solitude requiring mind and breath control, as well as the saving power of the Buddha and the saintly bodhisattvas who postponed their own salvation for the sake of others. They even encouraged the Chinese to join a new class—the clergy. The idea that persons could be defined by faith rather than kinship was not new in Chinese society, but it had special appeal in a time of serious crisis like that of the turbulent Six Dynasties period. In the south, the immigrants from the north found that membership in the Buddhist clergy and monastic orders offered a way to restore their lost prestige.

Mogao Cave mural showing Buddhist figures, floating spirits, and people gathered in a blue mountain landscape.
Mogao Caves at Dunhuang This scene comes from Mogao Cave 285 (c. 540 CE, during the Northern Wei dynasty) at Dunhuang on the Silk Roads. Winged apsaras (heavenly spirits) float above a landscape of brilliant blue-hued mountains and deer-filled forests. On the left, five robbers, who have been blinded by troops in a previous scene, wander aimlessly, but in the central scene, their sight having been restored after adopting Buddhism, they sit peacefully at the foot of the Buddha. Hundreds of beautifully painted caves were created at Mogao over several centuries through the painstaking devotion of monks and with the sponsorship of wealthy donors, whose names are often inscribed on the walls.

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Even more important, in the northern states—now part Chinese, part “barbarian”—Buddhism provided legitimacy. With Buddhists holding prominent positions in government, medicine, and astronomy, the Wei ruling houses could espouse a philosophy that was just as legitimate as that of the Han Chinese. As a Tuoba who ruled at the height of the Northern Wei in the early sixth century CE, Emperor Xuanwu was an avid Buddhist who made Mahayana Buddhism the state religion during his reign.

Painting of the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang walking with a staff while riding or accompanied by a tiger.
Xuanzang This painting portrays the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang accompanied by a tiger on his epic travels in South Asia to collect important Buddhist scriptures.

In 643 CE, the Chinese Buddhist Xuanzang brought back to Chang’an (then the world’s largest city) an entire library of Buddhist scriptures—527 boxes of writings and 192 birch-bark tablets—that he had collected on a pilgrimage to Buddhist holy sites in South Asia. He lodged them in the Great Wild Goose Pagoda and immediately began to translate every line into Chinese. Although the importation of these texts from India was profoundly important, Buddhism did not seek to be the same in all places and at all times. On the contrary, as the expression of a cosmic truth as timeless and varied as the world itself, Buddhism showed a high level of adaptability, easily absorbing the gods and the wisdom of every country it touched.

By 400 CE, China had more than 1,700 Buddhist monasteries and about 80,000 monks and nuns. By contrast, in 600 CE (after two centuries of monastic growth), Gaul and Italy—the two richest regions of western Europe—had, altogether, only 320 monasteries, many with fewer than 30 monks. Yet, in the two ends of Afro-Eurasia, the principal bearers of the new religions were monks. Set apart from “worldly” affairs in their refuges, they enjoyed the pious support of royal courts and warriors whose lifestyles differed sharply from their own. Through their devoted faith in the divine and the support of secular rulers, these two universalizing religions—Buddhism and Christianity—would continue to grow, flourish, and revitalize themselves.