paper

S E C O N D E D I T I O N

Asian Cultural Traditions

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S E C O N D E D I T I O N

Asian Cultural Traditions

Carolyn Brown Heinz California State University, Chico

Jeremy A. Murray California State University, San Bernardino

WAVELAND

PRESS, INC. Long Grove, Illinois

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To Chloe, Bella, Emily, and Zoe,

and to all of our students

For information about this book, contact: Waveland Press, Inc. 4180 IL Route 83, Suite 101 Long Grove, IL 60047-9580 (847) 634-0081 [email protected] www.waveland.com

Cover image: “Back Home” by Vietnamese artist Do Xuan Doan

Copyright © 2019, 1999 by Waveland Press, Inc.

10-digit ISBN 1-4786-3620-3 13-digit ISBN 978-1-4786-3620-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans- mitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Preface xi

PART I Land and Language 1

1 Asia as Cultured Space 11

“The Great Collision” and Asian Landforms 13 Rivers 19 The Outer Ring of Islands 23

Monsoon Asia and Rice Adaptations 27 Rice, Dry and Wet 28 Origins of Rice Cultivation 29 Two Rice Cultures 30 Rice and the Green Revolution 32

Early Asians 34 ■ REFERENCES CITED 37

2 Tongues, Texts, and Scripts 39

Voices from the Past 42 Making Family Connections: The Indo-Europeans 42 East Asian Homelands 47 Austroasiatic 49 Austro-Tai 49 Sino-Tibetan 51

Texts 57 “You Are Hurting My Language” 57 The Search for Sacred Texts 59

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Scripts 64 South Asian Scripts 64 Written Chinese 67 Korean and Japanese 71

■ REFERENCES CITED 73

PART II Outsiders 75

3 Central Asia, Xinjiang, and Tibet 81

The Silk Roads 85 Silk and Steeds 86 Travelers 87 Religions along the Silk Road 90

Barbarians 91 Women on the Steppe 93 The Xiongnu and the Mongols 94 Genghis Khan (Chinggis Qa’an) and

the Mongol Empire 95

Xinjiang and Tibet 100 “New Dominion” 100 “Western Treasure-House” 102

■ REFERENCES CITED 104

4 Tribal People 105

Self-Governing People and Expansionary States 107 Ethnic Identity 111 The Colonial Theory of Ethnicity 112 Hmong: A Case Study 115

Who Are the Miao? 117 Hmong in Thailand 120 The Transitory Community 121 Adaptation and Response: Opium 123 Fathers and Sons 126 “Silver Celebrates the Worth of Women” 131 Spirits, Domestic and Wild 133

■ REFERENCES CITED 138

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PART III South Asia 141

5 India 147

A Forgotten Past 149 Puzzles of Indian Origins: The First Civilizations 151 Indus Valley Civilization (2500–1500 B.C.E.) 153

Brief Outline of Indian History 157 The Vedic Age (1500–450 B.C.E.) 157 The Mauryan-Guptan Empires (323 B.C.E.–550 C.E.) 164 Medieval Period (550–1210 C.E.) 167 The Indo-Islamic Period (Twelfth to

Nineteenth Centuries) 168 British Colonial Period (Eighteenth to

Twentieth Centuries) 171 Era of Independence 172

The Caste System 172 Ancient Sources on the Caste System 173 Economics of Caste: The Jajmani System 175 Case Study: Two Hundred Years of Caste in

a North Indian Village 177 Social Justice: Reservations for Scheduled Castes

and Scheduled Tribes 178

The Dharma of Women 179 Patriarchy 181 A Woman’s Life Cycle 182 Two Social Problems 186

■ REFERENCES CITED 188

6 Religions of South Asia 191

Early Core Ideas 194 New Ideas Emerge: Upanishadic Thought 194 The Proliferating Gods 196

The Hindu-Buddhist Traditions 197 Life in Society: Clean and Unclean in Caste Society 198 Life In and Out of Society: Having It Both Ways 200 Temple Worship and Bhakti 202 Pilgrimage to Buddhist India 207 The “Three Jewels” of Buddhism 209 The Four Periods of Buddhism 213

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Islam 220 Sufis, Saints, and Shahs 221 Sunnis and Shias in Colonial India 223 The Umma and the Independence Movement 226

Sikhism 227 ■ REFERENCES CITED 231

PART IV East Asia 233

7 China 239

The Beginnings: Xia, Shang, Zhou, and Qin 245 “The Ruins of Yin” 246 The Uses of Bronze 248 Communicating with Heaven 249 Idealized Zhou Feudalism 250 Two Sages: Confucius and Laozi (Lao Tsu) 254 The First Emperor and the Unification of China 260

Emergence of the Confucian Elite (Shenshi) 263 The Buddhist Challenge to Confucian Civilization 267 Neo-Confucianism 273

The Confucian Model for Kinship and Gender 276 Ancestor Worship 278 Wealth, Power, and Morality in the Large Lineage 280 The Family in the Twentieth Century 284 Women in Confucian China 288

■ REFERENCES CITED 294

8 Japan 297

The Yamato State 300 Chinese and Early Japanese Sources 301 Shinto, Folk and Imperial 304

The China Connection: Asuka, Nara, and Heian Periods 313

Buddhism Comes to Japan 314 The Failure of the Centralized State 318 Romance at Court 320

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Warrior Culture in Feudal Japan 325 The Shogunate 327 The Samurai Class 328 Zen Buddhism and Samurai Culture 335 The Practice of Zen 337 Zen Buddhism’s Institutions 339 Zen Culture: Zen and the Arts 340

■ REFERENCES CITED 342

9 Korea 343

Religion, Ritual, and Korean Culture 347 Myths of Origin 347 Korean Shamanism 348

Three Kingdoms Period (378 B.C.E.–935 C.E.) 353 Koryo Dynasty (918–1392) 357 Neo-Confucianism in Choson Dynasty (1392–1897) 359

Neo-Confucianism and Scholar-Officials 359 Writing the Korean Language 361 Turmoil in Late Choson: The Tonghak Movement 362

Korea as Japanese Colony 364 Challenges of Modern Korea 366 ■ REFERENCES CITED 368

PART V Southeast Asia 369

10 Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia 375

Four Stages of Southeast Asian History 377 The Prehistoric Period 2500–150 B.C.E. 379 Period of Indian Cultural Influence 100 C.E.–1300 C.E. 382 The Period of Chinese and Islamic Influence, 1300–1750 389

Theravada Buddhism and the Thai State 394 The Buddhist Ramayana 398

Buddhism and Popular Religion 400 The Soul and Other Spirit Entities 403 The Monkhood 404 Women in Theravada Buddhism 407

■ REFERENCES CITED 408

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11 Insular Southeast Asia 411

Borneo 413 Haddon in Borneo 413 Death in Borneo 418

Head-Hunting in the Philippines 422 Romanticized Bali 423

Trance and Dance in Bali 423 The Balinese Cockfight 429

■ REFERENCES CITED 430

PART VI European Empires in Asia 433

12 The Colonial Period 437

Trade in the Precolonial Period 441 European Empires in Asia 443

Portuguese Port Cities and Priests 443 English and Dutch Merchant Companies 446 Britain’s Indian Empire 447 China: Opium Wars and the Treaty Century 452 “Below the Winds”—Colonizing the Islands 458 Burma and Thailand 461 Vietnam 463 Cambodia 464

The Meiji Era 466 ■ REFERENCES CITED 468

Index 469

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PREFACE

It has been almost twenty years since the first edition of Asian Cultural Tra- ditions was published in 1999. In many ways, changes have been rapid and almost bewildering to the student of Asia, with economies and geopolitics shifting considerably. But the cultural traditions of the region have continued to shape the lives of billions of people who live in the region, even while those cul- tures are adapted and transformed for changing times. We aimed to capture both the changes and continuities of the histories and cultures of the region in this revised and updated edition.

College and university instructors have used this book as an introductory companion to courses on Asian cultures across several disciplines since its pub- lication. An impetus to begin work on a revised and updated edition of the book has come from the constructive comments of instructors who have used the book in their classes, and from written reviews from sixty students in Prof. Murray’s classes. We have considerably updated and revised the text to reflect new developments in scholarship as well as changes in the region and the world. We have also added chapters on Central Asia, Korea, and Southeast Asia, included new images and maps, and added a section of color plates.

This second edition is a collaboration between an anthropologist specializ- ing in India and a historian specializing in China, and this pairing has been lively and rewarding. We hope that the reader benefits from our enjoyment in working together, and that this volume carries on the interdisciplinary spirit of the first edition.

We are grateful to Waveland Press for the hard work of its production team, and especially Jeni Ogilvie, in tracking down artwork, snaring infelicities and errors in the manuscript, and making better writers of both of us. Tom Cur- tin, senior editor at Waveland, has supported this project since the launch of the first edition with encouragement and sage advice; he also has a remarkably good eye and we thank him for making the book beautiful, inside and out.

We are grateful to several readers of chapters, including Morris Rossabi and Cheehyung Harrison Kim. Sinwoo Lee clarified the puzzle of romaniza-

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tion of Korean, and we have followed his advice. Above all, we are grateful to the hundreds of students who have read the book over the years and shared with us their likes and dislikes; we have rewritten it with these opinions in mind and hope that future students will continue to let their opinions be known. We are listening.

Carolyn Brown Heinz California State University, Chico

Jeremy A. Murray California State University, San Bernardino

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Part I

Land and Language

1 ASIA AS CULTURED SPACE

2 TONGUES, TEXTS, AND SCRIPTS

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The Study of Asia

If ever there was a time when Asia could be ignored, that time is not the present. At the end of the twentieth century—a century plagued by war, domi- nated in its first half by the great European colonial empires in their heyday and in the second half by the “Cold War” between the US and the USSR—most of the old certainties had slipped away. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, economic and political weight is shifting eastward, to Asia.

An argument could be made that the last 400 years, the centuries of Euro- pean dominance, have been the aberrant ones. Prior to this period, the great civilizations of Eurasia—China, India, the Middle East, and Europe—main- tained a balance of power for many centuries. There were occasional interrup- tions in this balance by ambitious empires of conquest. The European one from 1700 to 1950 is only the most recent; before that, the Mongols in the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries went thundering in every direction from their Central Asian homeland, conquering China, Iran, Afghanistan, and India, and threatening Europe. But these civilizations absorbed the blows, civilized the invaders, and carried on, enriched by the new cultural strands contributed by the foreigners.

Asia is in such a period of recuperation now, in which great and ancient civ- ilizations, after enduring humiliation and defeat at the hands of colonizing European powers, are absorbing the cultural contributions of the invaders and recasting their civilizations. Meanwhile, the old balance is being restored. Once again there are European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese cultural spheres.

By “Asia” we mean, in this book, only “monsoon Asia”—the geopolitical regions of South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia (see Map I.1). Our focus is not nationalist, but cultural. We do not take as given or eternal the nation- states that have emerged in the postcolonial world, enduring as those may prove to be. Hard at work as they are at proving ancient natural rights to pres- ent borders, none of the current outlines of Asian nation-states, with the single exception of Japan, have a time depth of even a century.

Our subject here is rather more amorphous; it is those old civilizations themselves. Not, of course, “Asian civilization,” for there is not and never has been such a thing. Like “the Orient” and “the East,” “Asia” has always been something of a fiction created by Europeans whose capacities to truly engage with a culture stopped at the eastern edges of the Greek world. Beyond lay “Asia,” the “East.” In fact, the word Asia appears to come from the Assyrian word for east, asu. In recent times the simple dichotomy between “the West” and “the East” has contrasted European civilization with all the rest of Eur- asia, lumped as “the East.” However, we tend to think, more subtly, of the

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West as a plural place, but the Japanese playwright, Masakazu Yamazaki (Yamazaki 1996), looking at the history of European civilization, marveled at its early cultural—if not political—unity. Founded on ideas and institutions originating in Greece and Rome, the dominant unifying force of Western civili- zation from Constantine through the eighth century was Christianity, a fusion of Judaic and Hellenic traditions that gave a common cultural overlay to an ethnically diverse array of peoples in the far west of Eurasia. Even as this unity began to erode at the end of the eighth century, English, Germans, French, Italians, and others continued to think of themselves as sharing in Western civ- ilization even though no single nation could claim to be the heartland of this pluralized civilization.

Nothing like this cultural unity ever existed in Asia. Despite the fact that nearly all rulers claimed to be monarchs of the whole world, no ruler ever con- quered it all—though of all peoples, the Mongols came closest to doing so (see chapter 3). Nor is there any one religion that provided a unifying creed for Asia as Christianity did for Europe. One might be tempted to speak of a “Buddhist civilization” in the same vein as one speaks of “Christian civilization” in the West, except for the fact that India, which gave birth to Buddhism, after a dozen centuries repudiated it, and even in China, to which it spread, it never triumphed against Confucianism.

Map I.1 Geopolitical regions of Asia.

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Guangzhou

Manila

New Delhi

Teheran Tokyo Beijing

Moscow

R U S S I A N F E D E R A T I O N

C H I N A

I N D I A

AUSTRALIA

TURKEY

PHILIPPINES

IRAN

MONGOLIA

EAST ASIA

I n d i a n

O c e a n

A r c t i c

E U R O P E

U ra

l M

tn s

WEST ASIA

NORTH ASIA

SOUTH ASIA

INDONESIA

SOUTHEAST ASIA

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Far more, even than Europe, the regions of Asia we focus on in this book are places of extraordinary and perplexing diversity. The peoples of this vast region have no common political system, no common language, no common history, religion, culture, geography, climate, or economy. To study Asia is to study its diversity. In fact, accounting for that diversity is part of the subject matter of this book. We explore this diversity in several ways. First, we exam- ine it as it exists spatially. The cultures of Asia are distributed across a geograph- ically complex expanse whose features partially account for the extraordinary differences we find in human communities. The Himalayas present a barrier between South and East Asia, which ensured that they developed along differ- ent lines largely in isolation over 4,000 years. Though they knew about each other in vague ways, there was never an Indian conquest of China or a Chinese conquest of India or any war between them of any great significance (a brief border war occurred in 1962). Yet there were periodic interconnections of pro- found importance. The Chinese sent emissaries to India to bring back knowl- edge of Buddhism. The Japanese sent shiploads of courtiers and students to bring civilization from China. Small rulers in Southeast Asia similarly sought ideas of statecraft and kingship from India, and traders from India who settled in Southeast Asia brought along family priests who brought Sanskrit culture, sacred texts, and the art of writing to emerging kingdoms in the valleys and islands there.

The second way of exploring Asia’s diversity is in terms of cultural evolution. Early states emerged by 2300 B.C.E. in the Indus valley and by 1700 B.C.E. in China, but nonstate cultures have persisted throughout Asia and present prob- lems of integration into modern nations that have, in a way, “captured” peoples who would prefer to remain independent (see chapter 4). Before the period of nation-states defined by boundaries drawn on maps, there were extensive fron- tier regions between powerful states where small-scale (“tribal”) societies lived unmolested or with only cursory acknowledgment of some distant centralized power. The luxury of independence is now lost to these peoples.

A third form of diversity in Asia is linguistic (see chapter 2). When Wil- liam Jones went to India in 1784 and began studying Sanskrit, he made a dis- covery that would change the way the world thinks about language. The Sanskrit language, he wrote, bore resemblances to both Greek and Latin more far-reaching than possibly could have occurred by chance; they must have all sprung from some common source. His discovery of a great family of lan- guages that spread from England to North India enthralled Europe and was the late-eighteenth century’s version of moon rocks; he lectured on the “Indo- European language family” to audiences of over a thousand on his return to England. Tracing the complex family tree of this language family was one of the preoccupations and accomplishments of nineteenth-century linguistics. Only now are equivalent breakthroughs beginning to be made in another great language family, Sino-Tibetan.

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The search for sacred texts, which occupied Chinese, Japanese, and South- east Asian intellectuals for better than half a millennium—India was the source for most of them—involved difficulties of translating mutually unknown lan- guages and deciphering each other’s exotic texts. India had one script, China another. Those who came in search of civilizing texts—Japan to China, South- east Asia to India—had the problem of fitting scripts meant for one language to their own very different ones. Japan, with its polysyllabic language, could have had a better neighbor than China to borrow a script from; India’s would have suited much better. Southeast Asia’s Sino-Tibetan languages would have done well with China’s logographic script, meant for monosyllabic languages, but the texts they were borrowing were Indian. Thus it went.

India and China are the two foundational civilizations of Asia. These two civilizations were creating their characteristic profiles during the pivotal first millennium B.C.E. Over a thousand year period, both China and India were developing concepts of social order and institutions of civil society that have characterized them into the present. During this period, the Indian caste sys- tem was taking form. The Chinese centralized state had its earliest instance under the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang, who became one model of the author- itarian emperor ruling under the Mandate of Heaven. In India, Emperor Ashoka embodied the ideal ruler, the dharmaraja (“righteous king”) responsible for moral order in the state. The Upanishadic philosophers, Buddha, and Con- fucius lived and taught during the middle centuries of the first millennium B.C.E., and their philosophies became as foundational for their civilizations as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were for Europe. All these thinkers lived within a few centuries of each other during a period sometimes called “the axial age” because it was a kind of axis or pivotal point in history. Both civilizations were decisively configured during this epoch in ways that civilizations in later centu- ries expanded, elaborated, and reformed.

Southeast Asia and Japan came under influence from India and China, respectively, in the following millennium (the first millennium C.E.), so that the earliest forms of the state and court culture in those hinterlands resembled the more advanced cultures from which they borrowed. The early states of South- east Asia borrowed, along with sacred texts and scripts from India, concepts of the sacred kingship, the devaraja or “god-king.” They accepted first Hinduism and, later, Buddhism. Japan borrowed everything it possibly could from China: books, script, urban planning, Confucianism, Buddhism, and the imperial sys- tem—but without the undesirable feature of the Mandate of Heaven that could be withdrawn by Heaven in the case of a successful rebellion. The imperial dynasty founded during the period of borrowing from China, but subsequently projected backward in time to the Sun Goddess, has survived into the present; Emperor Akihito is the 125th emperor of Japan. Of course, both Southeast Asia and Japan made these cultural borrowings their own in unique ways, but their affinities to India and China remain clearly visible even in the present.

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Culture Areas of Asia

The terms we have been using—South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia—are fairly recent geopolitical terms that began during World War II and have come into increasing use in the postcolonial period as modern Asian nations have formed regional associations for trade and military security rea- sons (see map I.1). Such maps represent current political alignments, more than long-term cultural affinities, and lay on desks at the US State Department.

Anthropologists more typically use the concept of “culture area.” Behind the culture area concept is the assumption of a geographical region with some degree of environmental unity within which local societies have made similar cultural adaptations. For instance, humid lowland riverine regions of Southeast Asia have been cultivated by wet-rice methods that have supported a number of small states. By contrast, the cooler uplands support much smaller populations of slash and burn tribal cultivators.

Societies within a single culture area, it is assumed, will share similar polit- ical, economic, and religious institutions. Thus, in the Indian cultural sphere we find small, unstable kingdoms where the king models himself after Shiva or Vishnu, his capital is a replica of Heaven, and the Brahman supports the state with appropriate sacrifices and interpretation of sacred texts. Society is hierar- chically organized in a moral order based on elaborate codes of rank and honor. The state in the Indian cultural sphere often looked like sacred theatre, as Clifford Geertz describes in a famous study of one of the more byzantine Indic states, the Balinese:

It was a theatre-state in which the kings and princes were impresarios, the priests, the directors, the peasantry, the supporting cast, stage crew, and audience. The stupendous cremations, teeth-filings, temple dedications, the pilgrimages and blood sacrifices, mobilizing hundreds, even thousands of people and great quantities of wealth, were not means to political ends, they were ends themselves, they were what the state was for. Court ceremonialism was the driving force of state politics. Mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state; the state was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. To govern was not so much to choose as to perform. Ceremony was not form but substance. Power served pomp, not pomp power. (Geertz 1980:13)

In the Chinese cultural sphere, by contrast, we find a striving toward per- fect centralization and the realization of Confucian norms of the state-as-fam- ily. There is a secular quality to the state not seen in the Indian cultural sphere. The state is a problem in management, and bureaucratic machinery has been elaborated to facilitate its effective operation. Scholarship was similarly practi- cal, unlike in India, where books explored metaphysics, the nature of the soul, the doings of the gods, the conduct of rituals, but rarely applied itself to practi- cal matters of governing. You search in vain in India for a historical textual account of the day-to-day workings of a given king; in China, such state

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archives are absolutely overwhelming. The minute directives from one minister to a subordinate scholar-official in his local office are preserved in meticulous detail. The Chinese literally invented bureaucracy and created a system for recruitment into that bureaucracy that set generation after generation of young men studying for years to pass the examinations that would open the doors of government to them. Nothing like this ever emerged in India.

These cultural traditions led to the China and India of the present— together almost half the world’s people. Jay Taylor, writing in 1987 about the two “Big Sisters” of Asia, contrasted them thus: India has a chaotic but viable democracy, while China has a command politics of the elite. China has been obsessed with uniformity and the doctrinaire, while India has been tolerant of all heresies. Art and literature are more viable and alive in India than in China, even though literacy is high in China and low in India. The Chinese emerge from their ancient classics as sober and down-to-earth, the Indians as mystic and sensual; China is a political society, while India is a spiritual one. These are broad strokes for comparing two very complicated nations, but they cap- ture the “Dragon” (China) and the “Wild Goose” (India) with some clarity.

China and India, of course, are not the sum total of Asia’s cultural diver- sity. In the “lands below the winds,” the islands of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, live speakers of Austronesian languages, a vast language family distributed from Madagascar (off the coast of Africa) to Easter Island (off the coast of South America). This vast ethnolinguistic category contains folk at every level of social complexity, from hunter-gatherer bands of Semai in Malaysia to small-scale tribal societies like the Iban, Dayak, Tana Toraja, Ilon- got, and Ifugao, to state societies like those of Java and Bali.

Organization of the Book

The diversity can be overwhelming, and no single book can bring order to all of it. In this one we have tried simply to sketch the more significant and enduring profiles. We have divided the book into six parts, each with a brief introduction. After this brief introduction, part I looks at the natural environ- ment of monsoon Asia, a region of mountains, rivers, lowland valleys, islands, and volcanoes that limit and shape what is humanly possible. The next chapter takes on the complicated matter of languages, texts, and scripts, focusing on the major language families whose speakers are by no means able to speak to one another, but whose linguistic histories suggest common origins in the ancient past.

In part II we turn to peoples who have remained on the peripheries of the great states—for most of the time. These are the “invasion and aversion” cul- tures, which seemed to have an approach-avoidance relationship to the settled societies that were growing in power and with which they had complicated trade and political relations. In Central Asia, nomadic groups like the Turks and Mongols herded sheep, goats, and yaks, used camels and horses for trans-

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port, but needed to trade with settled agricultural peoples for grain and other goods. But as we see in chapter 3, the Turks and Mongols (and also Tibetans) were fierce warriors capable of thundering across grasslands and mountains to conquer the rich states on their peripheries. Other, smaller groups wanted only to keep out of the way, willing to adapt to rugged environments in order to maintain their independence from grasping states short on labor (chapter 4). None of these groups escaped the drawing of borders, but numerous ones are in politically vulnerable positions straddling borders and practicing subtle forms of resistance sometimes referred to as “the weapons of the weak” (Scott 1987).

Part III is devoted to South Asia, part IV to East Asia, and part V to South- east Asia. The introductions to each section are brief explanations of the approaches taken, different in each case. Finally, part VI summarizes the mod- ern era of colonialism and postcolonialism.

REFERENCES CITED Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton:

Princeton University Press. Scott, James. 1987. Weapons of the Weak, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Taylor, Jay. 1987. The Dragon and the Wild Goose; China and India. Westport, CT: Green-

wood Press. Yamazaki, Masakazu. 1996. Asia, a Civilization in the Making. Foreign Affairs (July/

August): 106–118.

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1 ASIA AS

CULTURED SPACE

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n the fourteenth century, a Japanese scholar named Chikafusa summa- rized the knowledge of Asian landforms that had come to Japan from ancient times: four great continents float in four great oceans. There is a

tree called Jambu, 1,200 miles high, and it stands on the shore of a lake at the top of Mt. Anavatapta in the center of a continent named Jambu, after the tree. Just south of Mt. Anavatapta are the Himalayas, and south of them lies India, in the true heart of Jambu. To the northwest of India is Persia (now Iran), and to the northeast is China. Because this was not an age when the Japanese deferred to China, Chikafusa added with a sniff: “China is thought to be a large country, but compared to India it is a remote and small land on the periphery of Jambu” (Varley 1980:54-55). Japan, on the other hand, was the “central land” in the ocean between Jambu and the eastern continent, a land apart ruled by a line of sovereigns descended from gods.

Asia’s landscape has everywhere been overlaid with cultural meanings, both sacred and political. The Ganges River, sacred from source to mouth, comes tumbling out of Heaven and is caught in Shiva’s matted locks to release the waters slowly from his Himalayan abode on Mt. Kailash, thus preventing destruction of the earth by floods. Asian rulers sought to build their capitals at the central axis where Heaven and earth connect, a fitting and authoritative location for a king. Throughout Southeast Asia, the Himalayan “pillar of the universe,” Mount Meru (known to Chikafusa as Mount Anavatapta and to Hindus and Tibetan Buddhists as Mount Kailash), was reconstructed in capital after capital to assert the divinity of the god-king who resided there.

As the above examples show, India plays a central role in most Asian mythogeographies. What is surprising is that India plays a central role in mod- ern geophysics as well.

“The Great Collision” and Asian Landforms

In China, when the earth shook, it was taken as an ominous sign of Heaven’s displeasure with earthly regimes; and when a regime toppled, a heav- enly sign was later interpreted as a forewarning. In 1556 an earthquake near Xi’an (Xian) (then the capital Chang’an [Changan]) killed 830,000 people; 70 years later, when another earthquake shook the new capital, Beijing (Peking), the court astrologer said ominously: “The reason why the earth growls is that throughout the empire troops arise to attack one another, and palace women and eunuchs have brought about great disorder” (Lach 1965). The omen was fulfilled 15 years later when China was conquered by the Manchus.

I

Chapter opener photo: Padi cultivation.

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14 Part I: Land and Language

Mongolia

India

China

Hu an

gh e

Yangzi

A m

u D arya

Brahma pu

tra

Syr D arya

Ganges

Ind us

Irraw addy

Tarim

Aral Sea

M ekong

M ekong

M ekong

Salw een

Salw een

Salw een

Gobi Desert

Red

Legend

Brahmaputra

Rivers Borders

Pakistan

Deserts Mountains

Taklamakan Desert

TIBETAN PLATEAU

H I

M A

L A Y A S

Hindu Kush

Xi

C hao Phraya

C hao Phraya

C hao Phraya

Bay of

Bengal

Arabian Sea

South China Sea

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Map 1.1 Physical map of Asia.

Box 1.1 The Highest Mountains in the World

The highest mountains in the world are in the ranges created by the collision of India and Eurasia: the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, Pamir, Kunlun Shan, and Tien Shan.

Country Elevation in feet

Everest China-Nepal 29,029 K2 China-Pakistan 28,251 Kanchenjunga India-Nepal 28,207 Dhaulagiri Nepal 26,811 Annapurna Nepal 26,503 Muztag China 25,338 Tirich Mir Pakistan 25,230 Pik Kommuniza Tajikistan 24,590 Pobeda Peak China-Kyrgystan 24,406

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Modern science interprets those disasters differently. All the great earth- quakes of India, China, Mongolia, and Tibet are caused by one colossal event: the slow-motion “collision” of India with the Eurasian continent that has been going on for 10 million years without interruption (Molnar and Tapponnier 1977). Riding on its own tectonic plate, India broke off East Africa and drifted north-eastward, traveling 5,000 kilometers before beginning its collision with Eurasia. Isolated in the Indian Ocean during the emergence of mammals in the Eocene, it was only after the beginning of the collision 10 million years ago that mammals from Mongolia swarmed down into the subcontinent.

The collision radically altered Asia’s landforms, compressing and distort- ing the earth’s crust from the Himalayas to Siberia, and from Afghanistan to the China coast. Where Tibet and North India are now, there was once a low coast and a submerged continental shelf. Colliding with such force that India slid under the Eurasian crust and lifted up the Tibetan Plateau, the continent continued to shove northward another 1,200 miles, and continues its north- ward push at the rate of two inches a year, or nearly six feet per century. This slide is not a smooth one; India regularly gets stuck, but when the obstruction gives way, there’s a lurch of several feet causing earthquakes and rockslides.

It is unclear exactly where the “suture” of the two continents lies, but sev- eral features of the geology of the Tibetan Plateau are becoming clearer. Five major fault lines similar to the San Andreas Fault of California rim the plateau in an east-west direction, clearly visible in satellite photographs and traceable across more than 1,500 miles. The southern block is moving eastward and the northern block is moving westward. This continuing slow-motion collision makes the Himalayas among the most unstable regions of the planet. Frequent earthquakes and landslides cause death and destruction; an earthquake in Nepal in 2015 leveled thousands of buildings and killed over 8,500 people. An even worse earthquake in 2008 in Sichuan Province of China killed more than 70,000 people (see map 1.2 and box 1.2).

Portions of the former ocean floor were lifted high and dry in central Tibet, a high plateau drained by no rivers and containing only brackish lakes that are the remnant of the ancient Tethys Sea. The mountains south of the Tibetan Pla- teau—the Himalayas—are the old northern portion of India, stacked up slice upon slice, the highest mountains in the world. The Tibetan Plateau was squeezed like an accordion and stretched eastward, creating deep east-west gashes that became rivers draining the Himalayas across China and down into Southeast Asia. The plateau isolates India from Siberia’s cold, winter winds and isolates central Asia from the moderating influences of the southern oceans.

North of the Tibetan Plateau, stretching from the Karakorum Pass into India to the famous Gansu (Kansu) corridor into China proper, lies a region of arid grasslands, dry hills, and sheerest desert. The Gobi Desert is the best known section of this harsh land, too dry for wheat cultivation, where sheep herding is the best option for survival. The Gobi is a graben, a sunken region where crustal blocks are being stretched and pulled apart by the pressures of

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the Indian collision. Harsh as the Gobi is, to the west is a far worse place, the dreaded Taklamakan (see map 1.1). The Chinese knew the Taklamakan as the liu sha, or “Moving Sands,” but “Taklamakan” is Turki, meaning, “go in and you won’t come out.” One traveler described this environment: “Never once until we reached the plains were we out of sight of skeletons. The continuous line of bones and bodies acted as a gruesome guide whenever we were uncer- tain of the route” (Hopkirk 1980:10). The French explorer von Le Coq describes being caught in a “black hurricane”:

Quite suddenly the sky grows dark . . . a moment later the storm bursts with appalling violence upon the caravan. Enormous masses of sand, mixed with pebbles, are forcibly lifted up, whirled round, and dashed down on man and beast; the darkness increases and strange clashing noises min- gle with the roar and howl of the storm. . . . Any traveler overwhelmed by such a storm must, in spite of the heat, entirely envelop himself in felts to escape injury from the stones dashing around with such mad force. Men and horses must lie down and endure the rage of the hurricane, which often lasts for hours together. (Hopkirk 1980:10)

The Chinese first ventured into this forbidding region in the first century B.C.E. when the Han emperor sent an emissary with a yak tail as sign of his ambassadorial authority. Zhang Qiang’s mission was to check up on the activi- ties of the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu), nomadic warriors who kept harassing Chinese

Box 1.2 Earthquakes along the Tectonic Plates

Map 1.2 illustrates just how seismically active Asia is, as a result of the slow-motion collision with India (see also color plate 1). On the map the border of the India plate is marked with a solid line that goes up along the west of the Indus River, crosses North India above the Ganges, and swings down through Burma and the Bay of Bengal. Almost all the seismic activity is on the Eurasia side of the two plates, where the Hima- layas, Tibet, the Tarim Basin, and the highlands of Southeast Asia have been lifted up. Five major fault lines are “strike-slip” faults, where the two sides are slipping in oppo- site directions.

Each circle on the map represents an earthquake that occurred between 2000 and 2016, sized according to its severity. The Richter scale measures the release of energy in an earthquake on a scale in which each point is 10 times greater than the previous point. On the map, white circles represent earthquakes in the 7-point range, which are severe and generally result in great loss of life.

• The 2015 Nepal earthquake, at 7.8 magnitude, killed over 8,000 people and brought down many historic structures in Kathmandu.

• The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan Province killed over 87,000 people. • The 2004 Indian Ocean quake was a whopping 9.1, sending tsunamis in all direc-

tions, as far as Africa on the west. More than 230,000 people in 14 countries died.

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farmers in border areas (see chapter 3). The emissary was gone for 13 years of harrowing adventures, including 10 years of imprisonment by the Hsiung-nu. He finally returned with only one of his hundred men, plus the yak tail, bring- ing accounts of peoples living far to the west, at Samarkand, Bokhara, Persia, and a place called “Liqian (Li-jien),” which was probably Rome.

The news that there were interesting people to trade with in those distant lands led to caravans filled with Chinese silks and other prestige goods, and soon also to garrisons and watchtowers at the expanding western fringes of Chi- nese influence. This was the famous Silk Road. It started at Chang’an and led northwestward through a series of oasis towns, including the famous Dunhuang in the Gobi Desert. But the Silk Road could not cross the Taklamakan; instead, a northern and a southern route skirted the perilous wastes of the desert, linking oases watered by short rivers that flowed from fringing mountains and disap- peared into the ocean of sand. Most of these oasis towns met the terrible fate of

Box 1.3 Mapping the Himalayas

Prior to 1865, surveyors had not been able to verify their suspicions that the Himala- yas were the highest mountains in the world—a prediction first made as early as 1784 by Sir William Jones, the brilliant founder of the Asiatic Society, after he had gazed upon dis- tant peaks from the plains of Bengal. [European geographers believed the Andes were the highest mountains in the world.] By 1865 the British were standing at the gateways to Nepal and Tibet without hope of entry into the Himalayan fastness. The two states were blanks on the map. Nepal was officially barred to them by treaty, while in Tibet the Chi- nese Emperor had long declared that all feringhees—foreigners—were unwelcome. Anyone who got through in disguise might well be beheaded on the spot. And so the indefatigable officers of the Survey trained Indians to go where they could not.

These intrepid explorers—more than fifteen in all—became known as the Pundits, or teachers, after the best known of them, Naian Singh. For over fifteen years in vari- ous guises they tramped the immense bare plateau of Tibet.

Before they went forth they had to be trained. The Survey intended them to take surreptitious measurements of distance, latitude and height. The favorite disguise was that of a Buddhist lama, or priest. A sergeant-major drilled Naian Singh with his pace- stick until he could walk at a precise pace—exactly two thousand steps to the mile. A hundred-bead rosary (instead of the usual 108 beads) allowed him to count his paces, and inside his prayer-wheel constructed in the Survey workshops were com- passes for taking bearings while at prayer. In the false bottom of his traveling chest was a sextant, and inside sealed cowry shells mercury for his artificial horizon. Naian Singh’s salary was a paltry 20 rupees a month.

When a British surveyor returned to one of these peaks in 1911 he found the raised survey platform and finely chiselled markstone firmly in position. Nearby was a ruined stone shelter, in the corner of which lay a human skeleton.

Source: Simon Berthon and Andrew Robinson, The Shape of the World: The Mapping and Discovering of the Earth. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1991, pp. 146–149.

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the shifting sands, suddenly swallowed whole by a black hurricane, not to be rediscovered for a thousand years or more until early in the twentieth century.

Rivers

If you examine map 1.2, it looks as if the Indian continent plunged into Eurasia like a bull, plowing its two horns deep into the continent, pinching the ranges that emerged in the west and in the east; these eastern and western “pinches” are the sources of Asia’s nine greatest rivers.

Part of the romance of great rivers is that they have single “sources” that can be sought and named, around which mythologies can grow and pilgrim- ages can focus. In fact, all rivers are vast drainage systems whose true source, say in the case of the Yangzi, is its 700,000-square-mile basin. Yet, the headwa- ters of the Huanghe, Yangzi, Red, Mekong, Salween, and Irrawadi can be traced to a series of parallel gashes in the Tibetan and Qinghai (Chinghai) mountains; at one point the Mekong, Salween, and Yangzi are separated by only 40 miles (see map 1.1).

The distortions of the earth’s surface caused by the Great Collision gave China most of its geographic features: more mountainous terrain and less ara- ble land (11 percent) than any of the world’s large nations. An older east-west range bisects central China almost to the Pacific. This range is the watershed dividing the two great river systems, the Huanghe and the Yangzi, and dividing China into its two critical ecological and cultural regions, North China and South China. North of these mountains, winters are cold, wheat grows better than rice, and for peasants working the powdery soil, life is hard. By contrast, South China is subtropical, with abundant rainfall, hilly green land, tea, bam- boo, water buffalo, and two or more crops of rice a year. For centuries North- erners have imagined the south as a lush and sensuous place, but also a dangerous region of “southern barbarians.”

“China’s Sorrow” is the nickname given to the treacherous Huanghe, or Yel- low River, that cuts a northern loop through the upland plateau of powdery soil, and then descends to the low-lying North China Plain. The Yellow River gets its name from the ochre-colored soil called loess that has been blowing into the North China uplands from Inner Asia for thousands of years, reaching a depth of 400 feet in some areas. This soil, as fine as talcum powder, has been gradually raising the bed of the river, which now is contained only by dikes built along its edges. The result is that after centuries of dike building, the river is actually higher than the surrounding terrain. Chinese historians have counted that it has broken its banks 1,573 times since 602 B.C.E. (roughly every year and a half).

Building these dikes to protect farmers from floods has been considered the duty of rulers since ancient times. According to Sima Qian, a court historian writing in the first century B.C.E., a woman named Jiandi (Chien Ti) found a blackbird egg while taking a bath. She ate it, became pregnant, and gave birth to a son, Xie (Hsieh), who grew up and went to work controlling the floods. This engineering achievement was considered the foundation of Chinese civili-

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zation and Hsieh the founder of Shang dynasty (1766–1122 B.C.E.). This myth encapsulates the expectation that rulers will be responsible for water control, an essential function of government throughout Chinese history.

The Yellow River generally spills into the Bohai Sea but occasionally cata- strophically changes its mind and drops south into the Yellow Sea. Over the last thousand years spectacular course changes have come in 1194 (south into the Yellow Sea), 1855 (north into the Bohai Sea), 1938 (south), 1946 (north—where it flows today). At every course change, human suffering has been immense. In 1938 the change was man-made; Chiang Kai-shek blew up the dikes in order to halt the Japanese advance by flooding the North China Plain. It did slow them down, but it also caused 500,000 deaths and produced six million refugees.

By contrast, the Yangzi is “China’s Main Street,” sometimes compared to the Mississippi for commercially profitable navigability. It has 10 times the vol- ume of the Huanghe/Yellow River and is far more stable. The Italian merchant Marco Polo spent time in the lower Yangzi region in the early 1290s and was impressed by the commercial activity along the river. More than 200 cities in 16 provinces were involved in the river’s great trade network. One of those cit- ies was probably Shanghai, then only a small coastal town. Only after it was acquired as a “Treaty Port” by the British because of its strategic location for international shipping at the mouth of the Yangzi did Shanghai grow into China’s largest and richest city.

The great challenge for early rulers was to link the rich, rice-growing south- ern provinces with the north so that barges bearing grain, tribute, and taxes could reach the northern capitals. All the rivers flowed east and west; why not build a river that would run north and south? It could connect the Yangzi with the Yel- low River and go north to the capital at Xi’an (and later, Beijing). So a “Grand Canal” was begun in the sixth century B.C.E. at the same time as the earliest stretches of the Great Wall (see map 1.3). Over the next centuries, work on the Grand Canal was undertaken during periods of strong regimes and was allowed to fall into disrepair during periods of disorder. Between 600 and 610 C.E., two to three million laborers (including women when they ran short of men) constructed over 1,400 miles of canal. It began at Hangzhou (Hang-chou) on the coast, cut north to the Yangzi, curved around several large lakes and then northeast to meet the Yellow River, from where it was an upriver journey to the capital, Chang’an (Xi’an), with a 500-mile extension northeast toward a town near what later became Beijing. This canal was in use for the next 700 years. After the Mongol conquest in 1279, the Yuan dynasty made a new capital at Beijing so they rerouted the canal, shortening it to just over 1,000 miles—about the distance from Miami to New York. Nothing comparable existed anywhere else in the world.

That ancient canal is by no means obsolete. In yet another astonishing hydraulics project, China is currently reexcavating and reengineering the Grand Canal to transfer water from South China to the north, where half of China’s population lives with only one-fifth of China’s water. It won’t be fin- ished until 2050; the water will end up flowing in the opposite direction (south

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to north), and it will cost far more than the initial $22 billion, but it will be the largest megaproject ever undertaken anywhere.

In the western Himalayas India’s three great rivers—the Indus, Brahmapu- tra, and Ganges—are formed from melting snowpack and summer rains drain- ing the high mountains (see map 1.1). Their “sources”—much sought by Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims—are within 75 miles of each other at the foot of Mt. Kailash near the northwestern corner of Nepal in Tibet.1 Pilgrims circum- ambulate the mountain in arduous but holy three-day treks.

In the west, the Brahmaputra flows eastward across Tibet, almost to the Mekong-Salween-Yangzi group, but then suddenly plunges south to mix its waters with the Ganges in the Bengal Delta. At the same time, across the entire southern fringe of the Himalayas, more than a dozen smaller rivers drain south, caught like so many ribbons in the two great North Indian rivers, the Indus and the Ganges.

Every day several million Hindus bathe away not only their physical dirt but also their sins in the holy waters of the Ganges. No Asian river is more beloved, more revered, or more transformed by mythology than the Ganges. This river is also a goddess the Hindus call “Ganga Ma” (Mother Ganges), one of the wives of Shiva. The river is said to flow out of his hair at his abode on Mt. Kailash and down through the Himalayan foothills, spilling out onto the

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Map 1.3 The Grand Canal, Great Wall, and Silk Road.

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plains of North India at the sacred town of Haridwar. Gathering river after river in her eastward flow, Ganga Ma finally empties into the Bay of Bengal. In sacred towns up and down the river, Ganga Ma is worshipped daily at dawn and dusk by priests waving sacred flames while devout Hindus sing the great hymn, “Om Jai Gange Mata” (“Hail to Mother Ganga”).

However, there is constant worry about the health of the river. With mil- lions washing and shampooing, “doing latrine,” laundering clothes, dumping the remains of cremation and often enough uncremated bodies into the river, Mother Ganga does indeed carry away the pollution of humans. “Ganga coex-

Worship of Ganga Ma at Rishikesh on the Ganges. At hundreds of sites all along the Ganges River, but especially at certain sacred sites like the upriver towns of Rishikesh and Haridwar, the Goddess Ganga—i.e., the river itself—is worshipped with fire (arati) at dawn and dusk. Brahmans perform the worship, joined by hun- dreds of worshippers.

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ists with this gandagi (pollution) and lovingly carries it out of sight,” anthropol- ogist Kelly Alley was told in Banaras. “Ganga is like a mother who cleans up the messes her child makes” (Alley 1994). Yet, scientists report that levels of Pseudomonas, Escherichia coli, Enterobacter, Klebsiella, and Acinetobacter are alarmingly high, and since the nineteenth century, epidemiologists have traced cholera outbreaks to major festival bathing such as happens every 12 years at Allahabad, the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna.

The Outer Ring of Islands

Where, exactly, is the eastern edge of Asia? Looking at a map of Southeast Asia as it is today, we see the familiar southwestward curve of Vietnam, ending just a little beyond the Mekong Delta. The shallow (118 feet) South China Sea separates Mainland Southeast Asia from Island (Insular) Southeast Asia, the group of islands that make up Indonesia and the Philippines. A long peninsula of which Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia own pieces, drops almost to the equa- tor and comes within a few miles of Sumatra. But this is today (see map 1.4).

If we were to look back a mere 10,000 years, we would see a far different coastline. The eastern protrusion of Vietnam dropped straight down to Borneo. Sumatra, Java, and Borneo were the southern highlands of mainland Southeast Asia. A vast and fertile riverine basin was drained by Thailand’s Chao Phrya River, then the largest river system in Southeast Asia (Higham 1989). The only islands in Southeast Asia were the Philippines, Sulawesi, and the smaller islands east of Bali. The area that was exposed above the seabed is known as the Sunda Shelf, the true eastern limit of Asia. During glacial periods, when waters are locked up in the Arctic, the Sunda Shelf is exposed and dries; during warm interglacials such as the one we have been in for the last several thousand years, the South China Sea rises and inundates it. The inundating of the coastline has been going on very recently, perhaps as recently as a thousand years ago, though the main inundation was between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago, and with ongoing global warming and glacial melting, the coastlines are again at risk. These changes were in comparatively recent times; ancestors of present popula- tions, including human ones, have lived through at least three of these cycles.

Beyond the true eastern edge of Asia—beyond Borneo and beyond what is called “Wallace’s Line”2—is a biogeographically distinct region. Placental mammals are found on the Asia side; marsupials are on the far side.3 Since there was never a time when a land bridge connected New Guinea and Austra- lia to Asia, human settlement there depended on seagoing skills, which must have developed early (see later in this chapter).

A spectacular arc of volcanic peaks follows the outer curve of Indonesia, north through Sulawesi and the Philippines, and on to Japan. The most famous of the volcanic eruptions in recent times occurred on August 27, 1883, when an island between Sumatra and Java called Krakatau began a series of paroxysmal explosions that ended blowing away two-thirds of the island (Francis and Self 1983). No witnesses survived. Its effects, however, were felt around the world.

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The explosion was heard 1,500 miles away in Australia and in South India, and the ash caused atmospheric effects and gorgeous sunsets around the world for months. Tsunamis moving as fast as air waves churned through the Sunda Straits and lashed the shores of Sumatra and Java, killing over 30,000 people. Waves from Krakatau reached Honolulu in 11 hours. It is thought that the thick ash in the immediate aftermath of the eruption may have muffled the noise of the explosion for people nearby (though heard quite well in Australia 1,500 miles away) and so failed to warn them of the coming tidal waves.

Map 1.4 Southeast Asia showing volcanism and the Sunda Shelf.

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Sixty-eight years earlier an even more devastating eruption occurred, whose global destruction has only recently come to be understood. We know now that bad as Krakatoa was, it was only half the magnitude of Tambora, on a nearby island. (See box 1.4.)

But Krakatau and Tambora were exceptional events (Tambora was a “thousand-year eruption”); most people in the island regions live near poten- tially dangerous active volcanoes and simply get used to the danger. To the east of Java is the small island of Bali (only 90 by 50 miles wide), which has its own chain of volcanic mountains. The highest (3,142 meters) of these peaks is Mt. Agung (which erupted in November 2017) and is presided over by a male god who has power over fire. A lower but perhaps more sacred cone is Mt. Batur, a young volcano in the heart of an ancient crater. Part of this crater is Lake Batur, home of the Goddess of the Lake. Both of these deities, it is said, were given authority over Bali by the great god of Mt. Mahameru (i.e., Kailash), Shiva, on the Indian continent. These deities preside over highly active volca- noes, which erupt with disastrous frequency, burying whole villages but often miraculously sparing temples.

Box 1.4 1816: The Year with No Summer

Benjamin Franklin was the first person to suggest that extreme weather could be linked to volcanism. In 1783–84 he speculated that a universal fog and cold that blan- keted Europe could have something to do with the recent eruption of Iceland’s Laki volcano. No one else thought that could be true. The subject was dropped.

Two decades later the largest volcanic eruption in a thousand years on planet Earth occurred on Sumbawa Island in the East Indies (a small island just east of Bali in Indonesia). Hardly anyone outside those islands, other than a few passing ships, took note, although over 10,000 people died on the first day alone. What followed over the next three years was a painful demonstration of the global nature of many natural forces, although even the best scientific minds of the period 1815–1818 had no idea of the interconnection of the disasters that assaulted societies around the planet. Only in the last few decades as meteorology has had the computerized data to understand global weather patterns, along with other scientific investigations (such as analysis of ice core data), have the pieces of the Tambora puzzle been fit together.

In 1815, Tambora was a “dormant” volcano that had begun to rumble a bit and send out dark clouds of ash. Local folk thought the gods might be celebrating a mar- riage, or maybe one of them was angry. On April 10, whole villages and 10,000 people were consumed within “a vertical hell of flames, ash, boiling magma, and hurricane- strength winds” (Wood 2014:17). The raja of Sanggar escaped, with his family, to tell the tale of the local destruction. In the following weeks, some 40,000 people died from sickness and starvation as their wells were poisoned by ash and their crops destroyed. The raja of Sanggar’s report to a lieutenant of the British Royal Navy is the sole eyewit- ness account.

(continued)

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Unlike Krakatoa, Tambora’s eruption was hardly noted in Europe in these pretele- graph times. No one understood that global temperatures had lowered by one degree, though they were dismayed by frosts and snowfalls in June and July of the following year. Crops worldwide failed in 1816, a year later, as volcanic aerosols circled the globe in the jet streams, darkening the sun, and creating disastrous weather patterns. In Shanxi, China, summer frosts destroyed crops and provoked mass immigration and starvation. In Yunnan, China, “Famished corpses lay unmourned on the roads; moth- ers sold their children or killed them out of mercy, and human skeletons wandered the fields, feeding on white clay” (Wood 2014:98). In India, the monsoons failed, and chol- era swept the subcontinent, which over the next years became a global pandemic. In Ireland, that same summer saw cold and ceaseless rain that fell week after week, month after month, in the “Year without a Summer,” as the wheat crop failed and pota- toes rotted in saturated soil. The next year, 1817–1818, there was a typhus epidemic.

Artists, poets, and writers around the world responded to these global conditions with paintings, poems, and stories that reflect—unbeknownst to them—the global impact of the Tambora eruption. There were spectacular skyscapes by J. M. W. Turner and John Constable portraying vivid turbulence dominating human life. A small group of English poets happened to spend the summer of 1816 holed up in a mansion in Lake Geneva, Switzerland. They included the rock star poet, Lord Byron, his friends Mary and Percy Shelley, and Byron’s lover Claire Clairmont. They passed the time tell- ing ghost stories, out of which came Mary Shelley’s famous Frankenstein, created on a dark and stormy night just like the ones they were enduring. Byron wrote a long apocalyptic poem called “Darkness,” which began:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’ed, and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. . . .

Meanwhile in China, a 32-year-old poet named Li Yuyang living in Yunnan Province recorded the suffering around him in a series of poems:

Outside, the starved corpses pile high, While in her room the young mother Waits upon her child’s death. Unbearable Sorrow. My love, you cry to me to feed you— But no one sees my tears. Who can I tell which aches More? My heart or my body wasting away? She takes her baby out to the deep river. Clear and cool, welcome water. . .  She will care for that child in the life to come. (Quoted in Wood 2014:114)

These global experiences brought about by the great volcanic eruption of Mt. Tam- bora have only recently been pieced together by scholars from a variety of disciplines, showing how interconnected our world has been for longer than we have been aware.

For more on the Tambora eruption and aftermath, see Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora, The Eruption that Changed the World, Princeton, 2014.

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These Asian volcanoes are part of the great “arc of fire” that rims the Pacific Ocean. Its American arm includes the Cascades, Sierras, and Andes. Another type of volcano in the mid-Pacific is of the basaltic type: great, fast- moving, fast-spreading, enormous volcanoes, such as Mauna Loa and Kilauea in Hawaii, which build up from the ocean floor to the surface. But the volca- noes of the Pacific Rim are of a type known as andesitic; they erupt at lower temperatures, are stickier, and tend to pile up around the vent. They often throw large amounts of broken rock into the air and build the pile of material around the rim higher and higher into pointy peaks, like Mount Fuji in Japan, which we tend to admire as graceful and symmetrical. By contrast, Mauna Loa has about a hundred times more material in it than Mt. Fuji.

The reward for living with dangerous volcanoes is the most fertile soils in the world. In nonvolcanic regions of Indonesia, soils are often poor and the land sparsely populated, but volcanic areas have soil and climate conditions that allow for the highest population densities and some of the most successful agricultural systems ever devised. Before turning to those human adaptations, however, one more piece of the geographic picture must be put in place: the monsoons.

Monsoon Asia and Rice Adaptations

At midwinter in Asia, when the sun is far south over the Tropic of Capri- corn, Central Asia and Siberia are intensely cold. The Tibetan Plateau prevents the warm southern oceans from moderating the frigidity, and (since cold air sinks) a vast region of high pressure pushes this cold air eastward into North China and southward over the edge of the Himalayas to spill onto the North Indian plains. But throughout the spring, as the sun begins moving northward, the situation reverses. Temperatures rise in North India and Southeast Asia, and accumulated ground water slowly evaporates. April and May are intensely hot and dry. The same thing is going on over the Indian Ocean and the seas of Southeast Asia, where ocean water is evaporating and rising into the atmo- sphere as moisture-laden clouds. These are the conditions that create the mon- soons. Because the land heats faster than the ocean, the warmer air over the land rises. As it rises, denser, moisture-filled air from the ocean is pulled in to fill the vacuum. These are the monsoon winds. As the winds blow inland, this air, too, rises, releasing its heavy load of water vapor as monsoon rains (Web- ster 1981).

The coming of the monsoons is greeted with celebration throughout “monsoon Asia,” even by the casual visitor who happens to experience the shift from the numbing heat of May to the dripping humidity—briefly relieved by daily deluges—of June and July. For farmers, it means their paddy fields, which they have plowed and weeded and repaired in preparation, will now fill with the water essential to the first growth of rice. If the monsoons come con- sistently over the next few months, they will have a good crop; if, as sometimes inexplicably happens, the rains begin and then stop, the young rice shoots will

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yellow in their dried-out fields, and then wither away. If the monsoons are overgenerous, the waters will rise until the ridges separating fields disappear, and the rice drowns.

Rice, Dry and Wet

Monsoon Asia is the natural habitat for rice. “Monsoon Asia”—the por- tions of Asia dominated by the wet–dry pattern described in the last section—is not the whole of Asia, by any means. In the equatorial islands of Indonesia, rain falls more or less evenly throughout the year, and little seasonal variation can be detected. And of course the mountainous regions of Tibet and the arid regions to the north are outside “monsoon Asia.” But India, mainland Southeast Asia, the lower, eastern regions of China, Korea, Manchuria, and southern Japan are all influenced by the monsoons. In monsoon Asia, rice is the single most impor- tant crop, covering one-third of the total cultivated area. Parts of monsoon Asia have longer dry and weaker wet seasons, and so grains like wheat, millet, and sorghum are more reliable crops. You can draw an imaginary line north–south in India, leaving the southern tip of India and Sri Lanka on the eastern side; to the west is wheat, to the east is rice cultivation. You can draw another line east– west across China north of a rough line lying between the Yangzi and the Yel- low Rivers. South is rice cultivation, north is millet and wheat.

Map 1.5 Arrival of monsoons in Asia.

Guangzhou

Manila

New Delhi

Teheran Tokyo Beijing

Moscow

Summer Monsoons

Winter Monsoons

Asian Monsoons

late May

early Julyearly Julyearly July June

late May

early June H imalayas

Tibetan Plateau

June

De

Gobi Desert

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Origins of Rice Cultivation

We know that rice originated someplace in monsoon Asia, but its prehis- tory is far less well documented than that of wheat in the Middle East. Rice still grows wild in the three valleys of the Red, Mekong, and Chao Phrya Rivers. All Asian rice belongs to a single species of annual grass: Oryza sativa. There the simplicity ends. There are over 120,000 varieties among the three subspecies, indica, japonica (also known as sinica), and javanica. The japonica variety evolved along a Chinese branch of the Brahmaputra River (and so the Chinese call it sinica). And in the Indonesian islands, a third race of rice, javanica, evolved in adaptation to equatorial conditions. The huge number of varieties is a fabulous genetic resource that has made possible the hybridizing of a whole set of high-yield varieties of rice (HYVs) since the 1960s. These thousands of strains are treated as national treasures in rice-growing nations, preserved in “germ plasm banks” where they are stored on shelves like so many tins of tuna.

Because of its efficient system for transporting oxygen from shoots to roots (10 times better than barley and four times better than maize), rice is highly adaptable to hot, wet, waterlogged environments such as are common through- out monsoon Asia, where rice is typically grown in several inches of water throughout most of its growing cycle. It was probably in such environments that rice as a cultivar first evolved, with later adaptations to dry “hill rice” con- ditions. A second characteristic of rice is its extreme photosensitivity, requiring a precise number of minutes of sunlight per day at various stages of its growing season. This is why thousands of varieties have emerged in adaptation to micro-regions throughout monsoon Asia. It is this photosensitivity that required emergence of the javanica subspecies before rice could survive in the very different solar conditions of the equatorial region.

In the search for the origin of rice cultivation, however, the picture is not yet clear. Archaeology in Southeast Asia has documented a long period of suc- cessful foraging by peoples such as those who inhabited Spirit Cave in the northwestern hills of Thailand, and there is no easy explanation why they gave up their adaptation for the hard work of rice cultivation (Higham 1984). We assume it took some kind of as-yet unidentified pressure to push them to it. The oldest phase of the Chinese Neolithic is about 6000 B.C.E., but that was based on millet, not rice, in the Huanghe basin. The oldest sites of rice cultivat- ing appear to be in southern Chinese coastal areas, running down as far south as the Red River basin in Vietnam. At the site of Hemudu in Zhejiang Prov- ince, dated at 5000 B.C.E., is a whole Neolithic assemblage: pottery, carpentry, stone adzes, boats, paddles, spindle whorls for weaving, ropes and mats, evi- dence of domesticated pigs, dogs, chickens, possibly cattle and water buffalo— and lots of rice. There were layers of rice husks, grains, straw, and leaves 20 inches thick. Bellwood summarizes:

The main significance of southern China, and one which becomes ever firmer as the archaeological record unfolds, is that it was the zone where

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first developed the Neolithic technological and economic “package” that fueled all later population expansions into mainland and island Southeast Asia. (1992:91)

Two Rice Cultures

Since the earliest domestication of rice, its cultivation has diverged into two distinct patterns: Swidden (known by a number of different terms, including “slash and burn,” “shifting cultivation,” “dry rice cultivation,” and various indig- enous terms such as jhum, taungya) and padi cultivation (“wet-rice cultivation”). A wet-rice terrace boldly rebuilds the natural landscape through earthmoving and channeling water downhill into level after level; a swidden imitates nature by leaving hillsides alone and sowing seed in the sunny spaces of burnt-off trees.

Throughout much of rice-growing Asia, the two rice ecosystems corre- spond with two forms of societal complexity. Prestate peoples mostly inhabit upland environments where they practice swidden cultivation, while state soci- eties have emerged in the fertile riverine areas where they practice intensive wet-rice cultivation. We will return to these social concomitants in chapter 4, and for now keep our focus on the ecological dimensions of rice cultivation.

This hill field has been slashed and burned prior to planting. Stumps of burned trees still stand in the field, but their removal allows essential sunlight to reach the young plants. These varieties of rice do not require standing in water as does padi rice. The field will only be culti- vated for a year or two before it must be abandoned.

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Swidden. The swidden plot often looks like a haphazard field of grain sown on a hillside amidst blackened stumps and logs (see photo). This is because a hillside has been burnt of its original forest and undergrowth to allow sunlight to reach the growing rice. In actuality, the swidden plot is a “general- ized ecosystem” with a high diversity of species, as many as 40 different species in one field.

Vegetation debris rapidly decays in the humidity, but this does not produce the good soils that one might expect. The soil in swidden areas is often a bright red that is better used for making brick than growing rice. This soil is porous and crumbly, badly leached of nutrients by the process of lukewarm monsoonal rainwater soaking downward, carrying away important silicates and bases and leaving behind an unhealthy mix of iron oxides and clay. Because so few nutri- ents remain in the upper levels of the soil where shallow plant roots can reach them, most of the minerals available to crops come from the ash produced in the burning phase of slash and burn. Between the first and second crop in a newly burned field, rice production drops as much as 80 percent because of the leaching process and using up the value of the ash by the first crop. The combi- nation of loss of soil fertility and weed growth will make swiddeners decide,

Wet-rice cultivation is practiced in this newly terraced field. Wet-rice varieties must stand in water during the first phases of the growth cycle; as the plant matures, the seedlings must be transplanted from nursery beds to fields where they can continue to grow, an extremely labor intensive process.

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after a few years, that it is easier to move than to keep working harder for less return in the same field.

Paddy (Wet-Rice) Cultivation. The large states of East and Southeast Asia are based on wet-rice cultivation, a system that supports vastly larger and denser populations than swidden agriculture.

In China, wet-rice cultivation is known as the “four stoops”—stoop to plant, stoop to transplant, stoop to weed, and stoop to harvest. The phrase con- veys something of the labor intensiveness of this system. Paddy cultivation has an endless capacity to respond to loving care. You can pregerminate seeds in the house; you can sow seeds in nurseries rather than broadcast them as in upland swidden practice; you can hand-transplant in tight and even rows; you can weed three or more times during the growing season; you can double-crop and even triple-crop. You can dig irrigation channels, and you can go up moun- tainsides by carving terraces and channeling waters at enormous expenditures of labor. If you do these things, you can support population densities as high as 3,200 persons per square mile in fields that never suffer a decline in productiv- ity even after 1,400 years of continuous use.

Rice and the Green Revolution

Green Revolution scientists have tended to assume that correct technology is all that really counts in getting high yields from agricultural land. Farmers could get three crops a year on irrigated paddies with a new hybrid like IR36 (a “high-yield variety” bred to resist four major rice diseases and four damaging rice insects, including the brown planthopper) along with appropriate fertilizers and pesticides. Premodern forms of agricultural activity—the ones that are responsible for the high population densities and longevity of paddies men- tioned above—can then be modified or abandoned.

This proved to be an inadequate view in many parts of the world. In Bali, for instance, where some terraces have existed for more than a thousand years of continuous use, anthropologist Stephen Lansing discovered a complex inter- relation between the ritual system and the agricultural system (Lansing 1991). Individual family-owned paddies are the elementary unit, locked in a system of ever more inclusive temple congregations and irrigation management. To begin with the rice paddy, according to Stephen Lansing:

In essence, the flow of water—the planned alternation of wet and dry phases—governs the basic biochemical processes of the terrace ecosystem. A general theory in ecology holds that ecosystems that are characterized by steady, unchanging nutrient flows tend to be less productive than systems with nutrient cycles or “Pulses.” Rice paddies are an excellent example of this principle. Controlled changes in water levels create pulses in several important biochemical cycles. The cycle of wet and dry phases alters soil pH; induces a cycle of aerobic and anaerobic conditions in the soil that determines the activity of microorganisms; circulates mineral nutrients; fos- ters the growth of nitrogen fixing algae; excludes weeds; stabilizes soil tem-

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perature; and over the long term governs the formation of a plough pan that prevents nutrients from being leached into the subsoil. Potassium, for exam- ple, is needed for rice growth and depends largely on drainage. Phosphorus is also essential and may be increased more than tenfold by submergence.

The main crop produced is, of course, rice. But in addition, the paddy also produces important sources of animal protein, such as eels, frogs, and fish. . . . After each harvest, flocks of ducks are driven from field to field, gleaning leftover grain and eating some of the insects, like brown planthop- pers, that would otherwise attack the next rice crop. Traditional harvesting techniques remove only the seed-bearing tassel, leaving the rest of the stalk to decompose in the water, returning most of its nutrients to the system. (Lansing 1991:39)

From the Balinese point of view, all water has its source in a lake high in the crater of Mt. Batur presided over by the Goddess of the Lake, Dewi Danu (Day-we DAH-nu). Her human representative is the High Priest, the Jero Gde (jeer-o g’DAY), and together they reside in the Temple of the Crater Lake on the shores of Lake Batur. The life-giving waters of Lake Batur flow downhill via various rivers and streams, ultimately spilling out into the ocean, the end point of dissolution and regeneration. These streams are not broad meandering rivers that would be easy to dam and divert for agricultural use, but they flow through precipitous clefts where they may actually disappear underground for a length before reappearing. Nevertheless, over centuries an intricate web of thousands of diversionary weirs and channels have been built to bring this sacred water to irrigate the terraces of the Balinese.

Such a system needs careful management, since many hundreds of farmers are upstream and downstream of each other, all dependent on a fair share of the available water in the right amounts at critical points in their growing sea- son. Yet, unlike in China, this management was never the responsibility of any state official or bureaucracy. There were kings of Bali, but they ruled by rituals focused on a different god, a different mountain, and a different chief temple.

Rather, it was the system of temple worship, by farmers organized into worship-groups, that managed not only the flow of water but also a number of collective cultivation issues, such as when to plant, when to burn to control pests across a whole hillside, when to harvest, and when to fallow. At every node of water diversion—that is, at every weir across a stream or river—there is an altar or temple and a deity associated with it. Everyone downstream of that altar is part of its congregation. At the village level, water management associa- tions composed of all farmers in the vicinity, known as subaks (soo-buks), were responsible both for worship and for collective agricultural and water-use deci- sions. The temple festivals require obtaining holy water from upstream sources; the need to collect this holy water provides the means by which temple congre- gations are linked in ever more inclusive units. The intricate annual calendar for all those temple festivals is simultaneously the calendar for opening and closing the irrigation weirs. Ultimately, the high priest, the Jero Gde, has the

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right to make certain decisions with implications for the entire watershed, such as whether to open a new region to terracing and cultivation.

Although this system has tremendous practical results for life in Bali, notice that its practical effects are not distinct from its ritual ones. For Balinese, the earth is a sacred place, the waters are sacred, life is sacred, and because the Goddess of the Lake makes the waters flow, “those who do not follow her laws may not possess her rice terraces.”

The lessons for the Green Revolution scientists were serious. As much good as rice research has done for rice-producing nations in Asia, there was also wisdom in patterns of rice cultivation honed over centuries of experimen- tation in Bali that technology alone could not improve upon. The Balinese have returned to the ancient system of management of irrigation by means of temple festivals and the ritual calendar.

Early Asians

In traditional Chinese pharmacology, one of the most potent of substances is “dragon bones.” In powdered form, stirred into tea, it is a remedy for a great number of ailments, from general weakness to specific illnesses such as dysen- tery and malaria. One might think dragon bones would be hard to come by, but an excellent source of them about 30 miles southwest of Beijing supplied the pharmacologists of the capital for many years. Around the turn of the twenti- eth century, a few scientists came to recognize that these dragon bones were actually fossils of ancient animals, some of them extinct, including saber-tooth tigers, rhinoceroses, horses, bears, hyenas, and buffaloes. Among these fossils were two teeth that ended up in the Swedish laboratory of paleontologist J. G. Andersson. In 1926 he made the astonishing announcement to the scientific world that they were “human.” That is, they were of genus Homo, but of spe- cies erectus, not sapiens. They were thought to be an evolutionary precursor to modern humans.

The first Homo erectus fossils had been discovered in 1891 in what is now Indonesia, and these were dubbed “Java Man.” H. erectus may have been in Java as early as a million years ago, having migrated out of Africa in waves, and spread throughout the islands and southern China for millennia. It made repeated efforts to move north during periods between glacials when the north was less frigid; Peking Man is part of that northern movement, a late arrival 550,000 to 300,000 years ago.

The scientific world responded cautiously to Andersson’s assertion that Peking Man was “human.” It was a fabulous find, if true. These teeth were found in association with extinct species like saber-tooth tigers in a bed assumed to be over a million years old. But it was, after all, only two teeth, a molar and a premolar. There was already controversy over a few specimens of an early man called Piltdown Man, found in England, which was later proved to be an elaborate fake and exposed the scientific world to ridicule by the press.

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But the announcement of a hominid find at Dragon Bone Hill, now better known as Zhoukoudian (jo-ko-dee-an), led to a long but intermittent sequence of excavations and the discovery of a great many more remains of what is now called Peking Man, or H. erectus pekinensis.

There are now remains of 40 individuals, males and females of various ages, plus tens of thousands of stone tools made by them (Wu and Lin 1983). They inhabited a large cave where they first took shelter about 460,000 years ago and continued to live until about 230,000 years ago. Something of the sig- nificance of that length of time can be grasped if we remember that only 8,000 years have passed since humans began cultivating grains in northern China. This earliest population is classified as Homo (“man”) erectus (“upright”), not sapiens (“thinking”); that is, it is the same genus but not the same species as modern humans. The average size of modern H. sapiens’s braincases is 1,450 cc; Peking Man had an average cranial capacity of 1,054 cc. The skull was thicker and flatter, with protruding brows, and a marked protrusion in the rear of the skull, very similar to H. erectus specimens found widely throughout Eurasia and Africa. Over the long period of life in the cave, evolution of cranial capacity seems to have been occurring, since the most recent skull, dated at 200,000 B.P. (before the present) was 1,140 cc. During that time, their tools got nicer, too, beginning with awkward choppers (a few flakes knocked off a large pebble to produce a sharp ridge) and ending with delicate and well-made points that could be tied to sticks to make hunting spears. Moreover, H. erectus pekinensis had front teeth that were slightly curved in the back, a type known as shovel- shaped incisors that are common in modern Chinese populations. This was taken as evidence that modern Chinese evolved directly out of Peking Man. In the 1930s Franz Weidenreich argued that populations descended from Peking Man evolved into the “Mongoloid Race” of modern East Asian peoples. In addition, according to this now-outdated racial theory, there are two other great human races: the Caucasoid and the Negroid. Further subdivisions were arrived at based on observable physical (phenotypical) characteristics like skin color and hair type.

The appeal of Peking Man to contemporary Chinese may seem obvious: the ancestor of all Chinese already on the scene half a million years ago. We are all descended from this common ancestor! We have been here practically forever. Millennia later comes the Yellow Emperor and all of Chinese civiliza- tion flowers. Unfortunately, the picture isn’t that simple.

Modern paleontologists believe that H. sapiens originated as recently as 143,000 years ago in East Africa and migrated north and eastward, often into areas where late H. erectus still lived. In Europe, for example, Neanderthal evolved from H. erectus that died out with modern H. sapiens when they entered 30,000–40,000 years ago. Whether they interbred was long in doubt, but in 2013 it was established that modern Europeans have some Neanderthal genes.

The evidence for the late date of H. sapiens comes from DNA studies begin- ning in the 1980s, which showed that all modern humans are descended from a

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small early population in East Africa that replaced H. erectus. One type of DNA known as mitochondrial DNA, which transmits through females only, allows geneticists to determine the degree of differentiation of human populations worldwide. These studies show that all contemporary humans are recent descendants of a small group of Africans, numbering only about 10,000 indi- viduals (Sautman 2001; Ziętkiewicz et al. 1998). Only about .01 percent of all genes in the human genome relate to physical features that are used to distin- guish the “races.” This new genetic evidence has meant that the old racial cate- gories have little scientific significance (except culturally, of course, which we will get to later).

The results of these newer studies involving the science of genetics is that H. sapiens reached China from Africa very recently—around 60,000 years ago—via India and Southeast Asia. They spread north into China and may have encountered “Peking Man” (i.e., H. erectus), but this population died out and was replaced by the newcomers.4 Asians separated from Africans no ear- lier than 100,000 years ago, from Australians 50,000 years ago, and from Euro- peans only 30,000 years ago (Sautman 2001:100). Features that are identified as “Mongoloid,” that is, supposed East Asian physical characteristics like flat faces, shovel-shaped incisors, and epicanthic folds of the eyelids evolved within the last 50,000 years.

However, cultural categories of race, and all the issues of national and eth- nic identity that accompany them, have been slow to catch up with the scien- tific facts. After a century of thinking about race in the old three races way (see above), these ideas have embedded themselves in national cultures in a pretty fixed manner and are very difficult to change. In China, for instance, the idea of a continuous racial identity from earliest Peking Man half a mil- lion years ago to the present provides a mythology of Chineseness that tran- scends dynasties and regimes. It is a myth that attempts to overcome separate identities as Han, Uighur, Tibetan, Miao, and so on as more recent environ- mental developments from an original common racial stock, allowing for the argument that ultimately, “we are all Chinese.” There is plenty of political utility in such a myth. But the truth, as now understood through paleoanthro- pological and genetic studies, is that small groups of East Africans in the last 60,000 years migrated along the shores of Africa, the Middle East, and India, eventually reaching Southeast Asia, from where they finally spread north into China. Branches of them settled in each place along the way. Only much later did various kinds of cultural identities emerge. Someday, perhaps, our com- mon human identity will be as celebrated as our separate national and “racial” ones.

ENDNOTES 1 Since international borders are now guarded and unfriendly, pilgrimage to Kailash from India

is rare, and Hindus have adapted by revering a source of the Ganges called Gaumukh, “the Mouth of the Cow,” slightly to the southwest in the Indian Himalayas.

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2 In 1859 the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace noted distinct differences in ecozones between Asia and Australia, with distributions of fauna distinct on the two sides (e.g., kangaroos, koa- las, and wombats in Australia, but not monkeys, tigers, or deer).

3 The exception: a few species of bats and rodents (placental mammals) managed to swim or float to Australia and New Guinea in pre-human times.

4 The spread of modern humans probably also eradicated a puzzling species discovered in Indo- nesia in 2003 and dubbed “hobbits” (Homo floresiensis) because of their small size. Early studies concluded they were as recent as 11,000 years, but recent retesting of rock and sediment has pushed that date back. Paleontologists now think they were gone by 50,000 years ago, about the time of the arrival of modern humans (Callaway 2016).

REFERENCES CITED Alley, Kelly. 1994. Ganga and Gandagi: Interpretation of Pollution and Waste in

Banaras. Ethnology 33(2): 127–144. Bellwood, Peter. 1992. Southeast Asia Before History. In The Cambridge History of Southeast

Asia ed. Nicholas Tarling. Pp. 55–136. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Callaway, Ewan. 2016, March 31. Did Humans Drive “Hobbit” Species to Extinction?

Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-humans- drive-hobbit-species-to-extinction/

Francis, Peter, and Stephen Self. 1983. The Eruption of Krakatau. Scientific American 249(5): 172–187.

Higham, Charles. 1984. Prehistoric Rice Cultivation in Southeast Asia. Scientific Ameri- can 250(4): 138–146.

———. 1989. The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press.

Hopkirk, Peter. 1980. Foreign Devils on the Silk Road; The Search for the Lost Cities and Trea- sures of Chinese Central Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lach, D. 1965. Asia on the Eve of Europe’s Expansion. Englewood-Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Lansing, Stephen. 1991. Priests and Programmers; Technologies of Power in the Engineered

Landscape of Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Molnar, Peter, and Paul Tapponnier. 1977. The Collision Between India and Eurasia.

Scientific American 237:30-41. Sautman, Barry. 2001. Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropological National-

ism in China. Journal of Asian Studies 60(1): 95–124. Varley, H. Paul. 1980. A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns: Jinno Shotoki of Kitabatake Chi-

kafusa. New York: Columbia University Press. Webster, Peter. 1981. Monsoons. Scientific American 250(4):138–46. Wood, Gillen D’arcy. 2014. Tambora; The Eruption that Changed the World. Princeton. Wu Rukang, and Lin Shenglong. 1983. Peking Man. Scientific American 248(6): 86–94. Ziętkiewicz, Ewa, et al. 1998. Genetic Structure of the Ancestral Population of Modern

Humans. Journal of Molecular Evolution 42(2): 146–155.

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2 TONGUES, TEXTS,

AND SCRIPTS

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f any evidence were needed of Asia’s tremendous diversity, you need look no further than language. There are over 2,000 distinct languages spoken in East, South, and Southeast Asia. Language both creates communities

through mutual intelligibility—a group in a room with a light on—and divides people, possibly even close neighbors, across language borders in the darkness of nonintelligibility. Language may, in fact, be the most severe of cultural boundaries, for when you cannot understand other people it is easy to suspect them of any number of other contrasts with yourself: they speak gibberish; they are barbarians (heathens, cannibals); they are uncivilized (uncultured, primi- tive, savage); they are irrational; they should learn from us. On the other hand, language creates communities of mutual comprehension and becomes the base for other markers and reinforcers of community. We who speak a common lan- guage also share a common culture, have a sense of common identity, surely must have a common history and common ancestors, and are a common “peo- ple,” a nationality, an ethnicity. Many of these commonalities are actually fic- tions—but important fictions in the creation and maintenance of social unity.

For instance, in the present age when so many national borders enclose people with no common language, there may be a desperate search for one. In India, where there are over 150 distinct languages, the effort to create a com- mon one has been intense and controversial. The dominant language, Hindi (which is the fourth largest linguistic community in the world after Mandarin, English, and Spanish), has been hotly resisted in South India where speakers of Dravidian languages resist imposition of a northern language. If there is a neu- tral common language, it is English, although the irony is that this is the lan- guage of the former colonial power. And, of course, a great number of Indians never learn this “common” language.

China, too, is a country of linguistic diversity, but it deals with the problem somewhat differently. It simply declares that all ethnic Han Chinese (92 percent of the population) speak “dialects” of Chinese, even though these “dialects” are mutually unintelligible, and linguists consider them separate languages. The “Chinese” language is actually a language family equivalent to the “Romance Family” of Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. It helps, of course, that in written form, speakers of these separate languages of Chinese can actually read the same texts (see later in this chapter). It is as if all speakers of the various Euro- pean languages had a single written language that everyone could understand.

I

Chapter opener photo: A Brahman consults the genealogist about a potential marriage for his daughter. Genealogies 24 generations long are maintained in traditional style texts in this part of India.

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On the other hand, Lao and Thai are mutually understandable and are therefore technically dialects, but since they are the national languages of Laos and Thailand, they are considered by their own national speakers to be two separate languages. This is one of those cases about which it has been said that a language is a dialect with its own army and navy.

There are many reasons for the study of language. You might want to study a particular language so you can speak it: that is, so you can go into the lighted room and converse with other speakers of that language. That may seem like the main point of language study. But that will not be the point of this chapter, nor could it be. Why else, then? In this book we are taking a view of Asia that seeks interconnections among people, one that is not content with a “Holistic Asia” view, or with the present nation-state configuration, or with any simple view of the “great traditions” as bounded and eternal. Rather, we are attempting to order the diversity. The diversity of Asia’s languages is not truly chaotic, though occasionally it might seem so. Although in one sense the languages appear as so many separate lighted rooms, in another sense we are coming to know a great deal about the relationships between these languages and about the larger house, or family, of which each one is a part. The study of language families often uncovers startling connections—you might be surprised who your “rela- tives” are—but beyond this, historical linguistics is a key tool of prehistorical research, along with archaeology, paleontology, and biogenetic research.

Voices from the Past

Making Family Connections: The Indo-Europeans

In 1784 a young Englishman named William Jones rented a thatched bun- galow 60 miles upriver from Calcutta and began taking lessons in Sanskrit. The learned Brahmans at first refused to teach their sacred language to a foreigner, since not even their own women and lower castes were allowed to speak or hear it, but Jones managed to find a non-Brahman who would teach him. Only one other Englishman had learned the language before him. It proved to be an exceedingly difficult language even for a linguistic whiz kid like Jones. Before graduating from university he had already mastered French, Greek, Latin, Per- sian, and Arabic. Within a few months of beginning his lessons, he began to notice remarkable similarities between Sanskrit, which he was learning, and Greek and Latin, which he already knew. They even look suspiciously similar to English speakers. The Sanskrit word for mother was matr, for mouse was mus, for name was nama, for two was dva, for three was tryas, and so on. In grammar, too, the similarities were impossible to miss. Clearly he was on to something important. Two years later, he announced to the Asiatic Society:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful struc- ture; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affin-

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ity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than can possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all without believing them to have sprung from some com- mon source, which perhaps no longer exists. There is similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick [i.e., Ger- manic] and Celtick, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same fam- ily. (Franklin 1995:361)

Prior to this time, European scholars who noticed similarities between, say, English and German or English and French, assumed it was because these lan- guages had borrowed words and constructions from each other over the course of centuries. But with languages as far apart geographically as the Mediterra- nean and India, borrowing over centuries of close contact was ruled out as an explanation. The idea that languages could have similarities because they had “sprung from some common source” was novel. Jones’s much-quoted state- ment is said to have begun the science of historical linguistics. These discover- ies were equivalent to DNA profiling of our age; they so enthralled Britain that at Jones’s public lectures in later life, over a thousand people would show up. What was discovered, and over the next century more fully pieced together, was the prehistory of a set of languages now distributed from Europe to North India. The original language, which Jones speculated might once have existed and may no longer exist, is now called Proto-Indo-European.

The terms in figure 2.1 illustrate the kinds of similarities that needed to be accounted for. Two words with the same meaning in two different but related languages that are later forms of a common earlier form are called “cognates.” The word for “two” in Greek and Latin was the same: duo. The Sanskrit form was dva. Over time the /v/ of Sanskrit had become /u/ in Greek and Latin. Aside from this somewhat minor, but recognizable, sound shift, the three

English Sanskrit Greek Latin Old German Japanese

one ekas heis unus ains hitotsu two dva duo duo twai futatsu three tryas treis tres thrija mittsu four catvaras tettares quattuor fidwor yottsu five panca pente quinque fimf itsutsu six sat heks sex saihs muttsu seven sapta hepta septem sibum nanatsu eight asta okto octo ahtau yattsu nine nava ennea novem niun kokonotsu ten dasa deka decem taihum to

Figure 2.1 The numbers one through ten in five Indo-European languages and also, for contrast, in Japanese, which is not a member of the Indo-European family.

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words were clearly cognates. If English “two” is also a cognate, we have to account for two sound shifts: /v/ to /w/ and /d/ to /t/. Linguists know that these are easy shifts for languages to make. /V/ and /w/ are made in similar ways in the mouth, and easily shift from one to the other. (Try it and see). In North Indian languages today, individual speakers vary in their pronunciation of /v/ on a range from a good, hard /v/ to a soft and liquid /w/. Similarly with /d/ and /t/, both are made with the tongue on the alveolar ridge (just behind the teeth) and by stopping—then freeing—the breath; the only differ- ence between the two is a lack of voicing on the /t/.

In the case of dva/duo/twai you can probably figure out which of these lan- guages English is closest to. The “spelling” of the English word preserves a pro- nunciation now lost. If we were to spell English “two” the way we pronounce it, we would spell it “tu.” But once we pronounced it two, in that pronunciation the similarity to Old German twai is apparent. The /d/ has already become /t/, and the /v/ has become /w/. The vowels, /o/ and /ai/ are different, but vow- els are a lot more slippery than consonants.

If you were to work out the relationship of the five languages just on the basis of “two,” you would probably come up with:

The tree diagram in figure 2.2 orders the similarities by degree of closeness and by generation. Greek and Latin are identical; between them and Sanskrit there has been one consonant change. Between those three and Old German, there have been two consonant changes. Of course, this is just one word. You would want to take many words to discover repeating patterns or modify your diagram as more evidence seems to require it. Notice, for instance, the /d/ to /t/ shift shows up again in “ten”: dasa/deka/decem vs. taihum/ten. You would probably want to be selective about what words you chose for comparison. The word “motor,” for instance, has passed into a large number of the world’s

Figure 2.2 Relationship between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Old German, and English on the basis of “two.”

*[parent form]

Old German twai

Sanskrit dva

Greek duo

Latin duo

English two

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languages along with the actual automobile. Languages do “borrow” words extravagantly (“steal” might be a better word; they rarely give them back) along with technological innovations, religious concepts, new foods, etc. Any- thing new can bring along its label from the original language. These words are called “loanwords.” When Christianity moved into Europe, hundreds of reli- gious terms, most of them from Latin, came along with it. The French invaded England in 1066, and over the next three centuries more than 10,000 French words were added to English, often duplicating perfectly good Anglo-Saxon (Germanic) words. Similarly, when Hinduism and later Buddhism spread into Southeast Asia, thousands of Sanskrit words were added to local languages, and Japanese absorbed several thousand Chinese loanwords along with Con- fucian and Buddhist texts and the Chinese script. When tea was carried west- ward from China, its Chinese name went along with it. The English and French (the) forms are from a Fujian dialect, and Russian (cha) and Hindi (chai) are from a Cantonese dialect. Now, of course, new words are being cre- ated with new technology; words like Internet, software, user-friendly, and cell phone and are not only added to English but are spread widely wherever the new technology travels.

Other types of words rarely change. Pronouns are among the most stable of terms. So are kinship terms, body parts, and words like sun, moon, sky, path, home, name, fire, hot, cold. These are sometimes called “core vocabulary,” the oldest, most stable words in any language, and they are used by linguists in comparing languages and finding relationships. These words are most useful when the two “daughter” languages split off long ago. In linguistic terms, a split of 1,000 years is so recent that even untrained observers would not deny they had a common parent. But when the distance to the parent, or “protolan- guage,” is in the range of several thousand years, it may not be so readily appar- ent. Most linguists now agree that “Proto-Indo-European” was spoken some 5,000 years ago. This is by far the best-documented language family in the world, partly because so many scholars have worked on it during the last 200 years, and partly because there is documentation of old, intermediate forms in texts written in ancient Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Hittite.

In fact, much of the vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) has been painstakingly reconstructed, and this reconstructed lexicon holds clues about where PIE was spoken. There were no words for elephant, tiger, banana, rice, or ocean; there were words for herd, cow, sheep, pig, goat, dog, house, wolf, bear, goose, duck, bee, salmon, beaver, squirrel, beech, willow, oak, grain, and wheel. It follows that the original Indo-Europeans must have been acquainted with these things, and an effort to map their distribution on a map of Eurasia has led to the hypothesis that the original homeland was the central grassland regions north of the Black and Caspian Seas. It is assumed they were a mounted warrior people who, around 3000 B.C.E., began to move westward into Europe, south into Turkey, and southeast into Iran and India. The Indic, or Indo-Aryan, branch moved into North India around 1700 B.C.E. where they

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encountered a civilization in decline (the “empty cities” of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro; see chapter 5) and speakers of a wholly different language fam- ily, Dravidian. Conquering and intermarrying, they spread across the northern half of the subcontinent, where their language, Sanskrit, began to undergo its inevitable regional transitions into such modern languages as Punjabi, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Nepali.

The language that gave Sir William Jones his great insight, Sanskrit, pro- vides the oldest known samples of an Indo-European language. It continues to be both written and spoken to this day, but it has not been a “mother tongue”— the first language learned by children in a language community—since some time in the first millennium B.C.E. Already by Buddha’s time in the sixth cen- tury B.C.E. it was archaic, for Buddha insisted on preaching in the vernaculars, the actually spoken languages, and most of the Buddhist texts are written in such a language, Pali. But early Sanskrit and even earlier “Vedic” were pre- served by the oral transmission of the most sacred compositions of the Hindus, the Vedas. These four works are regarded by all Hindus as the source of their religion, given directly to humans as “revealed” truth.

U r a l M o u n t a i n s

A r a b i a n S e a

Caspian Sea

Mediterranean Sea

Black Sea

B al

tic S

ea

R ed

S ea

Presumed Indo-European

Homeland

EUROPE

ASIA

A t l a n t i c O c e a n

9

1 2

34 56

7

8

10

H i m a l a y a s

1 2 3 4 5

I n d o - I r a n i a n H i t t i t e T h r a c o - P h r y g i a n G r e e k I l l y r i a n

6 7 8 9

1 0

I t a l i c C e l t i c G e r m a n i c S l a v i c B a l t i c

Map 2.1 Distribution of Indo-European languages.

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East Asian Homelands

The great success of reconstructing the Indo-European language family has naturally led linguists who work in East and Southeast Asia to attempt similar reconstructions there. But in this part of the world the complexities are much greater and the time-depth deeper. There have been far fewer linguists at work on far more languages, and the effort has only begun in the last century. This means that at the present time there is still much uncertainty and disagreement, though some general outlines are beginning to emerge, and we intend to pres- ent a picture that is a good deal firmer and clearer than many experts would prefer. This emerging picture has come about as other kinds of scholars, partic- ularly archaeologists, have brought their data to bear on questions also of inter- est to linguists.

For instance, as soon as languages have been shown by linguists to be mem- bers of a language family, we want to know where the original mother tongue was spoken, when it was spoken, and why and how the languages began moving to where we now find them. With such questions, obviously, archaeology can be helpful. The archaeological record of excavated sites can be examined for impor- tant clues about the people. For instance, were they foragers or cultivators? What is the geographical range within which a typical assemblage of artifacts is found? What is the physical type of the human remains? What seems to have been the population densities? How long were sites inhabited by the same people?

What, for instance, would cause a population to disperse? This is the first stage in the breakup of a language into a number of daughter languages. According to archaeologist Colin Renfrew (1989), there are four principal ways by which populations, together with their languages, spread. First, there were the earliest periods of human dispersal, when people settled in previously unin- habited territories, leaving the African homeland and moving throughout most of Eurasia, Australia, and New Guinea. In some parts of the world, for exam- ple the eastern Pacific islands, this has happened recently enough that we have quite a lot of knowledge about the peoples and their languages. In Asia, those earliest Homo sapiens, we are certain, must have had some language, if only we could rediscover its traces in modern languages.

This initial migration was followed by the “farming dispersal.” The inven- tion of farming in various places caused population growth, and as these agri- cultural populations expanded at the expense of earlier foragers, they took their languages with them. The full impact of these dispersals is only now coming to be recognized by historical linguists. For instance, Renfrew has argued that the Indo-European dispersal was not by mounted warriors of the steppes but by the earlier agriculturists of the Middle East, very well documented archaeologi- cally, who moved from the Mediterranean north into Europe, displacing earlier foragers (leaving the Basques as a lonely remnant), and also eastward into the Iranian Plateau and India. (Historians of India are not yet accepting this hypothesis, however; if and when they do, it will require radical rethinking of early Indian history.)

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The third form of dispersal came about during the global warming several thousand years ago when regions north of the 54th parallel became liveable and pioneers settled in Siberia and crossed the Bering Straits into the circumpo- lar region where they became the Eskimo-Aleut.

Finally, the fourth form of migration, occurring in later historic times as societies became more complex, is “elite dominance,” when incoming groups, better organized and better armed, conquer indigenous groups and imposed their languages on them. The Altaic languages (Mongolian, Manchurian, Turkish, Korean, and possibly Japanese) originated in Central Asia and were carried westward and eastward by well-documented conquests (though Kublai Khan’s invasion of China and the dynasty he established, the Yuan, left scarcely a trace on the Chinese language). Thai and Lao spread into Southeast Asia, shoving aside Khmer. The spread of English accompanying the era of colonialism would be a more recent example.

Just as archaeologists know that the Neolithic is invariably accompanied by population growth, linguists know that a region with the greatest diversity of languages is likely to be the oldest area of settlement and possibly the origi- nal home of the speakers of a language family. For an easy example that this might be so, think of the diversity of English dialects in the British Isles (in as small an area as London, “Queen’s English” and Cockney are extraordinarily different) or the dialect diversity of American English on the East Coast as opposed to the homogeneity of the more recently settled Midwest and West. The same process, allowed to develop over, say, 7,000 years, will turn dialects into languages and then into language families. If a region is an ancient center of agriculture it is more likely to have resisted intrusion from people speaking other languages, and its own language(s) will go on modifying, diversifying, and transforming themselves into a family of related languages. Then, of course, if people begin to move around, at first because of the population explo- sion associated with agriculture, and later because of military adventuring by conquering peoples, the picture becomes quite complex.

Let us make a simple observation from a linguistic map of today: the great- est linguistic diversity in East and Southeast Asia can be found in a circle with a radius of a thousand miles with its center on Canton. This circle will include the island of Taiwan, the whole eastern region south of the Yangzi, as far inland as Kunming, and the northern hills of Burma and Laos.

This is, first of all, the area where China’s many “dialects” have their great- est diversity. Besides Chinese, Southern China also contains four additional language families: Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Miao-Yao, and Tibeto-Burman. And just across the Formosa Straits on Taiwan is a member of the Austrone- sian family and the probable original homeland of a group of languages now spread from Madagascar to Hawaii.

The later out-of-Africa dispersal of H. sapiens traversed southern Asia toward southeast Asia around 60,000 years ago. The southernmost of these people crossed Wallace’s Line into Australia and New Guinea, remaining for-

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agers in Australia but independently inventing agriculture in New Guinea. Then, quite recently in this grand view of things, some of those who remained in Asia began to cultivate grain. At about 6000 B.C.E. they were cultivating mil- let in North China, and about 5000 B.C.E. they were cultivating rice over a region stretching from coastal South China through the hills of Burma and across into India as far as Bihar. We assume that these earliest cultivators were the first to experience the population growth that accompanies agriculture, and the first to disperse amongst foraging peoples, displacing and isolating them. We do not, of course, know anything about their languages. But based on the hard work of many linguists, we can perhaps piece together a picture as things stood between the end of the last glaciation, 10,000 years ago, and the period of the first written texts from China, about the fifteenth century B.C.E.

Several things seem certain to be true during this long period. First, as the area being discussed is vast, it is unlikely that peoples living there 10,000 years ago would all have been speaking the same language. However paleolinguists eventually settle the great debate on the origin(s) of human language, by 10,000 years ago there must have been several, and perhaps many, languages in exis- tence in East and Southeast Asia. Second, no one could then have been living in the fully glaciated Himalayas; settlement of the Himalayas by Tibetans and others came much later. Third, the Neolithic “revolution” must have spread slowly throughout the human communities in this vast area, but as a popula- tion acquired the new economy they would quickly have experienced popula- tion growth at the expense of others. These newly cultivating populations were Renfrew’s “farming dispersal” at the expense of still-foraging populations.

Austroasiatic

There is a family of about 150 languages called Austroasiatic that we assume must be the languages of this first population explosion; it includes Vietnamese and Khmer in Southeast Asia. Over in India it survives among a few hill tribes such as the Munda. But once they must have been widespread throughout the region, including South China; the old name for the Yangzi, jiang, is believed to be Austroasiatic, and from their reconstructed vocabulary we find linguistic evidence attesting to their knowledge of rice agriculture. Some cognates of jiang, such as song (Vietnamese), krung, kroung, and karung, are now general-purpose words for “river.”

Austro-Tai

Somewhat later, around 4500 B.C.E., people who spoke another protolan- guage called Austro-Tai and also lived in South China began to migrate across the Formosa Strait to Taiwan. Their subsequent migrations are relatively well documented archaeologically, and the linguistic evidence for much of what fol- lows is also strong. Those who remained behind on the mainland of South China stayed put for millennia and in historic times began moving into South- east Asia as the Thai, the Shan of northern Burma, and the Lao of Laos. Those

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who went to Taiwan began their linguistic differentiation, and about a thou- sand years later, possibly around 3500 B.C.E., began moving southward into the Philippines. Here Malayo-Polynesian began to develop. Eventually a western branch moved into the Indonesian Islands of Borneo, Sulawesi, Sumatra, Java, and Bali, while an eastern branch headed out into the Pacific where they became the Polynesian peoples (Bellwood 1992).

The reconstructed protolanguages of Austro-Tai and Malayo-Polynesian provide interesting evidence for the changes in the economies of peoples adapt- ing to an equatorial environment. In the Proto-Austro-Tai lexicon are words for a wet-rice adaptation: field, wet field, garden, plow, rice, sugarcane, the betel nut complex, cattle, water buffalo, ax, canoe. A new set of terms appears in Proto-Malayo-Polynesian indicating their new adaptation in the equatorial

Figure 2.3 Members of the Austro-Tai language family.

Austro-Tai*

Tai-Kadai Austronesian**

Malayo-Polynesian**

Western Oceanic

Thai Lao Shan Formosan Malay Iban Javanese Balinese Fijian Samoan Hawaiian etc.

*The Austro-Tai lived in South China prior to 4500 B.C.E. where they developed an economy based on rice cultivation. Their reconstructed lexicon contains words indicating a wet-rice adaptation: field, wet field, garden, plow, rice, sugarcane, the betel nut complex, cattle, water buffalo, axe, and canoe. As populations grew, a group of these Austro-Tai speakers migrated across the Formosa Strait to Taiwan. Others stayed behind, and their languages became the Tai group, now reduced to areas of Southern China near the Laos and Vietnamese border. In historic times some of these Tai began moving into Laos, Burma, and Thailand.

**On Taiwan, over the next thousand years new variants of the language emerged. This became the parent language known as Proto-Austronesian.

***Around 3500 B.C.E. some of these Taiwanese set out for Luzon and settled the other Philippine Islands. The Malayo-Polynesian family began to emerge. As they then spread westward into the Indonesian Islands of Borneo, Sulawesi, Sumatra, Java, and Bali, and eastward into the Pacific, the economy of many of the groups again changed to suit equatorial conditions, and this is reflected in a new vocabulary: taro, breadfruit, banana, yam, sago, coconut. When they entered the Pacific, rice disappeared from their economy and from their language.

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islands: taro, breadfruit, banana, yam, sago, coconut. Rice disappears from the economy of the Malayo-Polynesians when they enter the Pacific.

Sino-Tibetan

This brings us to Sino-Tibetan, which includes Tibeto-Burman and Chi- nese. Surprisingly, Sino-Tibetan may be the least understood of all these lan- guage families. Though there have been scholars aplenty—for centuries— devoted to the study of Chinese, its vast written traditions have absorbed most of their energies. There has been far less interest in spoken forms of the lan- guage, and still less interest in establishing links between the elevated language of the Middle Kingdom and the most certainly “lower” forms of speech of Western and Southern Barbarians. As a result, as recently as a few decades ago, many scholars were still uncertain whether Chinese belonged with the Tibeto-Burman group at all. Tibeto-Burman consists of over a hundred poorly documented languages spoken mostly by small tribal groups, although a few of these, notably Tibetan and Burmese, have very important literary traditions. In fact, a seventh-century Tibetan text and a twelfth-century Burmese text have been useful in reconstructing Proto-Tibeto-Burman.

All the Sino-Tibetan languages are tonal, but so are a number of other nearby language families, like Tai-Kadai and Miao-Yao. Further, Chinese is one of the most purely “isolating” languages in the world; that is, its words, mostly monosyllabic, are very rarely modified with prefixes and suffixes (unlike English, Sanskrit, and Japanese, which are highly inflected languages). This, too, is a Sino-Tibetan characteristic, but Chinese is a more extreme form. However, the word order of the Chinese sentence is unlike the Tibeto-Burman languages: subject-verb-object (SVO) rather than subject-object-verb (SOV). (English also happens to be SVO, a meaningless similarity since there are only six possible variations for all world languages to choose from, and only three

Figure 2.4 Members of the Sino-Tibetan language family.

Sino-Tibetan

Tibeto-Burman Chinese

Tibetan Burmese Newari Sherpa etc.

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are widespread.) That made Chinese the odd one out and led some to doubt the existence of a Sino-Tibetan Family. However, when linguists got down to the exhausting job of comparing the core vocabulary of Chinese with the Tibeto-Burman languages, all doubts about their relationship vanished. Here is a sample:

Speakers of nontonal languages are usually intimidated by languages with tones and don’t quite understand how they work. In Chinese the issue is not really as terrifying as it seems. All languages need many thousands of words in order to talk about the wide ranges of topics humans want to discuss, and these words have to be constructed out of the limited number of sounds in their sound system (i.e., the phonemes). In order to construct enough words, most languages put together multisyllable words. With prefixes and suffixes, these can go to extremes, such as the infamous “antidisestablishmentarianism” in English. Chinese, however, has opted for a lexicon of single-syllable words, but gets quadruple-duty out of them with their four-tone system. Take a simple word like ba. English only makes use of this as a quaint Dickensian expletive, as in “Bah humbug!” But in Chinese, meaning differences are conveyed by tones as well as by phonemes. If ba is spoken at a high-level pitch, it means “eight.” If it is spoken at a high and rising pitch, it means “pull out.” If it is spo- ken at a low falling-then-rising pitch, it means “grasp.” If it is spoken with a high pitch that abruptly falls and stops, it means “dam.” All of this requires that as a Chinese child learns her language each new word has to be learned with its correct tone, not really such a difficult process. Even so, Chinese appears to have run short on words, as evidenced by the fact that there are a great number of homophones—words with identical pronunciations and tones but different meanings, like English “to,” “two,” and “too.” This has come about because of the simplification of Chinese morphemes over time. Once they had consonant-cluster beginnings (/ts/, /dj/, etc.), and final consonants, but most of these have disappeared, collapsing a set of words into a single con- sonant-vowel syllable such as those in figure 2.6.

Chinese Tibeto-Burman

sun, day niet *niy name mieng *r-miη neck, collar lieng *liη tree, wood sien *siη year nien *s-niη fish ngio *ηya hair sam *tsam

Figure 2.5 Relationship between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman.

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China’s four-tone system is actually a bit on the simple side as tonal lan- guages go in Asia. James Matisoff writes:

It is Miao-Yao which is the tonal champion among the tone-prone lan- guages of East Asia. Most dialects of Miao have more than 5 tones, and most dialects of Yao Mien have 6–8, though some have more than 10. The Pu-nu dialect of Yao provides a good example of the tonal virtuosity and “tone-consciousness” of the people of this linguistic area. Pu-nu already has 8 tones of its own in native syllables; but for words which it has bor- rowed from Chuang and (recently) from Chinese, it has gone to the trouble of introducing three new “foreign” tones, which it keeps distinct from the 8 others! Much can be crammed into the monosyllables of these languages, but there are limits! (1983:84)

The above shows how easily languages can borrow tones. It is believed that some Asian languages, such as Vietnamese, which were originally nontonal, became tonal by borrowing tone-systems from their neighbors. Matisoff thinks that Sino-Tibetan was the original “stronghold of tonality” and that the origi- nally atonal Miao-Yao, Tai-Kadai, and Vietnamese acquired their tone systems from the culturally dominant influence of Chinese. The Miao call themselves Hmong, and large numbers of southern Hmong have migrated to the United States from Laos (see chapter 4). Their ancestors may once have been widely distributed throughout North China and perhaps were the original millet culti- vators in the Wei Valley. They have a tradition of once inhabiting a snowy cli- mate, and their shamanistic traditions are similar to Siberian shamanism. Thus they have had a long association with tonal Chinese and may have picked up tones from it.

Let us turn to the question of a Sino-Tibetan “homeland.” We have seen evidence of a Proto-Austro-Tai–speaking people inhabiting Southeast China who must have been at the coast in order for some of them to spread to Taiwan. Others (the Tai, some of whom later became the Thai, Lao, and Shan) stayed on in Southern China, while some spread to the south and west. It seems likely, then, that speakers of a different language group—Proto-Sino-Tibetan—were settled west of the Proto-Austro-Tai in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas, in

b “eight” bá “pull out b “grasp” bà “dam” x “tin” xí “mat” x “wash” xì “opera” lu “slide” liú “flow” li “willow” liù “six”

Column one is high level; column two is high and rising; column three is low-fall- ing, then rising; column four is high pitch that falls abruptly and stops.

Figure 2.6 Chinese words indicating the four tones. Column one is high level; column two is high and rising; column three is low falling, then rising; column four is high pitch that falls abruptly and stops.

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Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces. When the last glaciation receded, some of them must have moved up into the headwaters of the Yangzi, Brahmaputra, Irrawadi, and Mekong around 4000 B.C.E. (Matisoff 1991). From there, one subgroup, the Tibeto-Burmans, followed the Brahmaputra into the Tibetan Pla- teau, or followed the Irrawadi and Salween south into Burma, where their lan- guages continued to diverge. But another subgroup moved northeast, into the Huanghe and Wei River Valleys. These were the Chinese speakers.

These proto-Chinese speakers were surely not the original inhabitants of this central Huanghe region. The Chinese have no tradition of a migration

C H I N E S E

T I B E T A N

MUNDA BURMESE

KAREN MON

KHMER

MIAO-YAO and T’AI

Austro- Tai

NAGA KACHIN

South China SeaBay

of Bengal

Proto-Sino- Tibetan

A N

N A M

ESE

Language Migration

Map 2.2 Hypothetical distribution of Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Austro-Tai.

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from elsewhere, but their consciousness of an “ethnic” difference from other peoples, expressed in early texts, suggests a multilinguistic situation early on. The earliest records speak of a Ti people to the north (possibly Altaic speakers) and a Jung people to the west (possibly Miao) with whom the ruling families sometimes arranged marriages. The original inhabitants of North China may have been the mysterious Miao, “mysterious” because there has been much speculation regarding this last language family from Southern China, Laos, and Thailand to be accounted for. During the first Chinese dynasties, Shang and Zhou, a distinction was made between the aristocrats, designated by the phrase “the hundred surnames,” and the peasants, the min (“people”). The people who came to know themselves as the “Han” (92 percent of modern China) have probably descended from a mix of early Chinese-speaking elites and the indigenous people with whom they intermarried. In the process they affected each other’s languages. The SVO word order of Chinese may have been borrowed from Miao, along with some vocabulary, such as the word for “dog.” And Chinese gave Miao tones.

The dialect map for Chinese (see map 2.3) presents us with a puzzle. Notice that the region of greatest diversity is not the old center of early Chinese civilization on the Wei-Huanghe Rivers. It is on the South China coast between Canton and Shanghai. The Amoy dialect, just across from Taiwan, is unintelli- gible to anyone much further than a hundred miles away. If we were to com- pare it to a dialect map of the United States, this southeast coast would be equivalent to the dialect diversity of our east coast, the oldest settled area, and we might guess that the broad area of Mandarin is, like the Midwest and West, a recently settled region. This guess, however, would be wrong.

The ancestor of all these “dialects” was spoken on the North China plain in the second millennium B.C.E. Since then, according to Jerry Norman (1988), Chinese has evolved under the influence of two competing forces: first, the spread of Chinese to ever more marginal areas, and second, the conscious impo- sition of a standard dialect—Mandarin—throughout the empire to achieve greater uniformity. Interesting comparisons can be made between Chinese and Roman imperial expansion in the first few centuries B.C.E. and C.E. The lan- guage of Rome, Latin, was carried to France and Spain through imperial con- quest and colonization. Similarly, early Chinese was carried south and east by the Qin and Han dynasties. For instance, in 221 B.C.E. the First Emperor ordered 500,000 military families to settle in the newly conquered lands of the “Yue people.” In the process of colonization in Europe, Latin diverged into Ital- ian, French, Spanish, Rumanian, and Portuguese, while in China, Chinese diverged into Mandarin, Gan, Xiang, Hakka, Wu, Min, and Cantonese. These two families are roughly comparable in age and degree of difference between the daughter languages. However, there the similarity ends. For the Roman Empire never again rose to claim its old territories and assert the unity of its diversifying language(s), to claim them all as mere dialects of Latin; whereas that is exactly what China did. There is one language, Chinese, and its “dialects” are called

TAIWAN

HAINAN

Yellow Sea

East China Sea

Beijing

Guangzhou South China Sea

Northern Mandarin

Northwest Mandarin

Southern Mandarin

SouthwestSouthwest MandarinMandarin

Southwest Mandarin

Wu

Min

Min

Min

Kejia

Yue

Huizhou

Xiang

Gan

Map 2.3 Dialect map of China.

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fangyan, “regional speech.” Chinese speak of “picking up” one of the other regional speeches but do not think of themselves as “learning another language” as an Italian learning French would say. Nor has there been a time in Chinese history, even during periods of disunity, when a region asserted its independence by the sort of “linguistic nationalism” that divides India, another place where the Latin model, not the Chinese model, has been followed.

The diversity we see in South China on the dialect map has therefore been growing for the last 2,000 years. At the same time, the dialect of the Beijing area, Mandarin, has dominated since the fifteenth century. Called guanhua, the “lan- guage of the officials,” it is spoken everywhere north of the Yangzi. It even has its own dialects. Thus, it is repeating the early history of Chinese, moving south- ward, diversifying, and absorbing earlier dialects in its wake (Norman 1988).

Texts

“You Are Hurting My Language”

The linguist J. L. Becker describes his first lesson in writing Burmese at the beginning of three years of study with a kindly old teacher, U San Htwe:

As I had been taught to do, I would ask him words for things and then write them down. He watched me writing for a while and then said, “That’s not how you write it,” and he wrote the word in Burmese script. For the word evoked by English “speak,” I wrote / / and he wrote

. I insisted it made no difference. He insisted it did and told me I was hurting his language. And so I began, somewhat reluctantly, to learn to write Burmese: /p—/ was a central , and /-y-/ wrapped around the to make and the vowel / / fit before and after it: .

This difference in medial representation made a great difference . . . I could not segment the Burmese syllable into a linear sequence. . . . But seg- mentation into linear sequence is a prerequisite for doing linguistics as most of us have been taught it. . . . To write my kind of grammar I had to violate his writing.

At first it seemed to me a small price to pay, to phonemicize his lan- guage. But over the years—particularly twenty years later, in Java and Bali—I learned how that kind of written figure (a center and marks above, below, before, and after it; the figure of the Burmese and Javanese and Bali- nese syllable) was for many Southeast Asians a mnemonic frame: every- thing in the encyclopedic repertoire of terms was ordered that way: directions (the compass rose), diseases, gods, colors, social roles, foods— everything. It was the natural shape of remembered knowledge, a basic icon. (Becker 1995:195)

This respect for writing, even to the single syllable, is pervasive throughout Asia. The mystery of capturing a sound in an inscribed symbol is thought to be divine. The name for the script of Sanskrit and the North Indian vernaculars, devanagari, suggests the writing of the gods (Horton 1992), and the earliest

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form, brahmi, meant “of Brahma,” God. In early Japan, when writing was first borrowed from China, “its very words were pregnant with spiritual power, called ‘word-mana’ (kotodama)” (Horton 1992). When early writers began writ- ing Japanese rather than just reading and copying Chinese, it was to write Jap- anese poetry once chanted orally and infused with kotodama. And about China, Chiang Yee writes:

In every district of a Chinese city, and even in the smallest village, there is a little pagoda built for the burning of waste paper bearing writing. This we call Hsi-Tzu-T’a—Pagoda of Compassionating the Characters. For we respect characters so highly that we cannot bear them to be trampled under foot or thrown away into some distasteful place. (Yee 1973)

Box 2.1 “Written Symbol” Is Its Name

Greatly may I be forgiven for my intention to call forth a story. And where dwells the story? There is a god unsupported by the divine mother earth, Unsheltered by the sky, Unilluminated by the sun, moon, stars, or constellations. Yes, Lord, you dwell in the void, and are situated thus: You reside in a golden jewel, Regaled on a golden palanquin, Umbrellaed by a floating lotus. There approached in audience by all the gods of the cardinal directions . . . There, there are the young palm leaves, the one lontar, Which, when taken and split apart, carefully measured are the lengths and widths. It is this which is brought to life with hasta, gangga, uwira, tanu. And what are the things so named? Hasta means “hand” Gangga means “water” Uwira means “writing instrument” Taru means “ink.” What is that which is called “ink”? That is the name for And none other than The smoke of the oil lamp, Collected on the bark of the kepuh-tree, On a base of copper leaf. It is these things which are gathered together And given shape on leaf. “Written symbol” is its name, Of one substance and different soundings.

Source: Translation from a Balinese text by Mary Zurbuchen, quoted in A. L. Becker, Beyond Translation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

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The sacredness of the captured word probably follows from the nature of what was written down in the earliest texts. Although some have argued that writing began in the Middle East as a way for merchants to keep track of their stock and sales, there is no evidence for a similar mundane origin of writing in Asia. Rather, writing began in China 3,000 years ago to communicate with the ances- tors; in India it was first used to declare the Buddhist message throughout Emperor Ashoka’s realm and then, finally, to write down the sacred Sanskrit hymns of the Vedas that had been chanted orally for a millennium. When writ- ing came to Southeast Asia, it came embodying Hindu and Buddhist teachings. How could the written word not be sacred, when all that was captured in it was?

The Search for Sacred Texts

The scripts with which to record sacred words were invented only twice in the whole of Asia, and all other scripts are adaptations of those originals. But before we turn to that story, there is the story of the texts to be told. For sacred texts spread through Asia in many directions and by many means. Priests car- ried them to serve kings and religious communities far from home. Pilgrims set out on long journeys seeking authoritative texts from their source. Adventurers sought hidden libraries and plundered them. Poor or unscrupulous dealers traf- ficked in stolen texts and occasionally created ingenious forgeries. Texts were translated from one language to the next, and the next.

In China, the process of getting Sanskrit texts translated into Chinese was tedious. Few Chinese ever learned Sanskrit, and finding ways to convey multi- syllabic Sanskrit words into monosyllabic Chinese was not easy. For instance, the Sanskrit word, nirvana, was translated nie-pan, meaning “opaque place of retirement.” And in the early years the “texts” were often oral, and required “translation teams” of four persons: one to recite the oral Sanskrit, one to write the Sanskrit down (usually two monks from India), one to orally translate the Sanskrit into spoken Chinese, and one to record the oral Chinese into written Chinese (Tanabe 1988). You can imagine how cumbersome this process was. It also shows how closely linked were orality, text-reading, and text-writing. Stud- ies of the “performance of texts” and the “ethnography of reading” (Boyarin 1993; Engelke 2004; Street 2009) show that the silent, lonely room in the mind where a reader is alone with his private decoding of the text and his private “thoughts” is a rarer and more recent phenomenon than we have supposed.

One of the most important of the early text gatherers was a Chinese pilgrim named Xuanzang, who grew up in the chaos following the fall of the Sui dynasty in 618, when the only books being studied, he complained, were mili- tary texts. He studied under two great Buddhist monks at Chang’an, but find- ing the Buddhist texts few, incomplete, and conflicting (probably because of the translation method described above), he resolved to go to India to acquire the originals. He was only 28 years old when he left in 630 C.E., and his lengthy record of this journey is one of the most important sources we have on early seventh-century India. (Xuanzang was not the first Chinese pilgrim to go to

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India in search of texts; 200 years earlier, Faxian made a similar journey, also to collect texts and visit the sites associated with the Buddha, and he left an impor- tant record of this journey.) Crossing through the thirsty wastes of the great cen- tral deserts, endangered by bandits but also aided by devout rulers, Xuanzang finally reached India. There he visited all the major Buddhist sites and spent five years at Nalanda learning Sanskrit and studying the Buddhist texts.

In India, Xuanzang found the Indian method of bookmaking remarkable. Indians wrote on palm leaves and strung the leaves together on a string. Two types of palms, talipat and palmyra, were suitable (in Southeast Asia, the lontar palm is also used). Each leaf had to be cut from its central spine, trimmed to size, boiled in milk or water several times, and finally rubbed smooth with a cowry shell or stone. They could be written on with ink or incised with a stylus, and the type of writing implement affected the emergence of scripts, as we shall see. The disadvantage of palm leaves is their vulnerability to humidity and insects, which is why very few palm-leaf manuscripts older than the sixteenth century exist. They require tremendous care; they are kept wrapped in cloth when not in use and have to be recopied frequently. They have survived better in dry climates outside India and Southeast Asia. In 608, 22 years before Xuan- zang left for India, a Japanese envoy brought an Indian palmyra leaf text that he had acquired from Sui dynasty (China) to Japan, and it is still there, the oldest in existence (Tanabe 1988). The fragility of texts probably contributed to the Bud-

Indian palm leaf book in Malayalam script, similar to those seen by Xuanzang in the sev- enth century C.E.

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dhist notion of the fragility of dharma, in continuous decay since the time of Buddha’s existence on earth and constantly requiring protection and renewal.

Xuanzang was used to texts written on silk that could be hung or rolled up in a scroll to be stored compactly, although already by his time paper was in frequent use. Because silk was costly, the Chinese invented paper as an alterna- tive as early as 105 C.E., at first by recycling old silk rags and later cheaper linen. The rags were first allowed to rot; then they were cleaned, bleached, pulped, mixed with wheat flour, and finally spread on a frame to dry in sheets. These sheets were then glued together in great lengths, typically 20 feet long, which could be rolled up like silk scrolls for storage (Tanabe 1988).

Xuanzang was a member of the intellectual elite of his time, in search of philosophical-religious texts, but these texts and the arguments they contained were embedded in a worldview where everything associated with the Bud- dha—himself no longer in existence—radiated power, or spiritual merit. As a devotee, Xuanzang describes being overcome with emotion at sites where Bud- dha once taught or where relics of the Buddha’s body were enshrined in a stupa. He later recalled the power of these places: “A mysterious sense of awe surrounds the spot; many miracles occur. Sometimes heavenly odors are per- ceived” (Hopkirk 1980). When finally, 15 years later, in 645 he returned to the Monastery of Extensive Happiness in Chang’an, he deposited six statues of Buddha in various acts, 657 texts carried on 20 horses, and 150 particles of the Buddha’s flesh. We should not think of these as eccentric or grisly souvenirs, but as dharma itself transported to China. The objects were at once symbols, carriers, and extensions of dharma. The texts, the Buddha relics, and the images shared in the power of Buddha himself.

This began a whole new era of translating and then of “sutra copying,” both in China and in Japan. There was first of all the task of translating the new works brought back by Xuanzang. In catalogs of Buddhist texts made two cen- turies later, the Chinese Buddhist canon had grown to 1,076 and then to 1,258 works. At first the concern was just to get good Chinese translations in an effi- cient manner, but later it became an act of religious merit-making to have them copied. The wealthy employed monk-scribes, or if they were talented, copied the sutras themselves. Emperors commissioned copies of the entire canon, and for this, large official bureaus were set up and permanently staffed. Finally, attention turned to making them beautiful. The first sheets of scrolls were often decorated with scenes from the sutra that followed, and sometimes the paper was dyed a deep indigo and the sutra written in gold characters. Many of these have survived in Japan, with a postscript noting that the sutra had been com- missioned by Empress Shotoku or Lady Fujiwara or Emperor Shomu to trans- fer merit to specific ancestors.

One of the places Xuanzang stopped for a little while on the outward and return trips was Dunhuang, at that time China’s western outpost, the “Jade Gate” through which caravans left for the perils of the Taklamakan and the western world. Here there was a great Buddhist monastery carved into a mile

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of stony cliffs known as the “Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.” Four hundred and sixty-nine of more than a thousand caves still exist. For 1,500 years monks and devout laymen filled these grottoes with paintings and sculptures and earned merit by commissioning copies of sacred texts.

Dunhuang continued in use, though much reduced in importance, into the twentieth century, unlike many similar sites more in the reach of the desert. In one of the first years of the twentieth century, a Daoist priest named Wang Yuanlu made a stupendous discovery. While carrying out an ambitious but underfunded and poorly conceptualized revamping of some of the caves, he discovered a concealed room that had been bricked over around 1000 C.E. Yanking out some of the bricks, he was astonished to find thousands upon thousands of manuscripts, a whole library, in a dozen languages or more. Wang was no scholar, and actually reading these scrolls was not high priority for him. But he reverenced them because they contained the teachings of Lord Buddha and the labor of unknown thousands of monks who had lived and studied at Dunhuang since the fourth century, and he was willing to part with a few of them—there were so many!—in order to fund the repainting of frescoes and other repairs he was trying to carry out. He notified the local authorities of his find, but they did not seem to have any clear idea about what should be done next—notifying scholars in Beijing does not seem to have occurred to them—so they told Wang to leave the manuscripts where they were.

Not long after, in 1907, the British explorer and archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein arrived in Dunhuang by camel in the middle of a freezing sandstorm. He was in a fine mood because he had just discovered the long-lost westward extension of the Great Wall mentioned in Chinese annals. What happened next still infuriates the Chinese, and appears to have shamed even Britain, for in the Central Asian gallery of the British Museum, where many of the manu- scripts ended up, it is difficult to find even a trace of Sir Aurel Stein. Stein got wind of Wang’s finds, and together with his Chinese assistant stayed around for several weeks, trying to find a way to weasel some of the manuscripts from Wang. Stein, it must be said, had as much respect for ancient manuscripts as anyone, though for scholarly reasons rather than for religious ones. He truly believed that to acquire the manuscripts and take them to India, and then to London, was to rescue them from oblivion and possible destruction.1 More- over, he considered Xuanzang his patron saint, because like the ancient Chi- nese pilgrim, Stein, too, crisscrossed the dangerous deserts of Central Asia looking for traces of the Buddha and his followers. This was a happy coinci- dence, because a local artist had just finished murals commissioned by Wang depicting scenes in the life of Xuanzang. So imagine the impact it had when the very first manuscript Wang drew at random from the pile to allow Stein to examine carried a final colophon that the translation had been done by Xuan- zang himself from originals he had personally carried from India.

Stein describes the scene in the little room: “Heaped up in layers, but with- out any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest’s little lamp a solid

The Diamond Sutra, the oldest printed book in the world. Chinese characters on a rolled-up scroll, copied by Wong Jei in 858 C.E.

In this photo, taken at Dunhuang in 1907 by Aurel Stein, the secret door to the hidden cham- ber can be seen on the right. Found a short while earlier by a Taoist priest, the chamber, con- taining thousands of manuscripts, had been walled up 900 years earlier. Some of the manuscripts are piled outside the door for inspection by Stein. He managed to talk the elderly caretaker out of 13,000 manuscripts, most of them now in London or India.

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mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet.” He managed to talk the dedicated priest out of 13,000 manuscripts, 7,000 in Chinese, the rest in other languages. Because Stein could not read Chinese, his selection was on the basis of age and condition more than on the importance of the text. Had he known that a thousand of them were copies of the Lotus Sutra, he might have been more selective. The most famous of all was a copy of the Diamond Sutra. Although there are many manuscripts of the Diamond Sutra in existence, this work is famous because it was block-printed on seven pieces of paper joined together with a block-print illustration on the first sheet and bears a date, 868, which makes it the oldest printed book in existence. It can now be seen in the British Museum near the Gutenberg Bible. A Chinese scholar in a National Library of China publication describes the Diamond Sutra and adds: “This famous scroll was stolen over fifty years ago by the Englishman Ssu-t’an-yin [Stein] which causes people to gnash their teeth in bitter hatred” (Hopkirk 1980).

Scripts

South Asian Scripts

The two major families of scripts that dominate in Asia are based on prin- ciples different from the Roman alphabet that we use. The alphabet used for writing English is phonetic; theoretically, there is a graph for each sound, both consonants and vowels. (In what follows we will use the term “graph” in place of such diverse, and potentially confusable, terms as letter, character, sign, sym- bol, etc.) In reality, the correspondence between the actual sounds of spoken English and the 26 graphs available for writing it is not good. What sound does /c/ correspond to? Is it /k/ as in “picnic?” Or is it /s/ as in “implicit”? We could really use a separate graph for /ch/ as in “church,” and while we are at it, we could add a single graph for the /sh/ as in “shame,” something to stand for the soft /g/ in “corsage” (for people who don’t already pronounce it with a /j/), and for the /ng/ in “singing.” Perhaps we are most in need of graphs for vowels, such as the different /a/’s in “father,” “famous,” and “fashion.” How- ever, imperfect though it is, the logic of our system is one-sound-one-graph, and vowels count the same as consonants.

We have already seen a different system at work in Burma. That system focuses on the syllable, and the core of the syllable is its consonant. The sense of speech is different in these languages. Speech is made up of so many conso- nants modified by vowels. In writing speech, you write consonants, then put marks above, below, behind, and in front of them to indicate vowels. So in the Tamil script of South India, /pa/ is ப, /pā/ is written பா, /pi/ is பி, /pu/ is பு, /po/ is பொ, /pai/ is பை, and /pau/ is பௌ. Prior to the advent of computer software with their hundreds of specialized fonts, typewriters for these languages allowed you to make a consonant sign, then instead of moving ahead automatically, it waited while you decided where the vowel marks go.

This column was erected around 250 B.C.E. by Emperor Ashoka, declaring his commitment to Buddhist values. It contains the earliest examples of the brahmi script, a forerunner of the modern devanagiri.

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The syllabic systems of Tamil and Burmese came originally from India. The earliest known Indian script is found on 40-foot-high columns set up by King Ashoka around 250 B.C.E. to mark the boundaries of his empire and to proclaim Buddhism as the law of the land. This script, now known as Ashokan brahmi, was not deciphered until the nineteenth century by James Prinsep who worked for the East India Company. A sure sign of its antiquity was the fact that even the Brahmans could not read it. When the first Englishmen saw it, they guessed it might be Greek, but how Greek came to be written on columns in Delhi, Allahabad, and Bihar was anyone’s guess. What is usually needed in deciphering ancient scripts is a key text such as the famous Rosetta stone where the same inscription is recorded in a known script and in the unknown one. It turned out that Ashokan Brahmi was not Greek, but an ancestor of Devanagari in which Sanskrit is written, and there was an intermediate script, now known as Gupta brahmi, in use during the Gupta Empire in 319–550 C.E. Once Gupta Brahmi was translated, scholars could work backwards to Ashokan Brahmi. The key for Prinsep was a number of stone columns that circle an ancient Bud- dhist stupa at Sanchi in Central India. He wrote to a friend: “The Sanchi inscriptions have enlightened me. Each line is engraved on a separate pillar or railing. Then, thought I, they must be the gifts of private individuals where names will be recorded. All end in danam [i.e., the Brahmi graphs for danam]— that must mean ‘gift’ or ‘given’ ” (Keay 1988:52). So danam gave him the d, n, and m, and from there he was able to decode the rest.

Below is a line of Brahmi script. You will notice that there is one character per syllable, with a special graph for a vowel that begins a word: u-pa-sa-ka, etc. Non- initial vowels are indicated by modifying the consonants with little added marks.

For instance, the third graph, , is /sh/. Without any modification, the vowel associated with sh is assumed to be a; this is called the “inherent a.” Thirteen graphs later, it reappears with a little on the top, making it /shi/: The vowel /i/ appears with /mi/ and /ri/ . The vowel /e/ is seen in the second /l/: /la/ and /le/ and in /ne/: . With just this much knowl- edge, you could predict other Brahmi syllables.

Figure 2.7 Brahmi inscription reading: “The Cave of the female lay-devotee, Shila, wife of the lay-devotee Nagamitta, [is given] to the Sangha.”

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It is unknown where Brahmi originated. Some have supposed that the still- undeciphered script of Indus Valley (see chapter 5) may be its ancestor, but most scholars doubt that. It has important resemblances to Semitic scripts of the Middle East, especially in its emphasis on consonants. Semitic scripts in their earliest forms did not show vowels at all; you had to guess that k-t-b meant kitab, “book.” Later, little marks were placed above, below, and beside the con- sonants to indicate vowels, and this is the form in which it must have been brought to India. But there is no historical trace of its route or date or means of arrival in India. At any rate, this is the script used by Ashoka, and in later forms of it, was the script of the earliest Hindu and Buddhist texts. All major scripts of South and Southeast Asia descended from Brahmi, but of course they had to be adapted to the very different languages that they had to serve. In Southeast Asia, where the materials for writing were until very recently the palm leaf and iron stylus, the graphs evolved in rounded forms that would not damage the leaves. In North India, where pen and ink were used, the distinc- tive “clothes hanging from a clothesline” style developed, where the line over the top connects graphs for individual words. Such a line, made with a stylus, could damage the palm leaf. Like Brahmi, each consonant graph has either an inherent a, or an attached sign to indicate the vowel:

Written Chinese

The word for “civilization” in Chinese is wenming. In written form it is composed of two graphs: the graph for wen (“writing”) and the graph for ming (“understanding”). To be civilized has always been a marked feature of Chi- nese self-identity; to be civilized was to understand writing. The Chinese have had a fully developed script since at least the fourteenth century B.C.E., and emergent forms can be traced back 6,000 years. The most remarkable fact is that this script has been in continuous use ever since, and the script used in the twentieth century is a direct descendant of the earliest forms.

The discovery of the earliest forms of Chinese writing came about much the same way as the discovery of Peking Man fossils: Ancient specimens inscribed on bones and tortoise carapaces were classified as “dragon bones” and ground up as a cure for fever (Chou 1979). In the year 1899 a Peking scholar named Wang Yirong was taking doses of “dragon bones” for his

Figure 2.8 Devanagari script. Sample shows /k/ with vowel markings.

ka ki k ke ku k ko kau

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malaria. When he ran short, he asked his house guest, who was also a scholar, to go to the apothecary for a refill. As this man watched the “dragon bones” being freshly ground, he noticed strange markings on them and had a closer look. He thought the markings looked like old forms of Chinese writing, but they were not immediately readable. Wang and his friend bought all the remaining fragments of bone and then asked about the source. Over the next few years this amazing discovery led Chinese scholars to rediscover the ancient history of their own written language. In excavations carried out between 1928 and 1937 at five sites, all around what proved to be the ancient capital of Shang dynasty, Anyang, over 20,000 specimens were found, and eventually the num- ber grew to 100,000.

The ancient Chinese communicated with their ancestors and occasionally with a shadowy deity named Shangdi (“Emperor of Heaven”), by writing ques- tions directed to them on the shoulder blades of oxen or on the carapaces of turtles. These have come to be called “oracle bones.” The questions were writ- ten twice, once in the affirmative and once in the negative: “Will Lady Hao be in good health after she gives birth to her baby?” “Will Lady Hao not be in good health after she gives birth to her baby?” These were then heated by the method of holding a red-hot iron to the backside of an inscription until the bone cracked. The diviner looked for—and tried to produce—a crack shape that would resemble the Chinese character pu, which meant an affirmative answer. Thus, the question was conveyed and the ancestor replied.

Knowing how the Roman alphabet evolved is not particularly helpful in understanding any of its written languages, but for an English speaker trying to understand Chinese writing, it is helpful to know how the graphs came to be formed in earliest times.

The Chinese graph is “logographic”; that is, each graph represents a word, and as we have already seen, in Chinese each word is generally a single sylla- ble.2 There are very few words like the English word “river” or “elephant” where meaning is carried across two or three syllables. There are two types of logographs in Chinese, simple and complex. Box 2.2 shows some simple ones. The first column consists of the ancient form, the second column the modern form, and the third column the pronunciation in Mandarin. A large number of the earliest simple graphs were fairly obvious pictures of the things they referred to: the sun, rain falling from a cloud, a man walking, a woman kneel- ing, a child with a head large in proportion to its body, a man in a cell, a kneel- ing man with his hands raised in surrender, etc. Graphs for less easily drawn words could be made by combining them: “love” is the graph for mother plus the graph for child. “Prisoner” is a man in a cell; “east” is the sun behind a tree; “quarrel” is two women side by side; “flute” is a mouth with a reed, and so on. There are a thousand or so of these simple graphs.

A writing system cannot get very far with pictures alone. To make up more words, scribes began adapting words that were picturable to make words that sounded similar (or at least they did in the language as it was spoken at that

Box 2.2 Simple Chinese Logographs in Ancient and Modern Form

sun/day

rain

river/water

fish

man (i.e., human being)

woman

mouth

eye

eyebrow

tree

winnowing-basket

child

to have two at once (hand-holding two arrows)

yield, conform

east (sun behind tree)

prisoner (man in cell)

love (woman and child)

quarrel (two women)

flute

prince

Source: Sampson, 1985, p. 24

sun/day

rain

river/water

fish

man (i.e., human being)

woman

mouth

eye

eyebrow

tree

winnowing-basket

child

to have two at once (hand-holding two arrows)

yield, conform

east (sun behind tree)

prisoner (man in cell)

love (woman and child)

quarrel (two women)

flute

prince

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time). Let’s look at how this worked using English rather than Chinese. In Eng- lish the word “sun” (picturable) sounds like the word “son.” You could use the sun graph for both, and let the correct meaning be deduced from context. You could go on with this process:

= sun

= son

= soon

= sung

= sin

= shun

Graphs like this were roughly phonetic; a single graph that once stood spe- cifically for a single word came to stand for a whole set of similar-sounding words. But you can imagine that if the system kept on like this, it would even- tually get tremendously confusing. So ancient Chinese scribes developed another device for sorting them out. Another set of elements, known as “signif- ics,” were developed to combine with phonetics to give the reader a clue as to which meaning was intended. For instance, the graph for “man” could be com- bined with the graph for “sun” to indicate “son”—i.e., “the man-type of sun.” A graph for an open mouth could be combined with “sun” to mean “sung.” The mouth and man graphs could also be combined with other elements to cre- ate other words. Because of these combinations, Chinese graphs can be learned and remembered more easily than might be imagined, since constituent ele- ments show up again and again.

All these combined elements are written with great elegance in a single imagined square, so they all take up roughly the same amount of space, unlike English words that vary tremendously in the space it takes to write them out. A Chinese graph may have two strokes, such as in the graph for “man,” or 30 or more in a very complex graph, but they will both take up the same size square. These are then written in vertical rows beginning on the right hand side. And because of the monosyllabic nature of spoken Chinese, each graph will (usu- ally) be pronounced as a single-syllable word.

One of the virtues of the Chinese system of writing is the very fact that there is no direct connection between the graph and its pronunciation. This means that any given graph can be called by whatever word is used in the vari- ous “dialects” of Chinese, so that it does not matter if all Chinese do not speak the same dialect; they all read the same script. It works much like the numerals in Europe, where the numeral 1 is called “one” in English, un in French, eins in German, uno in Spanish. This feature may be the single most important factor in the historic unity of the Chinese cultural world.

In the last several decades, the People’s Republic of China has attempted two far-reaching reforms of the written language. The first reform is an attempted simplification of many of the old multistroke graphs. Simplified Chi-

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nese characters have become standard throughout mainland China, but most Chinese communities outside of the People’s Republic, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese, have all maintained the use of traditional char- acters. The second reform has to do with the way spoken Chinese is transcribed into the Roman alphabet. The old system, known as the Wade-Giles system, involved many digraphs and apostrophes, and was often quite misleading as to actual pronunciation. Mao Tse-tung, T’ang, ts’ao-shu, jen (pronounced “run”), and so forth, are examples of Wade-Giles. The more recent system, pinyin, was adopted in 1958 and is the method Beijing has urged all writers and publishers everywhere to adopt. However, it is questionable whether this new system is really less ambiguous. Most non-Chinese speakers find qin and xia more puz- zling than the Wade-Giles ch’in and hsia. (In this book we are usually following pinyin except in a few well-known Wade-Giles transliterations.)

Korean and Japanese

Both Korea and Japan were deeply influenced by China when, in the first few centuries of the Common Era, they began forming state systems. China was the sun and they were moons reflecting her cultural glory. Each copied or attempted to copy major institutions wholesale. Korea tried to become a sohwa, a “small China.” Among other things, each borrowed China’s script, having none of its own.

This was probably not a wise thing to have done, if looked at on purely lin- guistic grounds. Chinese writing was wonderfully suited to the grammatically simple, tonal, and monosyllabic nature of the Chinese language, but Korean and Japanese had not even the remotest connection to the Sino-Tibetan family. Korean is one of the Altaic languages (including Mongolian, Tartar, and Turk- ish), and Japanese may be also, although there is a lot of uncertainty about that right now. At any rate, both languages are polysyllabic, atonal, and highly “inflectional”; that is, verb forms change by adding a variety of different end- ings to perform various functions in the sentence. This is something written Chinese does not have the capacity to do.

However, Chinese was the only script available during the critical period. And so both Koreans and Japanese struggled for centuries to make Chinese writing work for their very different languages. The result in Japan was “quite an astonishingly complicated method of making language visible” (Sampson 1985).

There was another factor beyond the language difficulties contributing to the complexity of written Japanese. To quote Geoffrey Sampson:

Japanese society, during much of the period in which the script was devel- oped, was characterized by the existence of an aristocratic class many members of which lacked political power or indeed any serious employ- ment, so that their only role in life was as definers and producers of cultural norms, ways of civilized living. As a natural result, many aspects of Japa- nese culture, including its writing, were greatly elaborated, made exquisite and intellectually rich rather than straightforwardly functional. (This con-

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trasts with the case of China, which at most periods of its history was a rather down-to-earth, workaday civilization and where the script, for instance, was shaped in the historical period largely by civil servants who had plenty to keep them busy.) (1985:172–173)

This contrast, however, is no longer true. The Japanese writing system, compli- cated though it is, works fine for one of the most hard-working and technologi- cally advanced societies in the world. Moreover, Japan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world; at 99 percent, it is higher than the US, France, and many other industrialized nations. And dyslexia is practically unknown.

Let’s take it one step at a time. First, Japan adopted Chinese writing along with a whole literature—Buddhist and Confucian texts, poetry and prose—in Chinese. Inevitably, an enormous number of Chinese loanwords merged into the Japanese lexicon during those first few centuries (from the seventh century on). Even today, when the Japanese need to coin new words, they turn to Chi- nese roots as we turn to Greek and Latin ones. The graphs, taken more or less directly from Chinese and still used in that form, are known as kanji, from the Chinese hanzi, “Han characters.”

When Japanese tried to write native words and sentences, the problems were immense. While the writing system was still the plaything of an idle elite, ingenious adaptations were created, which made reading a matter of clever decoding and elegant word play. But eventually a syllabic script emerged. The Koreans had invented a syllable system (not Hangul, an earlier one) in which the first four syllables were ka-na-ta-ra, and the Japanese used the first two, kana, to refer to their own similar efforts (in the same way “alphabet” comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet). Each kana graph stands for a consonant + vowel combination since almost all Japanese syllables take that form. There are actually two kanas: hiragana (plain kana) and katakana (partial kana). Both sets were constructed by simplifying kanji graphs, and both are per- fect matches for each of the 49 syllables of the Japanese language.

In modern writing, all three can be used together. Kanji graphs are used for morphemes like verb roots and nouns. Hiragana is used for inflections at the ends of verbs and nouns (like “-ing” and “-ed” in English) and also to spell out grammatical morphemes that are equivalent to English “of,” “the,” etc. Katakana is used for loanwords from foreign languages other than Chinese and to spell out foreign names.

Korea went through much the same trials for centuries but finally, in the fif- teenth century, King Sejong (1418–1450) invented a new script. He set up a “Bureau of Standard Sounds” and appointed a group of scholars to create a phonetic (i.e., syllabic) script. By this time, of course, the Koreans were quite familiar with such scripts, originating in India, which were widely used throughout Asia. In two years, a 24-character system was devised that has been called “the world’s best alphabet.” It took a while for the script to be accepted, because the educated elite viewed it as a trivialization of Chinese. They called it “vernacular writing” (onmun), and for a long time it was used only for the

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most practical clerical functions, a kind of inferior shorthand. But in this cen- tury the script was renamed Hangul, “great script,” to raise its status, and it is used exclusively in North Korea and widely in South Korea.

ENDNOTES 1 There was something to this concern. A few years later, 400 White Russian soldiers were

interned in the caves. They did so much damage to the great wall paintings that now Stein’s photographs are the only remaining record of them.

2 The view that each graph represents an idea or concept rather than a word is quite misleading, therefore the term “ideograph” is best avoided.

REFERENCES CITED Becker, A. L. 1995. Biography of a Sentence. In Beyond Translation; Essays Toward a

Modern Philology, ed. A. L. Becker. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bellwood, Peter. 1992. Southeast Asia Before History. In The Cambridge History of South-

east Asia, Vol. 1, ed. Nicholas Tarling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyarin, Jonathan, ed., 1993. The Ethnography of Reading, Berkeley: University of Cali-

fornia Press. Chou, Hung-hsiang. 1979. Chinese Oracle Bones. Scientific American 240(4):135–149. Engelke, Matthew. 2004. Text and Performance in an African Church: The Book, “Live

and Direct.” American Ethnologist 31(1): 76–91. Franklin, Michael J. 1995. Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works. Cardiff:

University of Wales Press. Hopkirk, Peter. 1980. Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Trea-

sures of Chinese Central Asia. London: Oxford University Press. Horton, H. Mark. 1992. Japanese Spirit and Chinese Learning: Scribes and Storytellers

in Pre-Modern Japan. In The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin. Pp. 156–179. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Keay, John. 1988. India Discovered. London: Collins. Matisoff, James A. 1983. Linguistic Diversity and Language Contact. In Highlanders of

Thailand, ed. John McKinnon and Wanat Bhruksasri. Pp. 56–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 1991. Sino-Tibetan Linguistics. Annual Reviews in Anthropology 20:469–504. Norman, Jerry. 1988. Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Renfrew, Colin. 1989. The Origins of Indo-European Languages. Scientific American

261(4): 106–114. Sampson, Geoffrey. 1985. Writing Systems. London: Hutchinson. Street, Brian, 2009. Ethnography of writing and reading.” In The Cambridge Handbook of

Literacy, ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance. Pp. 329–345. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press.

Tanabe, Willa J. 1988. Paintings of the Lotus Sutra. Boston: Weatherhill Press. Yee, Chiang. 1973. Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic and Tech-

nique. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Part II

Outsiders

3 CENTRAL ASIA, XINJIANG, AND TIBET

4 TRIBAL PEOPLE

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ome groups, as we will see in chapter 4, want to be outsiders. Others, driven by complex motives, want to be insiders, or at least to get inside— as we’ll see in chapter 3. The distinction between insiderhood and outsi-

derhood is one way to characterize the cultures and polities of Asia as they relate to one another.

This distinction implies several things: first, that there are some cultural centers of such power, wealth, and glamour that others either envy (chapter 3) or fear (chapter 4)—perhaps both at once or at different times. Second, we do not assume cultures grow on their own in isolation, particularly not in Asia; we are doubtful that even the most remote and isolated “tribe” is ever truly “undis- covered.” In fact, all such cases, however celebrated in the press, turn out to be folk who have fled and are in hiding. Third, we assume that all cultures are interconnected, perhaps by two or more degrees of separation (remember, the number of connections between you and anyone else on the planet is said to be a mere seven). The Uighurs of western China trade with Tibetans who trade with Hmong—that’s two degrees of separation. Add in a few more, and you reach the highlands of Irian Jaya in eastern Indonesia or Cairo to the west.

Not all nodes are equal; some are ancient, rich, powerful, and huge. Fore- most among them, for this book, are India and China. Roots of both go back to the third millennium B.C.E. Both invented writing systems that have been loaned to almost all other literate Asian cultures. Both learned to centralize power in polities with quite different hierarchical and bureaucratic strategies (see chapters 5 and 7) and to invest power with theatrical splendor sufficient to convince their populaces of their connections to the gods and to heaven. These two cultures have been so sufficiently enduring that they withstood centuries of disintegration and recentralization, of conquest, of epidemic and famine, of good government and bad. Each now in its contemporary incarnation numbers over a billion people.

Separated by seas and the highest mountains on the planet, they have dom- inated their regions, expanded their borders, and absorbed thousands of smaller groups into their orbit. India’s caste system is almost infinitely elastic; China’s dominant ethnic group, the Han—now a billion and growing—“not only absorbed outsiders, it dissolved them” (Gladney 1994). India and China grew from smallish states in the Indus Valley and along the Yellow River into the enormous states you see on modern maps, a stop-and-go process that has taken four millennia but is unlikely to carry on into the future, as smaller states on their periphery, deeply influenced by them, strengthen their independence. This “center and periphery” model, however, is far from the complete story, as the next two chapters attempt to demonstrate.

S

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We turn first to Central Asia (chapter 3), whose people inhabit an arid region of grasslands and deserts and at present appear to be caught betwixt and between greater states who all have the better land: Russia to the north, China to the east, India to the south. The major spaces on the map seem to be occu- pied by the “-stans”—meaning “place”—belonging nominally to five ethnic groups: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Only a few decades ago, however, these were units of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), along with Ukraine, Belarus, and of course Russia, in an empire that lasted only 70 years. But “Central Asia,” historically speak- ing, is a much larger space, including Afghanistan, parts of Iran, Mongolia, the western regions of China, and Tibet. We could describe it in geographical terms as stretching from the western Caspian Sea to the Gansu Corridor lead- ing into the interior of China, and from the southern edge of Siberia to the Himalayan heights of Tibet. As we look at the peoples and cultures of this vast space, if we do not let modern borders constrain the discussion, we will find movements of peoples, goods, and armies that shook and shaped the rooted civilizations of India and China. These outsiders sometimes wanted to be left alone. At other times, they wanted in: to loot, to learn, to rule.

If we think all the emerging states of Asia grew in splendid isolation with no knowledge of each other, eating out of their own plates, all we have to do is look at the Silk Road to see how much they must have known about each other and craved each other’s goods. Chapter 3 describes some of these goods and travelers: silk and horses, but also ivory, glass, silver and gold, jade, bronze, porcelain, fur. Roman chariots (and horse skeletons) have been found in Shang dynasty tombs of the second millennium B.C.E. A string of trading cities linked stretches of the Silk Road, less a single highway than a network of roads skirting the worst des- erts. These were multiethnic places, where people of many cultures and faiths rubbed shoulders. Buddhism traveled this road in the early centuries of the Com- mon Era, and later so did Islam, soon after the Prophet began his teaching in the seventh century. Monks, merchants, mullahs, and priests joined in caravans going east or west or dropping down into India. The monks Faxian and Xuanzang and the Italian Marco Polo trudged the length of it and back again (chapter 3).

The people who lived outside the cities of the Silk Road herded sheep, goats, and yaks, which provided meat, milk, clothing, shelter, and fuel. Camels could transport their household equipment and trade goods. Above all, horses made them mobile. As mounted warriors, three of the most earth-shaking, dis- ruptive populations of Central Asia were the Turkic people, the Mongols, and the Tibetans. Each of these was a vast ethnolinguistic group whose named sub- groups make for a confusing array of peoples. Turkic people still dominate the various states of modern Central Asia (25 million in Uzbekistan, 15 million in Iran, 12 million in Kazakhstan, etc.). They called their chiefs “Khan” and formed polities known as khanates, reaching the Middle East and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century they fought their way into North India, forming the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1414) and sending Hindu

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princes into exile. Eventually other Turkic groups conquered Anatolia and formed the Ottoman Empire, which dominated much of the Middle East and Eastern Europe until it formally ended after World War I.

Meanwhile, back in Central Asia, Mongol clans in the late twelfth century unified under the brilliant Genghis Khan (aka Chinggis Khan 1162–1227), a man of humble origins who became the undefeated conqueror of the largest empire ever. The Mongols were not Muslims, at least for the first century, but adopted the cultures of the lands they conquered, becoming Persianized in Iran, Indianized in India, and Sinicized in China. Under Genghis’s sons and grandsons, the Mongols occupied China, Russia, Poland and Hungary, and Persia. In 1526, a descendant of Genghis Khan and the Turkish conqueror Timur (Tamurlane) founded the Mughal dynasty in India. (Mughal is the Per- sianized form of Mongol.) In China, meanwhile, Mongol armies overran much of North China, and eventually founded the Yuan dynasty (in 1279) under Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan.

Among the many peoples conquered by Genghis Khan were the Tibetans. The territory of the Tibetans included their current location in the People’s Republic, plus areas to east and north of the Tibet Autonomous Region some- times referred to as “ethnographic Tibet” (Goldstein 1997). Tibetans were war- riors, too; during the Tang dynasty they conquered some of China’s vassal states and even briefly captured Chang’an, China’s capital. But by the time of Genghis Khan they barely avoided invasion by agreeing to pay tribute to the Mongols. After Genghis Khan died, the Tibetans again had to be forced into submission by the sacking of their monasteries. Here we reach a tricky point of disagreement between modern China and Tibet. A famous Tibetan Buddhist lama was summoned to the Mongol court in Gansu Province. The Mongol prince proposed that “if we Tibetans help the Mongols in matters of religion, they in turn will support us in temporal matters. In this way, we will be able to spread our religion [Buddhism] far and wide” (Goldstein 1997:3). When Kub- lai Khan became supreme khan in 1260 and conquered China in 1279, he became a patron of Buddhism and installed the Tibetan lama Phagpa as his spiritual tutor. Phagpa insisted that Kublai show deference to his superior reli- gious stature. The quarrel was resolved with the agreement that Kublai would sit on a throne lower than the lama when he was receiving religious instruc- tion, and the lama would sit lower than Kublai in all other settings. Today, China considers this the point when Tibet became part of China. Nationalist Tibetans claim they only submitted to the Mongols, not to China for all time.

These three Central Asian groups—Turks, Mongols, and Tibetans—thus have had enormous impact on the rest of Asia, conquering north, south, east, and west, not only carrying their cultures with them but adopting and trans- forming local cultures and shaping the modern world far beyond anything that might have been expected from the vantage point of 1000 C.E. These were “out- siders” who emphatically and portentously got inside. Chapter 3 takes up these processes in greater detail.

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Chapter 4 turns to others who, in danger of being captured by growing states, sought only to keep their distance. They are on the fringes of state cen- ters that are always in need of labor and looking for areas into which their own peasant populations might expand. Turning from the nomadic and warlike Central Asian peoples, we look at the mountainous regions between India and China and the Southeast Asian states, where free peoples have taken to the highlands to survive by swidden cultivation and cross-mountain trade. Some scholars have called this region “Zomia” where, according to James C. Scott in The Art of Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009), hill peoples have

been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys— slavery, conscription, taxes, corvee labor, epidemics, and warfare. . . . Virtually everything about these peoples’ livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length. (p. ix)

We examine this argument and then come to focus on one such group, the Hmong, who inhabit the highlands of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and southern China, where they are known as Miao.

REFERENCES CITED Gladney, Dru C. 1994. Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/

Minority Identities. Journal of Asian Studies 53(1): 92–123. Goldstein, Melvyn C. 1997. The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai

Lama. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast

Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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3 CENTRAL ASIA,

XINJIANG, AND TIBET

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n 126 B.C.E. an emissary of the Chinese Han Empire arrived in the Central Asian Yuezhi kingdom after escaping 10 years of captivity by Xiongnu nomads. Zhang Qian had traveled from the Han court to request the mili-

tary assistance of the Yuezhi in fighting their rival neighbors, the Xiongnu. Both the Yuezhi and Xiongnu lived in what is today far western China and Central Asia, and they had been at war for decades when Zhang arrived. Zhang explained that on his mission to reach the Yuezhi court, he had been captured and enslaved by the Xiongnu, and in that 10 years he had married a Xiongnu woman who gave birth to their son. After his long captivity, Zhang was able to escape with his wife, child, and servant, but he did not flee east and back to the safety of the Han court. Rather he continued west to the Yuezhi kingdom in an effort to complete his mission of seeking allies for the Han.

In spite of this determination, Zhang could not persuade his Yuezhi hosts to join in the Han’s campaigns against the Xiongnu. Yuezhi leaders were exhausted by years of conflict with the Xiongnu, and they had retreated farther to the west and away from the punishing campaigns of the Xiongnu. Zhang Qian learned that the Xiongnu ruler, according to custom, now drank his wine from the skull of a vanquished Yuezhi leader. In defeat, the Yuezhi had been fractured and pushed westward where the group that Zhang Qian encountered had established stable communities and had, in turn, come to dominate regions of Bactria and Sogdia, later moving as far west and south as the Ganges plain.

Zhang Qian remained among the Yuezhi for a year, extending his long absence from the Han court and collecting information about the people and the region. Then, without having secured the military alliance that he had sought, he left the Yuezhi and began his return trip to the Han capital of Chang’an (today Xi’an). Forced to return via Xiongnu territory, he was way- laid and once again taken prisoner. A chaotic period of infighting among the Xiongnu gave Zhang the chance to escape again, and he finally made his way back to the Han court, failing in his diplomatic mission, but contributing enor- mously to the Han knowledge of their western neighbors.

Zhang Qian told of magnificent steeds that sweat blood and were swifter, larger, and stronger than any horses known in the Han realm. Today, the “fly- ing horse of Gansu” has become an iconic image of early imperial China. While the remarkable bronze sculpture is Chinese in origin, the horse is not. It is based on the celebrated horses of Fergana (today Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) that Zhang Qian reported on when he returned to the Han court. Zhang’s mission served in part to establish contacts and mutual aware- ness between the Chinese cultural sphere and Central Asia. In the centuries

I

Chapter opener photo: A Mongolian woman leads a caravan of camels.

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that followed, trade in horses, silk, gold, and other precious goods thrived, and lines of communication, trade, and migration connected the extremes of the Eurasian landmass. Military conquests also swept across Central Asia, some- times originating with the nomadic empires there, and sometimes led by neigh- boring sedentary empires that engulfed the region. In times of war and peace, the peoples and cultures of Central Asia were essential in connecting west and east. Like many nomadic communities of history, once powerful and expan- sionary, the Xiongnu and Yuezhi do not have a corresponding nation-state in today’s world, but aspects of their cultural legacy live on in far western China and in the countries of Central Asia.

In 2002, the Scottish author, Rory Stewart, walked across Afghanistan and then wrote about it in his book, The Places in Between (2004). This provocative title is a blunt challenge to learn more about Central Asia, a region of the world too often relegated to being a place “in between” and often forgotten. Central Asia lies between the more geopolitically dominant eastern and western reaches of the Eurasian landmass. Stewart urges the reader to seek a deeper cultural and historical understanding of the region than the political leaders of

The “Flying Horse of Gansu” is a bronze sculpture from Han China in the second cen- tury B.C.E. It represents the magnificent and much coveted horses bred in regions like Fergana (today Uzbekistan) on China’s western frontier.

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London and Washington at the time were willing to consider as they launched yet another war into this “graveyard of empires.”

“Stan” simply means “place of ” in Persian, and hence the many “stans” of Central Asia are cultural and political names that encompass the historical regions of the Kazakhs, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Afghanis, and so on. This chapter will include these countries as well as neighboring Xinjiang (some- times called East Turkestan) and Tibet, today part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as well as the Republic of Mongolia. The history of this region is rich and complex, and perhaps since it has not been the center of a regionally dominant power in several centuries, it is not as exhaustively chronicled or understood compared with its neighbors to the east (China), south (India), west (Persia, Arabia, and Europe), and north (Russia). The dominance of much of the region by the Soviet Union throughout much of the twentieth cen- tury has earned several of the countries the label of “former Soviet republics,” and some of these regional governments maintain strong if sometimes troubled relations with Moscow in the post-Soviet era. Xinjiang and Tibet are suffi- ciently different in their cultural foundations from the dominant Chinese cul- tural historical narrative, and their connections to this central Asian region are strong enough, that they are examined here as well, as is the culturally Mongo- lian portion of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Mongolia itself.

The Silk Roads

“Such a fuss over caterpillar spit!” wrote historian James Millward (2013) about the fine Chinese silk that became the hottest fashion trend and scandal in many parts of the world including the Roman Empire. The silkworm (Bombyx mori), carefully nourished with mulberry leaves, produces a fine filament of saliva that become silk thread after the little creatures are tossed into vats of boil- ing water and plucked out again. “Caterpillar spit” was indeed all the rage in Rome, as it was in China and many other parts of Europe and Asia. Silk produc- tion had been a closely guarded secret of the Chinese empire, then the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), and it was extremely valuable and coveted on either end of the Eurasian landmass. Some disapproving Roman writers consid- ered the sensuous fabric to be both decadent and scandalous, but this did not pre- vent silk from rising in popularity among wealthy Romans (Millward 2013:69).

Silk was only one of the many precious commodities that were transported overland between China and the Mediterranean and beyond. The German geographer, Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen (1833–1905), coined the phrase “Silk Road” in 1877, 2,000 years after Zhang Qian and thousands of travelers had been making their way across Central Asia. Horses, spices, and precious stones and metals also moved along these trade routes, as did ideas, diseases, and people. In the Roman Empire, precious silk was paired with the rare purple dye of the murex shell to make purple silk, an exclusive fabric of royalty. When the western Roman Empire fell, and Constantinople became the

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center of the Byzantine Empire, Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora reigned there and cloaked themselves in purple silk that is still vibrant in mosa- ics from the time.

Due to the allure of the valuable fabric, von Richthofen’s phrase has stuck, and “the Silk Road” has taken root as a phrase that evokes adventure, mystery, and romance. Perhaps because the trade routes crossed through territory that was beyond the reaches of the Asian axial powers of Persia, India, and China, the “Silk Roads” were not only exotic, but also potentially dangerous, illicit, and even deadly. In keeping with these connotations, the briefly flourishing online “bitcoin” marketplace known as “Silk Road” (2011–2013) existed on the “dark web” as an illegal marketplace for drugs, weapons, and assassins (Martin 2014).

The mysteries of silk production would eventually be discovered in other regions like Persia, but the trade routes continued to be important for centuries. Between the eastern reaches of Persia, the northern borders of Indian king- doms, and the western frontiers of China lay desert, mountains, and grasslands that comprised the routes that would connect these regions through trade, exchange of ideas, and adventuresome travel. Eventually sea routes would become more efficient than overland travel for the journey from one end of Eurasia to the other, but this central region was forever shaped by the rich exchanges and interactions with its neighbors (see map 1.4).

Silk and Steeds

What we today call the Silk Road was in fact not a single trunk road, and it was also more than a network of trade routes that crisscrossed Central Eurasia. The region was naturally inhabited by diverse peoples, and the roads were well traveled over a thousand years before Marco Polo published his account of traveling the land route. Historian Christopher I. Beckwith wrote that the Silk Road “was the entire local political-economic-cultural system of Central Eur- asia, in which commerce, whether internal or external, was very highly valued and energetically pursued” (Beckwith 2009:328). Trade, not warfare, shaped the region in and between cities like Kashgar, Samarkand, and Turfan, where trade was the central preoccupation. Further, to use the anachronistic term “Silk Roads” is to privilege the perspective of those who produced silk (China) and those who valued it so highly (Rome, Persia, India, and other regions). But even more than silk, if it were not for the fine horses of Central Asia, it is likely that trade and the region’s history might have taken a different course.

As noted above, the Han dynasty emissary Zhang Qian traveled to the west in search of allies to fight the fearsome Xiongnu warriors, one of the ancestral groups of the later Mongols. The perennial tension between the Han and the Xiongnu was naturally caused by their shared frontiers, but it was also caused by a shared need. Xiongnu chiefs sought diplomatic relations with the Han court, since this official recognition would provide them with status among their countrymen. Legitimacy was in part bestowed on Xiongnu chieftains by their ability to fight the Han when necessary but also to engage them politically

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when possible. Silk played an important role in this exchange, as did horses. Chinese diplomats exchanged fine silks for fine horses. Xiongnu chiefs and their descendants donned silk as public evidence that they could negotiate with the Han in times of peace as well as war. The Han diplomats returned to the court with steeds that were far larger and more powerful than the horses bred within the empire. The Han historian Sima Qian based his account of a mirac- ulous blood-sweating horse on Zhang Qian’s travels to the west. Today, histori- ans offer several possible explanations of a horse that may appear to sweat blood, including parasites or burst blood vessels, but the breathless Chinese accounts of these animals reflected the constant desire to acquire the best horses of the western regions.

This desire for fine horses and the expansion of the western frontiers was largely what brought Chinese emissaries and traders into Central Asia. Chinese silks and other luxury goods, and also some basic foodstuffs, brought the Xion- gnu and other steppe peoples into contact with Han and other dynasties. The ecological vulnerability of the pastoral peoples of Central Asia also meant that slight shifts in the climate could force the Xiongnu and other peoples to bring their herds farther and farther south in an effort to follow pastures to graze their livestock of horses, sheep, and goats. These economic connections of the premodern world led to encounters that were both peaceful and violent, but either kind of encounter deepened connections and cultural awareness. Per- haps even more important to world history than the material goods that mer- chants brought back and forth from one end of Eurasia to the other were the ideas and cultural practices that were shared, blended, and adopted.

Travelers

The frontiers and borderlands of history are often full of fantastical beasts and trials awaiting the bold and heroic souls of the “civilized” world. Today, judging by popular science fiction literature and film, these uncharted regions are in space or perhaps the deepest depths of the oceans. But in the premodern world, the lands of Central Asia presented travelers and their eager audiences with fertile territories for outlandish and even supernatural experiences and accounts. Perhaps the two best known travelers of the Silk Roads are the Vene- tian Marco Polo (1254–1324) and the Chinese Buddhist monk, Xuanzang (602–664), also referred to as Tripitaka in some translations of the novelized account of his travels. In the sixteenth-century novel inspired by Xuanzang’s travels, the “real” quickly gives way to the fantastical and allegorical in a story about the monk and his companions—a shape-shifting monkey king and a lust- ful pig-man hybrid. The story, replete with violence and sensuous temptation, is a thrilling account of Xuanzang’s journey (see box 3.1).

The historical Xuanzang traveled to the west, leaving behind his position at the Tang court in the seventh century. He planned to travel to India in search of Buddhist texts. As various schools of Buddhism multiplied in China, some believed that these new schools were not loyal to the original teachings of the

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Buddha, and it was not uncommon for debates to rage among different sects. Travel to India and to the source of Buddhism, some thought, was the only way to finally resolve these disputes. Xuanzang hoped to access the purest source of Buddhist knowledge and wisdom, and so he set out on what became known as the “Journey to the West” in the imagination of delighted Chinese readers for centuries to come.

At the end of the sixteenth century, a novelized version of Xuanzang’s jour- ney was published full of magical beasts, meetings with deities, miraculous feats, romantic encounters, and a constant patter of humor from his monkey and pig companions. Both Polo and Xuanzang, from west and east, traveled into Central Asia and regions little known to their respective home cultures, and so their stories were told with great license and fabrication, leaving a last- ing impact on views of the region, even after it was clearly mapped and its cul- tures documented and well-known.

In the final years of the thirteenth century, a long conflict between Venice and Genoa led to the capture of Marco Polo. During his imprisonment, Polo recounted a fantastical story of travels to Yuan China to his cellmate, Rus- tichello da Pisa. Rustichello’s experience in writing historical adventures and romances blended with Polo’s account of his travels and resulted in The Travels of Marco Polo, which awed and informed Western audiences for centuries to come. Polo had traveled across the Eurasian landmass and arrived in the impe- rial court of the Kublai Khan (1215–1294), where he served the khan for many years and returned to Venice over two decades later.

Box 3.1 Journey to the West

Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West, ostensibly a story of a historical Buddhist monk’s pilgrimage from Tang China to India, has delighted audiences since its publi- cation in the end of the sixteenth century. Countless films, television series, comic books, and other rollicking adaptations have made the story even more thrilling. But the original is already a fast-moving account, even in four volumes and 100 chapters. In one typical episode, the reader is riveted by a high-flying scene of supernatural combat by the travelers, with Xuanzang referred to here as Tripitaka:

Suddenly a monster of horrifying aspect came surging through the mountainous waves. His hair was flaming red; his eyes were like two lanterns; at his neck were strung nine skulls, and he carried a huge priest’s-staff. Like a whirlwind he rushed straight at the pilgrims. Monkey seized Tripitaka and hurried him up the bank to a safe distance. Pigsy dropped his load and rushed at the monster with his rake. The monster fended off the blow with his priest’s-staff. The fight that followed was a good one, each displaying his powers on the shores of the River of Flowing Sands. They fought twenty bouts without reaching a decision. Monkey, seeing the grand fight that was in progress, itched to go and join in it. . . . Tripitaka did his best to dissuade him. But Monkey with a wild whoop leapt into the fray. At this moment the two of them were locked in combat, and it was hard to get between

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them. But Monkey managed to put in a tremendous blow of the cudgel right on the monster’s head. At once the monster broke away, and rushing madly back to the water’s edge leapt in and disappeared.

Pigsy was furious. “Heigh, brother,” he cried. “Who asked you to interfere? The monster was just beginning to tire. After another three or four rounds he would not have been able to fend off my rake, and I should have had him at my mercy. But as soon as he saw your ugly face he took to his heels! You spoilt everything!”

“I’ll just tell you how it happened,” said Monkey. “It’s months since I had a chance to use my cudgel, and when I saw you having such a rare time with him my feet itched with longing not to miss the fun, and I couldn’t hold myself back. How was I to know that the monster wouldn’t play?” So hand in hand, laughing and talking, the two of them went back to Tripitaka.

“Have you caught the monster?” he asked. “He gave up the fight,” said Monkey, “and went back again into the water.” “It wouldn’t be a bad thing,” said Tripitaka, “if we could persuade him to show

us how to get across. He’s lived here a long time, and must know this river inside out. Otherwise I don’t see how we are to get across an enormous river like this without a boat.”

“There is something in that,” said Monkey. “If we succeed in catching him we certainly ought not to kill him, but make him take the Master across the river and then dispose of him.”

“You shall have your chance this time,” said Pigsy to Monkey. “I’ll stay here and look after the Master.” (Wu [1942]1953:159–160)

The Monkey King, or Sun Wukong, is a central character in the Buddhist novel

of Ming China, Journey to the West. Monkey possesses many superpowers

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The book itself is an odd combination of extremely repetitive and mundane accounts of Polo’s work as a functionary traveling across the empire at the khan’s orders and of outrageous stories of animal-human hybrids, bizarre cul- tural practices, and hair-raising adventures. Of course, it was these colorful adventures that made the book an enduring classic, still in print and read today, in spite of its many dubious details. A lively and popular debate has developed among historians about whether Polo ever reached the Yuan imperial court of Kublai Khan, let alone served there. Frances Wood (1998) has led this camp, pointing to the exclusion in Polo’s account of chopsticks, tea, or the Great Wall of China. Rustichello’s dramatic flair and conventions of historical romances lead some scholars to question much of the narrative. While Wood is a highly regarded scholar, equally prominent voices have countered her claims, includ- ing Morris Rossabi (2011, 2012) and Igor de Rachewiltz (1997), who challenge, point by point, Wood’s debunking of Polo. But this recent debate aside, the book certainly had a profound impact on Western views of exotic Asia. Regardless of Polo’s reliability as a narrator, he was not the first European to visit China, or the first traveler on the Silk Roads. While his Travels became one of the first and most thrilling accounts of Asia for a Western audience, there would have existed, among some merchants and scholars at least, a rich and detailed mutual awareness of the peoples at either extreme of the Eurasian landmass, and all in between.

Religions along the Silk Road

As merchants transported goods across Central Asia, they brought with them a profusion of ideas, languages, customs, and beliefs. While pilgrims also walked these roads, merchant caravans were the most common travelers of the Silk Roads. The faiths and cultures that moved through the region and some- times took root were often explained and interpreted through the worldviews of merchants and nomads more than through the devotions and teachings of pilgrims. The kind of Buddhism, for example, that made its way from India to China in the first and second centuries C.E. was Mahayana Buddhism, a branch of the faith that would flourish and diversify in China, Japan, and Korea and was based on the principle of maximum outreach to bring the wider lay com- munity into the practice and belief of Buddhism. This inclusive Buddhism incorporated talismans, icons, alms, and the sponsorship of sutra inscriptions by wealthy patrons. In some branches of Buddhism, a single earnest invocation at the moment of death could wipe clean a life of sin and bring one to the promised land. In Mahayana Buddhism, a pantheon of bodhisattvas worked tirelessly to achieve enlightenment for all sentient beings, aspiring to bring them into awakening through their selfless acts (see chapter 6).

Buddhism brought a revolutionary egalitarianism to a strictly hierarchical and patriarchal India, but some of its more severe austerities and devotions were not for everyone. Mahayana Buddhism developed in part as an appeal to lay people, such as merchants, who could not possibly be successful while liv-

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ing a life of ascetic renunciation. Giving alms, carrying a rosary, occasional meditation, and the sponsoring of sutra copying and other acts of faith could salve the conscience of a busy man of the world. The multiplying schools of Mahayana Buddhism offered this new kind of Buddhism at the same time that the Silk Roads were entering a period of fluorescence.

The faiths that traveled the Silk Roads were changed by the travelers and their journeys; Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, and Sufi Islam all emerged along the Silk Roads as variants of their original forms in the Middle East (see box 3.2).

Barbarians

The histories of nomadic peoples are often told on their behalf by their sed- entary neighbors, so that we know the Scythians, the Parthians, and the Mon- gols through the accounts left by the Greeks, the Romans, and the Chinese, respectively. Popular images of these nomadic peoples are replete with visions of raiding hordes on horseback, uncivilized and brutal in both their war-mak- ing and their cultures. Conflicts and interactions that reinforce prejudices of these nomadic peoples often get most of the ink in the relatively voluminous historical accounts by their sedentary neighbors, so that exceptions only prove the rule of barbarity.

Pagodas and the Mogao cave structures at Dunhuang in the far west of China’s western Gansu Province represent the importance of Buddhism to many of the travelers of the Silk Roads.

Box 3.2 The Prophets Zarathustra and Mani

The movement of ideas and cultures is perhaps the greatest legacy of the Eurasian trade routes that we know today as the Silk Roads. Besides Buddhism, Islam, Christi- anity, and Judaism, the nearly forgotten faiths of Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism were also part of the premodern history of Central Asia.

Zoroastrianism was the pre-Islamic faith of the Persian Empire and continues to be the faith of India’s 70,000 Parsis (“Persians,” a prosperous merchant community cen- tered on Mumbai). The Avesta (Hymns) of Zoroastrianism taught several key con- cepts that echoed through Christianity and Islam. These included the idea of the final judgment of the soul upon death; monotheism; and the struggle between good and evil, manifested in Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu respectively. Zoroastrian priests tend sacred purifying fire in fire temples, and perhaps the most distinctive practice of Zorastrianism is “sky burial” where, at death, the body of the deceased is left exposed to vultures in a “Tower of Silence.” Vultures will devour a corpse over a period of days. (This practice is in jeopardy today, since vultures are nearly extinct in India.)

Mani was a prophet of the Zoroastrian tradition. Like Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism does not have a large community of practitioners, but its historical impact on Central Asia during the fluorescence of the Silk Roads was crucial. During his life in the third century C.E., Mani carried forward the Zoroastrian ideas of the struggle between good and evil but introduced new ideas encountered along the Eurasian trade routes, such as salvation and reincarnation from Christianity and Buddhism. Manichaeism appealed most to nomadic and merchant people of Central Asia who moved easily in and out of the sedentary societies that ringed the landmass. Practitioners of Man- ichaeism were divided into the “elect” and the “hearers”; the latter were a lay commu- nity that was not required to live the rigid lifestyle of celibacy, vegetarianism, and renunciation demanded of the “elect.” This basic division was later incorporated into most Christian sects as well as in the Mahayana Buddhist traditions. The “hearers” provided material support to the “elect” as an act of faith, rather than devoting their lives to meditation and renunciation.

Today, the word “Manichaean” in the modern English language refers not only to the historical religion but to anything characterized by contrasting or conflicting oppo- sites. Zarathustra (Zoroaster) took on a second cultural life in the novel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), in which the title character bears little resemblance to the historical Zarathustra except in his wresting with philosophical questions of morality. Richard Strauss (1864–1949) then composed a symphonic poem based on Nietzsche’s novel using the same name, and the titanic chords of its opening “Sunrise” are among the most recognizable in music history. Stanley Kubrick used this musical fanfare in an iconic scene of his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), since the scene represented a transitional evolutionary phase between ape and man, which Nietzsche had emphasized in his novel.

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For some it may seem absurd to suggest that groups like the Mongol hordes were more civilized than the Chinese Tang and Song dynasties that came before the Mongol conquests. And yet when we examine the history of the Mongols and their neighbors, we should interrogate the markers of civilization that we might otherwise take for granted. Gender relations, cultural produc- tions, religious practices, and the possibility of social or political advancement are worth consideration. The Mongols are best remembered for military profi- ciency and sometimes terrorizing brutality, but so, too, were generals of the Chinese dynasties that preceded the Mongol Yuan.

Women on the Steppe

The Amazons are perhaps the most striking example of gender roles in a nomadic society that were starkly different from their sedentary or agricultural counterparts. They first emerge in Greek descriptions of ancient Scythia, which included portions of Central and Western Asia. The label of Scythians or later, Sarmatians, could include nomadic peoples around the Caspian Sea but also could include the ancestors of the Xiongnu and even the Mongols. The women warriors known to myth and history as the Amazons are experiencing a dynamic revival as archaeological work in the past two decades has revealed with increasing certainty that Scythian women warriors indeed rode into battle and fought alongside men. Historian Adrienne Mayor has compiled much of this new research in a compelling argument that the mythology of Amazon women that existed in Greece, Persia, Egypt, and China portrayed a genuine gender dynamic among the nomadic peoples of the steppe that was far more equal than these sedentary societies (Mayor 2014).

The myth of the Amazons is a window to the roles of women in nomadic societies. Judging by the history and literature from ancient Greece and China, it seems that the relative social freedom of women within nomadic societies was a source of cultural and psychological anxiety and a flash point of pro- found and uneasy cultural difference. Women in nomadic cultures experience greater social freedom for a number of reasons. The necessary division of labor related to the total mobilization of the adult male population for warfare, herd- ing, or hunting led to women in Central Asian cultures taking on prominent public roles in work and social organization, including military and political roles, as recent archaeological finds have confirmed. Lyn Webster Wilde (2000) traveled to many Central Asian burial sites where she found tombs of women warriors buried with military honors, pierced by arrows, clasping weapons, and with skeletal evidence in their bowed legs of a life spent on horseback. The peripatetic lifestyle of nomads is also conducive to a lower birth rate, reducing the amount of time that women spend pregnant or caring for infant children. These facts may have led to the more outrageous claims among Greek writers that Amazon women lived in seclusion from men, practiced male infanticide, and amputated or cauterized one breast to allow for stronger archery, though none of these are confirmed in the expanding archaeological record. Beckwith

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explains the legendary tales of Amazon women by noting that Scythian soci- ety, like other Central Asian cultures, featured far more balanced gender roles than Egypt, China, Rome, India, or Persia, and hence when these groups encountered the Scythians and others who included women in their military ranks and political posts, their reactions tended toward the scandalized and the fantastic (Beckwith 2009). Mongol expert Morris Rossabi has found that elite Mongol women were allowed to own property, and their political power in other respects was also considerable as observed by the great Persian scholar and minister, Rashid al-Din, and the Moroccan legal scholar and minister, Ibn Battuta. Rossabi noted the prominence of Tolui Khan’s widow, Sorqoqtani Beki, a Nestorian Christian. When she spoke, “the commanders were silenced and all who heard her approved” (Rossabi 2011:123).

The Xiongnu and the Mongols

From its earliest days, the Chinese Empire was almost constantly in a state of war or uneasy peace with its nomadic neighbors to the north. Chinese philoso- phers and statesmen sometimes defined themselves in categorical contrast with the Xiongnu, the Jurchen, the Khitans, the Manchus, and the Mongols. Civiliza- tion was defined by the differences between the sedentary Han Chinese, with their complex agricultural methods and their sophisticated cosmopolitan cen- ters, and the nomads to the north and west.

The Amazons or warrior women made famous in Greek legends were inspired by historical fighting women of Western and Central Asia. While the Amazons of Greek legend blended fantasy and reality, recent archaeological discoveries have confirmed the existence and the prominence of women warriors among the steppe nomads. Here two Amazon women are depicted fighting a Greek warrior.

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Whereas the great no- madic cultures and empires celebrated horsemanship and martial prowess, the Chinese elite celebrated the achieve- ments of the pen. While the founder of a dynasty may have conquered on horseback, he could only rule with the writing brush. For centuries, Confucian culture favored lit- erary merit and scholarly achievement high above the skills of war, and this persis- tent denigration of the soldier is captured in the sneering and elitist Chinese phrase “good men are not made for soldiering just as good iron is not made for nails” (haonan bu dang bing, hao tie bu da ding). Exceptional military he- roes in Chinese history are notable, but this trend is un- avoidable, certainly into the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth. For centu- ries, the relations between a succession of Chinese empires and their neighbors to the north were contested and reg- ularly marked by violence. Sometimes the peace was kept along the frontier through trade and intermarriage, but the greatest threat perceived to Qin and then Han integrity was the Xiongnu.

Genghis Khan (Chinggis Qa’an) and the Mongol Empire

One of the nomadic peoples of Central Asia, perhaps descended from the ancient Xiongnu, were the Mongols, originally a hunting and herding people whose economy was based on the “five snouts”—sheep, goats, yaks, horses, and camels. A traveler moving through their lands in the eleventh or twelfth century would never have guessed that these people were about to create the largest empire the world has ever known. They had few crafts; they could not weave cloth. They could not write their own language. They were surrounded

This bronze deer finial or decorative top piece for a tent or pole reflects the early advanced bronze work of the Xiongnu and dates to between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C.E. Like their Mongol descendants, the Xiongnu valued fine craftsmanship.

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in every direction by superior civilizations—west, southwest, south, and east. The Silk Road enticed them with the fabulous trade between these great centers of production, but they had little more than pelts to contribute.

It all changed in the early thirteenth century. In 25 years Genghis Khan conquered more than twice as much land as the Romans conquered in 400 years. He, along with his sons and grandsons, conquered the most densely populated civilizations of the thirteenth century. From the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean, Mongol horses thundered across Eurasia. No city could beat them back, no nation could fight them off. At its zenith, the empire covered between 11 and 12 million contiguous square miles (Weatherford 2004). With an army that consisted solely of cavalry, Genghis Khan defeated a dozen Slavic states defended by knights in armor and walled cities; by the end, both armor and city walls were made obsolete, and the Slavic states were united into one large Russian state under Mongol control. Europe was terrified; the earliest known mention of Mongols was in 1240 when an English Benedictine monk named Matthew Paris called them “an immense horde of that detestable race of Satan,” and a century later Chaucer wrote about them in The Canter- bury Tales. On the other side of Eurasia, Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan, conquered three Chinese states (including the Song dynasty) and established the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The Muslim lands of the southwest consisted of

Map 3.1 Division of the Mongol Empire, ca. 1300.

LEGEND

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Black Sea

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Khanbalik (Bejing)

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Ilkhanate (Persia)

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Divisions among Genghis Khan’s sons and grandsons

M oguls ( 1526)

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Caspian Sea

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Arabic, Turkic, and Persian civilizations that were rich and sophisticated in virtually every branch of learning, possessing the world’s highest levels of liter- acy among the general population. The Mongols killed off soldiers and aristo- cratic classes but absorbed their clerks, doctors, craftsmen, musicians, cooks, and engineers.

What Genghis Khan had was, evidently, charisma, and military genius. As Temujin, a poor boy from an inferior clan with no natural constituency, he had joined the nomadic tribal rivalries, stealing each other’s women, making alli- ances, and waging war. Every Mongol male was a mounted warrior, and they joined the strongest leaders against common enemies. Temujin played in this great game until finally he had defeated every tribe, killed off their aristocrats, and married their women to his sons and followers. At a great khuriltai (assem- bly) in 1206, hundreds of thousands of Mongol, Turkic, Naiman, Tayichiud, and other tribes gathered near the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun to affirm the rule of Temujin, who took the name Chinggis Qa’an (Genghis Khan is the Persian spelling by which he is known in the West).

Having united the various Mongol and Turkic tribes, he reorganized them to ensure their loyalty, creating a unique military system for the time. Ten brothers were organized into a squad (arban); 10 squads formed a company (zagun); 10 companies formed a battalion (mingan); 10 battalions formed an army (tumen). An officer might be the head of 100, 1,000, or 10,000, which was how rank was noted. This system broke the old lineage system and gave Geng- his Khan control over officers and units loyal only to him. This vast army of about a million men consisted entirely of cavalry and an assortment of siege engines. Bringing together engineers from China, Persia, and Europe and vari- ous technologies from their conquered territories (gunpowder from China, flamethrowers from the Muslim world, and European bell-casting), they invented the cannon. No city could—or did—resist them.

With the reconfigured army and military technology the Mongols set out to acquire the wealth and accumulated achievements of all their neighbors. Caravans of booty brought the wealth of conquered civilizations back to the Mongol capital at Karakoram, providing them a century and a half of extraor- dinary wealth. They particularly valued the trade along the Silk Road and organized it into “history’s largest free-trade zone” (Weatherford 2004:xix).

Genghis Khan demanded complete religious freedom in his empire but was himself a devout shamanist who worshipped the Eternal Blue Sky. The most sacred part of his empire was the mountain Burkhan Khaldun out of which the Onan River flowed in northeastern Mongolia. Frequently he would retreat to this sacred mountain for days of prayer and meditation, while his fol- lowers and family waited quietly in their gers (yurts) for him to come down. This sacred territory is an inaccessible region of forests, mountains, river val- leys, and steppes 150 miles east of the capital of Mongolia that has been closed since the time of his death, and many believe he himself is buried there. Known

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as Ikh Khorig (the forbidden zone), it was kept off limits even by the Soviets into the twentieth century, who did not want the sacred area to play into Mongolian nationalism. The Ikh Khorig is still sacred to Mongolians, though there is inter- national competition to find the tomb of Genghis Khan and the treasures inside using ultra-high-resolution satellite imaging, so far with no success. Eventually his grandsons in their various segments of his empire adopted Tibetan Buddhism (Kublai) and Islam (Helugu). Many of the wives of the royal family were Christian, and places of worship of numerous faiths were built in the Mongol capital at Karakoram.

In the nineteenth century a strange document was found in Beijing. Though the Chinese characters could be easily read, it had been written in a code that used Chinese characters to represent Mongolian sounds of the thir- teenth century (Weatherford 2004:xxvii). It became known as the Secret History of the Mongols. It took more than a century to translate it, since the Soviets con- sidered all persons, Russian and Mongolian, who attempted to study it “anti- party” elements or Chinese spies. The greatest breakthrough came in the 1970s when one chapter at a time began appearing in Mongolian and English, and Harvard University Press published it all in 1982. The book appears to have been written within a couple of decades of Genghis Khan’s death in 1227, probably in 1252 (Atwood 2007), as the unitary vision of an elderly Mongol

Traditional gers or yurt dwellings like this goatherd’s can still be seen in Mongolia and other steppe regions.

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who was a “brilliant but opinionated writer” in a “single style and full of parti- san biases”—a kind of Homer, recording the astonishing events in the life of Genghis Khan. Though it is partly mythological (“At the beginning there was a blue-grey wolf, born with his destiny ordained by Heaven Above. His wife was a fallow doe.”), it is a record of Genghis Khan’s life from someone who was alive and saw it all firsthand.

On one of his campaigns in 1226 Genghis Khan was injured in a fall from his horse, and he died surrounded by his family at the age of 65. He divided his vast empire among his four sons (see map 3.1), while the third son, Ogodei, became the Great Khan after him. Ogodei kept the conquests going as the new Great Khan, and eventually separate territories emerged under branches of the Mongol royal family: the sons of Jochi controlled the Golden Horde in Russia; the descendants of Chaghatai in 1526 founded the Mughal (i.e., “Mongol”) dynasty in India; Helugu founded the Ilkhanate dynasty in Persia; and Kublai founded the Yuan dynasty in China.

In China, after absorbing the Song and unifying the three Chinese states, Kublai attempted to Sinicize his image, ordered the building of an ancestral temple along Confucian lines, built a Chinese capital, and set up a Chinese ad- ministration. The capital he called Khanbalik, the City of the Khan (modern Beijing), with broad straight streets on a north-south axis and east-west streets perpendicular to them, wide enough to allow horses and military maneuvers. In the heart of the city the Mongol rulers created a Forbidden City where they could live as if on the steppes, in gers, and with a wooden palace resembling the one in Karakoram, drinking large amounts of alcohol, women mingling freely with men.

Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, completed the Mongol conquest

of China and consolidated Mongol rule with the establishment of the

Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). This paint- ing is by a Nepali artist done shortly

after Kublai Khan’s death.

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But Kublai also modernized China, expanding the use of paper money and patronizing the arts, especially drama. Most significant of all his efforts was to create the China of which the Chinese elite dreamed:

The Mongols united not only all of the areas speaking various Chinese dia- lects, but they combined with it the adjacent kingdoms of the Tibetans, Manchurians, Uighurs, and dozens of smaller kingdoms and tribal nations. The new country under their administration was about five times as large as the civilization where people spoke the Chinese languages. The official Chinese state culture that emerged was certainly not Mongol; nor was it Chinese. Khubilai Khan had created a hybrid, and, through his efforts, the culture would have a worldwide impact of unanticipated dimensions and importance. (Weatherford 2004:209)

Xinjiang and Tibet

Xinjiang and Tibet have presented the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with two of its most vexing challenges of governance. At the time of this writ- ing, occasional flare-ups of unrest have continued to frustrate the governments of both these “Autonomous Regions” of the People’s Republic of China. The regional governments are run by the closest allies of Beijing, and the name “Autonomous Region” does not denote significantly more autonomy than any other Chinese province. Both Xinjiang and Tibet have seen floods of Han migration into the regions, with Xinjiang now comprised of nearly equal por- tions of Uighurs and Han Chinese, and smaller percentages of ethnic groups like Uzbeks and Kazakhs. These two regions are certainly under the political control of Beijing today.

“New Dominion”

The Uighur (Uyghur) ethnic group of Xinjiang now makes up between 40 and 50 percent of the population, with a Han portion nearly equal to that and growing. The region, now called Xinjiang (literally, “new dominion”), became part of China only under the Mongol Yuan (1279–1368) and the Manchu Qing (1644–1911). The Uighurs are not the only group in China that is culturally Central Asian, or distinct from the axial Chinese civilization, nor are they even the only non-Han group in Xinjiang. Kazakhs, Tajiks, and others also play an important role in the cultural fabric of the region, but Uighurs are the most sig- nificant cultural force.

Located today in the northwest of China, the geography of Xinjiang is for- bidding, and the Taklamakan Desert described in chapter 1 was bypassed to either the north or the south by Silk Road travelers. Like other peoples who lived along these trade routes, the Uighurs developed a tolerant and cosmopoli- tan culture in many ways, exposed to diverse cultures, languages, and faiths. As nomads, merchants, and sometimes pilgrims, the Uighurs interacted with their

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neighbors as well as travelers from distant lands who traversed their homeland, and they in turn traveled far for their spiritual and economic sustenance.

James Millward (2007), the Silk Roads expert noted above, called Xinjiang the “Eurasian Crossroads,” which for centuries incorporated cultural elements from the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, China, and the Middle East. In his survey of Xinjiang history, Millward notes that its centrality has made its his- tory fraught with overlapping claims to contested territories, leaving layers of conflicting names for regions, cities, and towns. Some separatists refer to northwestern China as East Turkestan and resist the Qing Chinese label of Xinjiang. Uighur sentiment toward Beijing and toward Han Chinese is diverse but generally based on perceived injustice in the Chinese administration of the region, from the highest levels of power to local authorities and to individual Uighur–Han relations. Grievances range from cultural affronts like forbidding Uighurs from choosing certain names for their children, to the adoption of Han Chinese culture and language in the region, to physical violence against Uighurs either by mobs or by the police, leading to imprisonment. Uighur advocates assert that arbitrary imprisonment, censorship, political favoritism, and draconian cultural codes make life difficult or unbearable.

Extremist violence with roots in Xinjiang has touched other regions of China as well in recent years, from a suicidal car crash in Beijing’s Tiananmen

Uighur men at a market in Kashgar, Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the northwest of the People’s Republic of China. In the 1990s and early 2000s, ethnic tension between Uighurs and the Han Chinese ethnic majority group has occasionally erupted in violence due to the cultural, economic, and political pressures of increased Han migration into the region.

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Square in 2013 that left five dead to a coordinated knife attack that left 35 dead in 2014 in southern Kunming, both of which, according to official accounts, involved perpetrators with ties to separatists from the region. Yet, from the per- spective of Beijing and many Han Chinese people, this violence, separatism, and anti-Han sentiment is inexplicable, because in their view, the Chinese gov- ernment has worked to modernize and enrich the region.

Xinjiang’s history is one of fluid cultural and political identity that has shifted and adapted throughout two millennia from the flourishing of first Bud- dhism, then Islam; Turkic culture mixed with Mongolian and Chinese cul- tures; and finally absorption into China. Today the culture of Xinjiang is in flux with challenges to its Islamic roots presented by Beijing policies that pro- fess to counter extremism and separatism but often affect daily cultural prac- tices from naming children, to dress, to facial hair, and to forms of worship.

“Western Treasure-House”

Xinjiang’s neighbor to the south is Tibet (Xizang), and this region has a lon- ger history in the Western consciousness, due in large part to the global promi- nence of the fourteenth Dalai Lama who fled China during the Tibetan Uprising of 1958–1959 to live a life of exile and advocacy. In 2015, the Dalai Lama, leader of the Tibetan Buddhist faith, had a new disagreement with the PRC govern- ment in Beijing. The Dalai Lama proclaimed that he might not reincarnate. The belief, according to centuries of ritual, holds that the dying Lama provides some indication as to where his followers should find his successor reincarnated and where a series of ritual tests would confirm the boy’s identity as the new Lama. But the Dalai Lama suggested publicly that he may not take this traditional course. This declaration left many confused, and it seemed to have left the authorities in Beijing apoplectic as well. An official statement from the Chinese government declared that the Dalai Lama would indeed reincarnate and that he would do so within the 66-year-old boundaries of the People’s Republic of China. The Dalai Lama was wary of Beijing’s assertion of control not only over the region of Tibet but also over the institution of Tibetan Buddhism and the succession and reincarnation of the next Dalai Lama (Osnos 2015).

Tibetan Buddhism has a long and complex history with China and with the peoples of Central Asia. The Mongols, for example, engaged in a reciprocal rela- tionship of recognition and respect, as did the Manchus who ruled China from 1644 until 1911. Kublai Khan rewarded Tibetan Buddhist leaders with official recognition, patronage, and even high political office, and in exchange, the lead- ers of the Tibetan Buddhist faith declared the Mongol emperor to be a bodhisat- tva (Rossabi 2011:144). Later, the Manchus constructed a replica of Lhasa’s Potala Palace, the traditional home of the Dalai Lama from the middle of the seventeenth century until the Dalai Lama’s flight from China in 1959. The Man- chus built the replica palace in Chengde, north of Beijing, as a symbol of the closeness of Beijing and Lhasa, where Tibetan Buddhist officials and lamas would witness their cultural imprint on the Manchu Qing dynasty when their

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delegations visited. The historical interweaving of Tibetan politics and Tibetan Buddhism is also partially a cause of conflict between Beijing and Lhasa and now the Tibetan government-in-exile based in Dharamshala in far northern India. Within the profoundly diverse tradition of Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism offers a faith with a hierarchy that extends beyond local monasteries and con- vents to include powerful lamas (hence the early name for Tibetan Buddhism of “Lamaism”) and deep political, cultural, economic, and religious roots in the specific region of Tibet. These characteristics make Tibetan Buddhism distinctive from most other forms of Buddhism, and they account in part for the flourishing of the faith in Central Asia and among the historical rulers of the Mongols and Manchus, but they also account for the tensions with Beijing to the current day.

Like Xinjiang, the Tibetan Autonomous Region is a massive territory occupying the southwestern region of the PRC today. The forbidding Tibetan Plateau has long prevented the effective settlement of the region by major pop- ulation centers, and it remains sparsely populated, though increasing Han migration to Tibet has been steadily shifting the population ratios. Also like Xinjiang, Tibet has a sometimes troubled relationship with Beijing and the political centers of previous Chinese dynasties. Some dynasties thoroughly incorporated Tibet into their maps, while others did not. The 1911 revolution brought down the Manchu Qing, the last imperial house of China. The elites of Tibet declared that their allegiance would not flow naturally to the next ruling house proclaimed in Beijing or Nanjing. Their alliance had been to the Man- chu Qing court, and their relationship with the revolutionary government would have to be renegotiated based on a new and different diplomacy. Being at the crossroads of British (India), Russian, and Chinese interests, Tibet had no shortage of foreign powers advising its leaders on what course to take, lead- ing to confusion and ultimately conflict.

Potala Palace in Lhasa Tibet was the traditional center of Tibetan Buddhist religious and politi- cal power from the 1640s until the Dalai Lama fled China in 1959.

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After the cataclysm of war with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, and the ensu- ing collapse of the Nationalist regime on the mainland, Tibet was violently incor- porated in the new People’s Republic of China in 1950, and then opposition to Communist rule led to an uprising in 1959 that was crushed. This conflict led to the Dalai Lama fleeing the country, and brought about the current tense relation- ship with Beijing. Far more than its northern neighbor, Xinjiang, Tibet has become a cause championed by foreign powers and prominent celebrities who have advocated for increasing its autonomy or even for its outright independence. A broad spectrum of reflexive anti-Communists politicians, high-profile peace- loving practitioners of Buddhism from around the world, Tibetan exiles, and oth- ers have consistently criticized Beijing’s role in Tibet, perhaps most prominently in protests surrounding the Olympic torch relay in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Summer Games. The Dalai Lama has lamented the use of Tibet as a kind of polit- ical football, kicked around in the geopolitical contest between Washington, Lon- don, Paris, and Beijing. But this seems to be in keeping with the theme of Central Asian peoples being exploited by the predatory conflicts of their neighbors.

REFERENCES CITED Atwood, Christopher P. 2007. The Date of the ‘Secret History of the Mongols’ Recon-

sidered. Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 37:1–49. Beckwith, Christopher I. 2009. Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from

the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press. de Rachewiltz, Igor. 1997. Marco Polo Went to China. Zentralasiatische Studien 27:34–92. Martin, James. 2014. Lost on the Silk Road: Online Drug Distribution and the Crypto-

market. Criminology and Criminal Justice 14(3): 351–367. Mayor, Adrienne. 2014. The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the

Ancient World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Millward, James. 2007. Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang. New York: Columbia

University Press. ———. 2013. The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Osnos, Evan. 2015, March 13. Who Will Control Tibetan Reincarnation? The New Yorker,

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/who-will-control-tibetan- reincarnation (accessed May 8, 2017).

Rossabi, Morris. 2011. The Mongols and Global History: A Norton Documents Reader. New York: Norton.

———. 2012. The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, Rory. 2004. The Places in Between. New York: Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt. Weatherford, Jack. 2004. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. New York:

Broadway Books. Wilde, Lyn Webster. 2000. On the Trail of the Women Warriors: The Amazons in Myth and

History. New York: Thomas Dunne Books (St. Martin’s Press). Wood, Frances. 1998. Did Marco Polo Go to China? Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wu, Ch’eng-en. [1942] 1953. Monkey, ed. and trans. Arthur Waley. London: George

Allen & Unwin.

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4 TRIBAL PEOPLE

105

MAJORITY AND MINORITY ETHNIC GROUPS IN MODERN ASIAN NATIONS Nation

China (2016) 1.379 billion

South Korea (2016) 51.25 million

North Korea (2016) 25 million

Japan (2016) 127 million

Taiwan (2016) 23 million

Vietnam (2016) 92.7 million

Laos (2016) 7 million

Cambodia (2016) 15.76 million

Thailand (2016) 68.86 million

Myanmar [Burma] (2016) 52.89 million

Malaysia (2010) 31.19 million

Singapore (2016) 5.7 million

Indonesia (2016) 261 million

Brunei (2016) 797,000

Philippines (2016) 103 million

India (2016) 1.3 billion

Nepal (2016) 29 million

Bhutan (2016) 797,765

Pakistan (2016) 193.2 million

Bangladesh (2016) 163 million

Sri Lanka (2016) 21 million

Minority Groups

Officially 55 minzu Zhuang 1.3%, Other (includes Hui, Manchu, Uighur, Miao, Yi, Tujia, Tibetan, Mongol, Dong, Buyei, Yao, Bai, Korean, Hani, Li, Kazakh, Dai and other nationalities) 7.1%

“Homogeneous”

Other 0.002

Ainu Korean 0.5%, Chinese 0.4%, Other 0.6%

10 groups [Amis, Taya, Paiwan, Bunun, Puyuma, Rukai, Saisiat, Tsou, Yami, Taroko]

53 groups [Hmong, Yao, Mnong, Jarai, Ede, Bahnar, Kohor, Sedang, Hre, Raglai, Stieng, Jeh-trieng, Ma, Cho Ru, Brau . . . ]

Khmou 11%, Hmong 9.2%, Phouthay 3.4%, Tai 3.1%, Makong 2.5%, Katong 2.2%, Lue 2%, Akha 1.8%, Other 11.6%

Cham 1.2%, Chinese 0.1%, Vietnamese 0.1%, Other 0.9%

6 main groups [Karen, Hmong, Akha, Lahu, Lisu, Mien] 1%, Burmese 1.3%

Shan 9%, Karen 7%, Mon 2%, Rakhine 4%, Chinese 3%, Indian 2%, Other 5% [Kachin, Chin, Palaung-Wa, Arakanese, Pao, Naga, Akha, Lahu . . . ]

Indigenous 11.8%, 64 groups [Orang Asli (Semang, Senoi, Proto- Malay), Dayak, Bisayah, Kenyah, Kajang . . . ], Other 0.7%, Noncitizens 8.2%

Malay 13.4%, Indian 9.1% (includes Sri Lankan), Other 3.2%

300 groups on 6,000 inhabited islands: Sundanese 15.5%, Malay 3.7%, Batak 3.6%, Madurese 3%, Betawi 2.9%, Minangkabau 2.7%, Buginese 2.7%, Bantenese 2%, Banjarese 1.7%, Balinese 1.7%, Acehnese 1.4%, Dayak 1.4%, Sasak 1.3%, Chinese 1.2%, Other 15%

Chinese (10%), Tamil (3%), “Indigenous” (3.4%), Other 20.6%

“Indigenous Cultural Communities [ICC]” 55 main groups [Ifugao, Hanunoo, Ilongot, Kalinga, Agta, Sama, Tasaday, Igorot, Bangsa Moro . . . ]

More than 200 “Scheduled Tribes” [Koli, Bhil, Gond, Dafla, Naga, Khasi, Garo, Santhal, Oraon, Munda, Juang, Khond, Savara, Chenchu, Sholega, Toda Kota, Mizo, Andamanese . . . ]

Chhettri 16.6%, Brahman-Hill 12.2%, Magar 7.1%, Tharu 6.6%, Tamang 5.8%, Newar 5%, Kami 4.8%, Muslim 4.4%, Yadav 4%, Rai 2.3%, Gurung 2%, Damai/Dholii 1.8%, Thakuri 1.6%, Limbu 1.5%, Sarki 1.4%, Teli 1.4%, Chamar/Harijan/Ram 1.3%, Koiri/ Kushwaha 1.2%, Other 19%

Lhotshampa (expelled 1990s)

Pashtuns 15.42%, Sindhis 14.1%, Saraikis 8.38%, Muhajirs 7.57%, Balochis 3.57%, Other 6.28%

Marma, Chakma, Bawm, Mru, Khumi, Lushai, Bunjugi, Pankhu, Murung . . .

Sri Lankan Tamil 11.2%, Sri Lankan Moors 9.2%, Indian Tamil 4.2%, Other 0.5%

E a s t

A s ia

S o

u th

e a s t

A s ia

S o

u th

A s ia

Major Groups

Han (91.6%) 1.19 billion

Korean (100%)

Korean (99.99%)

Japanese (99%)

Han (14%) Taiwanese (84%)

Vietnamese [Kinh] (87%)

Lao (53%)

Khmer (97.6%)

Thai (97.5%)

Burman (68%) [Bamar]

Muslim Malays (50%)

Chinese (22.6%) Indians (6.7%)

Chinese (76%) Indians (6%) Malays (15%)

Javanese (40%)

Malay (65%)

Filipino

Hindus (80%) Muslims (11%) Christian (2%) Sikh (2%)

Hindu Nepalis

Bhutanese

Punjabis (45%)

Bengali (98%)

Sinhalese (74%)

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Self-Governing People and Expansionary States

This chapter is devoted to the barbarians. From the point of view of all the ancient states, out in their hinterlands and highlands, in their wastelands and coastlines, out of reach of court centers and their submissive padi cultivators live wild people they do not understand and cannot control. These uncon- quered people have been perplexingly resistant to the civilizing process offered (or demanded of) them by expansionary states like the Han Chinese or Hindu princedoms or Cambodian temple-kingdoms. They choose to live in difficult terrain, surviving by hybrid economies of hunting, gathering, swiddening, and trade. They have no texts or writing systems, or once had and lost them; they don’t miss them. They can pick up whole villages and disappear in days. Often their women are hard-working cultivators, the men hunters and warriors as needed. They value their freedom and have almost no social hierarchy; perhaps a headman, a respected leader, but rarely anything lowland states can identify as a “chief ” unless they themselves appoint them.

Nowadays, especially since the end of World War II and the demise of the old colonial empires, these people have been captured by those old expansion- ary states newly structured as nation-states. This new kind of state is no longer a court center with a broad haphazardly controlled frontier but is a geographic entity with boundaries on maps. Where one state ends, another begins. The ter- minology has changed: the peripheral people are no longer barbarian, “raw,” “savage,” or “wild”; they are now known as minorities, ethnicities, indigenous folk. The language is kinder, yet the powers of the state are more insistent.

Who are these people? Why and how did they stay independent for so long? What is happening to them now?

Several generations of researchers, often supported by colonial powers try- ing to govern and “civilize” them, have puzzled over their close studies of local populations, attempting to make sense of received assumptions about border- land people in light of social realities they see on the ground. Are they rem- nants of ancient peoples not yet fully modernized and civilized? Are they visible forms of ancient social systems, “our ancestors” surviving into the pres- ent? Or are they something more complicated than that? These studies have been brought together in a brilliant synthesis by James C. Scott in The Art of Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia:

I argue that hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the

Chapter opener photo: Akha woman in morning.

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oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvee labor, epidemics, and warfare. . . . Virtually everything about these people’s livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more contro- versially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic position- ings designed to keep the state at arm’s length. Their physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship struc- ture, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenar- ian leaders effectively serve to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from springing up among them. The particular state that most of them have been evading has been the precocious Han-Chinese state. (2009:ix–x)

This view, and most of the studies on which it is based, requires seeing Asia (and especially Southeast Asia) in a nonstate prism and without the grid of a modern map pressed over the territory. Some researchers have given the name Zomia to that vast and rugged territory of highlands, mountains, ravines, and jungles that stretch across seven nations (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thai- land, Burma, China, and India), a territory created by the Great Collision of India and Eurasia (see chapter 1). Zomia excludes the lowlands amenable to wet-rice cultivation where “padi states” have been founded. These padi states, “little nodes of hierarchy and power,” as Scott calls them, have small court cen- ters with inordinate demands for laboring folk to work the padi fields in order to support the small elite and their ceremonial cultures. Wars were fought less

Hmong village nestled in remote hillside in Thailand.

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for territory than for laborers; captives were little more than slaves working for the padi state. There was little incentive for free people to voluntarily join these centers, since labor demands were intense, and surpluses were seized as taxes and tribute. Most of what passed for “protection” by the state’s power was no less than the demands of the state itself, or else the greed of a neighboring mini- state after the same thing: territory and cultivators. So Zomia—the distant hilly territories that padi states could not well capture or control—became areas of refuge, “shatter regions,” where free people kept as much distance as possible from the nearest expansionary state.

This is not the story that states tell themselves. Rather, states—from the Han Chinese to the Thai, the Burmese, the Vietnamese, the Cambodian, the Khmer—see themselves as civilizations, great centers of culture and civil orga- nization, vastly superior in every way to the barbarians on the periphery. Their confidence in their superiority became the rationale for seeking to civilize infe- rior peoples in the hills, a “civilizing mission” that masked the constant need to keep a vast laboring force at work, cultivating grain and sending tax and tribute to support the projects of the center. There was constant loss of labor from desertion, high death rates from disease and warfare in concentrated popula- tions, and labor needs for monumental projects such as building the Great Wall of China or building monumental palaces and temples in the soggy plains of Cambodia. “The pagoda is finished; the state is ruined” runs a Burmese prov- erb. The benefits of civilization did not appeal to the peoples of Zomia.

Nowadays in the modern nation-state, these groups are viewed as a prob- lem in various ways by the states that have at last captured them. Tribal peoples may be viewed as impediments to full national integration because they retain nonnormative customs, languages, and adaptations. Their citizenship may be in doubt if they maintain strong connections with similar communities across state borders, or if their swidden-style cultivation or pastoral nomadism requires them to move their villages frequently. They may be viewed as insuffi- ciently civilized (or even as “wild” or as “living fossils”), requiring expensive remedial action on the part of the majority society. Every modern state has devised policies to deal with these “tribals” or “minorities,” and the targeted groups have themselves responded in various ways to the kinds of attention, definitions, and policies set by central governments.

Identification of such groups, even in the gross way required to create the chart at the beginning of this chapter, is filled with difficulties. The chart itself is organized by nation-state, many of which are of recent creation. “Minorities” are not necessarily “tribal” people. The Chinese are a minority in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, yet they are by no means tribal, nor are the Indians in Singapore and Malaysia, or the Vietnamese in Cambodia. On the other hand, what is a “tribe”? A century of anthropological research has not resulted in sat- isfactory concepts, far less consensus, for identifying a “tribe.” Tribes tend to be defined by what they are not: they are not states. “A tribe is an animal without a central regulative system,” wrote Marshall Sahlins (1968) in a famous

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attempt to define and describe a particular kind of social formation, the tribe. What he meant by that was that the tribe is a simpler system than the state, which has centralized political control and a presumed monopoly on the use of force, yet the tribe is more complex than simple hunter-gatherer bands. The World Bank identified the following set of characteristics of tribal societies:

1. geographically isolated or semi-isolated;

2. unacculturated or only party acculturated into the societal norms of the dominant society;

3. nonmonetized, or only partly monetized, production largely for subsis- tence, and independent of the national economic system;

4. ethnically distinct from the national society;

5. nonliterate and without a written language;

6. linguistically distinct from the wider society;

7. identifying closely with one particular territory;

8. having an economic lifestyle largely dependent on the specific natural environment;

9. possessing indigenous political leadership, but little or no national rep- resentation, and few, if any, political rights as individuals or collectively, partly because they do not participate in the political process; and

10. having loose tenure over their traditional lands, which for the most part is not accepted by the dominant society nor accommodated by its courts, and having weak enforcement capabilities against encroachers, even when tribal areas have been delineated. (World Bank Operational Manual Statement, OMS 2.34, cited in Davis 1993; Kingsbury 1995)

Many of these groups are still trying to keep their distance from the state, while the state attempts to create a new national identity that everyone accepts, trying to suppress consciousness of ethnic difference. The nation-state seeks a patriotic, nationalist buy-in to identities like “Indian,” “Chinese,” “Singaporean,” “Indonesian” while having to monitor and placate so-called primordial identities like Han, Tibetan, Hmong, Iban, Dayak, and Chin. Special privileges benefit some identities over others; for example, Muslim Malays and other bumiputera (“sons of the soil”) in Malaysia are privileged over ethnic Chinese and Indians.

Other nations, intent on clarifying once and for all exactly who is from what tribe or ethnic group in an effort to rationalize government and to admin- ister “civilizing” or “uplifting” programs, have overclarified to the point of cre- ating identities that never exactly existed before. China, in a concerted effort of social scientific bureaucratic research, has determined there are exactly 56 eth- nic groups (minzu), no more and no less, including the Han, who are 91.5 per- cent of the population, or 1.16 billion people. Different rules apply to these minority minzu than to the Han; the one-child policy, for example, did not apply to the Miao and they were granted a form of regional autonomy under the 1984 Law on Regional Autonomy for Minority Nationalities.1

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India has identified more than 200 tribes speaking 100 languages scattered throughout the subcontinent. These are registered as “Scheduled Tribes” (there is also a list of “Scheduled Castes”) who are deemed to need protection and uplift. Perhaps they benefit from the many laws intended to protect and assist them, such as India’s version of affirmative action (actually a quota system) that reserves seats in national and state legislatures and spaces in universities for them, but most of these advantages prove to be better on paper than in real- ity. The vast majority of Scheduled Tribes are among the poorest 30 percent of the Indian population.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a new word began to be applied to tribal peoples: indigenous. Indigenous means the original population of a territory, as Native Americans are the indigenous people of the United States. The term began to be used in the late 1950s when the International Labour Organization adopted a treaty intended to protect “indigenous and tribal” populations (ILO Convention 107). The term made good sense where first applied, such as in North America and the Amazon Basin, where the indigenous people have been for ten or twelve thousand years, while the colonizing people have been there for a mere 200. It is less illuminating when applied to Asia, however. The Orang Asli may have been in Malaysia for 10,000 years, but the Malays have been there for four or five thousand. The Malay term for themselves, bumiputera, means “sons of the soil.” (See Kingsbury 1995; Barnes, Gray, and Kingsbury 1995; Keyes 1995.)

However, the term “indigenous” is likely to be with us for a long while, since it is becoming the term of choice in a number of international institu- tions, such as the World Council of Indigenous People and the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous People, and also because minority groups in Asia are mobilizing around the term.

These examples show the conceptual difficulties and the political stakes for “minorities,” “tribes,” or “indigenous people” in the modern nation-state, how- ever they are labeled. But labeling a group with an ethnic identity is not as straightforward as it may seem. Ethnicities come and go. The rest of this chap- ter attempts to account for the emergence of “ethnic” identities within the con- text of historical political conditions and then looks closely at one such group, the Hmong.

Ethnic Identity

In chapter 2 we described broad linguistic groups—dialects, languages, and language families—with very ancient origins. We hypothesized ancient “home- lands” where ancestors speaking the protolanguage must once have lived. We suggested that these languages are “related” to each other, which implies that modern speakers of them are also somehow related. We traced the spread of these families into new territories. Subgroups speaking related languages, even if these are not mutually intelligible, are often referred to as “ethnolinguistic groups.” Identification of such groups, however, has been a scientific enterprise

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associated with a modern worldview and the interests of the modern state. They may have no reality for the peoples involved unless made real by fairly recent political conditions. For example, it was a great surprise for speakers of European languages in the eighteenth century to discover they were part of a vast Indo-European language family that included languages of India and the Iranian Plateau. They never had any conceptions of unity or of sharing a com- mon history and culture, and still do not. No more so do the “Sino-Tibetans” or the “Austronesians” or the “Austroasiatics.”

There are other collective identities that are genuinely experienced, yet are patently recent, and they have a lesson for us. The nation of Singapore, for instance, has existed only since 1965. Its citizens now think of themselves as “Singaporeans,” but that is an identity that had to be consciously constructed by the purposeful effort of the state in order to transcend older and potentially divisive identities: Chinese, Indian, and Malay. Singaporeanness is explicitly taught in the public schools and promoted in sophisticated public relations campaigns such as the television music video showing a multicultural group of young people singing “One people, one nation, one Singapore. . . .” Similarly, an “Indonesian” identity emerged from a heterogeneous group of islands and peoples during the movement to gain independence from the Dutch. Likewise, an “Indian” identity emerged in the late nineteenth century as a part of the early Indian nationalist movement.

The point of these examples is that these identities have been constructed in response to particular political conditions in a particular historical period; in this case, late colonialism and the emergence of modern states throughout the region. Because the process is so recent, it is visible to us.

But surely, one might argue, many other identities are not recent at all but ancient and enduring. Some people, such as the Han Chinese, developed their collective identities many centuries ago. Just as nationalist identities were phe- nomena of the last two centuries and were constructed in traceable ways, so, too, have ethnic identities been constructed. But when, how, and why in each case is a matter for historical investigation. Yet, we are accustomed to thinking in a certain way about identities that we now refer to as “ethnic,” without real- izing how modern the phenomenon is.

The Colonial Theory of Ethnicity

During the colonial era a certain theory of ethnic groups and ethnicity emerged. This was the tribal model of ethnicity. The tribal model assumes that originally there were isolated tribes inhabiting a certain territory, speaking a common language, descended from common ancestors, sharing a common cul- ture, more or less integrated in shared social institutions, and had a characteris- tic mode of adaptation to their environment. These traditions, according to the tribal model, were passed largely unchanged from generation to generation, with the result that at the point where they first encountered outsiders who were

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motivated to describe them (typically colonial administrators, Western mission- aries, or anthropologists), their lifeways could be regarded as preserved modern specimens of ancient cultural systems. They are sadly anachronistic peoples, in this view, and probably destined for extinction. Here is a common view:

The Shendus, Pankhos, Mrus, Murangs, and Bonjugis of the Chittagong Hill Tracts are yet to receive even a peripheral contact with the civilized world. Their way of life is timeless. Their cultural configuration is still intact, the outlines still hard and sharply drawn against the contrasting background of civilization with no sign of dimming. Their religious beliefs and practices completely insulate them against the demands of modernism. Even their economy is antediluvian. (Van Schendel 1995)

After constructing this model of tribal identity, colonial administrators set about “clarifying” the model on the ground, so to speak. As new peoples were encountered, their “tribe” or ethnicity was identified (or a label was assigned), very frequently by a term applied to them by other peoples. Maps of their terri- tories were drawn up. Censuses attempted to sort everyone into one and only one ethnic category. An evolutionary model identified the social attainments of ethnic groups in relation to each other (and to the colonial society), and efforts at “uplift” aimed to educate, convert, civilize, and develop those groups held to be wanting. Political benefits accrued (or didn’t) as one was or wasn’t a mem- ber of targeted ethnicities. Finally, this model was passed on to the modern independent states that emerged from colonial control and has continued to dominate policy in the new states. And so, in a strange way, this mistaken model of ethnic identity has become real. Every Asian nation today has its identified “ethnic minorities” that are regarded as problematic in various ways and toward which governments direct special policies. Members of these desig- nated groups have gone along with it in the interest of political survival.

However, if you read carefully the writings of some observant early travel- ers in the years before the model was fully developed, a different picture emerges. In the 1790s, at the very beginning of British control in India, Francis Buchanan traveled in the Chittagong Hills of what is now eastern Bangladesh (where Sendos and Pankhos were said to await contact with the “civilized world”). He described a complex ethnic situation in which there were villages inhabited by swidden cultivators belonging to different language groups. There were other villages consisting of a dominant group of one ethnicity together with their debt peons from different groups, and villages where leaders had ser- vants from several other groups. There were chiefs who collected tribute from households belonging to an amalgam of ethnic groups. Because of their style of agriculture (swidden) and because of raids and warfare, all groups were contin- ually on the move. There was no question of isolated “tribes” living in distinct territories, but instead there were a number of different patterns of multiethnic integration (Van Schendel 1995). In other words, the isolated, autonomous, and self-conscious “tribe” of the classical model was a rare phenomenon, not just in the Chittagong Hills, but throughout most of Asia.

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Moreover, there are long-term processes by which people change from one ethnicity to another. The 1.16 billion Han Chinese did not achieve those num- bers solely by outreproducing the other 55 ethnic groups. Over centuries, peo- ples from other groups have deliberately “Han-ified” themselves as a self- conscious strategy to raise their status and local influence by taking on the cul- tural practices of the dominant ethnic group of the Chinese state. This process of assimilation or acculturation is sometimes encouraged by the state and sometimes resisted by it. An example of the latter is the stigmatized boat peo- ple of Guangdong Province, who were required to register as non-Han “Dan” people. There was tremendous social pressure against any effort to pass oneself off as Han, yet many tried to do just that. The 1561 Records of Guangdong Prov- ince gives a typical characterization of the Dan boat people:

The Dan people are peculiar in that people of the same surname inter- marry, in that they do not wear hats or shoes, and are foolish, illiterate, and ignorant of their ages. . . . In recent years, those who live in the center of Guangdong are beginning to learn to read. [Some] have moved ashore and, having attached themselves to registered households, are themselves regis- tered in the same way as commoners. There are even some who have suc- ceeded in the examinations. (Ye Xian’en 1995)

In other words, through accumulating wealth, investing in land, and acquiring an education, some were beginning to turn themselves into Han. But this effort was not always successful, and there are records of ex-Dan being convicted and punished for falsely claiming to be Han.

On the other hand, the state often puts considerable pressure on people to assimilate to the dominant culture. The 1945 constitution of Indonesia describes the 1.5 million tribespeople on their 13,000 islands as having “social life, economic performance and level of civilization below acceptable stan- dards” (Burger 1987:142). The state views its mission as bringing these people up to acceptable standards. The dominant center of Indonesian power is Java, where 141 million people, or 57 percent of the entire population, live on 7 per- cent of the land. People on other islands have their own distinct cultures. It was only the Dutch Empire that gave legitimacy to Indonesia and established dom- inance from Java. Official Indonesian policy insists that the many distinct eth- nic groups are one political, economic, cultural, and defense unit. The state actively promotes “transmigration” to resettle Javanese in other areas, such as in Irian Jaya, the western half of New Guinea. The population of Irian Jaya is Melanesian, having vastly more in common linguistically, culturally, and his- torically with people on the eastern half of the island in the independent state of Papua New Guinea than they have ever had with the Javanese.

China even in prerepublican and prerevolutionary times had a similar viewpoint, as Stevan Harrell writes:

That the attitude of the late Imperial (Ming and Qing) Chinese state toward its peripheral peoples can be characterized as a civilizing project, we have

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no doubt. From the standpoint of the Confucian worldview, civilization was characterized by wenhua, which refers to the molding of the person (and by extension the community to which the person belongs) by training in the philosophical, moral, and ritual principles considered to constitute virtue. . . . It follows that there was a scale of civilizedness, with the most civilized being those who had the greatest acquaintance with the relevant literary works, namely the scholar-officials who served the imperial state and who served as theoreticians of the moral order. Other Chinese were somewhat cultured; their family life, religion, language, and other attributes were similar to those of the literati, even if they had no refinement or direct knowledge of the important literature. Non-Chinese were a step down, being not even indirectly acquainted with the moral principles laid out in the classics. . . . This moral scale of peoples fits in nicely with the continu- ing historical process of absorption of once-peripheral peoples into the broader category of Zhongguo ren (people of the central country), or Chi- nese. We know that ever since the southward expansion of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), regions had been sinified by a combination of Chi- nese migration, intermarriage, and cultural assimilation of the former natives. (Harrell 1995:19)

The lesson is that there is nothing “essential,” eternal, or primordial about ethnic identities. These identities come and go; they can be created where none existed before. They can be constructed internally by a people who have cause to begin imagining themselves as “one people,” or they can be assigned from the outside by people bent on differentiating “them” from “us.” Given suffi- cient motivation and resources, one ethnicity can be shed in favor of another. Yet when anthropologist Edmund Leach suggested that ethnic identity can change easily according to the dictates of economic and political circum- stances, another anthropologist, William Geddes, repudiated this as a danger- ous view with no scientific backing that would be attractive to “proselytizers and administrators of every faith and political persuasion” (Geddes 1976:11). Geddes was concerned that this argument was in the interest of dominant groups whose efforts at state building would assimilate the Hmong and eradi- cate their culture. Invariably issues of power underlie issues of ethnicity.

Hmong: A Case Study

Jou Yee Xiong lives in the United States. Though his Hmong ancestors lived lightly on their dry hillsides, prepared to move every five or ten years as necessary, depending on the productivity of fields, the distance needed to walk to reach them, or their relations with neighbors, no one could have imagined reaching such a distant land. His ancestors two centuries earlier had lived in southern China. But they had fought against the Chinese, losing many men to Chinese prisons and death, and so they followed their clan leaders southward, into the hills of Laos in French colonial Indochine. As Jou Yee Xiong tells his story, “The French asked the Hmong, ‘Why are you always fighting?’ The

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Hmong responded it was because they were not allowed to rule themselves. So the French gave them control of the region where many Hmong lived” (Fang et al. 1994).

Jou Yee Xiong was a proud highland cultivator who believed that Hmong who went to the lowlands got sick from lowland diseases brought on by the Lao people working black magic against them. They were safe but poor in the mountains, where people shared tools to prepare their fields for planting, hunted wild boar for meat, and raised opium poppies for the cash they needed to pay taxes to the French. Lowland Lao merchants would buy their opium with cash or with sugarcane. They grew hemp for the fiber to make their own clothes, which the women embroidered for the big New Years’ celebrations. Many of them went barefoot to work in the fields and even to hunt.

Then the Americans came. Some of the greatest Hmong leaders, Vang Pao and Touby Lyfong, allied with the Americans against the Red Laotians—the Communist Pathet Lao. Vang Pao came to his village to raise fighters to help the Americans build a base and an airstrip. Jou Yee Xiong joined this effort for a time but eventually pleaded to be allowed to return to his family to build a new village on the edge of the jungle. For 10 years they built new fields, learned how to talk to the buffaloes to induce them to plow the fields, grew rice, sugar- cane, and pineapples, and prospered. But then in 1975 the war ended and Gen- eral Vang Pao had to leave the country with the Americans, and Jou Yee Xiong and his family had to go as well, because there was no one left to protect them. Vang Pao warned them they had one month to get out; after that, it would be too late. Jou Yee Xiong was in charge of 60 families who left everything behind them, walking to Thailand for 28 days. After months in refugee camps, he and his family finally got papers to come to America. He has grown old in Santa Barbara, California.

Of all the nonstate people living in the rugged highlands of East and South- east Asia, the most widely traveled are the Hmong. For several thousand years they were known to the Chinese as Miao, limited to the upland areas of China where they had a reputation for being unruly and fierce fighters, resisting and often enough harassing various Chinese dynasties attempting to pacify their hinterlands. There were fierce rebellions in southern China in the eighteenth century in which Jou Yee Xiong’s ancestors fought, following which they began moving southward into areas controlled by lowland padi states that became Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. There they adapted to new forest and highland ecologies with swiddening and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cash crops like opium.

During the Vietnam War the CIA hired thousands of Hmong men to fight in the covert war in Laos, employing them in tracking, intercepting convoys along jungle paths, and protecting mountain airstrips. At the end of the war, these Laotian Hmong fled for their lives to refugee camps in Cambodia, and eventually thousands resettled in the United States, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Germany.

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The Hmong retain their ethnic identity as Hmong despite the very different societies in which they now live. In the Western nations where many have set- tled since the late 1970s, many Hmong have acquired university degrees and become successful middle-class professionals and businessmen. They have not had similar opportunities in Vietnam, where they are among the very poorest of the 53 national minorities (Taylor 2008; Luong and Nieke 2013), or in Laos, where the few thousand remaining Hmong are hiding in jungle camps from a Communist government still trying to dislodge them (Fuller 2007; Unrepre- sented Nations and Peoples Organization 2016).

In this section, we look at the Hmong/Miao from the perspective of their different situations in five Asian nations: China, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. Inevitably we will have most to say about the Hmong in Thai- land. This is because they are best known to scholars, who have been allowed access to the Thai uplands for decades. Other nations have been secretive and closed. The Communist governments of China, Laos, and Vietnam do not want outsiders learning about their minority populations; in the Myanmar hills, chronic rebellion by hill tribes such as the Chin, Kachin, and Karen have kept these areas out of bounds as well. But the story starts with the Miao in China.

Who Are the Miao?

The story of the Hmong really begins in China. Hmong have not lived in the hills of Southeast Asia longer than a few hundred years at most, but in southern China there are at present some ten million people classified as Miao. Older books on the Hmong of Thailand refer to them as Miao or Meo. “Miao” is not an ethnonym (the term that a people use for themselves), but the term that the Chinese have used for several thousand years to refer to the many non- Han groups in Southwest China belonging to the linguistic subfamily (Miao- Yao). The Miao comprise a large number of smaller ethnic groups, including the Hmong. These languages are not mutually intelligible, and even among the Hmong there are dialect differences.

The Chinese character that is read as “Miao” is a compound of the character for “plants” and for “fields” (see figure 4.1). This sug- gests a meaning of “sprouts” or “seedlings” or even “weeds,” sug- gesting “wild uncultivated tribes.” Indeed, miao was an ancient cate- gory appearing in very early Chinese histories compiled by Sima Qian (145–190 B.C.E.). These refer to a Miao kingdom existing around the third century B.C.E., which sounds specific enough, although miao was used more generically, along with man and yi, to mean “barbarians,” especially with reference to peoples liv- ing in the southwestern frontier of the expanding Chinese Empire. (What the “barbarians” called themselves at that time we have no way of knowing.)

Figure 4.1 Miao—The upper radical means plant, the lower means field.

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These people, who did not have systems of writing, who did not know the Confucian texts, and who were not centrally organized, were viewed by the Han Chinese as lacking civilization and even culture. For the Chinese, literacy was the key trait of civilization. If people could read, then they could read the texts of Confucius and other scholars, and this would transform them into civi- lized, virtuous people. The Chinese word for culture, wenhua, is also the word for writing, suggesting “literary transformation,” something like “the molding of the person by training in the philosophical, moral, and ritual principles which constitute virtue” in the Confucian system (Harrell 1995). Chinese descriptions of tribal people invariably mention—disparagingly—use of knots on string and notches on wood to record facts and numbers; what could be more “uncivilized” than that? The Chinese saw it as their civilizing mission to bring Chinese control, and with it Chinese culture, to them. You can see this rationale in Chinese gazetteers of late Ming and Qing times that attempted to classify different types of barbarians in the Yunnan-Guizhou area. One such classification distinguished Sheng Miao from Shu Miao—literally, “Raw Miao” and “Cooked Miao.” “Raw” seems to have meant unassimilated Miao resisting pacification and state control, while Miao who were more sinicized were “cooked.” (The Miao had a word for the Han Chinese, too: sua, which means “strange.”)

As the Chinese state was pursuing an active policy of conquest and pacifi- cation in southwestern China during the early eighteenth century, they met great resistance from the Miao, an episode that has become known as the “Miao Rebellions.” This resistance lasted into the nineteenth century and is what prompted migration of many Miao into Vietnam and Laos. This political effort of pacification was accompanied by renewed efforts to classify and describe the local populations in a series of publications known as the “Miao Albums,” which consisted of paintings or block prints with descriptive texts that tended to highlight the loveliness of the women—though of easy sexuality and provocative dress—and the aggressiveness of the men. For instance, the Hei Sheng Miao are described as treacherous and aggressive people who were conquered once and for all in 1736 but only after half of them were killed a decade earlier.

The process of bringing the southern regions under state control involved moving more and more Han Chinese into the area as administrators and settlers and also “using barbarians to control barbarians.” Some Miao (presumably of the “cooked” variety) were appointed as local officials (tu-si) over their own peo- ple, with responsibility for collecting and presenting annual tribute to the Chi- nese court. In the late nineteenth century a Miao became viceroy of Yunnan, and in the 1930s a Miao was the military governor of Yunnan Province.

Ethnology became a recognized social science in China in the first part of the twentieth century as an arm of government policies of assimilation and control. The Miao were described as of a low cultural level, their religious beliefs viewed as mere superstitions, and there was little effort to understand or

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convey the Miao worldview or its social organization—that is, Miao culture as it was lived by the Miao people themselves. The main effort was on classifying the various kinds of Miao, often on the basis of characteristics of Miao women’s clothing (Blue, White, Flowery, Black, Red, etc.), using categories the Miao themselves use to describe their own subgroups. As a result of this approach, their divisions and subdivisions across a number of provinces bal- looned into the hundreds.

Things changed after the Communist revolution. With a theory of cultural evolution based on Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, the People’s Repub- lic authorized an immense effort of scientific research that would identify the “nationalities” of China (using the Chinese form, minzu, of the Russian nation- alnosti) and rank them on a scale from primitive to slave to feudal to capitalist to socialist. Ironically, communal land use qualified a person as primitive, not socialist, if the person was not a collectivized Han farmer. The great diversity of the Miao that had perplexed social scientists in the first half of the century was now collapsed in a theory that all Miao were part of one ancient ethnic category and that any regional differences that appeared among them were recent divergences from an ancient common pattern. This view takes it as set- tled truth that their original homeland was somewhere between the Yellow River and the Yangzi River, from where they wandered south and west to their present locations.

Miao women in Fenghuang, China, wearing silver headgear for a local festival. The Miao in China are now an official “nationality” whose more colorful customs are encouraged, although they are still considered inadequately modernized.

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Descriptions of the Miao in China continue to emphasize their colorful customs and their differences from the Han and encourage maintenance of some, but not other, practices. Miao religious practices are summed up and dis- missed as worshipping spirits, ancestors, and ghosts and wasting lots of money on ceremonies. Yet their music, dance, and costumes can be encouraged, if they are not set in a religious context and if they make a good show for televi- sion, as proof that the cultures of the minorities are respected.

Hmong in Thailand

After uprisings among the minorities of southern China in 1698, 1732, 1794, and 1855, “Miao scattered in all directions” (Culas and Micraud 1997), above all southward into the high mountains of Southeast Asia. As we have seen, this is difficult terrain consisting of deep clefts between fast-moving mountain streams, mist-hidden peaks and ridges, and steep slopes that the armies of the Han Chinese and the valley padi kingdoms could not reach. Here groups like the Hmong were safe to practice hill rice cultivation, hunting, trade across upland paths, and cash cropping of opium, free from oppressive states. Jou Yee Xiong’s ancestors probably arrived after the 1855 rebellions. The Hmong settlements moved across the northern hills of Vietnam, into Laos, and later into northern Thailand. Some of these Thai Hmong settlements were founded as recently as the 1970s, including the village of Chengmengmai described later in this chapter, whose settlers crossed over from Laos as the Vietnam War was winding down.

The Hmong do use color terms to designate their various subgroups, as Chinese ethnologists noted and puzzled over a century ago. Modern scholars are also not sure why color terms are used, but it seems to be an ancient prac- tice (and groups other than the Hmong also use color terms for their sub- groups). Almost all the Hmong in Thailand are members of either the White Hmong (Hmong Glor) or the Blue Hmong (Hmong Njua) (who are known as the Green Hmong in the United States). There are linguistic differences between the two groups, although the dialects are mutually comprehensible. Again, women’s clothing is diagnostic: Blue Hmong women wear short skirts woven of hemp that are deeply pleated and have a light blue batik pattern on indigo. White Hmong women sometimes wear a white skirt (hence their name), but most of the time they wear dark trousers with a long embroidered sash that hangs down the front and back.

There can be no doubt that today the Hmong of Thailand consider them- selves one ethnic category distinct from other groups, whose villages are inter- spersed with theirs. Hmong villages may share a hillside with Karen or Akha or Lahu villages, the best land in the possession of whoever got there first. The sense of common identity among Hmong is not expressed in territoriality or in any kind of political organization at a level higher than that of the village, although everyone has kinship ties with people in other villages, and the clans also cut across village boundaries.

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There are several good studies of Hmong villages, notably a study of two Blue Hmong villages, Pasamliem and Meto, by William Geddes (1976), and of the White Hmong village of Nomya, by Nicholas Tapp (1989). In addition, the photos in this chapter are from the White Hmong village of Chengmengmai, where one author (Heinz) spent a short time in 1987.

When it comes to transliterating Hmong names and words, some authors use the Barney-Smalley system, devised specifically for Hmong. It uses Roman characters but expresses Hmong tones by adding a letter to the end of each word that should not be pronounced as a consonant but instead indicates the tone for the whole word. So “Hmoob” is pronounced “Hmong” in a high tone, Vaj is Vang, and so on. For Hmong speakers, this system is not confusing since none of their words end in consonants anyway, but because it is highly disori- enting for non-Hmong readers who are not specialists in the Hmong language, I will transliterate Hmong words in a way closer to their actual pronunciation for English speakers, ignoring tones altogether.

The Transitory Community

A Hmong village is a comfortable array of thatch and bamboo houses fre- quently situated in a horseshoe pattern on the highest hillside available to them, at least 3,000 feet in altitude, but four or five thousand if possible. At these elevations, mornings are cool, often beginning with a still mist, thickened by smoke from cooking fires, which burns away after a few hours. Even in the heat of the day the temperatures will be 10 degrees cooler than on the plains where the Thai live. The first sounds of the morning are rooster calls and rice pounders shaped like teeter-totters hammering out the rice for the day. Women rise early to get at the work that fills their long days, but in moments of leisure they will sit just outside their doorways at work on embroidering the new clothes for the New Year festival with a child or two playing nearby.

There are clues to the transitoriness of a Hmong village if you look around. The houses are airy and spacious structures built directly on swept earth with walls of split bamboo and thatched roofs. These are easily packed up and moved. At Chengmengmai all the fruit trees planted around homesteads were younger than five years, and the nearest fields visible from village doorways were already in fallow. People were having to walk a long way to their fields. Chaitong, the shaman, had a four-hour walk to the four rai (1.6 acres) he culti- vates with his two wives. As the soil near the village wears out and it becomes a day’s walk just to reach your fields, you begin to think about packing up and moving to where your fields are.

This simple calculation lies behind the famous mobility of swidden cultiva- tors everywhere. The Hmong are often said to be the most mobile of the hill tribes of Thailand, but the same issues face all of them. In 1965 the village of Meto studied by Geddes had a total population of 570. It had been pioneered in 1961 by four men of Tang clan and six men of Jang clan. When Geddes returned for a brief visit in mid-1966, not a single house remained. By 1970, the

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area of Meto had become “just another jungle valley with few signs of its for- mer habitation.” Where did they go? Almost all the planting area had shifted to the northeast, five or six kilometers away. People had begun building field huts, then improving them until they became like second homes, while they spent less and less time in the village. Eventually the final step was to abandon the original village and move out to the newly developing area. In the process, however, only some members of the old village reassembled at the new one. Others went off in other directions, forming new communities elsewhere.

The great problem of the last few decades, however, is finding new land that is not already in the control of another group. There is virtually no virgin forest left, and population growth in the hills means that there are already claims on almost all the land. The result is that people at Chengmengmai were beginning to talk about terracing their hillsides so they could turn to the wet- rice cultivation practiced in the valleys that enables one to go on using the same land practically forever. But terraces are expensive to build and maintain, and they would need a dam in order to channel the water, which they were looking to the government to build.

Hmong tend to idealize the lowlanders’ wet-rice system, viewing it as an easier life than their own life in the hills, but most of the evidence suggests they are wrong. A compilation of studies on the labor expenditures by foragers, swiddeners, and intensive (plow) agriculturists suggests that in the sort of inten- sive cultivation required by the wet-rice method, Hmong labor investment will radically increase (Ember 1983).

Anthropologist Edmund Leach (1964) described the keen admiration that British administrators had for the terraces of the upland Burmese during the early days of British control. It seemed like a highly efficient utilization of land, and they encouraged the highland peoples to extend the practice. But the more encouragement given by the British and the more political conditions became settled so that agriculture could proceed peacefully, the fewer new terraces went in. Gradually, in fact, people began dissolving back into the forest, return- ing to ancient methods of swidden cultivation. The explanation proved simple and logical. Terrace cultivation was so expensive and so labor intensive that only certain kinds of conditions forced people to it. One of these was chronic

Average Men Women

foragers 14 swiddeners 41 36 46 intensive cultivators 70 63 75

Figure 4.2 Hours worked per week

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warfare, which forced people to cluster around local warlords for protection. Another was the presence of certain trade routes through high passes where warlords could sit and play robber baron, forcing Chinese, Indian, and Bur- mese merchants to pay fees for safe passage. When the British put an end to both warlordism and robber baron games, the incentive to keep up the terraces was gone.

Today, however, there are new incentives: population growth in the Thai hills. Therefore, swidden cultivators are again talking about building terraces, and in the more prosperous villages, Hmong and others, one will see a few acres of terraces being put in by farsighted cultivators.

Adaptation and Response: Opium

Hmong and other hill tribes are having to adapt to conditions of overpopu- lation in the hills, just as they have adapted to changed circumstances in the past. This kind of flexibility is nothing new, despite the popular misconception about the “timelessness” of tribal societies and the antiquity of their lifestyles. Opium cultivation is another example of responding to new opportunities.

In the late eighteenth century, extensive opium use began in China. Arab traders had brought it to China in the seventh century for use as a medicine, and for centuries it was mixed in various concoctions for a variety of ailments and used as a sedative prior to surgery. But it was not smoked until the seven- teenth century when the Dutch introduced tobacco smoking from Java, and people soon thought of mixing a little opium in the tobacco for a stronger impact. It is not easy to smoke opium by itself, but gradually the tobacco was omitted as a way was devised to smoke opium by melting little bits over a flame and rapidly inhaling it.

The trade in opium in the eighteenth century was almost entirely in the hands of foreigners. The East India Company grew it in their colony in India and brought it to China to trade for silk, tea, porcelains, and other products desired in Europe (see chapter 12). China soon had a tremendous opium addic- tion problem, provoking the Opium Wars of 1840–1842 with England. The wars resulted in humiliation for China and the opening of the country to as much opium as European traders could bring in, thus feeding the new addic- tion problem and draining China’s wealth. In response, China began encourag- ing local production of opium. Suddenly there was a new cash crop opportunity for groups like the Hmong/Miao of China, many of whom already lived at altitudes above the 3,000-foot level where Papaver somniferum thrives. Chinese opium was not as high in morphine content as Indian opium, but it was cheaper and there was soon a large market for it.

For the Hmong, opium became a crop as important as padi. Padi provided subsistence needs and opium provided cash. Both were essential, and the trick was to strike the right balance of the two. Padi does best between 2,000 and 3,500 feet; higher than that, it is a little too cool for padi at its best. Poppy does progressively better from 3,000 to 5,000 feet. It likes cold weather and a gentle

The village’s most important shaman, Chaitong, is addicted to opium. It is legal for him to grow enough to meet his needs—about 10 pipes a day. He cuts the raw opium with aspirin and heats it in a tin spoon over an open flame. He then puts it into the pipe to smoke.

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rain as it is maturing. But the rain should stop about the time the petals begin to fall so the seed heads remain dry and the latex sticks to the heads when they are tapped. Poppies can grow in the same field for 10 years before the soil becomes exhausted, while padi fields need 10 years of fallow after only two or three years of use. It would seem to make sense to plant a field in rice, then shift to poppies after two years, but this is difficult because rice, being a kind of grass, is almost impossible to clear away sufficiently to allow room for the pop- pies to grow. The solution, when clearing a new area for cultivation, is to select some fields for rice, and others (higher up) for poppies. Maize is planted first in the poppy fields to keep them weed-free, then about August or September pop- pies are planted among the maize and harvested in December or January. This gives a bonus of maize, which is fed to pigs, important in the ceremonial life of the Hmong, and can be eaten or sold. Thus, a poppy economy is actually a poppy-pigs-maize complex.

At harvest time, after the petals have fallen, the seed heads of the poppies are tapped. This is highly labor-intensive work, as each head has to be handled twice. A special three-bladed knife is made by binding together three blades at different angles so each blade will cut a different depth into the seed-head to tap a different layer of the sap. After the first stroke, the sap immediately begins to ooze, quickly congealing along the gashes of the head. Four hours later, when the sap is viscous and amber-colored, it can be scraped off with a flat iron blade and wrapped in poppy petals. There can be as many as 30 heads to a plant, though the average is seven or eight. Though each poppy is only tapped once, workers go over each field many times to be sure they have it all.

Efforts to study opium production have been hindered by an understand- able tendency on the part of cultivators to underreport production and earn- ings. Nevertheless, the Thai government estimates 3.25 kg of raw opium per acre is an average for all producers. Some groups, such as the Mien, tap the poppy heads several times and get much higher yields, perhaps as much as 10 kg per acre. Using the lower figure, together with data on the amount of land actually under poppy production, Geddes calculated during the time of his fieldwork (1965–1966) that the 71 Hmong households of Meto village pro- duced 1.3 metric tons of opium. The total value was $59,880, or $843 per household. The richest household, the headman’s large extended family of 20 persons, earned $2,968. The Hmong were viewed as richer than other tribes, even richer than nearby Thai farm families whose average annual income from crops other than opium was $155.

The opium trade went through somersaults during the last century as entrepreneurs in and out of government, tribal brokers, and assorted drug lords waxed and waned in the “politics of heroin” (McCoy 2003). Chinese warlords during the struggle against the Communists in the 1930s and 1940s maintained their armies with opium wealth. The rural physician, Wu Lien-teh, wrote: “I often saw mile upon mile of land covered with multicolored poppy plants in Manchuria, Shansi, Shensi, Jehol, Fukien, Yunnan, and Szechuan, from

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which the various war-lords hoped to derive needed revenue for maintaining their troops” (Wu Lien-teh 1959:492). Chinese warlords were not the only mil- itary interests supporting themselves with opium in the last century. While China fairly successfully halted opium cultivation after the 1949 revolution, France was establishing an opium monopoly over poppy production in Laos and cultivating a Hmong leader, Touby Lyfoung, as their opium broker. When heroin addiction spread like a plague among American GIs during the Viet- nam War, the demand was supplied by narcotics rings with excellent connec- tions in the South Vietnamese government.

Ancient Indians knew Southeast Asia as suvarnabhumi, the “land of gold,” but when Myanmar, Laos, and northern Thailand are called “The Golden Tri- angle” it isn’t with precious metal in mind. The 1960s through the 1990s were boom years in opium and heroin production in the Golden Triangle, when the region was the world’s leading opium producer. However, the Thai government made a great effort to stop opium production in Thailand, seeking alternative cash crops for hill tribes like the Hmong. Coffee and rubber are more lucrative, although they take three to seven years to yield a harvest. Food crops like cab- bage, tomatoes, potatoes, ginger, and onions are easier to grow and quicker to yield a crop but are not as lucrative as opium. Still, these efforts largely brought an end to opium production in Thailand. By 2005, Thailand and Laos claimed to be opium free, and Myanmar’s harvests had fallen by more than 50 percent.

However, opium is having a comeback in the new century. New UN reports indicate Myanmar produced 893 tons of opium in 2013, 22 percent more than in 2005, and Laos’s production increased by 50 percent (UNODC 2015). Only Afghanistan produces more. Most of this opium is processed into heroin and goes to China, where addiction is again becoming a problem among the new middle professional classes. (Heroin in the United States mostly comes from Latin America and the drug cartels.)

Fathers and Sons

Elsewhere in much of Asia, it is land that holds fathers and sons together in kinship units. A family’s wealth, congealed in a single piece of earth, passed from father to son, often for generations, uniting them in common cause, is their means of survival and their defense against impoverishment. But the Hmong do not own land in this sense. The claim a father has on his son is not a piece of land to pass to him. Communities come and go, and sons could read- ily strike out in search of their own new fields, and sometimes do. More gener- ally, however, it is the case that fathers and sons work and live in close proximity. If not land, then what binds them together?

The bond between father and son transcends death, and this is the organiz- ing principle of social life. The father’s welfare in the afterlife depends on how his sons bury him and attend to his needs through ancestor worship. His sons’ welfare in life depends on the father’s well-being in the afterlife, for he will be in a position to send them good fortune or misfortune. A critical moment in this

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transdeath relationship is when the time comes for the son to bury his father. The headman of Nomya village attributed his good fortune in having four sons and only one daughter to the favorable alignment of his father’s grave. Another villager was less fortunate because a small peak between two mountains made his father’s grave less auspicious. The energy of the earth is conceptualized as a great dragon that lies beneath the crest of the highest mountain chains that form its spine. Parallel hills to left and right are male (left) and female (right). In order to reach the place from which rebirth occurs, the deceased must be buried in the late afternoon (which is the morning of the spirits) in such a place where it can catch the “dragon veins” before the dragon flies out at night, and so ride it to the otherworld. This place would be on the crest of the highest hills where the parallel male hills to the left are higher than the female hills to the right. Such a burial will favor the living sons and the continuity of the family. His head should be turned away from the sunrise so he can watch over their welfare without being blinded by light.

This unseverable bond between father and son is the basis of the house- hold, the village, and the clan, a principle often called “patrilineal” by anthro- pologists. Patrilineality can mean a great many things, however, and we will want to look closely at how it works among the Hmong.

The household is the primary work unit of Hmong society. Production of padi is to meet the needs of this family. There are no other production units in the society—no village-level production, no clan-level production, no private businesses that are not household based. Households hold the fields they work in common, husband and wife working side by side, with the children also con- tributing, for their work, too, is of economic value.

Above the household, the most important units within the village are the clans. Hmong say there are about 12 Hmong clans, but in any particular village there will be only four or five. Among the 106 households at Chengmengmai, 51 were members of Yang clan, 21 were Li, 18 were Thao, 15 were Ma, and one was Xiong. The numerical strength of the clans has important political conse- quences for the village, since generally the headman will be from the largest clan. These clans are patrilineal in the sense that one is a member of one’s father’s clan, while women change their clan identities at marriage, and at death women are among the clan ancestors who are worshipped by their living descendants.

These clans are not territorial or localized but are dispersed among the vil- lages of the Hmong people. There is no “apical” or founding ancestor, no heredi- tary clan headman or senior and junior lines, and no genealogies are remembered that would attempt to account for each person’s exact tie to everyone else. The clans have sometimes been called “surname groups” because that is the extent of their social organization. According to Geddes (1976:57), “We may define clans and their sub-divisions as essentially religious associations conferring rights of community upon their members through the spiritual bonds between them.”

A myth told by the headman of Chengmengmai accounts for the origins of the clans. The importance of this myth is apparent from the fact that Geddes

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and Tapp each record several versions of it that were told to them. Here is the Chengmengmai version:

There was a family who on the first day cleared a field; next day they went to check the work. The field had returned to its original state. So they cleared again. On the third day, the same thing happened. Next day, it all happened again. Then a messenger named Phya Eng appeared to them. He spoke to the youngest brother and said the world would be inundated by a great flood, so it was useless to be clearing the field. He was instructed to find a giant gourd and make a hole large enough for himself and one younger sister to get inside; he must do it by the 15th day of the 9th moon (i.e., the full moon). The rains began and they went in the gourd, closing it off, and bobbed away. Three days and nights rains flooded the world. At the end the water level dropped and they landed on ground. The flood had killed all human life. Procreation was now impossible. Phya Eng reappeared and told the brother and sister that they must take each other in marriage and produce offspring. They said they must not do this, as they were brother and sister, but he promised proof that it was right to do this. One of them took a needle up one side of the mountain, and the other took a thread up the other side and threw it down the hill. If it landed threaded, it was evi- dence that they should marry. So they did it, and it turned out as Phya Eng predicted; it was threaded. The couple begged for further evidence. They resisted marrying each other. Phya Eng told them to each take one part of a rice mill and do the same thing from the mountain top. If it lands with the right part on top of the other part, this is evidence that their marriage is proper. And this time again it worked as he said. So they married and after a year the sister became pregnant. When she gave birth, it was not a baby; it was a round mound of green flesh. So Phya Eng was again consulted. He said, no problem; you build a number of small houses. He took the green ball and cut it into many pieces and put them into each house. Quickly they turned into human beings. Each piece became a couple, and these couples were then given the many surnames of the Hmong people.

As a member of a particular clan, your advantages are a sense of relation- ship and thus rights as kinsmen wherever you meet. “Mere possession of a common name is enough to ensure a friendly reception among people who would otherwise be strangers.” If you migrate to a village where members of your clan are already settled, you can expect help from them in settling in. They will give you a field to get you started, and probably feed you until you can survive on your own.

The nature of the clan as a religious association is most apparent at death. A person cannot be allowed to die in the house of someone of a different clan, so in an emergency any clansman may be called on to accept someone to die in his house. It is village clansmen who conduct the many expensive and pro- tracted ceremonies associated with death and burial. When a man dies, the head of household selects two men, one from the clan of the deceased and one from the clan of the deceased’s wife, to organize the mortuary rites. The corpse

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will be buried in the late afternoon on an auspicious day, three to ten days later. In the meantime, many tasks must be accomplished. Chandarsi (1976) describes tasks that are assigned to relatives: preparation of the body; inform- ing relatives in distant villages of his death; preparing enough food to feed the many people who will come for as long as they stay; feeding the dead man himself three times a day; firing three shots from a gun every time he is fed; blowing the pipes and beating the death; making a coffin; obtaining the chick- ens, pigs, and oxen that will be offered; settling the dead man’s debts; and selecting the burial site. These tasks are the work of his clan and of people from other clans who are related to him by marriage. The splendor of a man’s mortu- ary rite is testimony to his greatness in life and of his family’s devotion to him. This message is aimed not only at the living community but at the deceased himself, who must be made willing to depart by provision of everything he needs for the journey to the place of his ancestors. Otherwise, disappointed and ashamed, he may stay around and cause trouble for the living, who will only have to go to great expense later on to find the causes, and then make the offer- ings necessary to induce the ghost to depart satisfied.

On the day of death the corpse is washed by the immediate family, dressed in new clothes, and laid out on a stretcher inside the house, with his head toward the main stove. At his head lies a chicken that has been killed by twist- ing its neck. It will accompany him to the next world. Food, a crossbow, and sword are laid nearby for the journey.

A long chant known as tergi helps the deceased realize that he has died and serves as a kind of verbal map for his journey. It describes the way through the spirit world that the deceased must follow, offering advice on how to prevent being waylaid and what to do upon arrival at the place of the ancestors. It also teaches the living about the nature of the afterlife.

Tergi begins by expressing the sorrow of the chanter who came to the great stove at the dead man’s house and did not find him alive, as in the past, but dead. The chant describes the preparations the family has made for the body. They’ve made a basket for cooking sticky rice, constructed a stretcher to carry him to the grave, killed a chicken (or a dog) to be his companion (“when you eat this chicken you should go with it”), covered his face with a red cloth so he will not be ashamed of being dead in front of others, put on shoes for the jour- ney, and provided a thousand rupees for his expenses (paper money is burned).

Thus provisioned, next he should go to the village where he was born to retrieve his placenta from under the main house post where it was buried on the day of his birth. This is his clothing to be worn in the next world. After nine days’ journey, he will come to two gates. He is instructed what to say to the guards in order to be allowed through. Then he will come to villages where Hmong are enjoying normal life. There will be man-eating stones and a tree with eight branches, nine roots, and nine eyes. He should drink the milk of the tree and call it mother and father to make all the sickness of his body disappear. At a third gate he will be asked how he wants to be reborn. A little further is a

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three-way junction; he should take the middle path that leads to a big river that he must cross. His new parents live just on the other side. That is his destination.

A dramatic feature of every Hmong funeral is the killing of one or more oxen for the mortuary feast, and the splendor of a funeral will be determined in large part by the number of oxen killed and the number of people fed. This is one of the reasons a man wants many children and many wives. An ox must be pro- vided by each of his wives, one ox must come from each of his married sons, and each of his married daughters should contribute to the purchase of a single ox. Other relatives contribute a pig, rice, paper money, alcohol, and incense. On the day before the burial, these people arrive at his house with these gifts, firing a gun twice to announce their arrival. The household fires twice in welcome, and pipes are blown as the large party enters the house. In the evening, all these relatives tell the deceased what they have given him and wish him well on his journey.

On the morning of the burial day, the body is finally carried out of the house and placed in the coffin. Strings tie each of the gift-oxen to the corpse, which the dead man is asked to accept. The oxen are then killed with axe blows to the head, and the internal organs cut out and cooked for a morning meal. The oxen are divided up and distributed according to formula to everyone who has played a role in the funeral rites.

Carrying the corpse to the selected burial site can be a dangerous prospect. The location will generally be a great distance away, on the crest of a hill, selected by geomancy in the process described earlier. There is never such a thing as a Hmong cemetery, for even two bodies buried nearby may quarrel over the land, which becomes their “fields” in the afterlife. The real danger, however, is that the souls of the funeral party may try to follow the soul of the dead man, so the souls of the living are called and ordered to stay in the house- hold when the dead man is taken away. Then a few close relatives carry the cof- fin to the grave site. Someone in the lead blows the pipes and a daughter of the dead man carries a torch to light the way. In the rear is a man who tosses paper money to spirits along the way for permission to let the dead man pass.

A third of the way toward the burial place, the pipes stop playing and the girl throws away the lighted torch and runs back home in order to confuse the ghost in case it wants to return. A little further, they stop again, and the ghost is told that in his “house,” that is, his grave, there is plenty of food and that is where he should henceforth eat. The coffin is put in the grave first, then the body placed inside, and the dead man is told that if he gets hungry in the next three days, there is money and rice for him that he can cook for himself. On the third day his family will bring him food and build him a “house,” a cairn of stones to mark his grave.

This and further ceremonies over the next year have the important function of setting the spirits of the dead into an appropriate new relationship to their former household. On the one hand, any animosity the dead might have toward the family must be headed off by respectful and generous words and gifts. The dead must not come back at inappropriate times to cause trouble. On the other hand, they should come back on certain occasions, especially at the

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New Year, to receive offerings and messages from the family and to bring them good fortune when called upon. In other words, the dead person through these ceremonies is taught how to be a good ancestor.

These are the tasks of family and clan in assisting one’s departure from life and celebrating the life just finished. One’s clan gives a person an identity and community larger than the household and different from the village, both cross-cutting and transcending village society. As we have seen, a village is a transitory thing, whereas a clan is eternal. But clan membership is not enough to satisfy all your needs. You must get your wife from another clan.

“Silver Celebrates the Worth of Women”

A Hmong woman spends her life working hard, but this labor brings her advantages that women in many other societies do not have.

The myth told earlier describes a primordial couple who are brother and sis- ter but become husband and wife. This myth should not be taken as sanctioning incest, for the brother and sister in the story know it is wrong for them to marry and resist the urgings of Phya Eng to do so, but they are forced to it by the neces- sity to resume life on earth. As if proving them right, the outcome is a monstrous mound of green flesh. The theme of going up opposite mountains, a male and female side, found in that myth appears in other myths recorded by Tapp. In one of these, a brother and sister compete for superiority. The brother says, “You’re only a woman. Your body is for carrying water and bearing children. You can- not govern heaven and earth.” Boiling with fury, the sister challenges him to sev- eral tests, and in one after the other they come out even. One she devises is a test of strength: “Each of us will have to carry ten loads of copper on the left side and ten loads of iron on the right side.” The brother said, “All right, you’re the old- est, you go first.” The sister was able to carry ten loads of copper and ten of iron, but so could her brother. Then they compete about wisdom: who can learn about the “veins of the slopes” (i.e., the knowledge of geomancy). For this they have to go up the left (male) and the right (female) hillsides, but in this case the brother got there first. There he caught the “veins of the dragon” and began rid- ing it, causing the slopes to collapse around him and churning up the land like water, while the sister lamented that she had lost everything (Tapp 1989:155).

This myth seems to be accounting for gender differences, among other things, and several features stand out. The first is how well the sister fares in competition with her brother. She suggests the competition in the first place. She dreams up the tests they must pass. On many of them they come out equal, most strikingly on the test of strength in carrying loads of copper and iron. She is the right hand, he the left. Many people in the world reverse that formula on the grounds that the right hand, the hand that throws the spear or holds the pen, is surely male. But the Hmong logic is that the “right hand toils and the left hand rests,” therefore the right hand is female.

So women are valued for their strength and their ability to work hard, to carry heavy loads, and to make important contributions to the household. The wife is a

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full partner with her husband in the economic survival of the family. Carol Ember (1983) amassed evidence that women in horticultural (i.e., swidden) societies work longer and harder than men in these societies, and also more than do women in societies practicing intensive agriculture. She suggests that this is because men devote themselves to politics and protection, leaving women to work in the fields once the hard part of clearing a new field is done. When men get pulled out of cul- tivation during warfare, if they find that women can carry on for the most part without their help, there is little incentive for them to return to the fields.

To have a wife is therefore essential, and she will not come cheap. If a man wants a wife, and wants to claim her children for his family and clan, he will have to pay a brideprice in silver. Traditionally this silver was in the form of Indian silver rupees that circulated for years in the hills of Southeast Asia, sup- plied by Indian traders settled in the larger towns like Chiangmai. One still sometimes sees these, bearing images of the young Victoria with braids looping around her ears, but these are becoming rare, since India no longer mints rupees in real silver. Most of the old coins have been melted down and are now traded in the form of ingots or silver neck rings. The value of the silver is gener- ally high, more than the savings of a household for several years.

Fathers may sometimes try to arrange these marriages, and child betrothals are occasionally agreed to with the exchange of a bottle of liquor and four silver rupees, but girls are rarely forced into marriages they do not want, and they do not have to stay in marriages where they are not well treated. There are too many opportunities for boys and girls to fall in love and decide they will marry. There is, for example, the famous “courting ball game” played at New Year’s, unfailingly mentioned in all accounts of the Hmong (and of the Miao in China). Gathering in a group of young people, girls on one side and boys on the other, they toss a soft cloth ball in a rather flirtatious way. Afterwards, cou- ples may romantically pair off during the freedom allowed during the holidays.

When the new bride comes to her husband’s house, she is introduced to the house spirits and ancestors and becomes a member of her husband’s clan. She begins a life of industrious labor, both productive and reproductive. She may well be older than her husband. Geddes found that first wives were on average two years older than their husbands. People said that boys marry when 15 or 16, girls around 20. This may be the result of the greater sexual freedom that allows boys to become involved with girls already somewhat more sexually mature, followed soon by marriage.

Men are entitled to go right on flirting after they are married, but if they get a girl pregnant, they had better be able to provide the silver to marry her. Men and women have very divergent points of view about polygyny, which a major- ity of men who survive to middle age will have experienced. Women do not enjoy sharing a bed with their husband and another wife, which is how the sys- tem works. Being a second wife is less prestigious than being a first, but having a second, younger wife brought in by one’s husband is also humiliating. Theo- retically a first wife’s permission must be obtained. If she has no children she

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will not be in a position to resist. She may also be willing since a second wife is expected to do the field work while she can retire to household work. If a woman is very strong-willed she may be able to prevent her husband from pro- ceeding with his plans. While all men hope to have two or more wives, both to increase the workforce of his household and for the prestige of being a man who can afford several wives, they do not wish this for their daughters.

Another form of marriage is sometimes discussed in the literature on the Hmong: marriage-by-capture. When it happens in Hmong communities in the United States it is usually treated as rape. When it happens in Thailand it may not be much more approved, and occasionally the Thai authorities are called in to intervene (Tapp 1989). Geddes describes a case in Meto where a girl of one clan was seized outside the village by men of another clan as a bride for one of their members. The girl was the pretty daughter of an opium addict who had no other members of her own clan in the village to protect her. The girl escaped and ran home and, a few years later, committed suicide by swallowing opium. Mar- riage-by-capture often appears in the literature as a valid marriage alternative, but in a society like this where the possibilities of marrying a person of one’s own choice are fairly good and where elopement is also possible, marriage-by- capture exists principally as a way of forcing a girl into an unwanted marriage.

In Hmong Means Free (Chan 1994), Xang Mao Xiong reminisces about how he married his wife:

In the old country, if a man liked a certain girl, and wanted to marry her, he simply gave her a gift of money, or some small item, such as a scarf, as a token of his interest. During New Year, when we were tossing balls, I gave her some money. She kept it, so I figured she must be interested in me and might be willing to marry me. I did not even know whether she would have said “yes” had I gone to her house to ask for her hand. Because I was uncertain how she felt about me, I did not want her to reject me. So, my friends and I decided to kidnap her, as our custom allowed. One early morning, my friends and I waited outside her house. When she came out, we grabbed her by the arms and legs. We called out to her sister-in-law, who came out to see what the commotion was about. She asked if Vue (my wife- to-be) had accepted anything from me. I told her “yes.” So all she said was, “Go and take her with you if she has accepted a gift from you.”

After three days, according to tradition, I bought her some new clothes and took her to visit her family. At her brother’s house, we set up a date for the wedding. That night, Vue and I returned to my house. I had to find two elders and a best man. The two elders would negotiate on behalf of my fam- ily, while her family would find their own representatives. . . . We held the wedding in Long Cheng. I paid four silver bars for her plus another two for the feast. (Xiong 1994:99–100)

Spirits, Domestic and Wild

The fields, forests, and hills beyond the village are filled with creatures liv- ing their own lives and desiring to be undisturbed by humans. When a man and

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a snake meet along a trail, they are mutually startled and hurry out of each other’s way. Similarly there are spirits of all kinds inhabiting the wild places and wanting to be left alone. When humans disturb their habitations, there may be trouble. A snakebite can threaten one’s life; so can a spirit attack. The most powerful and dangerous spirits, according to Chaitong, the shaman at Cheng- mengmai, are those that inhabit termite mounds and those that live in the great trees in and around Buddhist temples. Spirits in termite mounds cause nose- bleeds in children, physical weakness, and illness if you dig into them or even go near them. The spirits in the temples have made themselves resemble the fig- ures in the temple: they have elongated heads and red mouths. The Buddhist images must also have some kind of power, Chaitong supposes, but whether their power is equal to that of the spirits in the trees, he does not know.

There are other spirits closer to home, in the village and even in the house. They have various origins and vaguely known identities. Overlooking most vil- lages will be a large and well-formed tree on a hill where the main spirit of the mountain is invited to take up residence to look after the village. The door, the main post of the house, the large fireplace, and the small one each have their spirits. There is the spirit that lives in the funeral drum. There is Sierglung, once a living human, one of seven brothers, the useless one who never did his share of work but lazily spent his days amusing himself. When he fell sick and died, no one cared, and his body was left to be eaten by wild animals. But then his angry ghost came back to take vengeance by killing his brothers and their ani- mals until a shaman advised the family to set up a small shrine inside the house and give him food-gifts annually. Since then, all Hmong have a shrine to Sier- glung in their houses. Sometimes individual subclans or families have spirits of their own dead who for some reason failed to become benevolent ancestors but became angry ghosts bent on spite. All these spirits can become friendly allies in the spirit world if made happy with the regular offering of a chicken or pig.

Spirits are disembodied, but all living things, as their condition for living, have spirits temporarily housed in the body. Souls are sent to the human world to live within a particular body for a fixed period of time, sometimes described as a license with a fixed expiration date. When the time is up, death is inevita- ble, although under extraordinary circumstances extensions are possible. If a person falls into a coma it may be because his or her time has ended. If the per- son survives, it is evidence of a struggle and triumph in the spirit world; such a person will surely become a shaman.

The soul is viewed as not firmly attached to the body. In the West the “senses”—sight, hearing, smell, etc.—are viewed as part of the body’s percep- tual apparatus, not part of the soul. The Hmong theory of the self divides things up differently. The soul is a vague composite entity of seven divisible parts: a soul-piece for each eye and ear, plus one in the nose, the mouth, and the heart. All of these can stray from the body, posing a threat to life itself. In other words, the senses are part of the soul rather than part of the body. At death, the part of the soul of the ears, nose, and mouth remain with the body in

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the grave, but the soul of the eyes and heart go to the afterworld and are eventu- ally reincarnated. In sleep, the eyes and heart may wander and cause dreams.

The complexities of the interconnected worlds of spirits and humans require specialists who can move between these two worlds safely and skill- fully. Every village must have one shaman, and most will have several. The most powerful shaman in Chengmengmai was Chaitong, a 38-year-old man who had two wives and six children. Chaitong’s grandfather had been an espe- cially gifted shaman who had been selected by a spirit (neng) to become a sha- man (chingneng). Chaitong became a chingneng in a more usual way. He got sick, and an older shaman was called in to “kill the sickness,” but this did not help. Even though taken to the hospital, he still did not recover. More shamans were called, and finally his grandfather said, “If you do not become a shaman, you will get sicker and sicker.” But he was only a 10-year-old boy and the thought frightened him. They used a common divination method to determine whether Chaitong should become a shaman. He took four pieces of water buf- falo horn (made by sawing two horn tips longitudinally) and holding them together, he said, “If they fall all open, I’ll become a shaman,” and then he threw them. They fell open, and so he began studying with his grandfather.

Chaitong demonstrates the most important method of divination used by a Hmong shaman— casting the buffalo horns. Two tips of the horn of a black water buffalo or a black bull are cut in half, each with a convex and a concave side. Questions are posed and the answer is discovered, depending on how the bones land. This is how they landed when it was determined Chaitong should become a shaman.

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One of Chaitong’s most difficult cases was in a village a few miles downhill where a man lived with his wife, his mother, and his young son. When we arrived by Land Rover at this household it was unclear who the patient would be. The grandmother had a large goiter that projected six inches from her neck. The young wife appeared to have a cataract in one eye. But it turned out to be the adult son who was the patient. He suffered from epilepsy and did not seem to be improved by Western medicine that, in any case, they could not afford. Perhaps the problem was evil spirits.

Things were already arranged for the shaman and he went right to work. A bench faced the spirit altar. On the spirit altar were a bowl of padi, puffed rice, and incense. Chaitong put on the ti hao, the black cotton face covering that pro- vided sensory deprivation for him as he sat on the bench, or “horse,” which he rode into the spirit world. Various noisy implements get the spirits’ attention and drive them out: the brass gong that an assistant bangs at a hypnotic rhythm; a set of brass castanets with strips of red cloth that clatter and wave; and a spearhead attached to an iron ring that is his weapon to fight the spirit. The patient sits right behind the shaman, passive and hopeful, as the shaman fights on his behalf in the invisible world.

The shaman, his face shrouded with a black face cloth and waving strips of red cloth, rides his “horse” into the spirit world to contact those forces directly. An assistant keeps up a steady rhythm on a drum until the climax of the ceremony, hours later, when the final struggle with the afflicting spirit takes place.

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This all takes a very long time. For two and a half hours the shaman chants and gallops, his bare feet pounding the hard earthen floor, until a groove is gouged in it. Once he stops briefly, throws the “bones” (the tips of water buf- falo horns) four or five times, and makes a report to the household. He smokes a pipe of tobacco and then resumes his journey. The old grandmother waits with a chicken, its feet tied, under her arm. Two more are in a basket waiting. One is taken outside and killed in hopes that the evil spirit will go outside to get it. Apparently it doesn’t work. Another hour passes.

Suddenly there is a flurry of excitement. The shaman is thrown violently from the bench into the hearth, knocking over a pot of boiling water and filling the whole room with hissing steam and ash. As it clears we see the shaman roll- ing in the coals, fighting with the nearly visible spirit. Then he leaps up and hurls the spear in the direction of the door, as simultaneously the door is slammed shut. The spear stabs into the door with a thud. The evil spirit is defeated and gone.

There is still a bit more work to do in the spirit world; the exhausted, ash- covered shaman gets back on the “horse” and chants longer, thanking the household spirits for their assistance and restoring their authority. The tension is clearly relieved; the patient looks dazed but happy. The daughter-in-law and a neighbor stretch a chicken’s neck and cut its throat. Blood drains into a cup. Because the coal pot is broken, this chicken, a reward to the household spirits, has to be boiled at a neighbor’s house.

A chicken’s neck is cut as an offering to the spirits to protect the patient. The spirit gets the life force of the chicken and the family eats the flesh.

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The patient then receives the khlua ki tesh, the “wrist string,” specially braided with three colors of thread, around his neck, wrists, and ankles to bind his beleaguered soul more securely to his body. An X in lampblack is drawn on his forehead to disguise him from the evil spirit who may still be lurking in the vicinity for the next few days. And the triumphant warrior, the shaman, relaxes with a pipe of tobacco smoked in an old unexploded steel US 2.7 air-to-ground rocket pod left over from Vietnam War days.

Will the patient be cured of his epilepsy? Of course we wonder. We do know a great deal about the body-as-machine, and epilepsy as a disease. Do we know as much about the powers of the mind on the body? We are quite sure of our medical paradigm, but might not other models of human suffering prevail elsewhere, producing different forms of suffering? Or, at the very least, do not we also call priests and healers into hospital rooms to pray over and lay hands on patients attached to ventilators or dialysis machines? Who knows what powers lie behind and beyond the known diseases?

The shaman is healer and spiritual leader, physician and priest. He diagno- ses, divines, tells the future, does war with evil spirits, sends food-gifts to friendly ones, and stands between humans and the chaotic, invisible world that is the cause of all their suffering.

ENDNOTE 1 The one-child rule was relaxed for everyone in 2013 as the side effects of severe regulation of

the population began to be felt: labor shortages, unequal sex ratios, lack of care for the elderly.

REFERENCES CITED Barnes, R. H., Andrew Gray, and Benedict Kingsbury. 1995. Indigenous Peoples of Asia.

Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, Monograph and Occasional Paper Series, Number 48.

Burger, Julian. 1987. Report from the Frontier: The State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.

Chandarsi, Nusit. 1976. The Religion of the Hmong Njua. Bangkok: The Siam Society. Chan, Sucheng. 1994. Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America. Philadelphia: Temple

University Press. Culas, Christian, and Jean Micraud. 1997. A Contribution to the Study of Hmong

(Miao) Migrations and History. Bijdragen tot de Tal-, Land-, en Volkandkunde 153(2): 211–243.

Davis, Shelton H. 1993. The World Bank and Indigenous Peoples. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/387581468762591091/pdf/ 272050WB0and0Indigenous0Peoples01public1.pdf

Ember, Carol. 1983. The Relative Decline in Women’s Contribution to Agriculture with Intensification. American Anthropologist 85:285–304.

Fang, Lee, Thek Moua, and Vu Pao Tcha. 1994. Jou Yee Xiong’s Life Story. In Hmong Means Free, ed. Sucheng Chan. Pp. 63–76. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Fuller, Thomas. 2007, December 7. Old U.S. Allies, Still Hiding in Laos. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/world/asia/17laos.html

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Geddes, William R. 1976. Migrants of the Mountains; The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miah (Hmong Njua) of Thailand. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Harrell, Stevan. 1995. Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them. In Cultural Encoun- ters on China’s Ethnic Frontier, ed. Stevan Harrell. Pp. 83–88. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Keyes, Charles F. 1995. Who Are The Tai? Reflections on the Invention of Identities. In Ethnic Identity; Creation, Conflict, and Accommodation, ed. Lola Romanucci-Ross and George DeVos. Pp. 136–160. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

Kingsbury, Benedict. 1995. “Indigenous Peoples” as an International Legal Concept. In Indigenous Peoples of Asia, ed. R. H. Barnes, Andrew Gray, and Benedict Kins- bury. Pp. 35–58. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies.

Leach, Edmund R. 1964. Political Systems of Highland Burma; A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London: Athlone Press.

Luong, Minh Phuong, and Wolfgang Nieke. 2013. Minority Status and Schooling of the Hmong in Vietnam. Hmong Studies Journal 14:1–37.

McCoy, Alfred. 2003. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade; Chi- cago: Lawrence Hill.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1968. Tribesmen. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast

Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tapp, Nicholas. 1989. Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand.

Singapore: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Philip. 2008. Minorities at Large: New Approaches to Minority Ethnicity in

Vietnam. Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3(3): 3–43. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. 2015. Southeast Asia Opium Survey 2015.

https://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/sea/Southeast_Asia_ Opium_Survey_2015_web.pdf

Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization. 2016. Hmong: Laos Military Incur- sion into Indigenous Territory. Unrepresented Nations and Peoples. http://unpo.org/ article/19074

Van Schendel, Willen. 1995. The Invention of the “Jummas” State Formation and Eth- nicity in Southeastern Bangladesh. In Indigenous Peoples of Asia, ed. R. H. Barnes, Andrew Gray, and Benedict Kingsbury. Pp. 121–144. Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies.

Wu Lien-teh. 1959. Plague Fighter: The Autobiography of a Modern Chinese Physician. Cam- bridge: Heffer Press.

Xiong, Maijue. 1994. The Xiong Family of Lompoc. In Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America, ed. Sucheng Chan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Ye Xian’en. 1995. Notes on the Territorial Connections of the Dan. In Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China, ed. David Faure and Helen F. Siu. Pp. 83–88. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

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Part III

South Asia

5 INDIA

6 RELIGIONS OF INDIA

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Why South Asia?

“Eastward of India lies a tract which is entirely sand. Indeed, of all the inhabitants of Asia, concerning whom anything is known, the Indians dwell nearest to the east and the rising of the Sun,” wrote Herodotus in 440 B.C.E. Although there were peoples further east than India unknown to Herodotus, he used a familiar term for the region we now refer to as South Asia: India.

The India to which Herodotus referred was not a single state but a vast geographical region and a civilization renowned in the West for its wealth and exoticism. It was the land beyond the Indus River, from which the name came. Alexander the Great had briefly conquered the Indus valley in 326 B.C.E., but died soon after.

India (as the Greeks called it), al-Hind (as the Arabs called it), or Hindustan (as the Persians called it) was the region from the Indus River to the Brahmapu- tra, bounded on three sides by ocean and by the snowy mountains to the north. The people of this vast place had no single word for the region or each other. Other names were in use: Aryavarta was the Sanskrit name for the region of northern India where Sanskritic culture dominated. Bharat, after legendary King Bharata of the Puranas, is another. Bharat is currently one of the two offi- cial names for the Republic of India.

Since 1947

Since 1947, however, the preferred name of the region long known as India has shifted to South Asia, a neutral term that incorporates seven modern states: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives. Some also include Afghanistan and Burma (Myanmar). For perhaps obvious reasons, people of these nations prefer not to be lumped together as “Indians.”

What happened in 1947 to change this long usage? That was the year that Britain finally withdrew from the subcontinent after decades of the indepen- dence struggle and the disastrous Second World War. From the earliest forays of the East India Company in the eighteenth century, Britain had come to rule an “India” in its broadest historical sense, including what is now Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Burma (Burma, or Myanmar, is now considered part of Southeast Asia). At midnight, August 14, 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke to the people of India in his famous “Tryst with Destiny” speech with the ringing words: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full mea- sure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” In Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jin-

143

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nah, the first prime minister, delivered a speech a few days earlier, urging for- mation of a constitution in which each person is “first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights.”

These were high-minded and inspiring words, as such occasions call for, but they overlooked the “orgy of murder, rape, and plunder” that the Partition of India into two separate states (and soon into a third) had actually endured. The Partition had been along religious lines, an effort by the departing British to hand Hindus and Muslims separate religion-based homelands, even though Hindus and Muslims lived side by side in cities, towns, and villages across the subcontinent, a distribution that could never be reified into nations with clear borders. The attempt to create such borders set millions of people on the move, Muslims into new Muslim-dominated territory, Hindus and Sikhs trying to escape into safe Hindu areas. Seventeen million people fled one direction or another, but that did not and could not create monoreligious nations. There had been one hundred million Muslims in the British raj; sixty million ended up in Pakistan,1 leaving forty million Muslims in India. The effort was a con- ceptual failure from the beginning; and before it was over, nearly two million people had died, and the newly created nations were primed for religious intol- erance that afflicts South Asia to this day.

Why did Britain organize the Partition on the way out of India? The details were only worked out at the last minute in great haste, taking a mere 40 days to draw the new map of South Asia. Not until two days after Nehru’s historic midnight independence speech were the exact borders announced. Why the rush? When Lord Louis Mountbatten arrived in India as the last viceroy with the charge to organize the transfer of power, he moved the date up by 10 months, perhaps attempting to shock Indian leaders into serious negotiations. But why Partition at all?

The answer does not have to do with any long-term Hindu–Muslim ani- mosity; as we’ll see in chapter 5, a peaceful Indo-Islamic culture had been forged over nearly a thousand years. People did not think of themselves fore- most as Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh; they were more likely to think of themselves in linguistic, ethnic, or regional terms, as Bengali or Punjabi or Gujarati. The best explanation lies in the personalities and leadership strategies of the Indian elite, especially Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, and Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, leaders of the Congress Party. By the 1940s, these leaders had come into severe disagreement over the shape of postcolonial India, as Jinnah strove to achieve advantages and protections for the hundred million Muslims in an India dominated by Hindus. He was not himself a very devout or conservative Muslim. As Dalrymple describes him:

A staunch secularist, he drank whiskey, rarely went to a mosque, and was clean-shaven and stylish, favoring beautifully cut Savile Row suits and silk ties. Significantly, he chose to marry a non-Muslim woman, the glamorous daughter of a Parsi businessman. She was famous for her revealing saris and for once bringing her husband ham sandwiches on voting day. (2016)

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Most historians now believe that Jinnah backed himself into a corner on creating a Pakistan, using it initially as a bargaining chip to maneuver the Con- gress Party into conceding better terms for the Muslim leadership but the idea got out of hand. A passion for Pakistan that he had inflamed could not be con- tained. As the Second World War ended and many of India’s leadership were released from jail, the idea reached into the streets where local political leaders inflamed Muslim–Hindu feelings. Religious massacres began in Calcutta and spread to other cities, and by 1947 everybody but Gandhi realized that India had to be divided. To his dismay, his “nonviolent” movement for independence culminated in a violent dismemberment that left South Asia traumatized into the present.

This is why we now speak of South Asia, rather than India. Yet these are new boundaries, drawn up in 40 days in 1947. As we look in the next two chap- ters at the great civilization that is South Asia, we will find most present-day borders meaningless. The Indus Valley civilization, whose main ruins at Mohenjo Daro and Harappa are in Pakistan, spread across both sides of the Indus and down as far south as Gujarat and eastward to the Ganges. When “Muslim” invaders began entering India in the eleventh century, they were iden- tified by the people (and remembered in the Sanskrit texts), not as Muslims, but as Turks and Afghans. Indians knew all about religious variety—the gods were in the millions and the details varied village by village and caste by caste—but ethnic and linguistic distinctions were worth noticing and made a difference.

So, the term “South Asia” is important from 1947 on (e.g., Bose and Jalal 1997; Mines and Lamb 2010). In the chapters that follow, we will use the term “India” in its older sense, as a broad, brilliant, multistranded civilization that is the core of modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, as well as Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. However, we must admit that research on “South Asia” overwhelmingly favors India. That is partly for reasons described above, the status of “India” as both geographic region and a civilization prior to 1947. The impetus for replacing the generic India with a more inclusive South Asia largely comes from Pakistani scholars and citizens (plus diaspora descendants of the region now known as Pakistan), and it does not seem to have promoted more intense study of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, or the Maldives. We also cannot forget that most South Asians are Indian; there are almost 1.3 billion Indians, but only about 192 million Pakistanis and 166 million Bangla- deshis. The next largest nation is Nepal with almost 29 million.

These other South Asian nations stretch from the high Himalayas (Nepal, Bhutan) to a tiny chain of 26 atolls (the Maldives) and the larger teardrop- shaped island of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. Bangladesh lies on the delta of the great Brahmaputra River that crosses Tibet and then swings south into the Bay of Bengal. Their cultures have been shaped by the influence of their neigh- bors: Nepal and Bhutan by Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, the Maldives by Arab Islam, and Sri Lanka by Hinduism and Buddhism from South India, but all of them by “India.”

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ENDNOTE 1 Then an East and West Pakistan; later West Pakistan became Bangladesh.

REFERENCES CITED Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. 1997. Modern South Asia; History, Culture, Political Econ-

omy. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dalrymple, William. 2016, June 29. The Great Divide: The Violent Legacy of Indian

Partition. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/ the-great-divide-books-dalrymple

Mines, Diane P., and Sarah Lamb. 2010. Everyday Life in South Asia. 2nd Ed. Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press.

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5 INDIA

147

CHRONOLOGY OF INDIAN HISTORY

2500

1500

300

100 B.C.E. 300 C.E.

400

800

1200

1500

1757– 1900

1947

Indus Valley Civilization (ca. 2500–1500 B.C.E.)

Vedic Age (ca. 1500–450 B.C.E.)

Mauryan Dynasty (323–185 B.C.E.)

Satavahana

Gupta (4th–6th century C.E.)

Pala (8th–12th century)

Sultanate (1210–1526)

Mughal (1526–1827

British (late 18th c.–1947)

Independence

urbanization & city planning; worship of “Proto-Shiva” and goddess; wheat and cotton cultivation; trade with Sumer

1500–1000 Indo-European Aryans enter from Northwest 1200–900 Vedas composed by nomads in upper Punjab 1000–450 North Indian conquest and unification 950 Battle of Mahabharata said to have taken place 800–600 Brahmanas 500–300 Upanishads 563–483 Buddha

326 Alexander the Great invades India 324 First unification of north India under Chandragupta Maurya; capital at Pataliputra (Patna)

265–232 Emperor Ashoka; adoption of Buddhism throughout empire

300 B.C.E.–300 C.E. Mahabharata 200 B.C.E–200 C.E. Ramayana by Valmiki 185 B.C.E. Mauryan Dynasty ends

100 C.E. Dharmashastra by Manu 200 C.E. Arthashastra by Kautilya 300 C.E. Kama-sutra by Vatsyayana

“The Classical Age”-Establishment of temple worship 350–750 early Puranas 399–414 Faxian visits India 460–477 Ajanta Caves 643 King Harsha’s Great Feast (reigned 606–647) 630–645 Xuanzang visits India

900 and 1150 temples at Khajuraho 1001 Mahmud of Ghazni raids North India 1192–1192 Ghurids establish capital at Delhi Gradual end of Buddhism in India

Establishment of the Delhi Sultanate 1200 Gita Govinda by Jayadeva 1325–1351 Muhammad bin Tughluq reigns 1200 early Sufi orders established 750–1500 later Puranas; many new Ramayanas in regional vernaculars

1469–1539 Guru Nanak founds Sikhism

1526 Babur founds the Mughal Empire 1556–1605 Akbar 1574 Ramayana in Hindi by Tulsidas 1632–1653 Taj Mahal built

1757 British victory at Plassey 1757–1858 “John Company Raj”-rule by East India Company 1857 Anglo-Indian War (“Indian Mutiny”) 1858–1947 British Raj

1947 Republic of India 1947 Islamic Republic of Pakistan

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A Forgotten Past

In 1827 an English soldier of the East India Company deserted his regi- ment, footing it with a friend westward toward the Indus River and Central Asia. Fearful of being caught and executed, he wore disguises and called him- self Charles Masson. For a time he claimed to be an American citizen from Kentucky. Although he wrote extensively about his experiences in the four-vol- ume Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, the Panjab and Kalat (1844), he revealed little about his motivations or state of mind. From the adventures recorded in his memoirs, however, it is clear he was obsessed with the history and cultures of the Punjab and Afghanistan.

In those days—the early nineteenth century—India’s history was obscure. Whole civilizations had disappeared from historical memory. India had no tra- dition of historiography such as China’s, with its vast record-keeping bureau- cracy. When in 1974 the huge burial army of the First Emperor (r. 221–210 B.C.E.) was rediscovered archaeologically, the finds validated the claims of early Chinese historians who had written about Qin Shihuang, the unifier of China. No such early accounts of the doings of kings existed in India. Indian thinkers were busy interpreting the Vedas, their most ancient and most sacred texts, and then meditating on the meaning of Vedic rituals and myths in the Brahmanas (ritual texts on the details of sacrifice, constituting a portion of the Vedas). By the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E., new texts, the Upanishads, were creating revolutionary new ideas about the soul (atman), human action (karma), renun- ciation (sanyas), and life after death (samsara, reincarnation). But India had no Sima Qian, the Grand Historian (died ca. 110 B.C.E.), who pored through old texts written on strips of bamboo to piece together a lengthy history of China’s early dynasties, which became the starting point of all subsequent histories.

Therefore, in Masson’s time (1820s–1840s), India’s ancient history was known only through the Vedas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads. They were writ- ten in Sanskrit, the earliest known Indo-European language (see chapter 2). This meant that Indian history began with the Bronze Age people who called themselves “Aryans” (i.e., the Indo-European speakers), who had established small kingdoms in the Ganges basin, with names like Kuru, Pancala, Kosala, and Videha. Nothing was known of any earlier civilization. Likewise, there was a blank where the Buddha, Buddhism, and the great King Ashoka who spread Buddhism throughout the subcontinent should have been. Buddhist texts in East and Southeast Asia claimed the Buddha had lived and died in

Chapter opener photo: Rajasthani girl.

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India, but India itself had no historical memory of this, and Buddhism had dis- appeared from the land of its origination.

Masson had received a good education in England. He could read Latin and Greek. He knew from Greek sources that Alexander the Great had con- quered parts of northwestern India in 326 B.C.E., and so he trudged on a peril- ous journey into the upper Punjab region, the area of northern Pakistan where five rivers join to become the Indus. He made records on the land and people as he went, and collected oddities that he could carry. There were many ancient coins, eventually 80,000 in his collection, of bronze, silver, and gold depicting ancient kings and gods, many of them Greek, providing the first strong evi- dence that Alexander had left Greek kingdoms behind. He found two heads of

J u m

n a

R iver

Ganges River

Daro Mojenjo

Peshawar

Lahore

CALCUTTA

Nalanda

Bodh Gaya

Kapilavastu KATHMANDU

PATNA

LUCKNOW

DELHI

JAIPUR

Allahabad

Sanchi

Harappa

KARACHI

SIMLA

BOMBAY

HYDERABAD

Goa

Madurai

Mysore MADRAS

COLOMBO

PAKISTAN

NEPAL BHUTAN

BANGLADESH

SRI LANKA

I N D I A

A r a b i a n S e a

B a y o f

B e n g a l

S O U T H A S I A

B U R M A

N a r mada Riv er

Godavari River

In du

s Ri

ve r

Bra hm

ap ut

ra R

iv er

Map 5.1 India.

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Buddha that he and his companions mistook for a beautiful female deity. There were rock-cut caves and arches with gigantic stone Buddhas they identified as “female idols.” And he opened up some 40 stupas—raised spherical structures, some 160 feet in circumference—and hauled off their treasures without under- standing these were Buddhist monuments (Omrani 2008). Rather, he thought they were burial places of past kings, and the Buddha figures were their effigies. Knowledge of Buddhism’s millennium in India would slowly unfold over the nineteenth century as more adventurers, scholars, and archaeologists turned their attention to caves, ruins, sculptures, and art scattered throughout India.

In 1838 Masson made his most important discovery. He was back in the Punjab, camped near a town on the Sutlej, one of the branches of the Indus. As he writes in his memoirs:

A long march preceded our arrival at Haripah (Harappa), through jangal (jungle) of the closest description. . . . When I joined the camp I found it in front of the village and ruinous brick castle. Behind us was a large circular mound, or eminence, and to the west was an irregular rocky height, crowned with the remains of buildings, in fragments of walls, with niches, after the eastern manner. . . . The walls and towers of the castle are remark- ably high, though, from having been long deserted, they exhibit in some parts of the ravages of time and decay. Between it and our camp extended a deep trench, now overgrown with grasses and plants. . . . Tradition affirms the existence here of a city, so considerable that it extended to Chicha Watni, [20 miles] distant, and that it was destroyed by a particular visita- tion of Providence, brought down by the lust and crimes of the sovereign. (Masson 1844)

This was the first description of what turned out to be one of two great cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, a heretofore unknown urban civilization that preceded the Veda-writers by a thousand years. It was a contemporary of Sumer and Egypt, and it traded with them, but had disappeared without memory in India itself.

Puzzles of Indian Origins: The First Civilizations

The world’s earliest states, emerging in the second and third millennia B.C.E. in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, were the first to face the ques- tions that all states, including modern ones, face: How to mobilize power effec- tively? How to survive past the first generation? How to manage the force that created the state without immediately destroying it? How to get and keep the loyalty of diverse groups drawn together in the state? How to harness the eco- nomic resources needed to keep the state afloat?

The first civilizations had accomplished a long evolution out of farming communities whose growth and increased productivity supported the nonpro- ductive elite that dominated them. The list in box 5.1 identifies some of the pri- mary and secondary features associated with early civilizations.

The political structure of a civilization is the state, where power is central- ized in a monarch or oligarchy. As society grew more complex, with new forms

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of specialization and stratification, the king gathered around him a full-time warrior class; priests who functioned as advisors, diviners, and intercessors with the gods; and a nobility composed of the king’s family and lineage that grew larger and more powerful by the generation. All these people had to be supported by the agricultural classes. Independent cultivators were turned into peasants, tied to the land by various devices that squeezed them for surpluses to support the growing nonproductive elite. A percentage of the harvest, often 25 percent or more, was demanded, which forced peasants to work harder and find ways to grow more, because their own subsistence needs remained the same. Political coercion squeezed out an extra portion of grain to be passed upward as taxation.

In the meantime, urban densities formed around the king’s court and in a few trade centers, so that along with villages there was a hierarchy of urban spaces: towns and one or two major cities that were trade or court centers. In the earliest cities, 10,000 was a lot of people; by 2500 B.C.E., there were cities with populations close to 50,000. Cultural and intellectual life began to diverge from village culture in the courts of early kings. Specialists of all sorts elabo- rated their own cultural domains: a few carpenters turned into architects and engineers, building palaces, temples, and mausoleums for their royal patrons.

Box 5.1 Characteristics of Civilizations

Primary Features • The State:

— Centralized authority in a monarch, king, emperor, or oligarchy — Stratification of society with an aristocracy, priesthood, military, and peasants — A tax/tribute system for redistribution of surpluses upward — High population densities

• Expanded food production to support economically unproductive classes • Urbanization: villages, towns, and a few true urban centers with populations of

7,000–10,000 • Full-time craft specialists

Secondary Features • Monumental art and architecture • Long-distance trade • Codified law • Writing systems • Mathematics and astronomy • Religion in the service of the state • Bifurcation of folk culture and court culture, with court-sponsored arts and intel-

lectual traditions

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Ministers codified the law. Priests pondered the old myths and rites, raising new philosophical questions; they gazed at the stars and developed astrology and astronomy. Mathematics grew out of useful practices like engineering and astronomy. Royal courts sponsored new forms of art: theater, music, dance, and poetry. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is the development of new uses for religion: the power of the state needed to be legitimated somehow; new forms of religion emerged in the service of the state.

Note that a civilization is something more than a state. States are political formations of strongmen or warriors that can come and go rather quickly, and most will not form a true civilization around them. A civilization includes enduring cultural traditions that can be maintained and passed on from genera- tion to generation even when political centralization has lapsed, whereas a state is a centralized social system that is much more vulnerable to spinning into disorder at the death of a powerful leader or collapsing into bitterly con- tested struggles for leadership that end in fragmentation. So civilizations can outlast particular states. Civilizations can also support several competing regional states simultaneously. Indian civilization has survived through eras when no state could be said to be functioning, or when only small regional states existed. Similarly Chinese civilization has stretched across eras when the state itself disappeared in periodic chaos.

Indus Valley Civilization (2500–1500 B.C.E.)

The first urban society in India flourished in the Indus Valley from 2500 to 1500 B.C.E. This was the world’s third civilization, a thousand years later than the founding of Egypt and Sumer. Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was in con- tact with Sumer via a land route stretching from oasis to oasis across the Ira- nian Plateau and via a much easier coastal route in the shallow waters of the Arabian Sea and up the Persian Gulf. For the civilizations to the west, India was the fabled source of peacocks and monkeys, ivory and gems, spices and incense. The villages, towns, and two great cities of IVC were dependent on the Indus River for a water source and for transportation. Farmers in the region grew wheat and cotton, which they shipped by river to Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, where cotton was woven into cloth.

However, IVC is the mystery civilization of Asia. While its two major cit- ies, Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, have been extensively excavated and now lie exposed once again to the blistering sun of Pakistan (more than a thousand set- tlements are known) only 10 percent of these sites have been excavated. In the 1970s a third large city was discovered near the border of India and Pakistan, but because of political tensions, it has not been excavated.

Almost everything we would want to know about the people and their cul- ture remains unexplained. Who were the people who lived there? Were they ancestors of the Dravidians, who are now the vast populations of the southern Indian states of Tamilnadu, Kerala, and Mysore? There are a few tiny telltale pockets of Dravidian-speakers stranded in the Indus Valley region of Baluch-

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istan, though now the languages of the northern states are all Indo-European. Or were they the Aryans, the Indo-European-speaking writers of the Vedas, the foundational documents of Hinduism, as some argue? We will return to this question shortly.

They certainly had a well-organized and centrally planned society, but what kind of political order was responsible for this is not clear from the archaeological record. They had a script, but what ideas—if any—were cap- tured by it is unknown because the script has never been deciphered. The reli- gious ideas that motivated their lives have left traces only in rough sculptural form. It is tempting to guess what ideas might lie behind the ruins, sculptures, and seals, but they are only guesses.

The cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were the most modern cities of their time. They were built on a grid plan, with a broad north-south street bisected by narrower east-west streets. Houses built on these streets were often large and multiroomed with windowless exterior walls, inner courtyards, and flat roofs. Such houses are the main house style in much of India to this day, allowing family life to be lived in inner privacy in the courtyard and, on hot nights and cool winter days, on the rooftop. Many had private interior wells with outlets in several rooms of the house. Bathrooms were built against an exterior wall, with sloping floors and chutes that drained bathwater to the lane outside. From there, sewage was disposed through brick-lined covered channels to cesspits outside the city. This water and sanitation engineering was unmatched prior to the last few centuries, and there are Indian towns today that do not match it.

You might think a society this technologically advanced would be able to write its language. Contemporary civilizations had this knowledge: Sumerians had developed cuneiform and Egyptians had hieroglyphics, both of which can now be read. Early Chinese civilization, which developed later, also had a script that can be read today. And Indus Valley traders must have known of cuneiform writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics. But Indus Valley Civilization does not appear to have advanced far along this route. All known samples of Indus script come from some 2,000 seals and a bit of graffiti on pottery. These “seals” were terra cotta rectangles an inch or two in dimension. Most seals carry two types of inscription: charming images of animals or seated figures, and abstract figures that look like possible writing (see box 5.2).

There are 419 to 676 characters with 200 in frequent use (Robinson 2015). Over a hundred efforts have been made to translate them, none of them yet suc- cessful. Most scholars agree there are too many characters to be an alphabetic script like ours, and not enough for a logographic one like Chinese. If the char- acters formed an actual language, it may have been a logo-syllabic script like Sumerian cuneiform. But there are no true texts; the longest string of charac- ters is a mere 26 signs, and the average is more like five or six. Thus it is unlikely that the script was used to express complex ideas. Possibly the inscrip- tions were names of merchant families used to identify goods in long-distance

Box 5.2 “A Most Curious Object”: Indus Valley Seals

Above are four of the more than 2,000 seals found in the Indus Valley. Most have both script and animal depictions. The seals were used to make impressions in soft clay that probably identified bales of trade goods belonging to certain merchants. More than 400 distinct characters have been cataloged from the seals, too many for an alphabetic or syllabic language, but not enough for a logographic one like Chi- nese. They have never been deciphered and even the language is unknown.

Male figure in a yogic posture, surrounded with animals, similar to images of the later Hindu god Shiva. Also known as Pashupati (Lord of the Beasts).

Human figure separating two tigers.

Elephant with script. Bull (or unicorn?) near manger or sacrificial post.

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trade. If it was language, was that language an early form of Dravidian, or of Sanskrit, or of some other language such as Munda? Each view has its parti- sans, but there is no consensus.

When it comes to religious ideas, again we have to guess on the basis of intriguing clues. The seals that bear the puzzling inscriptions also contain pic- tures of animals that were important then: the humped bull, tiger, camel, ante- lope, and elephant. Often animals are depicted tethered to an ornamented post as if about to be sacrificed (or are these mangers from which they eat?), and one shows a woman about to be sacrificed, her arms raised in supplication. A frequent figure is the so-called horned god, a male sitting in a yogic pose with his hands on his knees and wearing a headpiece of buffalo horns. In another, two worshippers kneel beside him with hooded cobras towering over them. This deity so resembles the later god Shiva that he is often referred to as the Proto-Shiva. The frequency of religious themes on the seals could sustain a reli- gious, rather than commercial, function.

Other hints of later Hindu practices are the many female images, possibly goddesses, which far outnumber male images. They are often crudely made of terra cotta, as if constructed for popular use or to be discarded after brief use at a festival (as they would be now). These “mother goddesses” (if that is what they are) are lavishly decorated with layers of necklaces, bangles, and belts, have fabulous fan-shaped headdresses, and are bare-breasted. Perhaps this is how women of IVC dressed. Or are they a forerunner of the primordial Shakti who takes form in Kali, Durga, Saraswati, and other female deities? A few bet- ter-made male images were also found, one assumed to be a priest, another remarkably (but impossibly) Greek-looking from the realism of his torso.

Most puzzling of all is the question of how IVC was organized. Though it spread across a vaster region than either Sumer or Egypt, a thousand miles from west to east, with over 1,000 towns and two great cities so far excavated or located, there is precious little evidence of a strong centralized government beyond the indirect evidence of the well-laid out cities. No palace complex exists where a great king might have lived and held court. No great temple com- plex bears testimony to a cult of the divinities depicted on seals and suggested by terra cotta statuettes. There is a large tank or bathing area, 40 feet long, 20 feet wide, and eight feet deep, that must have been used for collective bathing (such tanks are now found in temple compounds). There is no evidence of rivalry between states or of warfare, and there is little weaponry. The closest to a structural center of power that has been discovered is a pillared hall with many tiny adjacent rooms called by archaeologists an “assembly hall” or citadel located at the highest points at Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. (A caveat: a Bud- dhist stupa was built over a high point at Mohenjo Daro; no one knows what lies beneath it.) So far, there is little to suggest the residence of a great king here, but it just might be the center of a priesthood, whose monks lived in the cubicles and functioned as a powerful oligarchy in worship of a god and goddess, order- ing society through their ritual authority and enforcing a rational plan in the lay-

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ing out of the cities and maintaining water and sewage systems. What seems most powerful, in IVC, is not monarchical authority so much as some kind of cultural authority, the existence of a conceptual plan for human social life that got peacefully re-created wherever people settled and formed villages and towns.

A final question remains: what brought IVC to an end? Between 2000 and 1500 B.C.E. its cities were abandoned and finally all memory of it was lost. Numerous theories have been advanced to account for its fall; the most recent points to a 200-year decrease in precipitation that may have led to the collapse of IVC (Marris 2014).

Brief Outline of Indian History

Scholars (or students) sometimes joke that history is “one damn thing after another.” It sometimes seems so. Unexpected events become game changers; then the next astonishing thing happens. Invaders, new religions, new twists on old religions, states rise then fall, new technologies, political innovations, droughts and plagues. . . . How can we think about the past without being overwhelmed by it? All the more so when it is a stretch of three or four millen- nia we are talking about. In this section, we attempt to provide a simple frame- work for comprehending the last three millennia of Indian history, which we structure into six large eras: the Vedic Age, the Mauryan-Gupta Empires, the Medieval Period, the Indo-Islamic Period, the British Colonial Period, and the Period of Independence. Of course, periods rarely have clear beginnings and endings, strands of culture persist while new strands come to dominance, and there are vague decades and centuries between periods that defy the orderly structure of periodization. The focus here is on major configurations of Indian society, relying heavily on clues from the early texts (e.g., the Vedas, the Upani- shads, the epics), which are religious and philosophical, for the most part. We reserve discussion of the broad and profound ideas coming out of them, i.e., the history and philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism, for chapter 6.

The Vedic Age (1500–450 B.C.E.)

For Indus Valley Civilization we have ruins but no words; for the Vedic Age, we have words but hardly any ruins. It’s nice to have words: we can hear the voices of ancient people talking about their world in a series of four books composed in the earliest known forms of Sanskrit. The oldest of the four is the Rig-Veda, formulated in the most obscure Sanskrit, probably composed between 1500 and 1100 B.C.E. in the upper Indus region and transmitted orally for more than a millennium. This text is the oldest known form of any Indo- European language. But it’s a conundrum: if we could read the Indus Valley Script, would we find it’s the same people and culture of the Vedic texts? Or is it a new population with a new culture entering India from somewhere else?

The people of the Vedas called themselves Aryans, “noble men,” and their language was an ancient form of Indo-European, that vast language family that

Indus Valley Civilization (2500–1500 B.C.E.). [top] Exca- vated ruins of Mohenjo Daro, with the later Buddhist stupa on the citadel and the “great bath” in the foreground. [left] Early nineteenth-century man- uscript page in Sanskrit from the Rig-Veda (1500–450 B.C.E.). Who were the people who built the IVC cities? Who wrote the Vedas? Were they the same or different people? The earliest of the four Vedas was composed around 1200 B.C.E. but not written down for perhaps another thousand years. The consensus of schol- ars is that the Vedas were the sacred texts of Indo-European- speaking people who migrated to India from the northwest over several centuries after IVC had fallen into decline.

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includes Greek, Latin, and most European languages, including English (see chapter 2). The Aryans, like the Hittites and Greeks to whom they were linguis- tically related, were an Indo-European-speaking society of Bronze-Age tribal warriors who loved their horses, herded cattle, and were organized patriarchi- cally under tribal chieftains called rajas. They worshipped male gods whose names of Indra (Indara in Hittite), Varuna (Uruvna), Mitra (Mitira), and the Naksatras (Nasatiya) were widely known to Indo-Europeans, as evidenced by the appearance in Hittite texts of about 1400 B.C.E. Like the Greeks, they moved into a region where more advanced urban civilizations were already in decline. Their religion of transcendent gods of the heavens encountered and partially replaced the earth goddesses of agricultural peoples. And like the Greeks, they developed epic stories of heroic and embattled kings based on pos- sible actual events early in the first millennium B.C.E. and much later written down. The Mahabharata, like the Iliad, is an epic tale of bloody warfare among related princes, and the Ramayana, like the Odyssey, is the tale of a long exilic journey in territories of mythical beings ending with a joyful return home. The kidnapped Helen of Troy whose abduction leads to the Trojan War has her counterpart in the abduction of Sita, whose rescue dominates the Ramayana.

But might the newcomers not have been new at all, but simply a survival of the people of IVC? Might the Vedas have been composed in the Indus Valley? This theory has some popular appeal because it places the most sacred sources of Hinduism within India, not originating someplace else. However, the textual evidence does not support this theory. Wendy Doniger, a major authority on the Vedic literature, evaluates the textual basis for the two theories (2009). If the Vedas were written in the cities of Indus Valley, she writes, why do they appear to know nothing of bricks, the basic building material of the Indus peo- ple? Why do they describe a nomadic lifestyle? Why are they so crazy about horses? The Indus Valley seals give us a pretty good picture of the animals that were important to them: bulls, rhinoceroses, elephants, tigers, snakes, croco- diles. Their children fashioned dogs (with collars) out of clay. They had domes- ticated camels, sheep, pigs, goats, and chickens. But no horses. Whereas the Rig-Veda is “intensely horsey” (pp. 96–99). Horses are “observed in affection- ate, minute, often gory, detail. . . . The Vedic people not only had horses but were crazy about horses.” Horses did not originate on the subcontinent and do not thrive there; they have to be constantly imported.

Given the depiction of social life in the Vedas, it seems unlikely these people were the IVC people. Rather, the “Aryans” of the texts were part of a nomadic population that originated on the steppes north of the Caucasus Mountains and spread gradually in the second millennium B.C.E. into Europe, the Mediterra- nean, the Iranian Plateau, and India. All the languages of North India—Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, etc.—are closely related Indo-European languages. Indo-European-speaking peoples, whose sacred texts were the Vedas, gradually moved eastward into the Ganges Valley, forming small kingdoms such as Kuru, Pancala, Kosala, and Videha. Out of these Late Vedic kingdoms came the tales

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of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, as well as new religious ideas in the Upanishads. Kashi was the early name for Varanasi (Banaras). After 500 B.C.E., Pataliputra would expand as the capital of the Mauryan Empire.

For the first 500 years of the period we call the Vedic Age, the newcomers made themselves at home in the upper reaches of the Indus. They wrote of encountering empty cities and dark-skinned people called Dasyus whom they scorned and fought. For the next 500 years (from about 1000 to 450 B.C.E.) they moved eastward, discovered the great Ganges system (consisting of the Ganges River and a large number of tributaries), and began setting up small kingdoms all across North India. Certain of these kingdoms became famous in the great epics. In the kingdom of the Kurus, the Pandavas and Kauravas in the Mahab- harata were two hostile clans. Kosala, with its capital city Ayodhya, was Rama’s kingdom, and Mithila was the capital of King Janaka’s (Sita’s father) kingdom; these are all figures in the Ramayana.

The Vedas and other texts being written in these small kingdoms of the Gan- getic Basin describe a social order based on three broad social categories called varnas: Brahmans, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas, categories that eventually evolve into the caste system. At this point the varnas appear to be functional social groups: Brahmans are priests and purohitas (sacrificers), Kshatriyas are warriors and rulers, and Vaishyas are everyone else: artisans, traders, and cultivators.

G anges River

Furthes t E

xte ns

io n

of Ary

an Settle men

t

H I M A L A Y A S

Path of former branch of Indus River

LEGEND Furthest extension of Aryan settlement

Kuru

Pancala Videha

Kosala

MT KAILASH

Saraswat i River

India

Gandhara

Map 5.2 Small kingdoms in the Late Vedic Period, 1100–500 B.C.E.

nued)

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Box 5.3 Two Models for Kings in the Ramayana and Mahabharata

Rama’s story is told and retold in hundreds of versions throughout India and Southeast Asia, in poetry and prose, almost always as a public event. It is chanted by pandits reading from a text or enacted by traveling troupes of actors or per- formed by puppets. For the last 150 years the Ramayana has been an annual event at a site across the Ganges River from Banaras. In nightly episodes lasting a month, Rama’s 14-year exile is reenacted by actors and followed by audience-pilgrims who literally journey from site to site where all the critical locations, from Ayodhya to Sri Lanka, are reproduced around the palaces and gardens of the Maharaja of Banaras. The actors who play Rama, Sita, Lakshman, and Hanuman are svarup, “forms” or incarnations of the divine figures themselves, worshipped with garlands and pranams (a gesture of reverence to the feet of superior beings) at the end of each performance. Before the final performance of farewell to Rama and Sita, they are carried by royal elephants to the palace, where the Maharaja of Banaras, dressed simply as a devotee of Rama, washes their feet and garlands, and feasts them.

A televised serial in 1987 had over 80 million viewers, the most watched program ever on Indian television. Paula Richman (1991:3) describes the reactions of viewers:

It was not just that people watched the show: they became so involved in it that they were loath to see it end. . . . Sanitation workers in Jalandhar went on strike because the serial was due to end without depicting the events of the seventh, and final, book of the Ramayana. The strike spread among sanitation workers in many major cities in North India, compelling the government to sponsor the desired episodes in order to prevent a major health haz- ard. . . . Many people responded to the image of Rama on the televi- sion screen as if it were an icon in a temple. They bathed before watch- ing, garlanded the set like a shrine, and considered the viewing of Rama to be a religious experience.

After transforming India’s television audience into a devotional congregation for a year, the Ramayana inspired a more omi- nous event. On December 6, 1992, Hindu mobs led by right-wing, religiously motivated political parties demolished a six- teenth-century mosque said to have been built by the first Mughal emperor, Babur, over the birthplace of Rama in Ayodhya, setting off Hindu–Muslim riots across India in which more than 5,000 people were killed.

When the Ramayana was serialized for Indian television, the entire nation came to a standstill. Viewers treated it as a reli- gious event, bathing prior to watching and lighting incense on their television sets. Gift sets of the show came out on DVD, such as this one of episodes 9–13 (out of 38).

(conti

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A text that has such life, age after age, is certainly a many-stranded thing; each gen- eration and class brings its own preoccupations to the narrative. Gandhi used the sym- bolism of Ram rajya, Rama’s reign, to mobilize Indians around a vision of a new golden age of an independent India, using a hymn to Rama as a nationalist rallying song.

However, during the era when the Ramayana was composed and had its first audiences—sometime between 750 and 500 B.C.E.—it was surely addressing differ- ent social concerns. As we know from all the epics that describe life in those times (the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Harivamsa), it was a violent era of bloody succession fights and conflict between small kingdoms. Kingdoms built by strength of arms had not found ways to “moralize” the exercise of power. The other great epic from this period, the Mahabharata, is the most pessimistic of all, describing a war of apocalyptic proportions with horrible weapons of destruction that ends with eigh- teen million corpses and the death of every principal character. King Dhritarashtra, in

This sixteenth-century painting portrays the most famous epi-

sode in the Mahabharata in which Prince Arjuna (in chariot

on right, aiming his arrow) is urged into battle against his

cousins by his charioteer, who is Krishna in disguise. The gods watch from on high.

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Clearly, there was another vast population in these regions who were not Indo- Europeans (i.e., Aryans), who spoke other languages, who supported themselves by cultivation outside the small kingdoms being founded by the newcomers. These dark-skinned Dasyus would slowly be absorbed into these kingdoms as society grew larger and more complicated, and the vocabulary and idioms of the texts would provide a conceptual framework for incorporation. But that is a pro- cess that took hundreds, indeed thousands, of years and is still going on. Remem-

desolation, says: “This world is savage. How can one understand the savagery of this world?” and Bhishma replies: “You are part of it.” The Mahabharata cannot imagine a dharma for a kshatriya (warrior) other than this one:

[The kshatriya] must always be ready to slaughter the enemy, he must show brav- ery in battle. . . . Killing is the chief dharma of one who is a kshatriya. There is no higher duty for him than to destroy enemies. . . . [A kshatriya] who would satisfy the claims of his dharma, a king in particular, must fight.

Mahabharata 12.60.13–18

The most famous and beautiful section of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad-Gita (the “Song of God”), where the warrior-prince Arjuna halts in his chariot, filled with dread at the coming battle where he must kill his cousins or be killed by them. The god Krishna has taken the form of his charioteer and urges him on, giving him moral justification for it:

I am time grown old, creating world destruction set in motion to annihilate the worlds; even without you, all these warriors arrayed in hostile ranks will cease to exist.

Therefore, arise and win glory! Conquer your foes and fulfill your kingship! They are already slain by me. Be just my instrument, the archer at my side! (Miller 1986:11–12)

But the Ramayana has a new vision for kings. Its author, Valmiki, writing the Rama- yana for kshatriya patrons, suggested a different dharma for kshatriyas. Rama rejects “the kshatriya’s code [rajadharma] where unrighteousness and righteousness go hand in hand, a code that only debased, vicious, covetous, and evil men observe” (Pollock 1986: 68). Rama is the first kshatriya prince to renounce artha, power. When palace intrigue puts his succession into jeopardy, instead of plunging into warfare to claim his rightful throne—the Mahabharata solution—he goes into a 14-year exile, liv- ing like an ascetic in the wilderness. On his return to Ayodhya at the end, purified by his suffering in exile, empowered by his asceticism, and made wise enough to gov- ern, Rama ushers in a utopian age of peace, abundance, and righteousness.

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ber the concept of “Zomia” discussed in part II: the zones of resistance— mountains, jungles, and wastelands—where independent peoples try to stay out of reach of states. Modern India still has vast areas of such independent people resisting absorption into the caste system, especially in eastern and central India.

Another body of texts attests to the emergence of persons discontented with urban life in the small kingdoms, opting instead for a lifestyle of spiritual practice and renunciation. The Upanishads bring new religious ideas that chal- lenge the dominance of priestly Brahmans and their mastery of ritual on behalf of kings. The forest seemed to call to people in the crowded cities of the late Vedic age. We hear of forest-dwelling sages such as Valmiki, who tells the story of Rama’s exile. Bands of renouncers traveled together, or individual mystics holed up in caves and mountaintops seeking a new reality that breaks with much of the worldview of the Vedas and the Brahmans. Among these was Gautama (the Buddha), who as a prince in the small kingdom of Sakya, had everything a man of the Vedic age could want, but outside his palace he encountered sickness, old age, and death, and decided to join a band of renouncers to escape this world. (The main story of the Buddha is told in the next chapter.) This was certainly a critique of contemporary society. The state, it seems, could not be everything to everyone. While marginal tribal popula- tions tried to keep their distance and many of those at the heart of it embraced renunciation, nothing could stop the growing power of state society.

The Mauryan-Guptan Empires (323 B.C.E.–550 C.E.)

A century and a half after the death of the Buddha, Alexander the Great invaded India in the west, the first firm date we have in Indian history (i.e., 326 B.C.E.). Historians traveling with Alexander reported the marvels of India: trees that produced wool (cotton), trees so gigantic that 500 troops could shelter under each one at noon, vast numbers of monkeys, and a large city, Taxila, governed by good laws whose king welcomed Alexander with kindness. They provided lengthy descriptions of the customs of the country and described a society of multiple castes and categories specialized by occupation. They noted three kinds of religious men: Brahmans, who were ritualists and advisors to kings; Buddhists, philosophers who were contentious and fond of argument; and naked ascetics who lived in the open air.

The small northern states were finally conquered and unified in 323 B.C.E. by Chandragupta Maurya, whose capital was at Pataliputra (now Patna) in a region south of the Ganges River known as Magadha (now south Bihar). At its peak, the Mauryan Empire was larger than any Indian government until Brit- ish times. A manuscript in Sanskrit discovered in 1905, probably unread for a thousand years, revealed the real world of political power underlying all the ancient religious texts that seems to portray an “empire of the spirit.” It proved to be a text on political power resembling Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or Machia- velli’s The Prince—although written sometime during the Mauryan Empire by a royal minister named Kautilya. “Kautilya makes Machiavelli look like Mother

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Teresa,” writes Doniger (2009:202). This work, the Arthashastra, advocates not only military might but “wit and intellect as well as guile, cunning, and deceit”—surveillance and even assassination in the practice of statecraft (Khil- nani 2016:32). Here’s one example: impress people with your brilliance by pre- dicting someone is going to die, then have him killed. Kautilya assumed a world of kings in perpetual conflict, of mandalas (circles) of competing inter- ests, where spy craft was essential, bureaucrats were likely to be corrupt (he identified 40 forms of embezzlement), and royal power needed to be autho- rized by priestly ritual action. However, even with all this political realism, kings needed to seem indifferent to power and wealth for its own sake.

Kautilya comes as a shock up against the more common idealized picture of ancient kings. Think especially of the beloved Rama, whose golden age still stands as some kind of moral political idea in modern India. Another king, forgotten for ages in India but revered throughout the Buddhist world much as Rama is revered in India, was Ashoka, known in his time as King Piyadassi, “beloved-of-the- gods.” He inherited the vast Mauryan Empire built by his grandfather and pushed it further south in his early years in bloody wars against southern kingdoms such as the Kalinga. Legends tell of his conversion to Buddhism and repentance for the suffering his wars inflicted, followed by development of a new moral code for kings, a rajadhamma (rajadharma) of tolerance and compassion for his subjects and improvements—we might call them infrastructure—to make social life function better. He built a road connecting the western cities like Taxila across the agricul- tural lands of North India to his capital at Pataliputra that came to be called the Grand Trunk Road (and still exists). Along its route he planted banyan trees and mango groves and dug ponds and built resting places for travelers.

Ashoka propagated Buddhism as the moral compass of his empire in vivid and concrete ways. He is said to have divided the remains of the Buddha into 84,000 caskets and built 84,000 stupas (among them were some of the stupas opened by Charles Masson in Afghanistan) across his empire to hold them. These became centers of spiritual power and merit, functioning like temples to draw Buddhist pilgrims. He also had constructed pillars and rock monuments memorializing his values at the borders and in important centers of the empire. These continue to be discovered; the number stands at 33 today (see box 5.4). The inscriptions are in brahmi, a script created toward the end of the first mil- lennium B.C.E., but gradually lost over the next centuries, so that for long the monuments could not be read, even by the greatest scholars.1

These rock edicts appear to be personal to Ashoka, often written in his very voice, and give a glimpse of the Buddhist values he extolled. For example, Rock Edict IV:

Promulgation of dhamma has increased that which did not exist over many centuries: abstention from killing, kindness to creatures, respect to relatives, respect for Brahmans and Shramanas [ascetics], and obedience to mother, father and elders. This dhamma conduct has increased in diverse ways, and will increase more thanks to King Piyadassi, beloved of the gods.

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Some of the stone pillars were topped with four lions facing the four direc- tions, with a wheel directly beneath them. The wheel is the “wheel of dhamma,” the wheel that carries the teachings of the Buddha across the land. Ashoka was a chakravartin, a “universal ruler” over all the earth. That lion cap- ital is now the symbol of the Republic of India, seen on the rupee note, on the flag, and on public documents.

The Gupta Empire (320–550C.E.). After Ashoka’s death, the Mauryan Empire dissolved, and there followed 500 years of decentralization. During this time a thriving coastal trade took Indian cultural influence—Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Indic ideas of kingship—to Southeast Asia, especially to Thai- land and Cambodia. But in 324 C.E. the empire was rebuilt from Pataliputra on new lines. This empire, the Gupta, is often called the “classical era” because of its inventiveness in art, architecture, literature, science, and mathematics. Why

Box 5.4 The Words of Ashoka, from the Thirteenth Rock Edict

When the king, devanampiya [“Beloved of the Gods,” i.e., Ashoka], had been con- secrated eight years, Kalinga was conquered, 150,000 people were deported, 100,000 were killed, and many times that number died. But after the conquest of Kalinga, deva- nampiya began to follow dharma, to love dharma, and to give instruction in dharma. Now devanampiya regrets the conquest of Kalinga, for when an independent country is conquered people are killed, they die, or are deported, and that devanampiya finds very painful and grievous. And this he finds even more grievous—that all the inhabit- ants . . . suffer violence, murder, and separation from their loved ones. . . . The par- ticipation of all men in common suffering is grievous to devanampiya. Moreover there is no land, except that of the Greeks, where groups of Brahmans and ascetics are not found, or where men are not members of one sect or another.

For all beings devanampiya desires security, self-control, calm of mind, and gentle- ness. Devanampiya considers that the greatest victory is the victory of dharma; and this he has won here and even 500 leagues beyond his frontiers in the realm of the Greek king Antiochus, and beyond Antiochus among the four kings Ptolemy, Antigo- nus, Magas, and Alexander. Even where the envoys of devanampiya have not been sent, men hear of the way in which he follows and teaches dharma, and they too fol- low it and will follow it. Thus he achieves a universal conquest, and conquest always gives a feeling of pleasure; yet it is but a slight pleasure, for devanampiya only looks on that which concerns the next life as of great importance.

I have had this inscription of dharma engraved that all my sons and grandsons may not seek to gain new victories, that in whatever victories they may gain they may prefer forgiveness and light punishment, that they may consider the only victory the victory of dharma, which is of value both in this world and the next, and that all their pleasure may be in dharma.

Source: Modified from William Theodore De Bary, ed., Sources of Indian Tradition. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, p. 144.

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do the stars seem to move westward? Because the earth rotates on an axis, wrote Aryabhata in the fifth century C.E. Other thinkers developed trigonome- try, defined zero, and calculated the solar year accurately. During this time the great narrative cave art at Ajanta, depicting scenes from the life of the Buddha, was produced. The Gupta age gradually reembraced Brahmanical orthodoxy, returned to the Vedic rituals of kingship including the dramatic spectacle of the horse sacrifice, and reinvigorated the caste system.

We have a helpful firsthand account of life in Gupta India from an unex- pected source: A Chinese Buddhist pilgrim known as Faxian traveled all the way across Central Asia and down into North India in search of authentic Buddhist knowledge and texts, departing China in 399 and returning by sea around 410. In his memoir, A Record of the Buddhist Kingdoms, he described life in Pataliputra, kings who hosted him, and large monasteries filled with shaven- headed monks. He witnessed royal ceremonies honoring the Indic gods, bodhi- sattvas, and the Buddha, led by Brahmans. Buddhism and Brahmanism were equally honored, but not for long; two centuries later, another even more famous Chinese pilgrim, Xuanzang, made the same journey, but by this time (627 C.E.) the Gupta dynasty had collapsed and Xuanzang encountered empty monasteries and a much reduced Buddhist presence. (The religious import of these journeys is discussed in more detail in chapter 6.)

Medieval Period (550–1210 C.E.)

Another period of decentralization began at the end of the Gupta period, but these “between” eras were important moments in Indian history. Numer- ous local kingdoms and monarchies arose, such as in western India, with a pro- liferation of ruling lineages that became the Rajputs (Chattopadhyaya 1997), who claimed lineage glory and legitimacy by projecting genealogies back to the sun or to various gods.

The caste system expanded during this period and achieved much of the complexity we have known in recent times. The old Vedic idea of varna got stretched, reinterpreted, and applied to new groups of people being brought under the control of local kingdoms. As independent tribes and cultivators got pulled into the orbit of small states, they were assigned a position in the varna system. Some warlike groups became Kshatriyas, but most new groups were identified as Shudras. To the original three varnas—Brahmans (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), and Vaishyas (merchants, artisans)—was added a fourth category: Shudra. Vaishyas came to refer primarily to mer- chants, and Shudras were everyone else: artisans, servants, agriculturalists. These were little more than labels to show the rank of groups within society as a whole and the overall structure of dominance and subordination, but the labels did not constitute actual communities of intermarrying families; those groups were called jati, that is, the actual group we call “caste” in English (see the section titled “The Caste System”).

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Also during these centuries, Hinduism was changing, or as some argue, it was actually coming into existence, depending on how one wants to think of the Brahman-dominated practices of previous centuries all the way back to the Vedic Age. Where Brahman ritualism had been court- and household-based, there emerged a new intense devotionalism to particular gods for whom tem- ples were built as centers of worship. The most popular deities were not exactly new, but newly dominant, especially three: Shiva, Vishnu, and the divine femi- nine, Devi (Shakti). These high gods and goddesses were known through com- pilations of mythology about them in the many Puranas, and numerous other deities were declared to be incarnations of a single high god. For example, Kali, Durga, Sati, Sita, Saraswati, Chinnamasta, and Gauri are all forms of Devi. Vishnu had 10 incarnations, including Krishna, Ram, and the Buddha.

The Indo-Islamic Period (Twelfth to Nineteenth Centuries)

The Indo-Islamic period began with a series of hit-and-run incursions from the west, but finally produced two settled historic periods in which rich hybrid cultures were created by the intermixture of Afghan-Turkish-Persian-Mongol- Indian cultural strands. Everything was affected: society, religion, art, and architecture, so that we can speak of a civilization that became “Indo-Islamic.” For most of this time, local populations lived peacefully together in towns and

Two Rajput warriors in a wall fresco in Jodhpur, Rajasthan.

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villages across the subcontinent, their temples, mosques, saints’ tombs, and shrines patronized by everyone.

By the eleventh century, India had become “an ocean world-economy” with important trade to West Asia and to China (Bose and Jalal 1998). Arab traders settled along India’s west coast, bringing the first inklings of Islam but not really intent on religious proselytizing. Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India 17 times between 1000 and 1027, primarily going after treasure from India’s great temples and monasteries, slaughtering “shaven-headed (Buddhist) monks” along the way. By the end of this period, Buddhism had disappeared from India, the surviving monks fleeing north to Nepal or south to Sri Lanka. These invaders were ethnic Turks, who were moving from Central Asia not only into India but also westward, where they founded the Ottoman Empire.

In 1192 Mohammad Ghori, a Turk, established the first Sultanate in Delhi. This was the beginning of cultural assimilation and fusion that grew into Indo- Islamic culture. Though as Muslims they brought Sharia law with them, they did not impose it on the indigenous population, who continued to be governed by local traditions. They brought other new ideas from West Asia: a fierce egalitari- anism that resisted the caste system and therefore made Islam appealing to many of the lowest social orders, although they could not entirely resist the hier- archizing influence of caste, especially in relation to low-caste converts to Islam. They contributed a strong belief in monotheism, in contrast to India’s polythe- ism. The newcomers were mostly Sunni, but the mystical form of Islam known as Sufism better suited Indian sensibilities. They brought new forms of architec- ture: the dome, the mosque, the tomb. Kings were not god-kings, as in Indic forms of kingship, but humans who ruled by Allah’s will, as the Prophet Muhammad himself had been not only the final Prophet but also a warrior chief.

The Mughals replaced the Sultanate in 1526, when a Turk named Babur, who was descended from the Mongol Genghis Khan on his mother’s side, defeated the last of the Delhi sultans. The Mughals expanded their control over India through a century of acquisitions and created a rich and brilliant court in Delhi where the so-called “Great Mughals” patronized poetry, art, and archi- tecture for the next two centuries.

No personality radiates from Indian history with the vibrancy of Akbar. He was a contemporary of Elizabeth I and part of a new cultural strand in India for whom the actions of kings were worthy themes to write about; therefore, we know a great deal about him. At the age of 13, in 1556, he inherited the Mughal Empire founded by his grandfather Babur. By his 20s, he had consoli- dated and expanded the empire by conquest north and south so that, by his death in 1605, his domain stretched from Afghanistan to Bengal, from the Himalayas to the Deccan. India has had conquerors aplenty; it is not Akbar the warrior who leaps from the pages of history, but a vivid personality whose actual face is known from dozens of paintings and whose life and times were recorded in admiring detail by contemporary writers. His biography, the Akbar- nama, was written in his lifetime by Abu’l Fazl and illustrated by court painters

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chosen and personally overseen by Akbar himself (see the image on the facing page). The 19-year-old emperor is at the epicenter of one scene in which a charging bull elephant chases another across a pontoon bridge. Holding him- self by a bare foot hooked under the harness of “Sky-Rocket” (Hawa’i), the meanest, most wicked elephant in India, Akbar has driven him against an equally aggressive elephant, now fleeing in defeat. The pontoon bridge breaks under the fury of their charge, throwing men into the water on either side, while others rush to pull the emperor from the danger he has put himself in.

Akbar maintained a workshop of over a hundred artists who painted epi- sodes from past and recent history, recorded scenes of Hindu life, and exhaus-

Emperor Akbar commis- sioned an illustrated chron- icle of his reign, called the Akbarnama, which was produced between 1590 and 1595. This painting was part of a two-page composition, showing an event when Akbar mounted his most difficult elephant, Hawa’i, then faced off with an equally difficult elephant of his enemy on a bridge of boats, which collapses under the weight. The artists were Basawan and Chetar.

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tively illustrated events from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Harivamsa, which Akbar had translated for the Muslim elite. He sat for his own portraits and also had all his noblemen sit for theirs, so that paintings of the emperor holding darbar (court) are filled with faces that really sat before the emperor. But the Akbarnama is the masterpiece, a work in 12 volumes with 1,400 illustra- tions, which took 15 years to complete (Welch 1978:40). These remarkably detailed paintings are all the more amazing for being miniatures. The scene of Akbar and the two elephants was only 13" by 8". They were painted in opaque watercolor with brushes made of a few hairs plucked from kittens or baby squirrels, which fit on the fingertip of the artist. The glint of sunlight burnishing a North Indian scene was accomplished with pounded gold mixed with a little silver or copper.

Akbar was the greatest of the “Great Mughals,” a line of brilliant, long- lived, cultured, often enlightened, and frequently cruel rulers whose zenith were the four men, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb, whose four reigns spanned the years from 1556 to 1707. Later Mughals continued to patronize the arts, but it was the “Great Mughals” whose patronage was responsible for the most significant examples of Indo-Islamic architecture such as the Taj Mahal, commissioned by the “Engineer Shah”—Shah Jahan—for his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal.

After the “Four Great Mughals,” weaker rulers followed in the eighteenth century as the British were maneuvering into India to trade. The “Last Mughal,” Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in exile in Burma in 1862.

British Colonial Period (Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries)

On December 31, 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to the East India Company, a group of 215 London merchants who put up shares to form one of the first joint stock companies in the world. (The Dutch had organized one the year before.) The company was given a monopoly on trade to the East, espe- cially India, China, and Indonesia, where the Dutch dominated the lucrative spice trade. Eleven years later, an English representative, Sir Thomas Roe, was in the Mughal court of Emperor Jahangir, petitioning for a monopoly on trade in India with promises of rare goods from Europe in return for permission to build factories (i.e., warehouses and trade centers) in various strategic spots in India. Over the next century and a half, the East India Company expanded its factories in India and squeezed out its European competitors, the Dutch, Portu- guese, and French.

Increasingly powerful in India, the Company became a de facto political entity, supported by their own private army and with forts in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, competing with the many Indian princes as the Mughals slowly lost control of their empire. The Company was nicknamed “John Company Raj,” governing large sections in the vicinity of their forts and competing polit- ically and militarily with local princes. In two major battles in 1757 and 1764, the Company under Robert Clive defeated the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II

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and was granted a vast territory to rule and right to collect revenues; this grant is known as the Diwani of Bengal. The East India Company was now a great Raj of India, in control of a region that included much of what is now Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and Bangladesh.

For the next century the Company learned to govern India under a mix of indigenous and British customs and laws. They attempted to rationalize taxation and land revenues, reshaping the structure of land use and the landed class. They built a large army based on a small number of English officers and a large force of sepoys, that is, “native” regiments. However, in 1857 a bloody rebellion broke out (called the “First War of Independence” or the “Indian Mutiny,” depending on your point of view), in which atrocities on all sides included the slaughter of women and children. This was the end of John Company Raj, as the British Crown took over direct control and Victoria became Empress of India.

Under British rule, modern institutions in education, medicine, land reform, and democratic values produced a Western-educated Indian elite with an eye on ultimate independence. In 1885 the Indian National Congress was formed, fostering nationalist sentiments over the next half century under the key concept of swaraj—self-government. Under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and after World War II had exhausted Britain, swaraj was attained on August 15, 1947 (see chapter 12).

Era of Independence

When the flags of the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Paki- stan were raised over Delhi and Lahore, the British Indian Empire was divided into two (and later three) nations, with large Hindu and Muslim majorities in their respective nations, but with substantial minorities of the other group. However, these were not the only sources of identity politics causing friction. There were 562 “princely states” that had never been entirely absorbed by the British government of India and whose rulers had to be retired so that all of India could be part of the republic. There were numerous regional and linguis- tic divisions. The 29 current states (there are also seven union territories) are the product of no less than 12 redrawings of boundaries to satisfy “linguistic nationalism,” the latest in 2014. No one language, faith, or race holds India together; yet it is the world’s largest democracy, a secular state with a constitu- tion guaranteeing free speech, a free press, and equality before the law. It did NOT ban the caste system (our next topic), as many people believe, but it did ban “untouchability” and some of the worst offenses of caste.

The Caste System

Caste is a controversial topic. It is indiscreet to refer to it in public settings. It is rude to ask a person’s caste. Many Hindu organizations deny that caste is intrinsic to the Hindu religion (e.g., HAF 2011). The pervasive hierarchy of the caste system is contradicted by the principle of equality under the law of the

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Indian constitution. Scholars have written about the “eternal” caste system, the “immutable” caste system, as if it has existed unchanged forever. Many people think the constitution and the law have abolished it. Some claim it no longer exists.

Yet, the caste system is ever present in the background. People guess each other’s caste if they don’t already know it. Surnames often reveal it, and in vil- lage India, everyone knows everyone’s caste. Politicians play to caste blocs, and people vote in caste blocs. Matrimonial advertisements almost always state or imply the caste of the girl (or boy) they are looking for. Yet in a nation of 1.3 billion people, caste is still a central organizing principle that impinges on almost all identities (even Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Chris- tians, who all formally oppose it but have been unsuccessful in totally escaping from it) and provides the principal social identity and local community for the vast majority of Hindus. It is also considered a social problem requiring gov- ernment efforts of uplift and remediation for the two hundred million Dalits (“oppressed,” formerly known as “untouchables”), roughly 20 percent of the population. The Indian constitution recognizes “Scheduled Castes” and “Scheduled Tribes,” both historically oppressed groups that have legally defined rights such as reserved seats in government and places in universities. There are also “Other Backward Castes,” which seems like an aspersion until you realize they have certain privileges coming out of the reservations systems, which have led to even some high-caste groups claiming to be “Backwards” in order to claim these advantages (see the section, “Social Justice: Reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes”).

Ancient Sources on the Caste System

The earliest sources on caste are the Vedas and other early texts, most of them the products of Brahman writers and therefore conveying a Brahmanical social ideology. Do these texts portray the actual world of the times, or an ideal world of the Brahmans’ imagining? We cannot firmly answer that question, other than to point out that over centuries these texts took on a normative role that acted back on society by forcing conformity. Even if they started out ideal- istically, they ended up by defining the moral order for society. In this sense it is correct to say that the caste system is the moral order for much of Indian soci- ety, past and present.

Take, for instance, the Myth of the Cosmic Sacrifice, found in the Rig-Veda (10.90). This is only one of several creation myths, but it is the one most rele- vant to the social order (see box 5.5). Purusha is some kind of primeval man or cosmic being whose sacrifice by the gods—who seem to already exist—brings the whole universe into existence. They kill and dismember him; his mouth becomes the priests (Brahmans, who utter the sacred speech); his arms are the Kshatriya (warriors, kings); his thighs the Vaishya (the common people, food producers), and his feet the Shudras (servants). This order is not horizontal but vertical: Brahmans are superior to Kshatriyas, Kshatriyas to Vaishyas, and

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Vaishyas to Shudras. From this same sacrifice came not only the four human orders but all the beasts of the air (birds), forests (wild animals), and villages (domesticated animals), as well as the sacred language of verses, chants, and formulas. So, we are to assume, the four hierarchical categories of humans were established at the very founding of the universe, the core of the human social order, on a par with the animal species.

This four-way classification is known as the varna system, a simple for- mula that can be stretched in numerous ways; it provides four slots to which all kinds of social groups can be assigned. As new social groups or farming com- munities or tribes were encountered and absorbed by society, their subgroups were assigned to one of these four categories. In South India, the actual groups were different from those in the north or west, yet the varna system served well enough to categorize groups into the hierarchical order so that an unknown group’s place in the hierarchy could be recognized from any part of India.

However, these varna categories are not castes. Though there are four main varnas, there are thousands of castes, and these are the actual relevant commu- nities for individuals and families. In any one area there may only be a handful

Box 5.5 The Cosmic Sacrifice

When the gods performed the sacrifice with Purusha as the offering, spring was the clarified butter, summer the fuel, autumn the oblation. They anointed Purusha, the sacrifice born at the beginning, upon the sacred grass. With him the gods, perfected beings, and sages sacrificed. From that sacrifice in which everything was offered, the melted fat was collected, and he made it into those beasts who live in the air, in the forest, and in villages. From that sacrifice in which everything was offered, the verses and chants were born, the meters were born from it, and from it the formulas were born. Horses were born from it, and those other animals that have two rows of teeth; cows were born from it, and from it goats and sheep were born.

When they divided Purusha, into how many parts did they apportion him? What do they call his mouth, his two arms and thighs and feet? His mouth became the Brah- min; his arms were made into the Kshatriya (warrior); his thighs the Vaishyas (the peo- ple); and from his feet the Shudras (servants) were born. The moon was born from his mind; from his eye the sun was born. Indra and Agni came from his mouth, and from his vital breath the Wind was born. From his navel the middle realm of space arose; from his head the sky evolved. From his two feet came the earth, and the quarters of the sky from his ear. Thus they set the worlds in order.

There were seven enclosing-sticks for him and thrice seven fuel-sticks, when the gods, performing the sacrifice, bound Purusha as the sacrificial beast. With the sacri- fice the gods sacrificed to the sacrifice. These were the first dharmas. These very pow- ers reached the dome of the sky where dwell the perfected beings, the ancient gods.

Rig Veda 10.90

Source: Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, 1988.

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or a few dozen castes, all interconnected through occupation and the varna hierarchy. The word caste comes from Portuguese for “race” or “breed,” which somewhat captures the actual Indian term, jati, which means “birth” and is also the term for “kind” or “species,” as in a kind of being or a species of animal (Marriott and Inden 1977). Cows, dogs, tigers, Brahmans, Rajputs, Chamars are all jatis: kinds of beings, each with respective characteristics; they have dis- positions, customs, lifestyles, occupations, food preferences, and limitations on mating. The differences among animal species appear to be the model for dif- ferences among human species. Of course with animals these characteristics are biological while among humans they can be altered or ignored. But they shouldn’t be. That’s the conventional and ancient morality. The sense is that this is a given, natural, and moral order; it exists from the foundations of the universe; and the word for that is dharma. Dharma is also sometimes translated as “reli- gion,” or “morality,” or “righteousness,” or the “cosmic order.” The ancient texts that outline these principles are known as the Dharmashastras—the teachings on dharma. And dharma is not universal; it is specific to the social units known as castes.

In the Bhagavad-Gita, Prince Arjuna on the battlefield is reluctant to go forward and kill his own relatives, the Kauravas, with whom he is at war. His charioteer, who happens to be Krishna in disguise, reminds him of his duty: “Killing is the chief dharma of one who is a Kshatriya.” It is not you who kills, but me, he says; “be just my instrument, the archer at my side!” And he adds: “How many times should I remind you that it is better to do one’s duty [dharma], though imperfect, than the duty of another even well performed?” Though this statement encourages one to embrace one’s own jati-dharma, else- where in the Gita Krishna says: “All beings are equal to Me. There is none especially hateful to Me, nor one who is especially dear to Me. But all those who worship Me with devotion are in Me, and so am I in them” (Bhagavad- Gita 9.29). In other words, there is a higher equality—being beloved by Krishna—that transcends the caste system.

Social processes that evolved as moral imperatives over centuries make it extremely difficult to escape them. There is no changing the caste identity into which one is born—everyone will continue to identify you with your caste; your family will ensure that your spouse is from the same group, your children will have the same identity, and no matter what you accomplish in life, you will die as a member of your caste.

Economics of Caste: The Jajmani System

In the past, and still to a certain degree in the present for many people, there was an occupation associated with jati. Name an occupation—priest, pot- ter, goldsmith, carpenter, farmer, sweeper, scribe, bangle maker, cowherd, gar- dener, barber, dancer, musician, thief—all were considered hereditary jatis. Some were considered “high,” some “low,” depending on the purity or impu- rity of the occupation. Many of these hereditary occupations were viewed as

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rights similar to labor unions; in many villages, for example, a rich landowner could not cut his own hair because that was the barber’s right. The barber’s wife was entitled to aid the landlord’s and the Brahman’s wives in childbirth. In exchange for these services there were customary benefits: a bit of land to work, a small share of the landowner’s harvest, hand-me-down clothes, meals. These exchanges of services and benefits were crucial for survival and the basis of the nonmonetized village economy. Yet, not everyone today will actually engage in this occupation, even though there is believed to be a natural affinity toward that kind of work among people born into that caste.

It is in India’s 640,000 villages, where 68 percent of Indians live (according to the 2011 census), that the caste system is most evident. In the mid-twentieth century, when American anthropologists began doing research in India, it was to the villages they headed. In India they were keenly aware that one village cannot stand for a whole civilization, yet what went on in those villages was a natural starting point, and anthropological methods could best be applied. Other scholars would have to study urban centers, the state, the texts, and his- tory. As a result, early anthropology in India emphasized the caste system that so deeply organized village life.

This young man is a member of the potter (Kumhar) caste in a north Indian town. His caste has a monopoly on making pottery of all kinds (here he is making roof tiles). He is married to a girl of the same caste. Occupational specialization was a key characteristic of the caste system and its local economy for centuries, although it is now possible for people to leave these hereditary occupations for new ones.

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Though the specific set of castes varied from region to region, many fea- tures turned up almost everyplace. In a typical village you find a dominant caste that is the major landowner, owning much or all the land, or even the whole village. In Madhopur (Cohn 1955) and Sirkanda (Berreman 1963) it was the Rajputs. In Kishan Garhi it was the Jats (Marriott 1955). In Kumbapettai (Gough 1954) and in Karimpur (Wiser and Wiser 1963) it was Brahmans. In Pahansu it was Gujars (Raheja 1988). In Rampura it was Okkaligas (Srinivas 1963). Note that these villages are distributed across India: Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Mysore, Madras.

These dominant castes may be high or low in the varna hierarchy, but they are invariably powerful as a result of the resources they control and, usually, the number of their households. For example, in Rampura village, the dominant Okkaliga caste was by far the largest, with 735 persons; the next largest was the Kuruba, a sheepherding caste of 235 persons. The Okkaligas were the most powerful caste, but not the highest ranking; that was the Brahmans with a grand total of 15 persons. Because of their control of the most crucial resource—land—the dominant caste is linked with other village castes in a complex economic and ritual network. The others provide extra labor during tilling and harvesting and provide services to the landowners’ households. The landowner is the patron (jajman) and the economic system that connects his caste with others is known as the jajmani system. It is about economic and rit- ual interdependence.

Case Study: Two Hundred Years of Caste in a

North Indian Village

In contemporary India, these village jajmani systems have undergone changes that have been documented by more recent anthropologists. A particu- larly vivid example comes from the state of Bihar in the northeastern part of India (Chakravarti 1986, 2001a, 2001b). The village of Aganbigha was founded 200 years ago by a man named Ishwar, a member of the Bhumihar caste, who was granted land by the maharaja. He immediately set about assembling a full complement of serving castes to establish a classic jajmani system. These Bhu- mihars considered themselves too high ranking to personally cultivate the land, so they brought in lower-caste cultivators to actually work it. Under British law, both the Bhumihars and these lower caste cultivators had rights in the land.

In order to expand cultivation to marshy land nearby, the Bhumihars brought in members of a tribal group, the Santhals, to reclaim the land, work- ing on it for half the produce. However, when the Santhals began to claim offi- cial cultivation rights to this land, the Bhumihar landowners attempted to replace them with Yadavas, a more pliable caste willing to accept their place in the caste hierarchy. At the same time the Bhumihar landowners began calling themselves “farmers” (kisans) rather than the more prestigious “landowners” (zamindar) in order to claim land rights for themselves. Throughout the 1930s there was a great deal of agitation by various agricultural castes over land rights

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led by the reforming Swami Sahananda, himself a Bhumihar, in the mode of Mahatma Gandhi.

In the 1960s, agriculture began to be restructured along capitalist lines. Trac- tors put plows out of business, along with the farmers who previously owned them and plowed fields for the landowners. Previously it took 60 days to plow 25 acres with oxen; with a tractor it could be done in 20 hours. The Yadavas, San- thals, and other farming castes were reduced to day laborers at the lowest possi- ble wages, as the Bhumihars controlled more and more land. Meanwhile, Bhumihars became more and more powerful in regional politics; one of their members became the chief minister of Bihar. In 2010 a rumor circulated that a bill was being considered that would redistribute land away from Bhumihar landowners to the impoverished former cultivators; but the chief minister sided with the Bhumihars, declaring this was just a vicious rumor and whoever was spreading it was “sowing seeds of hatred and discontent” (Ahmad 2010).

This case study, which could be multiplied hundredfold, illustrates the con- tinuing relevance of caste identities in rural economics. It is still true that “the circumstances of birth into a low-ranking caste tend to determine their social and material conditions” (Chakravarti 2001b:1459). (For more on the ritual aspects of the caste system, see chapter 6.)

Social Justice: Reservations for Scheduled Castes and

Scheduled Tribes

Earlier we described the caste system ideologically and economically, but both views are from the top: the Brahman (mythological) view, and the Kshatriya (landholder) view. The system looks very different from the bottom, from those who have suffered for centuries under the disabilities of caste.

Perhaps the best way to convey the experience of untouchability is by story. The following was told by the great leader of the untouchables, Ambed- kar, in 1936:

A most recent event is reported from the village Chakwara in Jaipur state. It seems from the reports that have appeared in the newspapers that an untouchable of Chakwara who had returned from a pilgrimage had arranged to give a dinner to his fellow untouchables of the village as an act of religious piety. The host desired to treat the guests to a sumptuous meal and the items served included ghee (butter). But while the assembly of untouchables was engaged in partaking of the food, the Hindus in their hundreds, armed with lathis [heavy sticks used as weapons], rushed to the scene, despoiled the food and belaboured the untouchables who left the food they were served with and ran away for their lives. And why was this murderous assault committed on defenseless untouchables? The reason given is that the untouchable host was imprudent enough to serve ghee and his untouchable guests were foolish enough to taste it. Ghee is undoubtedly a luxury for the rich. But no one would think that the consumption of ghee was a mark of high social status. The Hindus of Chakwara thought other- wise and in righteous indignation avenged themselves for the wrong done

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to them by the untouchables, who insulted them by treating ghee as an item of food which they ought to have known could not be theirs, consistently with the dignity of the Hindus. This means that an untouchable must not use ghee even if he can afford to buy it, since it is an act of arrogance towards the Hindus. (Ambedkar 1987)

This story could be multiplied a million times over in India’s history, and although this event took place in 1936, these attitudes still prevailed 66 years later in the same village where untouchables were still not allowed to bathe in the public pond. They organized a protest, demanding their rights according to the Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989. More than 50 of the Dalits were injured by caste Hindus who resisted these efforts (Prakash 2003).

The framers of the Indian constitution understood that centuries of institu- tionalized and religiously enforced inequality could not easily be mitigated, and so it established a system of affirmative action to ensure that members of oppressed castes and tribes would have opportunities for education, social advancement, and representation in government. A list, or “schedule,” of his- torically oppressed castes was created, as was another list of oppressed tribes. Special opportunities became available to members of these Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, such as reserved seats in universities, scholarships and loans, and specified numbers of seats in legislative bodies. These advantages soon became politically hot, as other castes claimed that they, too, were disad- vantaged. To accommodate these groups, a category called “Other Backward Castes” was created. Just how complicated, and contested, this whole issue is can be seen in box 5.6 (on the following page), which describes a man of the powerful Patidar caste in Gujarat who is seeking “Backward” status.

It is a good question how much these remedies have helped the groups they were aimed to aid. Very often the reserved seats at universities go unfilled, while qualified higher caste applicants are turned away. Poverty remains very high, and untouchability discrimination is still very common. Perhaps the greatest asset of Dalit communities is the voting box. They are a powerful bloc of two hundred million voters who are wooed by both major parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (now in office) and the Congress Party. A member of the Dalit Koli caste from Bihar, Ram Nath Kovind, was voted in as president of India in June 2017. Although this is largely a ceremonial role, it is presti- gious and indicates the political influence Dalit groups now wield.

The Dharma of Women

Traditional India was a patriarchal society in which males were dominant and played public roles while women were sheltered in domestic roles in the home “behind the curtain,” that is, in parda (purdah). The higher the status of the family and caste, the more extreme was the seclusion of women. Con- versely, the lower the status of the family, the more women may leave the home, often doing public jobs like sweeping and carrying loads. While modern

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Box 5.6 Dominant Caste Seeks Backward Status

It was a headline story on August 26, 2016: “Riots Break Out in India Over a Domi- nant Caste’s Attempt to Gain ‘Backward’ Status.” A young man of the Patidar caste, one of the most prosperous and powerful castes in the state of Gujarat, has become leader of a movement to downgrade the status of his caste. Down is not the usual direction of social aspirations.

Any list of famous Patels (i.e., Patidars) will include high achievers all over the world. In the US, Patels are said to own 25 percent of the motel industry. They are big players in the international diamond trade. In Gujarat, they are 20 percent of the pop- ulation, and in rural areas they are the dominant caste, controlling most of the land. Their new, downward aspirations only make sense in relation to India’s effort to bring fairness and equal opportunity to communities long depressed by the caste system.

Historically, the caste system grouped its higher and lower jatis according to the varna system: Brahmans (priests and scholars), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (merchants), Shudras (artisans and cultivators). Large numbers of castes were outside this system and thus considered even lower: once called Untouchables, then Harijans (a term invented by Gandhi), and now Dalits (“oppressed”). In addition, there were tribal groups, even farther outside this system.

In an effort to convert this dominance hierarchy into a social support and uplift pro- gram, the Government of India created a parallel hierarchy to offer opportunities for those previously oppressed. Along with this new hierarchy came privileges available only to those in underprivileged categories. This new system’s categories are: “For- ward” castes (those already favored and successful, for whom there were now no special privileges, groups such as Brahmans, Rajputs, Patidars, and Sikhs), “Back- ward” castes (many Shudra communities), which came to be known as OBCs (“Other Backward Classes”), the “Scheduled Castes” (SCs) (Dalits), and “Scheduled Tribes” (STs) (tribal groups such as the Gonds, Santhals, and Nagas). The government main- tains lists of approved castes in each category and modifies them from time to time, and the lists vary state by state.

The privileges reserved for OBCs, Scheduled Castes, and Scheduled Tribes are significant, including reserved seats (i.e., quotas) in legislative bodies, reserved seats in universities, and reserved positions in state and national government jobs. For instance, in Gujarat OBCs get 27 percent, Scheduled Castes get 7 percent, and Scheduled Tribes get 15 percent. Altogether, nearly 50 percent of such opportunities are reserved for non-Forward groups. This means that all Forward groups can com- pete for only the 50 percent of nonreserved university and government opportunities. And the problem is that far more of the Forward groups have the education and skills to compete than do the SC/ST and OBC groups, because lack of primary and sec- ondary education and family wealth still hold them back. Across India, it is often the case that jobs and university positions go unfilled because they are “reserved,” and there are not enough qualified persons to take those jobs.

Finally we come back to our young Patidar, Hardik Patel, who is 22 years old, has a BA in commerce, and is a member of a middle-class family that owns a small busi- ness in Gujarat. He argues that hardworking, ambitious young people in his own com- munity are unfairly kept out of the 50 percent of reserved seats that anyway often go unfilled and are faced with intense competition in the other 50 percent. And this move- ment, which has parallels in other parts of India, points out that many of the “Forward”

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India has greatly improved the status of women, who may now be seen every- where in public and in almost all careers, this section attempts to explain the logic and workings of patriarchy in the traditional order.

Patriarchy

It is always culture that determines (i.e., constructs) what it sees as the “nature” of men and women. Are men and women more or less equal, capable of doing pretty much the same things and participating equally in society? Or are men and women so different from each other that on every imaginable scale—emotion, intelligence, capability, strength, shrewdness—they are oppo- sites and must be assigned totally distinct and nonoverlapping roles in society? Anthropologist Sherry Ortner has argued (1996) that it was the rise of the state that produced the greatest extremes between men and women. In state societ- ies, the patriarchal extended family emerged as the state’s lowest-level unit; male heads of household were responsible for “their” women (and also junior males). In many ways this was the first true emergence of patriarchy, or at least its highest degree of institutionalization.

Daughters were useful for their potential in forming kinship alliances. Among elites, the practice of marrying daughters upward in rank (hypergamy) became a common ideal in marriage; you could raise your family’s status by marrying your daughter to someone superior in status, thus forming alliances with higher ranking families. The king set the pattern, accumulating wives partly as one kind of treasure of the realm and partly as a way of making bonds of kin- ship with subordinate chiefs whose loyalties were politically necessary. The Mughal Emperor Akbar had 5,000 wives, obviously more than he could ever get around to for erotic purposes. According to the A’in-i Akbari, “His Majesty forms matrimonial alliances with princes of Hindustan, and of other countries: and secures by these ties of harmony the peace of the world.” The account goes on to describe the good order in the emperor’s enormous household; despite the assis- tance of chaste women, writers, cash keepers, porters, and guards, “His Majesty does not dispense with his own vigilance, but keeps the whole in proper order,” a model for simpler patriarchal households throughout his realm.

This pattern generalized among elite classes. Along with the girl went addi- tional inducements, gifts of dowry like land and jewels (and these days, con- sumer goods). In this environment where brides are seen as a kind of gift, the

castes have numerous members who are also impoverished and could use help. Brahmans across India, for instance, are frequently among the poorest villagers, even though their status in the caste hierarchy is high.

This background explains why Hardik Patel wants his caste to be declared “Back- ward” in order to have access to all jobs.

Source: Iyengar 2015.

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“female purity complex” emerged, in which women’s virtue is prized and is seen as a problem for the men of her family. She must be a pure virgin at mar- riage; this led to early marriage in which girls were given in marriage before puberty so there could be no question of their virginity. Often there would be a first “marriage” in childhood at age six or eight, and then a second “marriage” at puberty when she actually went to live with her new husband and his family. This ensured not only that the girl was a virgin but also that she would be pli- able in accepting her role in her new household as the youngest woman in a house where women’s status was age-ranked: the senior woman, wife of the senior male, was in control, followed by unmarried daughters of the house and wives of the sons of the household.

It may seem to be a contradiction that the Indian pantheon is filled with powerful goddesses while actual women are kept in submission. What about Durga, the goddess who killed the buffalo demon? Kali, the drinker of blood? Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom? Lakshmi, the bringer of wealth? Wives are often said to be Lakshmis who bring the wealth of dowry into the home. But a woman’s truest nature and best potential is said to be embodied in the virtuous Sita (see box 5.7). The life experience of most women is to be kept sheltered by their male kinsmen, in her early years in her father’s house and village, and after marriage in her husband’s house and village, as Sita was protected by her husband Rama and brother-in-law Lakshman. But the princess of the late Vedic Age is not uniformly seen as a perfect role model.

A Woman’s Life Cycle

Parda/Purdah. The practices of seclusion of women are collectively referred to as parda. The most conservative Muslim women literally “wear the curtain” whenever they leave the house, in the form of the full-body wrap known as the burqa. Hindu women use the end of their saris to cover their heads when they go out, or may have the entire rickshaw swathed in a sari, but for the most part living “in parda” means not going out but rather staying in the courtyard of one’s own household, and even out of sight of the senior men of the household. Servants and children can be sent to shop or carry messages. Household architecture has been shaped to the needs of parda; throughout much of India a house is built around a central, enclosed courtyard where the women and children stay. There are women’s quarters, the zenana, and men’s quarters, the mardana. Guests do not get beyond the front verandah.

Stridharma. A woman’s career is her husband. “Career,” of course, is too modern a term; let us use dharma instead. Stridharma, the dharma of women, is devotion to one’s husband. A woman’s life is devoted to serving her husband and giving him children; her virtue protects him; he is her “lord.” The very word for husband, pati, means both husband and lord. At marriage she becomes a pativrata, one who has “taken a vow to her husband/lord.” She wor- ships him by eating the leftovers from his plate as prasad, just as worshippers

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Box 5.7 Sita as Role Model?

“Be like Sita,” is a formula urged on young women across India for countless gen- erations. In Bengal, girls are taught to practice a ritual fast involving an early morning bath, an offering of leaves and flowers, and a chant: “May I have a husband like Rama, may I have a father-in-law like Dasharatha, may I have a mother-in-law like Kaushalya, may I have a brother-in-law like Lakshmana, may I be a wife like Sita” (Divakaruni 2000).

But who is Sita and what did she do that women should emulate? Sita is a goddess, the heroine of the Ramayana, the wife of Lord Rama who won

her in a contest by pulling the bow of Shiva. She loyally follows her husband-lord into exile for 14 years, cheerfully enduring the hardship of jungle life to be with her beloved. Fate turns against her when she is kidnapped, carried to Sri Lanka and imprisoned, and has to be rescued by Rama together with an army of monkeys, events that take up the main portion of the text. Sita is thrilled finally to be reunited with her husband, only to find Rama cruelly suspicious: Did she remain chaste while imprisoned? He doubts it and intends to send her away. To prove her innocence and devotion, she asks for the agnipariksha: the fire ordeal. A pyre is built and Sita enters the flames, where—as many paintings hauntingly portray—she endures the fire and is not burned.

Sita undergoes a trial by fire to prove her fidelity during her captivity while being observed by Rama, Lakshman, and Hanuman.

(continued)

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take food to feed the gods and then eat the leftovers. She may fast on Tuesdays to ensure his long life. While he is alive, her life is filled with auspiciousness and good things; when he dies, she is plunged into an ascetic widowhood.

A young girl’s life is a time of joyous freedom in her father’s house and vil- lage. She does not have to cover her head and she may well be free of the household tasks that will be her lot in adulthood. Eventually her father will begin to worry about settling her future; he will have to arrange her marriage. Previously this had to be done before puberty, as it was a sin for a father to let his daughter reach sexual maturity in his household, but legislation now for- bids (without exactly having stopped) marriage before age 16.

A father will begin by making cautious inquiries among men of his caste, seeking a prestigious marital connection in a distant village. Far more attention

They return in triumph to Ayodhya, only to face another round of suspicion from the populace. This time Rama unceremoniously abandons her to the forest, unaware she is pregnant with twin sons—whom she raises to love and respect their father.

Though Sita has long been considered “the noblest flower of Indian womanhood, devoted to her lord in thought, word and deed,” and the story of Rama and Sita is held to be the best “text-book of morals which can be safely placed in the hands of youths to inspire them to higher and nobler ideals of conduct and character” (K. R. S. Iyengar, quoted in Hess 1999), many are not so sure. Why did the “ideal man,” Rama, treat Sita so badly? Should Sita have meekly accepted this cruelty and submitted to the fire ordeal and then to banishment? In the original version by Valmiki (ca. second century B.C.E.), Rama has a change of heart and goes in search of her, demanding that she once again go through the fire ordeal and then return with him to Ayodhya. This time Sita has had enough. She calls on mother earth to open up and receive her.

Young women idealize Sita’s romantic love for her husband, the handsome prince (and god) Rama, happily enduring hardship just to be with him. Her devotion became, in medieval poetry, a metaphor for human love for the divine. Sita-like char- acters—long-suffering heroines who never lose faith in their beloved—often appear in Bollywood films, and Ramayana themes can often be discerned.

But if you talk to young women, you frequently hear another view. The following is from a conversation with a young Brahman wife in the North Indian region of Mithila, where Sita herself was born:

I tell you, Sita is not a model. But what was her fault? Why shouldn’t I take her as a model? Her fault was nothing. If Ravan took her away, she was a weak girl! She was a weak girl. If her husband and brother-in-law couldn’t protect her, the peo- ple of Ayodhya should be blamed. Why should a girl of Mithila be blamed? I am telling you, Mithila seems to be scared of Sita. I tell you, if there is some misun- derstanding between wife and husband, the girl will be blamed. Every time. Even the parents, knowing that my girl hasn’t done anything wrong, you can interview my mother in this case, I think she’ll give you quite a lot of information. Even sup- pose I have a difference with my husband . . . my mother, she is going to be on the son-in-law’s side. Her son-in-laws are always perfect outside, you know?

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is paid to the prestige of the family the daughter is given to than to the boy him- self and whether the two will be happily married. The negotiations will include coming to terms over dowry. Daughters do not inherit wealth when their fathers die but receive their share at marriage, which is transferred to their hus- bands’ families. As India continues to prosper with economic development, the dowry system has intensified. Dowry generally includes a cash payment, elab- orate gifts to the son-in-law, and clothing and jewelry to bedeck the bride. Cash payments have become astronomical in recent years. The bride’s father may be required to pay several lakhs of rupees2 in cash and gifts, which frequently include refrigerators, motor scooters, automobiles, televisions, or four years’ university tuition for the groom.

When a girl marries, her life is transformed. She moves to a strange house in a strange village to begin life with a man she did not meet until her wedding. This transition is both fearful and romanticized, for Indians are socialized to

These are Brahman women in a very conservative village in the northern state of Bihar. You can tell a great deal about the social status of these women by their clothing. At the center is a young bride-to-be, led by her mother and grandmother in a prewedding ceremony. The mother and grandmother have their heads covered, because they are in their husbands’ village. From her white sari you know the grandmother is a widow. Far in the back are other widows in white, who are inauspicious and stay on the periphery so as not to bring bad luck. The younger girls with uncovered heads are in their fathers’ village; when they go to their husbands’ houses, they must cover their heads. A married sister of the bride (with a baby in her arms) has come home to her father’s village for her sister’s wedding, so she, too, can have her head uncovered.

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fall in love after the wedding, not before. The wedding rites initiate her suhag, the auspicious state of a woman with a living husband, no longer a virgin, not yet a widow. It connotes full adult sexuality, all the beauty and glamour of a woman whose arms and ankles jingle with bangles, whose forehead is red with auspicious sindur in the part of her hair, whose body is clothed in colorful saris, whose womb is productive with life (Raheja and Gold 1994).

As a young bride in her husband’s household, her delight in suhag is tem- pered by the necessity of submitting to the authority of all women senior to her, which includes first, her husband’s mother, and then all the wives of her hus- band’s elder brothers. These large extended households are built around a core of fathers and sons; daughters marry out to other villages, and wives marry in from outside. These can be warm and happy family communities with lots going on all the time and never a shortage of companionship, but they also have their built-in tensions, which are best handled by careful lines of authority and codes of conduct to protect the vulnerable. The young bride is vulnerable to possible sexual predation by older men of the family, and so avoidance pat- terns require her to keep her head completely veiled in their presence and to stay away from them if at all possible. The men will cough politely as they enter a room to give her an opportunity to slip out; they will convey messages to her through a child.

A woman is considered blessed if she dies before her husband. But if she becomes a widow, parts of the funeral rites of her husband will include the beginning of her widowhood. Such rites frequently include breaking her ban- gles, washing the red powder out of the part in her hair, and robing her in a white sari. The more extreme forms of ascetic widowhood have been modified in recent years, but in many parts of India one still meets young widows wear- ing the white sari and avoiding all auspicious occasions such as weddings.

Two Social Problems

Out of these patterns of marriage and the woman’s life cycle have emerged extremes that are a challenge to Indian society today.

Dowry Deaths. In the last few decades as consumerism has grown, Indian society has had to struggle with a new form of greed made possible by the old tradition of dowry. A young bride comes into her new family as a “Lak- shmi,” a goddess of wealth, bringing money and consumer goods. The groom’s family may continue to make demands on her father long after the marriage, a new form of extortion with the bride held hostage. When his resources run out, a “kitchen accident” may occur in which she burns to death in a kerosene fire. Most major Indian cities have several such “accidents” every week, referred to as “dowry deaths,” which are rarely successfully prosecuted. The husband then is free to marry again and gets a new dowry (see box 5.8).

Sati (Suttee). Widows have sometimes chosen to follow their husbands in death rather than to live for many years as a widow, an act that has Hindu

Box 5.8 “What Should Happen but Never Does,” by Supriya Jha

This painting by a young Indian woman artist tells a story of a dowry death, but proposes a vengeful conclusion that “should happen but never does.” In the room (on the left), a husband pours kerosene on his young wife while the mother-in-law lights a match. But women of the community come to her (the wife’s) rescue. The mother-in-law looks up to see kerosene being poured on her from the window above, while a group of women arrive to light the match. The painting urges women to take control of these atrocities through group action.

The artist is a young Brahman woman from Mithila in the northeastern state of Bihar, painting in a folk genre known as Mithila Art. Prior to the 1970s, women of cer- tain communities painted their walls on the occasion of marriage. These lovely wall paintings were mostly unknown until the great Bihar Earthquake of 1934 when thou- sands of homes broke open, exposing the art. After Independence, the government encouraged women of Mithila to begin painting on paper, and soon an international market emerged and a number of artists gained international renown. Mithila Art is India’s most successful and visible contemporary folk art tradition.

Source: Artist: Supriya Jha (Heinz, 2006).

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sanction, although practiced only in a few castes and very rarely since it was outlawed by the British in 1829. Sati sprang into a great national controversy in 1987 when an 18-year-old Rajput girl named Roop Kanwar committed sati by joining her husband of one year on his funeral pyre. Technically a woman does not commit sati but becomes a sati through this act. The word sati means “inner truth”; it is the strength of her vow to become sati that is believed to cause her body itself to ignite on the funeral pyre as she holds her husband’s head in her lap. The sati of Roop Kanwar immediately became a cause célèbre. Educated young Rajput men viewed it as a return to their old standards of valor by a heroic young Rajput woman, and they immediately formed a “Committee for the Defense of the Religion of Sati” (Sati Dharma Raksha Samiti). Much of the debate revolved around the question whether Roop Kanwar’s act was volun- tary (as most witnesses claimed) or was forced (according to some reports, she was found hiding in a shed as she got an inkling of what was in store for her, was dragged out and drugged, and “helped” onto the funeral pyre) (Hawley 1994; Oldenburg 1994). Indian feminists protested that however it happened, sati should not be glorified and no one should profit from it through the tem- ples that are built afterward on the site of a sati.

A sati becomes a satimata, a “mother sati” or goddess, and a shrine is built on the site of past satis, to which people come from afar to worship a woman who has so perfectly fulfilled her dharma as a woman and her vow (pativrata) to her husband. Remember Sita, who went through the fire to prove her purity as a wife, who is sometimes held to be the first sati, though the flames proved her purity by not burning her. The other myth-model of a sati is Parvati (also known as Sati), whose father insulted her husband Shiva by not inviting him to a feast. In protest against this insult, she flung herself into a fire, and grief-stricken Shiva stumbled throughout India carrying her corpse, leaving portions of her body here and there across North India where temples sprang up in her honor. But as one feminist Indian scholar, Veena Talwar Oldenburg, says in a contest- ing interpretation of the myth: “Her act did not signify piety toward a husband but willful protest against a father. So the Sati myth cannot really qualify as the inspirational myth for sati” (Oldenburg 1994:163).

ENDNOTES 1 Brahmi was finally deciphered by James Prinsep in the nineteenth century and discovered to be

based on prakrit, the speech of North India at that time in which most of the Buddhist texts were written.

2 One lakh = 100,000 rupees. As of this writing, the value of one dollar is about 65 rupees; so one lakh is over $6,500. A typical middle-class monthly income is $1,627, i.e., Rs. 1,500 to 3,000; so a dowry of two lakhs might be six years’ income.

REFERENCES CITED Ahmad, F. 2010, February 21. Where Is Bataidari Bill? Asks Nitish. The Times of India. Ambedkar, Babasaheb. 1987. Writings and Speeches. Vol. 1. Education Department,

Government of Maharashtra.

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Berreman, Gerald. 1963. Hindus of the Himalayas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. 2001. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political

Economy. London: Routledge. Chakravarti, Anand. 1986. The Unfinished Struggles of Santhal Bataidars in Purnea

District, 1938–1942. Economic and Political Weekly 21:1947–65, 1987–1989. ———. 2001a. Social Power and Everyday Class Relations: Agrarian Transformation in North

Bihar. New Delhi: Sage Press. ———. 2001b. Caste and Agrarian Class: A View from Bihar. Economic and Political

Weekly 36:1449–1462. Chattopadyaya, Brajadulal. 1997. The Making of Early Medieval India. Calcutta: Oxford

India Paperback. Cohn, Bernard. 1955. The Changing Status of a Depressed Caste. In Village India, ed.

McKim Marriott. Pp. 53–77. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Divakaruni, Chitra. 2000, March 22–26. Uncertain Objects of Desire. Atlantic Monthly. Doniger, Wendy. 2009. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univer-

sity Press. Gough, Kathleen. 1954. The Traditional Kinship System of the Nayars of Malabar. Boston:

Harvard University Press. Hawley, John Stratton (ed.). 1994. Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in

India. New York: Oxford University Press. Heinz, Carolyn Brown. 2006. Documenting the Image in Mithila Art. Visual Anthropol-

ogy Review 2:5–33. Hess, Linda. 1999. Rejecting Sita: Indian Responses to the Ideal Man’s Cruel Treat-

ment of His Ideal Wife. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67(1): 1–32. Hitchcock, John T. 1959. The Idea of the Martial Rajput. In Traditional India: Structure

and Change, ed. Milton Singer. Pp. 10–17. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society. Hindu American Foundation. 2011. Not Cast in Caste: Seeking an End to Caste-based

Discrimination. https://www.hafsite.org/media/pr/not-cast-caste-big-picture- and-executive-summary

Iyengar, Rishi. 2015, August 26. Riots Break Out in India Over a Dominant Caste’s Attempt to Gain “Backward” Status. Time. http://www.time.com/401101/hardik- patel-protest-arrest-gujarat-obc/

Keay, John. 1988. India Discovered. London: Collins. Khilnani, Sunil. 2016. Kautilya. In Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives. New

York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. Marriott, McKim. 1955. Little Communities in an Indigenous Civilization. In Village

India, ed. McKim Marriott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press/ Marriott, McKim, and Ronald Inden. 1977. Towards an Ethnosociology of North

Indian Caste Systems. In The New Wind: Changing Identities in South Asia, ed. Ken- neth David. Pp. 227–238. The Hague: Mouton.

Marris, Emma. 2014, March 3. 200-Year Drought Doomed Indus Valley Civilization. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/200-year-drought- doomed-indus-valley-civilization/

Masson, Charles. 1844. Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, the Pan- jab, and Kalat. London: Richard Bentley.

Miller, Barbara Stoler, trans. 1986. The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War. New York: Bantam.

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Oldenburg, Veena. 1994. The Roop Kanwar Case. In Sati, the Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India, ed. John Stratton Hawley. Pp. 101–130. New York: Oxford University Press.

Omrani, Bijan. 2008. Charles Masson of Afghanistan: Deserter, Scholar, Spy. Asian Affair 39(2): 199–216.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1996. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.

Pollock, Sheldon. 1986. The Rāmāyana of Vālimīki, an Epic of Ancient India, Vol. 2: Ayod- hyakanda. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Prakash, Louis. 2003. Scheduled Castes and Tribes: The Reservation Debate. Economic and Political Weekly 38(25): 2475–2478.

Raheja, Gloria Goodwin. 1988. The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Presentation, and the Domi- nant Caste in a North Indian Village. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, and Ann Gold. 1994. Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Richman, Paula, ed. 1991. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Robinson, Andres. 2015, October 20. Cracking the Indus Script. Nature 526: 499–501. Srinivas, M. N. 1963. The Social Structure of a Mysore Village. In India’s Villages, ed.

M. N. Srinivas. Pp. 21–35. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Wiser, William, and Charlotte Wiser. 1971. Behind Mud Walls. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

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6 RELIGIONS OF

SOUTH ASIA

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magine a Google Earth view of South Asia; slowly zoom in on the beauti- ful blue globe and gently twist the view west to east, north to south. Google imagery provides a landforms view of valleys and mountain chains, but

what if you could see the distribution of religions across that vast space? (Per- haps someday we will.) More than 1.7 billion people, one fourth of all humans, live here. In the largest nation, India, 80 percent call themselves Hindu. Another 13 percent are Muslim, 2.3 percent Christian, 1.9 percent Sikh. There are also smaller percentages of Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, Jews, and Baha’is. In Nepal, 80 percent are Hindus (plus Buddhists, 9 percent; Muslims, 4 percent; Christians and others 1–3 percent). This is the gigantic heartland of Hinduism.

Where are the Muslims? Besides India, they are west in Pakistan (95 per- cent, or 174 million), east in Bangladesh (89 percent, or 154 million), and south in the Maldives (officially 100 percent, as everyone is required to be Mus- lim—about 300,000 persons).

Where are the Buddhists? The largest density of Buddhists is in Sri Lanka, where 70 percent are Buddhists, alongside 15 percent Hindu, 8 percent Chris- tian, and 7 percent Muslim. In Bhutan, 75 percent are Tibetan Buddhists, while 24 percent are Hindus.

These distributions can be traced historically to the movements of mission- aries (e.g., taking early Buddhism to Sri Lanka in the third century B.C.E.), the arrival of conquerors bringing their own religions originating elsewhere (Islam, beginning in the seventh century, Christianity in the nineteenth century), and political population transfers (the Partition in 1947 that resulted in high Mus- lim concentrations in Pakistan and Bangladesh). Rulers were responsible for intensifying some religious traditions by adoption for themselves and their peo- ple (Ashoka in the third century B.C.E., the Gupta revival of Brahmanism in the third century C.E.). Conversions to new religions (Islam, Christianity) or old ones (Buddhism) came about as oppressed groups tried to escape the domi- nance of the caste system. Charismatic gurus founded new syntheses based on strands of older ideas (the Buddha; Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism). Mean- while, castes and tribes had their long traditions of worship and practice, pre- ferring certain deities and rites over others.

In this chapter, however, we will not examine Asian religion nation-by- nation, or by a history of ideas, tracing the development of ideas over time, as is commonly done. Though both are valuable approaches, ours is different. This chapter also is not organized on a World Religions plan (Hinduism, Bud- dhism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, etc.), although that is also a familiar mode of

I

Chapter opener photo: The goddess Durga travels by rickshaw to the Hooghly River in Calcutta as part of the Durga Puja Festival.

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analysis. Instead, we will move topically through the most significant charac- teristics of religious faith and practice in South Asia, using examples from the major traditions, texts, and practices as appropriate and as space allows.

Early Core Ideas

New Ideas Emerge: Upanishadic Thought

In the many small kingdoms that dotted North India during the Late Vedic Age, a new sophistication was emerging from court culture and early urbaniza- tion. Kings gathered Brahmans, philosophers, and sages to their courts. There were questions about the effectiveness of the sacrificial ritualism of the Brahmans and puzzles about the nature of the universe and man’s relation to it. The texts that record these new speculations are known as the Upanishads, the most philosophi- cal of all early Indian texts, which were being written between 700 and 200 B.C.E.

A bit of the flavor of these discussions is captured in the Katha Upanishad. A prince named Nachiketa calls Yama (Death) to his court and asks: “After death, does a man still exist?” According to prevalent ideas of the afterlife, the dead joined their ancestors in the pitr-lok, a vaguely understood “place of the fathers.” Death was death, the end of existence. Religious activity in life was about a good life, health, and prosperity, not about the afterlife.

Yama stalls. “Even the gods have trouble with this question,” he says. “Wouldn’t you rather have gold? Fair maidens? Chariots? Music?” These were the benefits of the current Brahmanical worldview and the rites over which Brah- mans presided. “Isn’t this enough?” Yama was asking. The world-weary Prince Nachiketa says, “These things last only until death. And they wear out the sense organs. Besides, wealth doesn’t make a man happy. Even kings know that.” Yama sighs and admits that Nachiketa has wisdom; he is seeking truth-knowledge.

The new ideas Yama explained to Nachiketa are indeed radical. It started with a new cosmology. Beyond all that is seen and known, all the material world with which we are familiar, beyond the gods is a greater nonmaterial reality that can hardly be expressed in language. Vague nouns are used to express it: the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Paratma (great soul), Brahman. Brahman is so unknowable that one can only talk about him/it in metaphors: the foundation of the universe, the first-born, the soul of all the gods, born in the form of breath, created with the elements, the place where the sun rises and sets, contains all the gods, is realized only by the mind, the unmanifest.

All material things that come into existence are transitory. All that we see as the material world is impermanent, and therefore illusion (maya). Because we, too, are matter, we are deluded by the material world in which we are embedded, wrongly thinking it is real and enduring.

However, deep within our bodies lies the atma. Though the body will die, decay, and disappear, the atma cannot; it is eternal. It, too, is described meta- phorically: atma is not born, does not die, has not sprung from anything, is

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smaller than the small and greater than the great, is hidden in the hearts of all living creatures, goes everywhere, dwells in impermanent bodies but is itself bodiless, is a subtle essence, is a part of Paratma. We sense it in deep, dreamless sleep, the still center of the self, when all the sense organs are closed off from the outside world. Yama’s answer to Nachiketa is, “The atma goes on after death because it is a part of eternal Brahman.”

Death belongs in the physical world because of karma. The word “karma” at its most literal means simply action. Because our bodies are material, we must eat, move, speak, listen, think; our bodies demand it. But it is this very action that keeps us connected to life. To exist in the material world is to act; it is the very condition of our existence. And one action leads to another and another and another. Acts are not solitary events but are connected by long chains of action and reaction. This is a law of the universe: all action comes from someplace and goes someplace. This is also a moral law, for good action produces good results and bad action produces bad results.

Our embodiedness is a matter of three bodies, all governed by karma: There is the physical body with its senses pointed outward to the world, to food, to comfort, to pleasure. Our senses keep us interacting with the world. Inside is the “subtle body”: emoting, longing, watching, caring, thinking, desir- ing—our “psychological selves,” we might say. In one creation myth desire was the originating force of the cosmos, and desire as karma keeps existence going on endlessly. Only desirelessness can bring an end to existence. Finally, further inside is the “causal body,” the “karmic seeds” left by actions in past lives that have caused this new life to sprout. It is an agricultural metaphor of seeds lying in the soil awaiting rebirth into a new plant, which will die and leave behind seeds, which will grow again, a cycle going on forever. All that action of the physical body gives life to the karmic seeds; all those actions await their results. This endless cycle of birth-death-rebirth is called samsara.

Yama revealed the whole secret to Nachiketa: There is a way to escape the hold of karma on you, but it is extremely difficult and only a few ever succeed. If only you could escape the demands of karma and the body, your atma would be finally freed to be reabsorbed in Paratma and exist eternally in blissful repose, returned to the source of all things. The task is to escape the body in this life. The senses, normally all turned outward, must get drawn inward. Stop the activities of the senses; empty the mind. Try to achieve a continuing state of dreamless sleep. All the disciplines of the ascetic are aimed at that.

A whole host of ascetics withdrew from society to seek this emptying and escape from rebirth, practicing long hours of meditation, often accompanied by withdrawal to places where the world’s hold is lessened, such as a mountaintop or a holy spot along the Ganges or a temple, a cave, or inner room. Frequently they tested the success of the struggle and triumph over the senses by flagellation, stilling the heartbeat, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, elimination of food.

These philosophical currents of the late first millennium B.C.E. became the foundation of the Hindu-Buddhist worldview.

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Ascetic practice did have its strong allure and many people did—and still do—renounce life in society, for despite its renunciation and its abstractions, asceticism is ironically a highly active form of religion, a full-time vocation. However, these ideas proved too abstract to be satisfying to the majority of the people, who were not prepared to renounce life in society. Most people contin- ued to be deeply imbedded in life and culture, enjoying its benefits, living pas- sionately in the world. For people living complicated lives, devotion to a god whose image (murti) can be seen, whose biography can be known, was much preferred over a formless god that could only be grasped with metaphors.

The result was two possible goals of life: one could follow the Brahmanical path of good work (i.e., keeping the rituals and observing dharma), thus lead- ing to a good rebirth, which is the path of most humans; or one could take the ascetic path of renunciation, seeking the end to rebirth in moksha (total annihi- lation and absorption into Brahman). These two options have continued in the Hindu-Buddhist traditions up to the present.

The Proliferating Gods

Even as these philosophical views of the fate of the soul developed, in other quarters the gods proliferated, and their stories were imagined, told, and retold

An elderly ascetic (sadhu) sits in meditation on a cliff in the lower Himalayas. Such per- sons are found all over India, easily identified by their ochre robes and matted locks, engaged in practices going back to the first millennium B.C.E.

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in numerous texts: the Mahabharata, the 18 major Puranas (plus others). Shiva and Vishnu became the greatest gods, each with his special traits and mytholo- gies, replacing earlier and vaguer deities like Indra and Varuna. Vishnu had 10 (or more) incarnations, including most importantly Rama and Krishna (who each got his own texts, temples, and devotional traditions). They had consorts and wives, who turned, in the medieval period, into high goddesses, maha devis, with divine power (Shakti) that fascinated and terrified their followers. They, too, became known through their own Puranas and worship. Humans con- nected with these deities through devotion, often emotional, often imagined in metaphors of romantic love (bhakti). Temples were something new—special homes built for the gods, many of them architecturally complex. The gods had to be installed, their eyes painted open in elaborate ceremonies; priests served them and assisted worshippers in puja (worship).

Despite the proliferation of gods with their elaborate mythologies, there was an assumption that all the gods were one in the end. All goddesses are forms of Devi, or Shakti. Many gods turn out to be incarnations of Vishnu, including Rama, Krishna, and Buddha. Brahma, an early four-faced deity, more or less disappears. Shiva alternates asceticism and eroticism and has multiple wives who go off on their own adventures. What else could you assume from the myths showing gods turning into one another, slipping in and out of human, divine, or animal forms? Beyond “all the gods are one” is a deeper monism, that all living things, human and animal, are part of a single universal being. This is a greater reality than all the fabulous multiplicity of the world of rebirth, which is ultimately illusion. So the astonishing polytheism is embedded in an underlying monism, though the polytheism is always the dominant strand. This underlying monism probably became more marked after true monotheists arrived from the West with Islam and Christianity, but it was there implicitly from the start.

The Hindu-Buddhist Traditions

As you might guess from the word itself, “Hinduism” is a late-arriving Anglicism intended to include the whole religion of the people of India (i.e., Hind—see the introduction to part III), minus several identifiable other reli- gions: Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism. (The morpheme “–ism” is what gives it away.) The term is widely used and also widely disparaged; there is no single “tradition” here, but there are many and diverse beliefs and practices across the subcontinent. The term “Hindu” (not to be confused with Hindi, a language of North India) is older, coming into use when Muslims came into South Asia and needed a term to distinguish the native people from the follow- ers of Mohammad; a Hindu was a person who followed the customs of Hind. But who knew what those were? The conquering Turks and Mongols invested a great deal of effort in documenting and understanding the customs of Hind. There was also little reason to differentiate “custom” from “religion”—still a problematic distinction. Nevertheless, Hinduism is by now a fixed category in

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the short list of “world religions.” We will use it, but the preceding caution should be kept in mind.

Buddhism (note the –ism) is a different situation. Buddhism does not sug- gest the religion of a place but the followers of its founder, a historic person known as Gautama who lived in the fifth century B.C.E. Most of those follow- ers are not now in South Asia at all (except for Sri Lanka and the Himalayan nations) but in East and Southeast Asia. The various strands of Buddhism are easier to untangle and describe; their histories are well documented, their texts rich and distinct. We speak confidently of Mahayana, Theravada, and Vajray- ana Buddhism, predominant in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Tibet respec- tively. These are differences that can be compared to Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, all branches of Christianity that broke apart and evolved in different cultural contexts.

The following sections look at several themes in Hinduism, as it unfolded over time, which have been practiced into the present. These are samples only, as the topic is far too huge for a work of this limited size. We look at the issue of clean and unclean as it operates to maintain boundaries and borders within the caste system; at the life stages that allow a person to live within society and yet choose a form of asceticism toward the end; and at bhakti, a form of pas- sionate devotion that began to spread during the medieval period when temple building made possible intense relations with a particular deity.

Life in Society: Clean and Unclean in Caste Society

An example of the unclear border between custom and religion is the whole matter of clean and unclean in Hindu practice. It is a controversial topic because it is so intrinsic to the caste hierarchy and because these ideas have been responsible for centuries of oppression of people at the bottom, and many would like to avoid the topic completely. Yet, it has long been, and still is, a per- vasive issue. Recall that we discussed caste as a political-economic social struc- ture in chapter 5, leaving the topic of clean/unclean for this chapter on religion.

The issue begins with a simple bodily fact: bodies get dirty. Filth from the streets and the fields cling to feet and skin on other body parts. The body oozes from all its openings, including pores. We have to wash our body regularly to keep it clean. And who knows what comes into the body from the food we eat and water we drink, often making us sick! This simple reality—the vulnerabil- ity of the body to filth—has since ancient times evolved into a complex meta- phor with enormous social consequences.

In the Indian view, clean and unclean are not just temporary conditions of one’s body; persons and indeed groups—castes—are clean or unclean. Perma- nently, intrinsically, hereditarily. There are clean castes and unclean castes, and the hierarchy is based on this conception of greater or lesser purity and pollution. The “clean castes” are those of the top three varnas: the Brahmans are the purest of all; most Shudra groups are more or less unclean; and those outside the varna system are in a condition of permanent impurity and thus a danger to those above them.

Death is a period of high pollution, both for surviving family members and for everyone involved in treatment of the body. In these photos, we see the two most important providers of ritual services. The Brahman (identifiable by his shaven head and the sacred thread around his bare chest) performs the religious rituals necessary for ensuring the release of the soul from the body and its onward journey. The Dom is a caste specializing in the highly polluting work of tending the actual body by stoking the fire that destroys the corpse. Because of this polluting work, the Dom caste is considered highly impure.

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In part, purity and pollution are based on the hereditary occupations (and thus contribution to society) of the castes. Brahmans are most pure because their hereditary work is speaking the sacred words of the Vedas and performing the rituals; their activity assists all of society, invoking the gods’ beneficence on behalf of everyone. At the other end of the hierarchy, the untouchable castes also perform a benefit to society, by dealing with the filth of the streets, as sweepers do, or carrying away the dead and burning their polluting bodies in the cremation ground, as Doms do. The contributions of these social actors enable Brahmans to do their work for society. In the middle, there may be con- tests about which caste outranks which in the local hierarchy, but few doubt the validity of the basic concept.

These preoccupations with purity and pollution keep the castes separate by limiting and defining their interactions; exchanges between persons of different castes are risky. Pollution can be transferred through water as electricity flows through metal. Therefore, in villages, there are wells designated for Brahmans, different wells in untouchable hamlets, and others for intermediate castes. Peo- ple of unequal castes do not eat together because of the danger of passing pollu- tion through food. At weddings and funerals of the dominant castes, the whole village with all its castes will be fed, but care is taken to separate unequal castes by seating them in different places or serving them at different times. Servants of high caste families cannot come from too low in the hierarchy; low Vaishya or high Shudra castes make the best servants. Brahmans often will employ only another, poorer Brahman to cook or serve. Restaurants in towns frequently employ Brahman cooks, because anyone can accept food from a Brahman, but high caste persons will not accept food from a low caste person. Some foods are more risky than others; raw fruits and vegetables can be accepted but taken home to wash and cook. Food that is fried in ghee is safer and is the usual food at weddings that include multiple castes (this is called pakka, “good” or safe ceremonial food), while boiled rice is riskiest of all (kachcha food), which can only be safely eaten with equals, mainly people of the same family or caste.

Thus, throughout most of village India, the local hierarchy is partly deter- mined (or at least made visible) by who can take food and water from whom. At the very top, the highest Brahmans can give food and water to anyone but will accept the same from no other group. Those at the very bottom can accept from anyone above them, but no one will accept from them. In intermediate levels, people may take from all their superiors and give downward. These days this formula is increasingly contested, with more touchiness about such traditional interactions and people in lower categories often refusing to play the game at all.

Life In and Out of Society: Having It Both Ways

An iconic sight in India is a nearly naked man wearing a loincloth or ochre robes, unwashed, his hair in long matted locks or piled atop his head, his body possibly smeared all over with ash, or with a streak of it across his forehead. Perhaps he is carrying a trident as a staff and wearing a chain of rudraksha

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beads around his neck. A man like this is regarded as a little dangerous, both fearsome and holy, and yet devout persons offer coins that he accepts, thus transferring merit back to the givers (while also feeding himself). These reli- gious gifts are known as daan, the gifts that support religious persons and estab- lishments, a practice followed by kings and ordinary persons since ancient times. The recipients are renouncers (sadhus or sanyasis), who have taken vows of renunciation (sanyas), often in a cremation ground. The goal of this renunci- ation is liberation, freedom from rebirth. (Sometimes the goal is a simpler free- dom from the demands of making a living and family life.)

Sanyas may be taken at any time, so sanyasis may be young men, but the classic formulation of life stages places it at the end. The four stages of life, known as ashramadharma, were enunciated by Manu (first century B.C.E.) but are still well-known, and many still follow the formula. The first stage is brahm- acharya, the period of youth when (in ancient days) one studied the Vedas under a teacher (guru) or, these days, while one is a student and presumably living a life of celibacy and self-discipline, often marked by white robes. Most young people do not dress this way today, but white-robed novices are often seen in religious places like ashrams.

The second stage is grihasthya, the householder stage of full participation in this world. It begins with marriage and the whole involvement of raising a fam-

Sadhus in Varanasi. These men have taken the vow of sanyas, embracing a life of renun- ciation, seeking liberation in moksha. They own nothing but what they carry, and live on gifts of food from individuals and temples.

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ily, engaging in appropriate work through all the middle years, seeking wealth and esteem, and seeing to the marriages of one’s children. Daughters are mar- ried out into other families and sons bring their wives in; as one’s sons begin their own grihasthya stage, and grandchildren come along, it is time to begin the withdrawal from life, turning worldly affairs over to one’s sons and embracing more spiritual activities; this is known as vanaprastha, now imagined in terms of retirement but which classically involved moving into a simple life in a forest hut shorn of all the commotion and materiality of a large busy household.

Finally the last stage is full renunciation (sanyasa), when final ties to life are severed, and the sanyasi begins a life of wandering. Along the Ganges River, Varanasi (Banaras) is the most revered place, with its cremation ground at Manikarnika Ghat, sacred to Shiva. This is the best of all places to die, whether as a sanyasi or not; many elderly persons go there during their final months to await death. It is said that the world will end only when the cremation fires at Manikarnika Ghat finally go out. Further upriver closer to the sources of the Ganges, there are many other sacred towns such as Haridwar and Rishikesh, where dozens of ashrams are located. These are meditative retreats for renun- ciants or semirenunciants, many of them quite comfortable and attractive in an austere way. For there are certainly class dimensions to renunciation; the poor sleep under the stars along the river and eat food distributed by temples; the well-to-do take up cells in pleasant ashrams where they pay an entry fee and monthly charges. These ashrams also have a strong appeal for foreigners from Western societies who are often seen practicing meditation and yoga along with Hindu renouncers along the banks of the Ganges.

Temple Worship and Bhakti

Between 700 and 1200 C.E. Indian kings developed a new approach to pro- claiming their authority to rule: they began building monumental temples to particular gods in place of the lavish Vedic sacrifices overseen by Brahmans. Rajadharma—the “dharma of kings”—had been defined by the models set in the Mahabharata and especially in the Ramayana (see chapter 5), but those were not temple-building ages. The movement began under the Guptas in competition with stupa-building Buddhist monarchs but reached a peak in South India around the time of the first Muslim invasions, the rapid expansion of the Delhi Sultanate, and the building of mosques (see the section on Islam later in this chapter). A temple was a palace for a god—Shiva or Hanuman or Rama or Vishnu—who dwelt deep in the inner sanctum known as the garb- hagriha—the “womb room,” a fitting term for the life-sustaining power of the image itself, which was bathed, dressed, fed, and taken out for walks in daily and annual homage.

Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim structures sponsored by pious kings, have distinctly different architectural styles. The main material used was stone, far more plentiful and long-lasting than wood. Over time, temples were increas- ingly ornamented with stone sculptures. (See the photographs on pp. 203–204.)

Sanchi Stupa, third-century B.C.E., Ashoka. Beginning with Ashoka, Buddhist rulers built stu- pas to house relics of the Buddha and his followers. The characteristic mound shape of these solid mortuary structures house cremated remains such as ash, bone, teeth. They cannot be entered but provide a field of merit from being in the presence of sacred remains, which are honored by repeated clockwise circumambulation. These are sites of pilgrimage distributed across the subcontinent from Bengal to Afghanistan. In China and Japan, Buddhist stupas took the form of tiered pagodas.

Jama Masjid, Delhi. The largest mosque (masjid) in India was built in 1656 by Shah Jahan. It can hold 25,000 people. It contains relics of the Prophet, including a hair of his beard, his sandals, and a footprint, along with calligraphic inscriptions from the Quran. A mosque is essentially a large courtyard with a large inner worship space for congregational worship and sermons. The central feature inside is the mihrab, an ornate niche oriented to Mecca that is faced by worshippers in prayer, and the minbar, or pulpit, for Friday sermons. The tall towers, or minars, are for the five- times-daily call to prayer. The large domes are the supreme achievement of Islamic architecture.

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Virupaksha Temple, Vijayanagar, Karnataka. From 700 to 1200 C.E., Hindu kings pro- claimed their authority in a new way. The earlier emphasis on elaborate Vedic sacrifices was replaced by the building of temples. Virupaksha (Shiva) is the chief deity of the tem- ple, built over a smaller early shrine by a chieftain of the Vijayanagar Empire in the four- teenth century. Unlike stupas, temples are open to worshippers who bring gifts to the deities enshrined in the innermost room, the garbhagriha (“womb house”). They face the east, so the deity greets the sun every morning as it rises. These vast temple complexes, raised on the dry plains of Central India, resemble the high Himalayas where the gods live. They were widely copied in the soggy lowlands of Southeast Asia, such as at Angkor Wat.

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With temples, the gods became more vivid and approachable; the worship- per at a temple enters the presence of the deity in a way not previously possible. The deity is visually present in a temple; you can see Shiva or Vishnu or Devi, and more astonishingly, they can see you. This mutual seeing is called darshan, a powerful exchange of human–divine interconnectedness. In her book, Darshan, Diana Eck writes:

When Hindus go to a temple, they do not commonly say, “I am going to worship,” but rather, “I am going for darshan.” They go to “see” the image of the deity—be it Krishna or Durga, Shiva or Vishnu—present in the sanc- tum of the temple, . . . The central act of Hindu worship, from the point of view of the lay person, is to stand in the presence of the deity and to behold the image with one’s own eyes, to see and be seen by the deity. (Eck 1998:1)

You may bring a gift of food to offer the god: garlands of flowers, coconuts, bananas, incense, and camphor are all fitting gifts. The gods have their food preferences, but most of them like sweets: Shiva and Ganesh love milk; Krishna likes butter; Lakshmi likes kheer and laddus. Kali likes red flowers and blood. Shiva also loves bhang. The deity partakes, and then you take back and eat the leftovers; this is prasad. Eating the leftovers of a god passes a bit of his or her nature into you (the opposite of what happens if you were to eat the left- overs from a person of lower ritual status), thus improving or blessing you. When Kali is offered a chicken or goat, the blood is for her, while the flesh is taken home to be cooked and eaten as prasad.

Seeing the deity, being in the physical presence of Shiva or Krishna or Durga, bringing the god or goddess food and sharing it as prasad, lavishing devotion on the image in clothes and incense and gifts, all this was powerful stuff. It developed into an increasingly emotional form of worship known as bhakti, a term connoting love and adoration of god. Poets began writing hymns to individual gods to be sung during temple worship, and because this move- ment began in South India, the new bhakti poetry in Tamil joined with Sanskrit as the linguistic vehicle for inspirational literature. Increasingly two sects emerged, especially in the south, joining temple worship with passionate per- sonal relationships to a particular deity; these were the devotees of Shiva (Shaivism) and the devotees of Vishnu (Vaishnavism).

In some ways, bhakti religions are analogous to Christian protestant move- ments, as A. K. Ramanujan put it, in suggesting some parallels:

Protest against mediators like priest, ritual, temples, social hierarchy, in the name of direct, individual, original experience; a religious movement of and for the underdog, including saints of all castes and trades . . . , speaking the sub-standard dialect of the region . . . ; a religion of arbitrary grace . . . ; doc- trines of work as worship leading to a puritan ethic; monotheism and evange- lism, a mixture of intolerance and humanism, harsh and tender. (1973:53–54)

Shaiva bhakti focused on emotional encounters with Shiva that often involved possession by the god and altered states bordering on madness:

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ecstatic dance to music and verse are favorite forms of communication. The fla- vor of the new passionate bhakti can be illustrated by one of the Tamil poet- saints of the eleventh century, Sambandar. Myths grew up around him; it was said that as a child he was suckled by Parvati, the wife of Shiva, and immedi- ately produced 15 stanzas of poems in adoration of Shiva. Here is one of them:

He has put on the white crescent moon over his Crested locks that bear the spreading waters; He is the deceiver who steals away my heart so that The white rows of beautiful bracelets slip off from my arms; So that this is named the one great metropolis of earth with its many cities, He hath come to Priama-puram, name renowned; our mighty one is he! Is it not so!

This song celebrates the imagery of Shiva, with a crescent moon and Ganges water in his hair. The singer adopts the voice of female lover, her heart stolen by Shiva, “the deceiver.” The final lines suggest Shiva is presiding king-like in a temple in the heart of a city made great by his presence. Sambandar, like many of the bhakti saints, made regular journeys from temple to temple and town to town, followed by a host of devotees, to sing in ecstasy in the great temples of Shiva (Kumar 2005).

Lord Shiva in calendar art. This paint- ing captures all the traditional iconog- raphy of Shiva. His long locks are wound on top of his head in the man- ner of a sadhu. The goddess Ganga is caught in his hair, channeling the Ganges River into the Himalayas, from which it flows into North India. The new moon is also caught in his hair. The “third eye” is visible in his forehead, denoting the higher con- sciousness derived from his tapasya. A naga is coiled around his neck, and the trident is his special weapon. The sacred sound, aum, is inscribed on his neck and palm. In the upper left is a lingam, a commonly worshipped form of Shiva.

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A later renowned bhakti poet from Bengal, the saint Chaitanya (1486– 1533), was a devotee of Krishna. His followers sang hymns and danced in a state of religious ecstasy celebrating the cowherd women (the gopis) who aban- doned their husbands to cavort with Krishna. Their love was so passionate that marriage could not contain it, and the adulterous love between Krishna and Radha became a model for human love for the divine. Radha says: “In the kad- amba grove, what man is that standing? . . . My mind is agitated, it cannot be still, streams flow from my eyes. . . . I cannot stay in the house; My soul rests not, it flutters to and fro in hope of seeing him” (Beames 1873).

This intensely romantic love for a god that began in Hindu kingdoms of the south swept India during the centuries that Muslim conquerors were entering in the north. A new version of the Ramayana was written by Tulsidas, elevat- ing Rama as another beloved god, and both Sita and Radha suffered in separa- tion from their beloveds when they were not swooning in their presence. And all this was shaping the religious imagination to a new way of connecting with divinities that continues to this day.

Pilgrimage to Buddhist India

In the late eighteenth century, Buddhism was known in Nepal, Tibet, China, Burma, Thailand, Ceylon, and Japan—but not India. Traveling in Burma in the 1790s, Francis Buchanan was told by devout Buddhists that the Buddha had been an Indian from Bihar. Later Buchanan worked in Bihar, where there was a town called Bodh Gaya, which means “Buddha went.” There were several old temples in poor condition served by Brahmans. People in the vicinity worshipped many Hindu gods—and also images of Buddha, said to be an incarnation of Vishnu. Every now and then strange-looking foreigners would arrive, often accompanied by servants, to reverently tour the ruins. One such pilgrim said these ruins had been built by “Dharma Ashoka, King of Pandaripuk.” No one had any idea who Ashoka was, or what place Pandaripuk had been (Keay 1988).

In 1819, a British captain came upon a circular stepped pyramid in a place called Sanchi surrounded by a colonnade of pillars; there were sculptures everywhere, many of them defaced (see Sanchi Stupa on p. 203). Among the Hindu and Jain gods, the captain was astonished to see Buddha images. But what were they doing on the plains of Central India?

More evidence came to light in the 1830s, when two travel journals of ancient Chinese pilgrims were translated into English and read with astonish- ment in India. Between 399 and 414 C.E. the Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian had traveled to India to find authentic Buddhist texts to take back to China. This was the height of the Gupta period when Buddhism was thriving. All of North India was at peace, and Faxian was able to travel from one vast Buddhist monastery to another, some of them housing thousands of monks. He wrote:

The kings are firm believers in the Law. When they make their offerings to a community of monks, they take off their royal caps and along with their relatives and ministers, supply them with food with their own hands. That

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done, the king has a garment spread for himself on the ground and sits down on it in front of the chairman; they dare not presume to sit on couches in front of the community. (Legge 1886)

Faxian was seeking Buddhist texts to take back to China, but in this he was dis- appointed, for in most places the dharma was being transmitted orally from master to pupil without the aid of texts. Finally, he did find a few of them, which he copied. He stayed three years, long enough to learn Sanskrit and make some of his own translations to take back. His careful descriptions amounted to a map of Buddhist India with site plans of all the main shrines.

Three hundred years later, another Chinese monk named Xuanzang made much the same journey, but now things had changed. Buddhism was in retreat. Many shrines were in ruins, and in Kashmir and Bengal Buddhists were being persecuted. Xuanzang wrote of his grief at the empty spaces where Buddha had once taught, evidence that Buddhism was going into decline. Over the next several hundred years, two factors would bring the Buddhist era to a close in India: the reembracing of Hinduism and Brahmanism by Indian kings—King Harsha was as much a Hindu as a Buddhist—and the incursions of Muslims of Central Asian origin. Muslim historians described “shaven-headed Brahmans” who were put to the sword. What the Muslims took to be whole cities and for- tresses were actually enormous Buddhist monasteries and colleges. The great library at Nalanda was scattered and images were wrecked, which explains why those beautiful Buddha images seen in museums all have missing noses, ears, and arms. This was the end of organized Buddhism in India; those who survived fled north to the Himalayas, south to Sri Lanka, or east to Burma or China, and historic amnesia spread over India.

This rediscovery of Indian Buddhism in the nineteenth century led to a resurgence of Buddhist pilgrimage to India. The places where Buddha lived and taught in the fifth century B.C.E., largely forgotten in India for two millen- nia, once again became pilgrimage sites. One February morning in 1895 a Sri Lankan Buddhist named Anagarika Dharmapala entered the temple in Bodh Gaya, lugging a stone sculpture of the Buddha, which he hauled up the stone stairs and set in the central altar of the main shrine. Then he and his followers lighted candles and incense, arranged flowers in front of it, and began the for- mal ritual of installing a Buddha image. This was a startling event in a Shaiva Hindu temple controlled by Brahmans. But the temple happened to be on the site of the revered Bodhi tree where the Buddha had achieved enlightenment 24 centuries earlier. King Ashoka had built the Mahabodhi Temple in ancient times, which had been reinvented over and over as a Hindu temple where Bud- dha was only incidentally worshipped as one of the incarnations of Vishnu. Now, foreign Buddhists reclaimed it for Buddhism (Kinnard 1998).

The controversy over control of Bodh Gaya and the Mahabodhi Temple carried on into the twentieth century. In 1956 the 2,500th anniversary of the birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha was celebrated, and India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited neighboring Buddhist governments

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to establish their own places of worship in Bodh Gaya. From that year on, Bud- dhist groups from Sri Lanka, Burma, Japan, Bhutan, Mongolia, Vietnam, Nepal, Thailand, Tibet, and other places have built monasteries and temples in their own distinctive architectural styles, and Bodh Gaya is now—once again— the center of international Buddhist pilgrimage (Geary 2008). So are other places in eastern India associated with the life of Buddha: the ruins of the great monastery of Nalanda is nearby; other destinations are Sarnath, outside Vara- nasi where the Buddha preached to his first five followers, Lumbini in Nepal where he was born, and Kushinagar where he entered Parinirvana (died).

The “Three Jewels” of Buddhism

Throughout the Buddhist world, devotees have recited the words that Ashoka uttered on his conversion as a way of making their own spiritual com- mitment: “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take ref- uge in the Sangha.” These are the “Three Jewels,” a mnemonic device that summarizes the key concepts of Buddhism.

“I Take Refuge in the Buddha.” Among the many renouncers of society who wandered between sacred river sites and Himalayan retreats in the sixth cen-

The Bodhi Tree in Bodh Gaya. Buddhists from all over the world come to the small town of Bodh Gaya, Bihar (India), to worship at the place where the Buddha gained enlightenment in the fifth century B.C.E. The tree is said to be a descendant of the original tree.

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tury B.C.E.1 was the son of a chief of the Shakya tribe in the foothills of the Hima- layas. His name was Siddhartha Gautama, a prince born into wealth and privilege. In the midst of this plenty, his beautiful wife, Yashodhara, gave birth to a son. It seemed he had everything good that life could offer. Yet, one time while traveling outside his palace he encountered four facts of human life that stunned him with the unavoidable suffering of the human condition. A feeble old man brought home the inevitability of old age; a burning corpse exposed him to death; and a hideously deformed leper revealed the horror of disease. Depressed by these inescapable truths, the sight of a wandering ascetic offered a radical alterna- tive to passive acceptance of old age, suffering, and death and planted in his mind the fourth fact: hope of an escape. Telling no one, he shaved his head, donned the simple robe of an ascetic, and left his home in search of spiritual liberation.

He traveled south toward the small kingdoms growing up along the Gan- ges in search of a spiritual teacher, a guru. His first teacher taught a form of meditation that led to a kind of trance state, or “state of nothingness.” Siddhar- tha soon surpassed his teacher but found such a state was no escape from old age, sickness, and death. He joined a group of ascetics who practiced severe physical punishment that endangered their lives. After several years and grow- ing expertise in these methods, Siddhartha realized that physical torture was no more spiritually liberating than physical pleasure. Again he had to leave.

These Tibetan Buddhists in Lhasa, Tibet, are worshipping the Buddha at Jokhang Temple with prayers and prostrations. Many have traveled hundreds of miles to reach this most sacred temple.

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He began to eat normally again and wandered on, coming to a small river in south Bihar. He stopped on its banks for several days to meditate under a fig tree. During one of these long nights of meditation he came to a profound new insight into the truth of the human condition. This was his True Awakening, his enlightenment. The place where this occurred became known as Bodh Gaya, which later became a place of pilgrimage, and the tree became known as the Bodhi Tree, or Tree of Enlightenment. Gautama himself became known as Buddha, the Enlightened One, at the age of 35.

The Buddha lived for 45 more years until his Parinirvana, final extinction, a long lifetime in which he established a large following. He first reached out to the five companions he had broken with over the futility of self-torture. In the Deer Park not far from Varanasi (Banaras) he preached his first sermon on the Four Noble Truths. Soon he had a core of 45 young followers who moved among the towns along the middle Ganges, teaching to an ever-growing num- ber of laymen and renunciants. The Buddha spent the last two decades of his life settled in Shravasti, the capital of Koshala, living a communal life that would become the monastic tradition of Buddhism. At the age of 80, he fell sick and died with his grieving followers around him. His body was cremated, and the ashes distributed to local rulers who enshrined their portion in 10 stupas.2

It should be clear that the Buddha was not a deity but an exemplar. He was the first to discover these great truths and teach them to others. At least from the point of view of early Indian Buddhism, Buddha’s role was that of spiritual master par excellence.

“I Take Refuge in the Dharma.” What was the insight that came to the Buddha under the fig tree? In an early text, the Majjhima-nikaya, the Buddha explains his thoughts during the night of his Enlightenment. In the early part of the night, when his body was tranquil and passive, he became free of desires and unwholesome thoughts, experiencing the joy of such freedom. Later in the night he recalled the details of his many past lives, and then he contemplated the birth and death of all living beings following the results of their karma. Then he directed his mind toward the elimination of ignorance, which led to realization of the dissatisfactory conditions of life and finally the means of ces- sation of life. With this ultimate insight his mind became liberated from the defilement of desire. This liberation was the final Awakening.

He realized life is burdened by suffering (duhka, dukkha) and that every- thing about life is impermanent (anitya, anicca). That impermanence applies even to the self, which far from being eternal (as was widely believed with the atma doctrine), is only a temporary compound of moods and emotions (anat- man, annata). This sad state of human existence was imagined as akin to ill- ness, and the Buddha’s teachings took the form of ancient medical formulas. First you state the nature of the illness, then the conditions that give rise to it, then determine whether there is a cure, and if so, prescribe the cure. The illness is suffering. Yes, there is a cure, he taught, there is a way to stop the suffering, not with medicine but by means of a moral regimen, the Eightfold Path.

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After his Enlightenment, the Buddha reunited with his former companions, who became his first disciples, and taught his first sermon containing these prin- ciples: the sermon of the Four Noble Truths. The First Noble Truth states simply that life is full of suffering. Suffering is inescapable; loss, sickness, death haunt us all. The Second Noble Truth states the condition that gives rise to suffering: not from fate, not from malevolent spirits or angry gods, but from human desire. We are in inner bondage to our cravings, we try to hang onto things and people; we long for wealth, prestige, and love. The Third Noble Truth states that there is a cure, which is cessation of suffering (nirvana). The Fourth Noble Truth declares the remedy: the Eightfold Path of wisdom, morality, and meditation.

The Eightfold Path was a middle way between living an unaware life of pleasure in the world and the path of extreme self-punishing renunciation. The eight steps of the path lead toward full Awakening; go as far as you can. The first two are the wisdom (prajna, panna) steps. The first is Right Understanding. A commitment to follow the Buddha leads to understanding his teachings (the Dharma). Right Thought is making an effort to cultivate purity and wholesome states of mind, renouncing unwholesome ones like greed, anger, envy, and spite.

The next three are the “proper conduct” or morality steps. Right Speech is using your conversation for good ends, avoiding falsehood, slander, and gossip. Right Action brings us to the deepest prohibitions of Buddhism: refrain from killing any living being (ahimsa). This did not just apply to other humans but to all living creatures; rather than taking life, one should act with compassion toward all living beings. In addition to ahimsa, do not steal, do not commit sex- ual misconduct, do not lie, and do not take intoxicants. Right Livelihood, intended for lay Buddhists, urges that your livelihood not be in conflict with other Buddhist principles. Don’t have a career involving killing animals or humans. Don’t trade in sales of weapons. Don’t work to become rich to satisfy cravings and desires that will interfere with achieving Awakening.

The final three steps of the Eightfold Path are the concentration (samadhi) steps, more advanced stages undertaken by monks and leading to nirvana. Right Effort is about abandoning unwholesome states of mind and cultivating whole- some states of mind. Your effort in life, even if you are a layperson, should be toward creating a mentality that leans toward abandonment of desires. With Right Mindfulness you live your life in a state of deep and constant awareness of the conditions of existence and of your own states of mind, temptations, lurking desires. Be mindful of annata, your lack of a permanent self while still prone to transient emotional states. Right Concentration refers to the practice of formal meditation to achieve tranquility, insight, and ultimate awakening.

These are the core teachings of the Buddha. From here, Buddhism devel- oped ever more complex philosophies, regional variations, practices, texts, and even additional buddhas and bodhisattvas.

“I Take Refuge in the Sangha.” The sangha, the community of monks, grew out of that population of wandering ascetics who followed the Buddha by renouncing society to seek spiritual liberation. The custom grew among Bud-

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dha’s followers to gather together during the three months of the rainy season, often in a place provided by a lay follower of Buddha in a grove or forest clear- ing. These became months of building community, rereading the Sutras, prac- ticing meditation, and instructing new followers of the Buddhist path.

Living in the community raised many of the same kinds of problems facing people who did not renounce society. Individuals do not always get along. Spir- itual aspiration can turn competitive. Pride can creep in. Above all, sexual urges are difficult to control. Therefore, soon after Buddha’s death a set of rules for the spiritual community, called the vinaya, developed and consisted of 227 prohibitions listed in order of seriousness; the first four required abstention from sex, from theft, from destruction of life even down to a worm or ant, and from claiming any superhuman powers. Offenses against these rules resulted in expulsion. Other rules forbade handling gold and silver, engaging in trade, drinking alcoholic beverages, sitting or sleeping more than eight inches from the ground, and eating any meals after noon.

The Four Periods of Buddhism

Buddhism has persisted for 2,500 years, undergoing profound changes dur- ing that time. Each of its phases resulted in the production of new sacred texts, theological elaborations, additions to the pantheon of Buddhist sacred figures, and new iconographies. Often these transformations occurred in new settings, as Buddhism was carried into Southeast and East Asia. Accommodations were made for laypeople who could not abandon secular life for monastic life, mak- ing it easier to achieve spiritual goals laid out by the Buddha’s original insights. Following Conze (1988), we identify four periods.

The First 500 Years: “Old Buddhism,” Theravada or Hinayana Buddhism (500–1 B.C.E.). The period begins with the life of Buddha (he probably died around 487 B.C.E.) and encompasses the Mauryan Empire. By the time of his death at age 80, his followers numbered in the thousands. Buddha’s simple psy- chological teachings became elaborated, as the monastic tradition of his imme- diate followers came to be supported by lay society and its rulers.

A key point came a century and a half later, when Emperor Ashoka (304– 232 B.C.E.) converted to Buddhism. We know about this event from the series of inscriptions on rocks and pillars put up by Ashoka across his empire and from several pious texts about his life, most importantly the Ashokavadana (“The Legend of King Ashoka”). His conversion to Buddhism is attested to by the Thirteenth Rock Edict where he regrets the suffering of Kalinga caused by his conquest, declares his devotion to dharma, and urges that dharma be accepted throughout his empire and proclaimed beyond it.

In “The Legend of King Ashoka” we learn of the prophecy of a wandering ascetic that he would be a cakravartin, a “wheel-turning” monarch, that is, a great king who rules the whole world according to Buddhist dharma. However, his reign did not begin well; he was a cruel king known as Ashoka the Fierce (Chandashoka) after beheading 500 of his ministers and burning alive 500

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women in his harem. He employed an executioner who contrived to carry out all the tortures of the Buddhist hells right here on earth. One day his execu- tioner imprisoned a Buddhist monk, intending to execute him the next day. The monk spent the night in meditation and achieved enlightenment. The next morning he was thrown into a cauldron of human blood, urine, and excrement. Just as Ashoka arrived to witness the execution, the monk began floating tran- quilly on a lotus blossom in the midst of the filth and horror. Ashoka begged for an explanation. “I am the son of the Compassionate Buddha who has cut through the tangles of worldly inclinations,” the monk told him. “I am detached from all modes of existence” (Strong 1983:217). He told Ashoka of a prediction by the Buddha that 100 years after his Parinirvana a cakravartin named Ashoka would spread his teachings by distributing his relics far and wide. “But instead you have built this place of suffering.” Hearing these words, Ashoka put his hands together in repentance: “Forgive me this evil deed. Today I seek refuge in the Sangha, the Buddha, and in the Dharma that is taught by the noble ones.” After his conversion he distributed fragments of the Buddha’s body throughout the world in 84,000 stupas (a number connoting totality). From then on he became known as Dharmashoka.

As Dharmashoka, he was both cakravartin, “world ruler,” and Buddhist layman. Ashoka enacted his rajadharma by many acts of religious donation (daan) to the monastic community (the sangha), culminating every five years in giving away all his worldly possessions. He spread Buddhism throughout his empire by edict and beyond it by sending out missionaries, including his own son to Ceylon. He built stupas and endowed monasteries.

Buddhist iconography during this period remained symbolic: the empty throne, the sacred Bodhi Tree, a footprint, the wheel of dharma, but never rep- resentation in human form.

The focus was typically Indian in its preoccupation on psychological ques- tions: suffering is a psychological state and salvation comes from control of one’s own mind. Buddha discovered these laws and passed them to his disci- ples, leaving an “open hand” when he died, all his insight passed on for others to learn. The perfected saint was the arhat such as the one who survived the tor- tures of Chandashoka; a monk who, like Buddha, had achieved extinction of desire and will no more be reborn in this world.

The Second 500 Years: Mahayana Buddhism (1–500 B.C.E.). Great changes take place in Buddhist thought. To realize in oneself the true nature of things is the path to salvation. Monasteries and renunciation continue, but another route opens for laypeople. A few fully enlightened saints are raised to the status of bod- hisattvas, god-like beings who halt on the brink of extinction for eons to bring sal- vation to others. Rather than veneration of a dead teacher, eternal bodhisattvas such as Amitabha, Avalokiteshvara, and Maitreya are now objects of worship, barely distinguishable from deities. They bring salvation to laypeople who are not able to become religious virtuosi like the monks. Around 100 C.E. a variant of nir- vana arose in the Gandhara area known as the Pure Land paradise. Rather than

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achieving nirvana through life-long self-discipline and meditation, a simpler path allows for rebirth into the Pure Land.

Almost any degree of attention to the Buddha would enable rebirth in [the Pure Land]. Beings needed only to set their minds on Amitabha, cultivate “roots of good,” and plan for achieving enlightenment there. Even beings that had not done well over their lifetimes in attending to the Buddha could achieve rebirth with Amitabha if they just directed their thoughts that way on their deathbeds and experienced a vision of Amitabha; even a single sin- cere thought might be sufficient. (Amstutz 1998:72)

No longer was there just one Buddha; now there were many Buddhas, and moreover full Buddhahood became possible for anyone. In these new forms, Buddhism began its conquest of the rest of Asia, traveling to China, Japan, and Korea by one route, and to Southeast Asia by another.

Amaravati

Mathura

Pagan

Bodh Gaya

Banaras Sarnath

Shravasti Lumbini (Nepal) Kapilavastu (Nepal)

Lhasa (Tibet)

Thaton

Dunhuang Kucha (Central Asia)

Angkor

Nara

Kyoto

Palembang

Vaishali

Barobadur

Chang-an Luo-yang

CHINA

INDONESIA

INDIA

BURMA

P a c i f i c

O c e a n

B a y O f

B e n g a l

S o u

th C

h in

a S

e a

I n d i a n O c e a n

Ya ng

zi R

iv er

Y e llo

w R

.

Map 6.1 Route of dispersal of Buddhism.

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Monasticism was at its peak with vast monasteries filled with new art forms. Many of these monasteries were dug into rocky cliffs, as at Ajanta in western India and Dunhuang in northwestern China. Wealthy lay devotees earned merit by commissioning paintings and sculpture, which were truly at a peak during this period. In the upper Indus region, a Greek-influenced king- dom known as Gandhara became particularly important in these developments because of its location at the crossroads on the way west on the route to the Mediterranean and north to Central Asia and China. Here Buddhism met Greek sculptural traditions, alive with sensuous realism. Buddha, with his ascetic’s topknot and semilidded eyes, looks remarkably like the Greek god Apollo. He wears a toga draped in the Hellenistic style and Athenian sandals, and is flanked by Corinthian columns. These influences travel all the way to China and Japan, where Buddhism becomes associated as much with high cul- ture as with renunciation.

The Third 500 Years (500–1000 C.E.). This is the period of the rise of Tantric Buddhism in India, Nepal, and Tibet, while in centers outside India, Buddhism takes on creative new directions, particularly Chan (China) and Zen (Japan) Buddhism.

In Tantra the goal is achieving harmony with the cosmos as the key aim of enlightenment, and magic and occult methods are used to achieve it. The ideal man is the siddha, a practitioner who is so much in harmony with the universe that he has no material constraints on him and thus has extraordinary powers, able to manipulate cosmic forces within himself and outside himself. In India, Tantra developed a “Left-Handed” and a “Right-Handed” form. Both forms assert that the goal of spiritual striving is to transcend all the multiplicity of maya into a state of perfect unity with the cosmos, symbolized by male–female dualism, which can be transcended by meditation and rituals in which the unity of the self with the cosmos is enacted through sexual union with a part- ner. The “Right-Handed” forms only did this symbolically, but the “Left- Handed” forms did it literally. The art of Tantra was full of sexual images, most notably the famous Yab-Yum, a male figure and a female figure locked in an energetic sexual embrace.

The Last 1,000 Years. There has been little change during the last thou- sand years. Buddhism has been in a holding pattern. Everything is bound to decay, according to the teachings of Buddhism, dharma included. Japanese Buddhism marked the year 1052 as the beginning of the age of mappo, a period of the total degeneration of Buddhism, after which individuals could no longer hope to achieve Buddhist enlightenment by their own efforts, but must depend on a savior. (See the following three pages for more about Bud- dhist iconography.)

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INDIA India—“Old Buddhism”—Fifth to First Centuries B.C.E.

During the first 500 years of Buddhism, simple metaphors portrayed the teachings of the Buddha, such as the wheel, the empty throne, the Tree of Enlightenment.

1 Wheel of Dharma The dharmachakra, or wheel of righteousness, i.e., Buddha’s teachings, conceived as a wheel rolling across the land

2 Empty Throne The throne where the Buddha taught the dharma remained after his Parinirvana.

Mahayana Buddhism—First to Fifth Centuries C.E.

Buddhism began to change in its second 500 years, with portrayals of the actual Buddha in paint, sculpture, and stucco. The Buddha and additional figures, Bodhisattvas, began to be treated as deities. Beginning in India, this was the form in which Bud- dhism traveled to East and SE Asia.

3 Ajanta Bodhisattva Sensuous fresco of a Bodhisattva in Cave 1 at Ajanta. Note crown, earrings, bracelets, and necklace of a prince who has halted at the edge of enlightenment.

4 Head of Shakyamuni Siddhartha Gautama, the Indian prince who achieved enlightenment and became known as the Buddha. Earliest images in Greco-Buddhist style from Gandhara. Note topknot, half-lidded eyes, and elongated earlobes of an ascetic.

SOUTHEAST ASIA Hinayana (Theravada) Buddhism—Third Century B.C.E. to Fifth Century C.E.

Ashoka’s conversion and missionizing spread Buddhism to Sri Lanka, and ultimately to SE Asia in its ear- lier form emphasizing the original Buddha and monasticism.

5 Sukhothai Buddha A sinuous Thai Buddha from the early king- dom of Sukhothai, fourteenth century C.E. A flame coming out of his topknot indicates spirituality.

6, 9 Various Yakshas Minor local deities protect Buddhist places

7 Khmer Buddha The cult of god-kings (devarajas) portrayed the king as a Bodhisattva, dressed in Khmer royal style. He is seated on a coiled snake, a protec- tor of Buddhism.

8 Devotee Human and angelic beings with hands clasped in worship of Buddha.

EAST ASIA Mahayana—Third Century C.E.

Monks take Buddhism to Central Asia, and Chinese monks travel to India seeking texts. New portrayals of the Buddha emerge, inspired by Greco-Roman styles of Gandhara.

10 Arhat Sixty-one enlightened followers of the Buddha attained magical powers.

11 Amida Buddha (Amitabha) The Amida Buddha of the Pure Land School. The daibutsu (“giant Buddha”) at Kamakura is 43 feet high.

12 Laughing Buddha A tenth-century Chinese monk named Pu-tai (Hemp Sack) claimed to be an incarnation of Maitreya, revered as the “Laughing Buddha.”

13 Miroku (Maitreya) Contemplative Bodhisattva, the Buddha of the future. Korean.

14 Fierce Guardians Warriors protect the sacred places of Buddhism.

15 Sleeping Buddha The 51-foot Buddha in Parinirvana, from Dun- huang Cave 158. One of the principal portray- als of the Shakyamuni.

16 Guanyin (Avalokiteshvara) This compassionate Bodhisattva escorts souls to Amida in the Pure Land. Over several centu- ries the Indian Avalokiteshvara slowly turned into the female Guanyin. In languid pose known as “royal ease.”

TIBET Vajrayana—500 C.E. 17 Avalokiteshvara

The patron Bodhisattva of Tibet. In pose of royal ease on a lotus pedestal, with royal adornment.

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Islam

Soon after the Prophet Muhammad began preaching in the Arabian Penin- sula in the seventh century C.E., his teachings made their way to India, brought by caravans from the Middle East and seafaring Arab traders. But despite these early arrivals, Islam had little impact on India for many more centuries, even though it was spreading broadly toward the subcontinent among Iranians, Turks, and Mongols of Central Asia and the Iranian Plateau. In these regions the original teachings emanating from Arabia mixed with local and newly sprouted ideas to form institutions of religion and kingship that would later transform India.

When Islam finally spread into India, it came in three not fully differenti- ated forms: Sunni, Shia, and Sufi. None of them is quite the form now taken in South Asia, after two centuries of colonialism, during which Indian Islam was deprived of Islamic rulers.

Islam begins, of course, far from India. In 610 in the Arabian Desert the Prophet Muhammad began to have visions in which the angel Gabriel dictated to him the words of Allah, which became the holy book, the Quran. As Muhammad communicated these visions, many followers were drawn to what became a new religion called Islam, meaning full and complete surrender to the divine will. He also attracted enemies who attempted to destroy the new faith. Muhammad and his followers defeated his enemies and conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula before his death in 632. Over the next 30 years most of the Middle East was conquered by his successors, and by a century later North Africa and Spain were conquered.

However, when the Prophet died his followers faced a severe dilemma: Who would succeed him? He left behind no son and no instructions for a suc- cessor. He had a large family, with multiple wives, a father-in-law named Abu Bakr, and a charismatic son-in-law named Ali, husband of his daughter Fatima. The elders chose Abu Bakr to succeed Muhammad as caliph, that is, to exercise both spiritual and political authority. However, another faction believed Ali was the true heir, and his son Husain, who was a blood descendant of the Prophet through Fatima, had been wrongly deprived of the succession. There followed 53 years of civil war as Ali’s followers tried to wrest power back from Abu Bakr and the next three successors. Thus began the great schism between the Sunnis (who accepted Abu Bakr and succession by choice of the elders and customs established by the Prophet) and the Shias (who believe succession should follow the actual bloodline of the Prophet himself). In 680, while on his way to join rebels in Iran, Husain was killed by Sunnis near Karbala (in mod- ern Iraq) and thus became the first martyr. The martyrdom of Husain is a cen- tral theme of Shia Islam; emotional laments for children killed at Karbala fill Muharram, the first month of the Islamic New Year (see box 6.1).

After the Prophet’s death, stories told by his wives and followers about his early life and the years of conquest and civil war were collected in a series of

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texts known as the hadith (“traditions”), which became secondary texts to the Quran in prescribing morality and social life for Muslims. Teachers (imams) master these texts and instruct the faithful in Friday sermons and in religious schools. Judges (qadis or qazis) resolve disputes based on several different schools of Islamic law (sharia), all derived from interpretations of the Quran, the hadith, and traditions of legal reasoning and consensus that have developed over the centuries.

Sufis, Saints, and Shahs

In later centuries, as Islam evolved in the Middle East and was adopted by non-Arab groups like the Turks, Persians, and Mongols, new forms emerged. In South Asia, traditions of religious practice such as we have already seen— sanyas, yoga, and bhakti—may also have influenced Indian Islam. From the tenth through the thirteenth centuries, Sufism became the dominant form of Islam, especially as it developed in the Iranian Plateau and India; its impor-

Box 6.1 Lament for Zaynab’s Sons

Zaynab, the daughter of Ali and Fatima, was the granddaughter of the Prophet. She joined the army of her brother Husayn in the march to Kufa to claim leadership of the Muslim community. However, Husayn and most of his army were slaughtered at Karbala (in modern Iraq), and Zaynab also lost her two sons, Aoun and Muhammad. The following text is a nauha, a poetic form chanted during gatherings in the Shia month of Muharram, accompanied by highly emotional ritual chest-beating in mourning.

Wept the mother over her dead sons, O Aoun, O Muhammad! Alas, I offer myself to save you O Aoun, O Muhammad! You departed this world without wedding garlands O Aoun, O Muhammad! I longed to see you wed, then live in peace O Aoun, O Muhammad! But in the face of Fate my hands were tied O Aoun, O Muhammad! In place of two grooms lie two corpses Let me be taken instead of you. With what eyes can I look at you in this state? O Aoun, O Muhammad! In front of me, a mother, lie your corpses How can I console my heart? Why not beat my head in lamentation, O Aoun, O Muhammad! You lived up to your uncles’ ideals But darlings, tell me this— Was your mother not worthy of your love, too? O Aoun, O Muhammad! This was the mother’s lament, Baquir, Over her sons’ corpses— Let me be taken instead of you!

Source: Syed Akbar Hyder and Carla Petievich, Shi’I Mourning in Muharram: Nauha Laments for Children Killed at Karbala. In Islam in South Asia in Practice, ed. Barbara D. Metcalf. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

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tance can hardly be overemphasized. Charismatic Sufi figures were patronized by sultans as “inheritors of charisma (baraka) derived through ‘chains of succes- sion’ from the Prophet himself ” (Metcalf 2009:8). Sufi elders were guides to inner realization of the divine, and miracles were evidence of divine interven- tion in everyday life. Their lodges and tombs became cult centers, places of pil- grimage and prayer.

An important theme of Sufism was the very great credence given to astrol- ogy to predict world-changing events. The movements of the known planets were carefully tracked. When Saturn and Jupiter came into conjunction in the seventh century, the Prophet Muhammad was born. Another conjunction occurred at the time of Timur (a.k.a. Tamerlane, d. 1405), who conquered much of Iran and Afghanistan and sacked Delhi in the late thirteenth century. These conjunctions were seen as heralding the rise of an Islamic savior (mahdi), an ideal sovereign, a true caliph. This cultural theme of a coming mahdi—an idea that could be claimed by a charismatic Sufi leader or military general— was another way in which Sufism shaped society and kingship.

The expansion of Islam into Asia is a story of vivid personalities and char- ismatic figures, as the Prophet had been, spiritual leaders who became warriors or miracle-working saints even lying in their sacred tombs, and world-conquer- ing kings with messianic claims. Charismatic holiness was passed down blood- lines from Genghis Khan (d. 1227) and Timur, similar to those of the Prophet himself. In Persia and Afghanistan there emerged a new type of mass-based Sufism centered on popular cults of the saints and hereditary forms of spiritual leadership a century before the rise of the Mughals. “These traditions were far more significant in shaping Muslim worldviews than the texts and traditions of doctrinal Islam” (Moin 2012).

We get a picture of this worldview from The Baburnama, a memoir written toward the end of his life by Babur, the Mongol prince who brought the Mughals3 to power in India in 1526. It is based in part on a journal that he dili- gently kept from his youth.4 Babur was highly intelligent and keenly interested in almost everything, both practical matters of conquest and rule and religious matters that he heard about in his travels from Afghanistan into India. In fact, the distinction between “practical” and “religious” matters would have made little sense to him, as these were far from separate domains of knowledge in his time. Azfar Moin provides many examples, such as the following:

In the year he came to Kabul, Babur was informed about a village shrine where the tomb moved when prayers were offered. Upon arriving at the shrine, Babur saw the miracle with his own eyes. Then he discovered that it was a trick: “They had put a screen over the tomb, which, when they made it move, made it seem as though the tomb was moving, just as it seems to people riding in a boat for the first time that the shore is moving.” Although Babur chastised the attendants and had the false screen destroyed, he did not condemn the “spurious” shrine. Instead, he had a proper dome built over it. (Moin 2012:65)

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Sufi saints often combined powerful religious authority with political ambitions. One famous Sufi was Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur (d. 1505), with a following of thousands who led a movement against Akbar, the greatest of the Mughals. As a young man Sayyid Muhammad had led a band of 1,500 Hindu ascetics into battle against a Hindu raja. When he hacked open the Hindu raja’s chest he discovered the image of a Hindu god carved on his heart. This so shocked him that he went into a trance: if a Hindu could be this devout, what could devotion to the true God do for a Muslim? He left on a long spiri- tual quest to Mecca, where he declared himself the awaited Mahdi (Moin 2012:108). Back in India, he claimed anyone who did not accept him as the Mahdi was no true Muslim.

Babur’s grandson Akbar was also part of the cultural milieu of Sufi Islam. In addition to being a brilliant conqueror who expanded the Mughal territories in India and created an effective state organization, he used Sufi practices and symbols in creating a “messianic sovereignty” along the lines of Sayyid Muhammad of Jaunpur. He, too, could go into a “divine rapture,” which he did in full view of the public while on a hunting trip in 1578. The Akbarnama, the chronicle of his reign written toward the end of his life, reports that a year after this divine rapture, he issued an edict declaring himself “the imam and mujtahid” of the age (Moin 2012:139). Akbar invited religious leaders from all over his empire to court to discuss their doctrines: Shias, Sunnis, Sufis, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Jews, Buddhists, and even Portuguese Jesuits from Goa (who were confident Akbar would convert to Christianity). He did not convert to any of these creeds but was keenly interested in all of them. Rather, he gathered them using his own charisma as emperor (padishah) with high spiritual status. To enhance his spiritual status he created an imperial order of disciples who greeted each other with the phrase “Allahu Akbar,” which means “God is Great,” but also suggests “Akbar is God.”

Akbar was certainly more Sufi than Sunni or Shia. He lived at the time when the first thousand years of Islam were coming to an end, considered by Sufis as a time ripe for a mahdi. He was the first of the four “Great Mughals,” followed by Shah Jahan, Jahangir, and Aurangzeb, who died in 1707. Already in Aurangzeb’s time, the charismatic, mystical openness of Akbar’s form of Islam was giving way to a stricter form of Islam. By the end of the eighteenth century, British power in the form of the East India Company was changing political and economic conditions for the Islamic elite as the final Mughals went into decline. Indian Islam began to change in the uncertain times, and new Muslim identities and values emerged.

Sunnis and Shias in Colonial India

In British India, before Independence and Partition, the Shias were few in number: not more than 4 percent of Muslims in any of the provinces (Hasan 1996). The highest percentage was to be found in Lucknow, where in the 1882 and 1921 censuses, Shias were 10 percent of the Muslim population. And yet,

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by far the most important Muslim event was the holy month of Muharram, a very specifically Shia commemoration of the death of Husain.

Firsthand accounts from the nineteenth century illustrate the widespread participation in Muharram. “The truth is that in those days the whole year was spent waiting for Muharram.  . . . After the goat sacrifices of Baqr Id the prepa- rations for Muharram began. Dadda, my father’s mother, started to softly chant elegies about the martyrs. Mother set about sewing black clothes for all of us; and my sister took out the notebooks of laments and began to practice them” (Rahi Masoom Reza, quoted in Hasan 1996). As the moon was sighted over the Gomti River in Lucknow, the loud and clear call to prayer marked the beginning of the holy month of Muharram.

They would renew and reaffirm their unflinching devotion to those Islamic principles for which Imam Husain, grandson of the Prophet, had laid down his life in 680 C.E. . . . They marched through the lanes and bylanes of Luck- now in fervent lamentation chanting “Ya-Husain,” “Ya-Husain,” rhythmi- cally beating their chests, self-flagellating, carrying replicas of Husain’s tomb, his coffin, and standards and insignia, and his horse. (Hasan 1996:543)

It was not only the tiny numbers of Shias who engaged in this emotional 10-day mourning for an event from the seventh century that was the founda- tional narrative of Shia Islam. Sunnis as well, and even Hindus, participated in Muharram. Hindu princes in central and southern India, including Brahmans,

Every year at Muharram, Shia Muslims commemorate the death of Husain with proces- sions and self-flagellation that brings blood dripping off their heads, chests, and backs.

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commemorated Muharram with “illuminations and processions . . . brilliant and costly” (Hasan 1996:545). Thousands of Hindus chanted mourning songs along with the Shias and Sunnis. In the North Indian town of Amroha, “accounts of Muharram . . . describe all religious communities attending Muharram sermons and parading effigies of Husain’s tomb, while the most ardent of Shias came out onto the town’s streets to engage in matamdari, self- flagellation as a form of penitence” (Jones 2009:879).

Several things are striking about this collective participation in the annual Shia commemorations. First, these accounts come from late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers. At that time, the sectarian rift between Sunni and Shia was not as severe as it later became. Wajid Ali Shah, the nineteenth- century nawab of Awadh, said: “Of my two eyes, one is a Shia and the other is a Sunni” (Jones 2009:545). Second, the story of the assassination of Husain at the hand of the tyrant Yazid is understood as the beginning of Sunni persecu- tion of Shias in the Middle East. In British India, however, there were reso- nances with colonial dominance and the destruction of the Mughal dynasty. Husain was the perfect man who becomes a martyr for God against the rulers of the world. Finally, the wide sharing of Muharram is evidence that Islam in South Asia only slowly pulled away from a cultural matrix in which Hindu, Sufi, Sunni, and Shia ideas and practices were widely availed; identities were not entirely fixed and bounded as religious categories. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, this was no longer true. Muharram ceased to be a com- mon symbol but became an exclusively Shia concern as Sunni–Shia conflicts became commonplace in North India.

These changes began in the mid-eighteenth century, when Indian Islam was influenced by the movement to purify the faith that came out of Arabia, where Shaykh Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, whose movement became known as Wahhabism, urged stripping Islam of “un-Islamic” practices, many of them associated with Sufism. This movement was more extreme in Arabia, a more isolated and homogeneous place than India with all its ethnic, linguis- tic, political, and religious diversity. But there were similar reform efforts in India against Sufi practices like the concept of baraka, the worship of saints and veneration of tombs. All the Sufi innovations of the previous centuries were repudiated; the sole basis of the faith should be the Quran and the Sunna (hadith); that is, the text of the actual Quran transmitted to the Prophet (in Ara- bic), and the collected accounts of the early centuries of the believers. In Ara- bia, anyone resisting these reforms was considered apostate; Indian reformists such as Shah Wali Allah (d. 1762) urged Muslims to focus on the teachings of the Quran and the hadith, to discipline their lives according to sharia (Ibrahim 2006), and model one’s life on that of the Prophet. These were above all Sunni reforms. Into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they intensified. Islamic schools, madrasas, which carefully differentiated between Shia, Sunni, and other sects, were established to educate youths in textual Islam. Sunnis tried to suppress mention of Ali and Husain; Shias complained they were

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underrepresented in Muslim colleges. Instructive tracts for Muslim women emphasized the need to observe purdah. Communal conflict was expressed in competing religious festivals. Identities firmed up and enmity increased.

The Umma and the Independence Movement

As Indian politics was moving toward independence, Muslim leaders set their sights on a separate Islamic state. Toward this goal, they attempted to unify India’s varied Muslims into a harmonious community. Islam provided a useful concept: the umma. The umma is an ancient vision of the total community of Islam, an idealized unity encouraged by events like the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca) and collective prayers in the great mosques. It has always been an ideal- ized value of pan-Islamic unity, never an actuality. But it became a key concept for Muslim leaders in building momentum for Partition. Some of this has been dis- cussed in the introduction to part III, but we return briefly to the religious forces that led to the Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The Islamic umma in India grew out of opposition to Hindus with the encouragement of Muslim political leaders like Jinnah. There had never been strong shared identities as Muslims among the millions of Muslims in India, which may seem a strange thing to say, but let’s look at who was a Muslim prior to the political movements of the early twentieth century.

The foundational social order of India was, and has always been, the caste order. Although Islam declares equality of all before Allah, Islam in India has never been able to fully free itself from caste-linked sensitivities. Over many long centuries of conversions to Islam (almost never by the sword, inciden- tally), the social origins of families and groups converting did make a differ- ence. Muslims were not all equal in India.

Indian Muslims distinguished between those whose origins were in low, peasant, artisan, and serving castes (the ajlaf), and those who came in from Per- sia, Central Asia, and the Middle East with the conquerors. The ajlaf continued to be dominated and exploited even after their conversion (Saberwal 2006). They include such groups as the Ansari, formerly weavers; or dyers, who were low caste because they used urine in the process of dyeing, prior to conversion. Many in eastern India (now Bangladesh and West Bengal state) were peasant castes. The ashraf were those who, during the Sultanate and Mughal period, had been part of the elite, descending from immigrants and proud of their lin- eages. They spoke Persian or Arabic and participated in the learned culture of poetry, art, and philosophy. They lived in urban areas like Delhi, Calcutta, Hyderabad, and Madras, or else lived comfortably in smaller rural towns on revenue-free grants of land from the Mughals (Jones 2009). They had little sense of commonality with Muslim converts from the lower castes. There were, as well, especially in the south, other Muslim groups of traders and merchants.

All of these diverse Muslim communities had to be brought together into a common umma for political reasons. They had to get over the instinct in Islam to take religious differences so seriously that rivals were declared as kafir, mis-

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guided, apostates or not even Muslims at all. The key was to heighten the sense of Muslim opposition to Hindu. What united all Muslims? They were not Hindu. This was how contemporary communalism grew on the Muslim side. A corresponding heightened sense of Hindu-ness (i.e., Hindutva) was growing on the Hindu side. The unexpectedly horrendous violence of Partition solidified these two communal identities and embedded themselves in the relationship between India and Pakistan. At Partition, 30 million of India’s then-population of 390 million went into West Pakistan and another 30 million became East Pakistan (later, Bangladesh). Muslims in India are now only 13 percent of the population (as of the 2011 census), an often oppressed minority whose contin- ued presence has been exploited by Hindu nationalism in recent decades.

Sikhism

Sikhism is not a blend or a reproduction of earlier religions but it is a new revelation altogether. . . . Sikhism rejects all fasts, rites, and rituals. It rejects the claims of Yoga, mortification of body, self-torture, penances and renun- ciation. Sikhism does not believe in the worship of gods and goddesses, stones, statues, idols, pictures, tombs or crematoriums. Only One God, the Formless, is to be Glorified.

Thus begins a Sikh missionary tract, explaining the core concepts of the Sikh faith. The statement makes it clear: Sikhism is not some variant of Hinduism.

No polytheism, no rigorous asceticism, no renunciation. A little more subtly, it is also not Islam, although it is profoundly monotheistic (“Only One God, the Formless . . .”); but no holy tombs. It is a “new revelation altogether.”

Like both Buddhism and Islam, it has a historic founder, Guru Nanak, who lived 1469–1539 in the Punjab area of northwest India. These were the years of Mughal arrival; Babur was conquering India during Guru Nanak’s life- time and died nine years before Guru Nanak died. We have seen the cultural environment of that period, with the widespread practices of Sufism and bhakti Hinduism. It was a period when many sants—charismatic figures with blends of religious ideas who had visions, wrote hymns, taught under spreading fig and banyan trees, established mosques, temples, and tombs, and sometimes led militant groups of disciples into political adventures—established followings.

Guru Nanak was a member of the Khatri caste, a Kshatriya group whose traditional occupations were military and administrative. At age 30 he disap- peared for three days after bathing in a river, emerging to declare: “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim.” He had had some kind of vision or enlightenment that caused him to reject the dominant religious categories available to him and espouse the necessity of inner transformation by listening to the True Guru in the heart. After lengthy travels, he settled in the Punjab and gathered a follow- ing, writing verses, hymns, and long poetical works—now the basic part of Sikh scriptures—and establishing the Sikh Panth (path), on which tobacco and alcohol were prohibited.

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Guru Nanak was followed by a sequence of 10 gurus, all members of his family and Khatri caste (much as the Shias believed Muslims should be led by persons of Muhammad’s own bloodline), who led the growing community of Sikh believers. The Fifth Guru, Arjun, founded the Golden Temple at Amrit- sar, known as the Harimandir, in 1604 and compiled the hymns and teachings of previous gurus, including his own, in the authoritative Adi Granth, Sikh- ism’s sacred book. The growing influence of the Sikhs came to be seen as a threat to the Mughals, and Guru Arjun was executed by Shah Jahan, becoming the first martyr.

But Sikhism kept growing. In the seventeenth century, there were large- scale conversions from a powerful landowning and agricultural caste, the Jats. Both Khatris and Jats were large and powerful Hindu castes, which may partly account for the continued political success of the Sikhs, and a worry to the Mughals, who were now at their height.

The Ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi. His son, Guru Gobind Singh, would be the Tenth and last Guru. He reorganized the commu- nity around himself, much like a court, and established an elite community among the Sikhs known as the Khalsa (pure). It was founded in 1699 when Sikhs of five different castes ceremonially drank from the same bowl and were given a new name, Singh, while their women took the name Kaur. The Khalsa also adopted a set of identifying markers for Sikhs, which have made male

Celebrating the birth of Guru Nanak, these five men are dressed as the panj pyare, or “five beloved,” the elite community founded in 1699 by Guru Gobind Singh. They wear the militant dress for which Sikhs became famous, leading the defense of Sikhs against the Mughals.

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Sikhs instantly identifiable ever since: “Five K’s”—kesh (uncut hair), kangra (a wooden brush for the hair), kirpan (dagger), kacha (distinctive undergarments), and kara (steel bracelet). The even more distinctive Sikh turban was not one of the Five K’s but became a unique additional marker of identity. No one dressed like this could be mistaken for a Hindu. There is a this-worldly asceticism here, but no renunciation. These symbols were clearly militant, signaling a strongly masculine culture that would defend its community against the Mughal state. For Sikhs, it added a sense of military self-discipline to the spiritual one coming from Guru Nanak, and over the next centuries Sikhs became a powerful and dominant community in the northwest of India.

Guru Gobind Singh’s sons were killed in the course of fighting against the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and the Tenth Guru himself was killed by a Mus- lim assassin. Realizing that their spiritual leaders were marked and vulnerable in the prevailing politics of North India, and that anyway it was not the Gurus themselves but the collective teachings coming down from Guru Nanak that was the core of the faith, ultimate Sikh authority was transferred to the sacred book, the Guru Granth Sahib, which contained the writings of Guru Nanak, Guru Arjun, Guru Tegh Bahadur, and Guru Gobind Singh. This sacred book is addressed as a Guru itself: Sri Guru Granth Sahib, always placed on a dais under a canopy in Sikh gurdwaras, where a living Guru might sit.

These organizational changes had important political consequences. The Sikhs were far from just a religious sect, followers of a founding sant. Because of their militancy, the mass conversion of a cohesive caste, the Jats, and the eco- nomic power of the Jat Sikhs, by the eighteenth century numerous small Sikh kingdoms dotted the Punjab region, competing with small Rajput and Muslim states. At the end of the eighteenth century, these kingdoms were united into a single Sikh Empire by Ranjit Singh, the “Lion of the Punjab” (as a historical reference point, Ranjit Singh was a contemporary of Napoleon). From a start- ing point in Lahore (now Pakistan), he led his Khalsa Sikh army in conquests from Kabul to Kashmir. The Sikh Empire controlled a region covering most of northern modern Pakistan and the Indian Himalayan states. He was a foe of the Mughals but made friends with the British, with whom they made an agreement to consider the Sutlej River a boundary between their competing interests. After Ranjit Singh’s death, the empire weakened and eventually was absorbed into British India. The Sikhs were admired by the British for their many virtues, especially their military discipline, and they became the core of the British Indian army.

In the 1970s and 1980s a Sikh nationalist movement began agitation for an independent state known as Khalistan, inspired by the old Sikh Empire, the creation of Pakistan, and the reorganization of the Indian states along linguistic lines. The movement received much enthusiastic support from the one million diaspora Sikhs who lived in the UK, the US, and other parts of Asia. Militant separatists in the state of Punjab clashed with the Indian government, which finally, in 1984, raided the Golden Temple, where militants were sheltering and

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storing their weapons. The raid, with loss of life on both sides, was seen as a desecration of the holiest Sikh temple. In vengeance, on October 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh guards. This prompted anti-Sikh riots in which 3,000 Sikhs lost their lives. These un- fortunate outcomes largely ended the Khalistan movement.

The Sikhs are perhaps India’s most visible and prosperous minority, thanks to their coherent faith, their distinctive symbols of identity, their cultural values of diligence, discipline, and loyalty, and their aptitude in busi- ness, administration, and agriculture. Though they are only 2 percent of the population of India, and Punjab is the fourth smallest state, it is one of the most prosperous with the highest lit- eracy rate and average life expectancy (Jetly 2008). Yet, this coherent iden- tity, at least from the outside looking in, masks significant inequality with- in. Despite Sikhism’s core beliefs in equality before God symbolized in shared meals, the old caste hierarchy continues to divide upper- and lower- ranking Sikhs. The Jat Sikhs are clearly the elite; they control all the Sikh organizations like gurdwaras, schools, and political parties (Ram

2007). Although thousands of Scheduled Caste groups converted to Sikhism in order to escape the disabilities of Hindu caste society, many feel that Jat Sikhs treat them as badly in the gurdwaras as they do in their farmlands, where they have been forced to live in separate settlements away from the main Sikh com- munity. They are not allowed to cremate their dead in the main cremation grounds and must establish separate gurdwaras, which are often in dispute between Sikhs of Scheduled Caste background, such as Balmikis (sweepers), and the Jat Sikhs. These caste-like groups among the Sikhs also do not inter- marry; in matrimonial ads in Indian newspapers, Jat Sikhs specify they will consider only other Jat Sikhs. This lingering casteism is not unique to Sikhism (it is also a social fact among Muslims and Christians in India), but it accounts

Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Sher-i-Punjab, “Lion of the Punjab,” unified many small Sikh and Muslim states into a Sikh Empire that lasted from his coronation in 1801 to 1849, when it was absorbed into British India. Ranjit Singh also possessed a famous diamond, the Koh-i- Noor, which had a much longer and fascinating history of its own, and now belongs to Queen Elizabeth II.

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for the fact that some Scheduled Caste Sikhs are beginning to separate them- selves into local hamlets and communities with their own schools and gurd- waras that are beginning to look like separate caste identities.

ENDNOTES 1 Dates for the Buddha’s life vary. Sri Lanka chronicles place it at 563 B.C.E.; a mainland tradi-

tion puts it at 450 B.C.E.; more recent research puts it at 485 B.C.E. (Gombrich 1984). 2 And a few centuries later, as we have seen, Ashoka opened these stupas, removed all but a frag-

ment from each, and built “84,000” more stupas (or at least quite a lot) throughout his empire. 3 Mughal is the Indianized term for the Mongols of Central Asia, and the name of the dynasty

that conquered and ruled India from 1526 to 1857. 4 He lived and conquered India during the time of the High Renaissance in Italy, when young

men like Leonardo da Vinci were also keeping meticulous private journals.

REFERENCES CITED Amstutz, Galen. 1998. The Politics of Pure Land Buddhism in India. Numen 45(1): 69–96. Beames, John. 1873. Chaitanya and the Vaishnava Poets of Bengal: Studies in Bengali

Poetry of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. The Indian Antiquary, A Journal of Oriental Research 2.

Conze, Edward. 1988. A Short History of Buddhism. London: George Allen and Unwin. Eck, Diana L. 1998. Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India. New York: Columbia Uni-

versity Press. Geary, David. 2008. Destination Enlightenment: Branding Buddhism and Spiritual

Tourism in Bodhgaya, Bihar. Anthropology Today 24(3): 11–14. Gombrich, Richard. 1984. Introduction: The Buddhist Way. In The World of Buddhism:

Buddhist Monks and Nuns in Society and Culture, eds. Heinz Bechert and Richard Gombrich. Pp. 9–14. London: Thames and Hudson.

Hasan, Mushirul. 1996. Traditional Rites and Contested Meanings: Sectarian Strife in Colonial Lucknow. Economic and Political Weekly 31(9): 543–550.

Ibrahim, Hassan Ahmed. 2006. Shaykh Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and Shah Wali Allah: A Preliminary Comparison of Some Aspects of Their Lives and Careers. Asian Journal of Social Science 34(1): 103–119.

Jetly, Rajshree. 2008. The Khalistan Movement in India: The Interplay of Politics and State Power. International Review of Modern Sociology 34(1): 61–75.

Jones, Justin. 2009. The Local Experiences of Reformist Islam in a “Muslim” Town in Colonial India: The Case of Amroha. Modern Asian Studies 43(4): 871–908.

Keay, John. 1988. India Discovered. London: Collins. Kinnard, Jacob N. 1998. When Is the Buddha Not the Buddha? The Hindu/Buddhist

Battle over Bodhgaya and Its Buddha Image. Journal of the American Academy of Reli- gion 66(4): 817–839.

Kumar, Sisir. 2005. A History of Indian Literature: From Courtly to the Popular. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.

Legge, James, Transl. 1886. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms: Being an Account by the Chi- nese Monk Fa-Hien of His Travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399–414) in Search of the Bud- dhist Books of Discipline. New York: Dover Publications.

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Metcalf, Barbara D. 2009. Introduction: A historical Overview of Islam in South Asia. In Islam in South Asia in Practice, ed. Barbara D. Metcalf. Pp. 1–40. Princeton: Princ- eton University Press.

Moin, A. Azfar. 2012. The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam. New York: Columbia University Press.

Ram, Ronki. 2007. Social Exclusion, Resistance and Deras: Exploring the Myth of Casteless Sikh Society in Punjab. Economic and Political Weekly 42(40): 4066–4074.

Ramanajan, A. K. 1973. Speaking of Shiva. Baltimore: Penguin. Saberwal, Satish. 2006. On the Making of Muslims in India Historically. Sociological

Bulletin 55(2): 237–266. Skilton, Andre. 1994. A Concise History of Buddhism. Birmingham, UK: Windhorse. Strong, John S. 1983. The Legend of King Ashoka. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolpert, Stanley. 1993. A New History of India. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Part IV

East Asia

7 CHINA

8 JAPAN

9 KOREA

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East Asian Civilization

By the Early Holocene (9600–6200 B.C.E.), over 35 human settlements are documented by archaeologists across northern China, Korea, and Japan. By 2000 B.C.E., Japanese communities are exchanging local goods across the island, something not seen in China at the time, but meanwhile in China, evi- dence of status differences—perhaps between chief-like figures or shamans and ordinary people—is showing up in burials such as at Dawenkou where high- ranking villagers were sent off with elaborate ceramics and jade items, clasping tusks from water deer.

The first site that might be identified as a “state” is an archaeological site known as Erlitou, actually a cluster of sites that include Erlitou itself as the pri- mary center, three secondary centers, five large villages, and many small villages (Barnes 2015:191). What gave Erlitou the advantage over other settlements in the early second millennium? Probably the development of bronze vessel cast- ing, made possible by technology imported from the steppes and by deposits of copper, lead, and zinc in nearby mountains. Erlitou is thought by many scholars to be the capital of the earliest Chinese dynasty known from ancient texts (and sometimes thought to be mythic): the Xia.

Archaeologists tend to identify states by evidence of social stratification, usually found in elite houses and burials, while others look for evidence of administration, that is, something beyond domestic units. But the ancient texts of China and Korea identify a state as a place where a chief or king is ensconced within walls. Ancient walled cities did indeed denote fortified cen- ters of power and authority; they also implied the power of a strongman who could mobilize the labor needed to construct such a wall.

The small settlements of Korea and Japan interacted with those of China over the next centuries, and by Western Zhou dynasty times (1046–771 B.C.E.) rice had been introduced to Korea, and Zhou coins and swords found their way to Korea and Japan. Japan was inaccessible enough that it could escape the growing impact of the Han Dynasty military, but Japanese chieftains were drawn into the tribute system that rewarded them with exotic gifts like polished mirrors and swords. Korea was closer and more vulnerable: by 108 B.C.E. Chi- nese military outposts were set up in northern Korea in the region of modern Pyongyang and more northern areas. Thus, Chinese influence grew more pow- erful along a number of lines.

And, moving forward, by the eighth century C.E., an “East Asian civiliza- tion” had emerged based on a shared religion (Buddhism), a shared state phi- losophy (Confucianism), and a shared bureaucratic structure founded on

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administrative institutions (Barnes 2015). This “East Asian civilization” now includes two billion people, a third of the population of the entire planet.

From those earliest states came three nations, which became five nations after World War II: China—the People’s Republic of China and Republic of China (Taiwan), Korea—North Korea and South Korea, and Japan. China claims “Taiwan” is only a renegade province of China, which has always been Chinese and most of whose population is Chinese. North and South Korea are remnants of an unresolved war fought by the United States to keep Korea from “going Communist” when North Korea (with support from China and Russia) attempted to incorporate the South in 1950. In 1953 an armistice was signed, establishing the status quo more or less to the present (though the two coun- tries are still technically at war). Since then, North and South Korea have diverged drastically, the North to a totalitarian state with nuclear arms, and the South to a capitalist powerhouse, but they are still indubitably the “Korea” that shares thousands of years of common history.

Geographic barriers ensured that whatever commonalties of culture East Asian countries shared, they would also remain isolated to a great degree, allowing cultural innovations to grow internally, working and reworking what- ever they shared from across water and mountain barriers. On the peninsula (North and South Korea) and the islands (Japan) there was a great deal of eth- nic homogeneity, despite the fact that regular cultural transactions took place among the three around the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea between China and Korea. On the mainland (China) there was very little ethnic homogeneity, despite a national narrative evolving over centuries asserting more homogene- ity than was ever the case (Rawski 2012).

For all three of the pre-World War II nations, the west was the source of new ideas, new peoples, and trade. But “the West” was not Europe until the nineteenth century. Through most of history, “the West” for Japan was Korea and China; for China “the West” was northern and central Asia and India. China’s great sixteenth-century epic, Journey to the West, describing the incredi- ble journey west of a monk, a monkey, and a pig, captures the exotic mystery that the West held for north Asian peoples (reversing the exoticism that the East has had for peoples of the West). More often, the West came to China; new ideas and new people arriving in the central plain of the Chinese heartland were non-Han (nonethnic Chinese) conquerors, and China was ruled by non- Han peoples for over half of its recorded history (Rawski 2012). The most important of all ideas coming westward across deserts and through trading towns was Buddhism, which reached China in the first or second century C.E., Korea in 372 C.E., and Japan in 538 C.E. Korea—the one in the middle—has often been on the defensive from China or Japan. From those early Han Dynasty military outposts to the ancient Korean state of Koguryo (37 B.C.E. to 668 B.C.E.) which stretched from about the location of modern Pyongyang to the Songhua River in China’s Jilin Province, Korea has had Chinese claims on its territory. Can China claim those early outposts, or are they Korean? Was

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ancient Koguryo Korean or Chinese? It depends on who you ask. Koguryo was one of three ancient Korean kingdoms vying for centuries for control of the peninsula, yet, a complex of Koguryo royal tombs has just been registered to China by UNESCO as a World Heritage site over the objection of Korea (Rawski 2012). Such questions emerge from efforts on the part of modern nations to trace their history and thus to project the modern nation backward into antiquity.

But Korean defensiveness has a more recent source. From 1910 to 1945 Korea was a colony of Japan, governed harshly and exploited for labor and resources during Japan’s rapid industrialization and military mobilization. Korean women were exploited as “comfort women” (i.e., sex slaves) for Japa- nese soldiers during World War II. In 1937 Japan invaded China, killing a hun- dred thousand Chinese during the Nanjing massacre. World War II ended with Japan’s devastating defeat; annihilation by nuclear weapons and occupation by the Allies (led by the US). In China the war ended in revolution and the cre- ation of the People’s Republic of China that did its best to expunge the tradi- tions of its past. In Korea it ended in dual regimes, at first under the control of Russia and the United States, and then under the two distinct governments of North Korea and South Korea. Postwar rebuilding and the astonishing success of capitalist economies everywhere but North Korea would seem to have erased any commonalities we might call “East Asian civilization.”

Nevertheless, the continuing relevance of the Confucian heritage in the way East Asian peoples live and think is often noted. It has been compared to the influence of the Greeks and Romans on contemporary Western society: as Greek language, logic, and rationalism, Athenian-style democracy, Roman law and the Latin language all continue to shape modern thought in the West, so Confucian ideas continue to shape people in China, Japan, and Korea (Jelonek 2005).

For Confucius, the family was the model for all of society. Based on famil- ial love and respect, on hierarchical (patriarchal) control, on norms rather than law, and harmony rather than conflict, the family is the fundamental social unit. Society should operate on the same principles. Even the emperor should order the nation on familial values.

This is not to say that Western peoples do not love their families or value har- mony at home, or that the Western family has not been patriarchal. But the dif- ferences are socially significant. In Confucian societies, there is not equality even among brothers, who are rank ordered by elder and younger (in Chinese, even kinship terms observe a distinction between elder brother and younger brother, or elder sister and younger sister). Filial devotion to parents is culturally marked in folklore and moral teachings, such as in the story of the devoted son who spends his entire life carrying his blind father on his back, or the daughter who carves out a bit of flesh from her arm to make a soup for her starving mother (an old story that showed up in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club). The respect shown to elders of the family can hardly find a parallel in Western society.

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American and Asian Values Compared

In this deeply embedded philosophy, it is the group rather than the individ- ual that is the center of the philosophical system. Cooperation and harmony are valued over open conflict. The family’s deep commitment to the well-being of the group is reproduced in communities, in organizations, and in corpora- tions. Individuals owe loyalty to the company they work for, which owes loy- alty and security in return. This has been particularly marked in modern Japanese and Korean corporations, where lifetime employment and weak or nonexistent unions have family-like characteristics.

Where does the individual come in? The individual should have deep loy- alty to the groups of which he or she is a part, and the individual should also cultivate him- or herself through the pursuit of knowledge. Education is one of the greatest of Confucian values that is still conspicuous in East Asian coun- tries; “Exam Hell,” on which one’s future success or failure depends, is a mod- ern version. The Chinese state was run for almost two millennia by an educated elite recruited by a rigorous examination system that kept young men bent over their pens and books for most of their youth and often long into mid- dle age. The Confucian value of self-cultivation through formal education can hardly be overemphasized.

The Romans gave Western nations the concept of the rule of law; Confu- cianism gave East Asians the concept of governance by wise fathers and culti- vated men. As a result, in East Asia, legal systems have been weakly developed (especially in China where it became a real problem in the rapid growth of the economy in recent decades), as society followed its accustomed pattern of put- ting its future in the judgment of superior men. In China, these powerful men and educated elites created the large-scale bureaucracy that runs the country today. The administrative empire was an unintended consequence of Confu- cian philosophy. The three chapters of part IV focus on these three core princi- ples of East Asian civilization: Confucian philosophy as it has shaped societies over two and a half millennia; the administrative state as it emerged in this con- text; and Buddhism as a shared religion borrowed from the west.

REFERENCES Barnes, Gina L. 2015. Archaeology of East Asia: The Rise of Civilization in China, Korea, and

Japan. Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books. Jelonek, Adam. 2005. Political Culture and Its Impact on the Contemporary Regimes

of East Asia. Polish Sociological Review 150:179–195. Rawski, Evelyn S. 2012. Beyond National History: Seeking the Ethnic in China’s His-

tory. Crossroads: Studies on the History of Exchange Relations in the East Asian World 5. http://www.eacrh.net/ojs/index.php/crossroads/article/view/26/Vol5_ Rawski_html

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7 CHINA

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CHRONOLOGY OF CHINESE HISTORY

4500 B.C.E.

1700

1100

221

206 B.C.E. C.E.

268

386

581

618

906

960

1200

1368

1644

1912

1949

Neolithic Yangshao, Longshan, Liangzhu Culture

Xia 2200–1700 B.C.E.

Shang 1700–1100 B.C.E.

Zhou 1100–221 B.C.E. Western Zhou 1100–771 B.C.E. Eastern Zhou 771–221 B.C.E.

Qin 221–206 B.C.E.

Han 206 B.C.E.–220 C.E. Western Han 206 B.C.E.– 9 C.E. Wang Mang Interregnum 9–21 C.E. Eastern Han 23–220 C.E.

Western Jin 268–317

6 Dynasties

Sui 581–618

Tang 618–906

5 Dynasties 906–960

Song 960–1280

Yuan 1280–1368

Ming 1368–1644

Qing 1644–1912

Republican Period

Communist Period

Walled settlements, wheel thrown pottery

Cities of 10,000; bronze; glazed pottery; silk; writing; horse chariot

“Golden Age” of feudalism Cast bronze coinage; stamped gold coins; glass; wrought iron; crossbow

Confucius (551–479) Great Wall begun; Grand Canal begun

First imperial unification under the “First Emperor,” Qin Shihuang; destruction of Confucian texts

Tomb of First Emperor at Xi’an [Chang’an]; completion of Great Wall

Sima Qian, “Grand Historian” Restoration of Confucianism Communication with West 65 C.E. White Horse Temple, first Buddhist monastery Paper, porcelain; tea; coal, wheelbarrow

Gunpowder

Block printing 399 Faxian to India; 401 Indian monk Kumarajiva 446 first Buddhist persecution; 574 second persecution

Beginning of “Golden Age of Buddhism”

627–645 Xuanzang to India 690–705 Empress Wu Peak of Buddhism; paper money, canal locks Chang’an greatest city in the world

Beginning of Japanese cultural borrowing 868 Diamond Sutra, oldest printed book in world Meritocracy

Movable type printing Neo-Confucianism 1130–1200 Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals Examination system Spread of foot binding

Kublai Khan conquers China, 1279; beginning of Mongol control; capital established in Beijing; embrace Tibetan Lamaism; rebuild Great Wall

Marco Polo

Overthrow of the Mongol Yuan dynasty by Han-Chinese 1406–1420 Construction of Forbidden City

Jesuit Mission Emperor Kangxi (r. 1661–1722) Pu Yi, Last Emperor

Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek

Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping

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he state is shattered; mountains and rivers remain.” These poetic words, written 1,200 years ago, express both a sense of the eternity of the Chinese landscape and the yearning for a stable centralized state

that has characterized Chinese culture for over two millennia (Van Slyke 1988:43). More than any other people in human history, the Chinese have achieved a continuity of social and cultural identity even during periods when the state itself collapsed into anarchy or was grabbed by alien conquerors. To imagine a comparable achievement in the West, let’s suppose that the Greeks of Homer’s time (900 B.C.E.), with their small territorial chiefdoms, survived through the golden age of fifth-century Athens when Socrates, Plato, and Aris- totle lived and wrote; and then further suppose, in this scenario, that all the small Greek city-states and chiefdoms were eventually unified by a conqueror who carried this culture north and west through all of Europe, founding a state that continued to survive and call itself “Greek” for the next 2,100 years, so that even now, all the peoples of Europe consider themselves one “Greek nation.” Suppose further that all the languages derived from Greek and Latin came to be identified as mere dialects of Greek, allowing everyone to believe that in some sense they all speak the same language. Imagine further that as other ethnic groups came into the orbit of “Greek” culture, they assimilated and came to call themselves ethnically “Greek,” abandoning their earlier French, German, Danish, Swedish, and other ethnicities. (We shall allow Eng- land to be Japan in this scenario, retaining its distinctive identity but borrowing extravagantly from “Greek” culture.) The capital remains at Athens for long centuries, then perhaps shifts after a period of social disunity or conquest to Rome or Paris or Berlin, but it continues to view itself as “Greek” society. Dur- ing the invasion of “Greece” [Europe] in 1237–1242, suppose the Mongols succeeded in conquering the whole continent and ruling for several hundred years, eventually becoming as “Greek” as everyone else, losing their separate cultural identity. And throughout these two millennia, the social philosophy of Socrates is continually elaborated, becoming a kind of civil religion throughout this vast realm.

Of course it didn’t happen this way in the West, but something much like this hypothetical European history is what actually occurred in China with the early unification of small states, the spread of Chinese culture outward through the territories you now see on a map of China, the absorption and Sinicization of peripheral peoples, and the defining of nonmutually intelligible languages as mere “dialects” of Chinese with a text everyone can read (see chapter 2).

“T

Chapter opener photo: Chinese scholar.

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A cultural unity among the Han Chinese is already apparent in Neolithic archaeological sites in North China. As long ago as 1600 B.C.E. the Chinese elite were asking questions of their ancestors by inscribing on oracle bones the earliest versions of the script still in use today. These oracle bones were usually the plastrons (or underbellies) of tortoises or the shoulder blades of the oxen that they used to plow their fields. A ritual master would inscribe a question on the bone and then apply heat until cracks ran across the inscribed surface. The cracks were interpreted as a resolution to the question in a way that was believed to represent the will of the ancestors or the gods. Writing and literacy early on became to the Chinese the supreme marker of civilization. It was the possession of civilization, in their view, that distinguished them from all other known peoples.

The Zhou dynasty text, Liji (Li Chi, or Book of Rites), provides a kind of ancient Chinese ethnographic classification of peoples in a system of “Five Regions.” At the center was the “Middle Kingdom” (Zhongguo), that is, the

Map 7.1 China.

Tibet Anyang

Taklamakan Desert

Himalay a s

C H I N A

Box 7.1 Romanization of Chinese

In this volume, as in most news outlets, periodicals, and other non-Chinese-lan- guage publications, Chinese is rendered in a Romanization system called “pinyin” (lit- erally “spell sound”) or Hanyu pinyin. Throughout the centuries of contact between China and Europe, several Romanization systems (or rendering Chinese in Roman letters) have been established, used, and eventually discarded. Even today there is no universally shared system, though pinyin seems to have emerged on top.

Pinyin is specifically a Romanization system for Mandarin Chinese, or Putonghua (“common dialect”), and there are different systems for Romanizing other major Chi- nese dialects like Cantonese. Mandarin is the most common dialect spoken in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and originates from an amalgam of northern dia- lects that came to be the language of scholar-officials in imperial China. Chinese offi- cials came from all over the realm and spoke many different dialects. Speaking a standard guanhua (“official’s speech”) helped smooth daily operations. Early Jesuit visitors to China translated guanhua as “Mandarin,” since a mandarin was a term for a high official. This eventually led to the Western name for the current standard Chinese dialect. While the Romanization system used by these Jesuits did not stand the test of time, they do have a couple particularly prominent legacies in Romanization. As they translated the classic Chinese texts into Latin, several names occurred constantly, and they decided to render these with Latin endings, perhaps for the reader’s com- fort; so today instead of Kong Fuzi and Mengzi, we have the very un-Chinese-sound- ing names of Confucius and Mencius, which continue to be used in most Western references to the philosophers.

Mandarin pinyin, or Hanyu pinyin, was established systematically and completely by the linguist Zhou Youguang (1906–2017) in the 1950s, and it was subsequently adopted in the PRC, and gradually around the world. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the overseas Chinese community have been slow to completely adopt pinyin for a combi- nation of reasons, including dialect differences and political implications of a PRC Romanization system. The system is nonetheless commonplace to the Western reader today and used in newspapers of record and official communications, though it still may involve some confusion about uncommon pronunciations of some of the letters used.

Abbreviated Pinyin Pronunciation Guide C is pronounced like the “ts” in “cats.” Z is pronounced like the “ds” in “kids.” X is pronounced like “sh” but with the tip of the tongue a bit closer to the front teeth. Zh is pronounced like a “j” sound. Q is pronounced like a “ch” sound.

These are just a few of the unfamiliar pronunciations of consonants in pinyin Romanization, and you can find a full pronunciation guide at this link: http://www.ctcfl.ox.ac.uk/Pinyin_Notes.htm

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Chinese themselves, the people who had texts and thus civilization, who could record their history and communicate with their ancestors in writing. On their periphery to the north, south, east, and west were peoples lacking civilization. Their “wild” cultural state was evident in the physical markers describing them: their hair was unbound, they tattooed their foreheads or their whole bodies, they ate raw food, they did not eat grain, they wore skins of animals and lived in caves. One group even had their feet turned in upon each other (Legge 1885). Part of the great enterprise of Chinese civilization was the proj- ect of civilizing these barbarians, which gradually they accomplished, turning them into Han (Harrell 1995).

The philosophy that eventually provided the civil religion of Chinese civili- zation, the role that Socrates played in our hypothetical example of a “Greek” Europe, is the teachings of a fifth-century B.C.E. Chinese sage named Confucius (Kongfuzi, Kongzi). The writing and texts that were held to be so morally improving that civilization itself was identified with them—wen—were in large measure the writings and compilations of Confucius and his followers through- out the centuries.

Wen, however, implied more than an advanced culture; wen also implied social institutions for preserving harmony and ensuring a well-ordered polity. The state was the instrument for advancing and protecting Chinese civiliza- tion. States did sometimes shatter, as in the poignant opening words of this chapter by Du Fu (Tu Fu), writing from such a period of luan, or social chaos. But such periods filled Chinese with dread, and Chinese history is a chronicle of triumphs over disorder and turmoil by strong and virtuous dynastic founders who restore order and receive the Mandate of Heaven for their dynasties. Such exemplary periods never last for more than a few centuries before incompe- tence, corruption, disloyalty, or conquest cause their decay, hence their loss of Heaven’s mandate to rule. Each dynasty may be seen as a new experiment in ordering Chinese society, in seeking improved institutions that will better meet the needs of the state, hence the people. Always, however, there was the assumption that there could be only one “Son of Heaven,” one emperor, to whom all the people looked for moral guidance and benevolent rule. Regional movements and competitive secessionist states were relatively rare, partly because emperors experimented with ways to prevent regional contenders for power from emerging. As Fairbank writes:

The central myth of the Confucian state was that the ruler’s exemplary and benevolent conduct manifesting his personal virtue (de) drew the people to him and gave him the Mandate. This could be said as long as rebels could be suppressed, preferably by decapitation. (Fairbank and Golden 2006:111)

Suppression of rebels by decapitation suggests the nonideological side of the strong Chinese state. Although such ideological systems of thought as the Man- date of Heaven, the de (te) or mystical store of power of a ruler, and Confucian social ethics provide the moral underpinnings of the Chinese state, there was

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always also the state’s coercive fist. This is wu, which means force or military order. Confucius may have preferred a state based on the wisdom and virtue of a fatherly ruler and the moral cultivation of filial subjects, but because virtue often fails, social order may also be imposed and defended by force. The legalists and militarists sometimes rivaled the Confucian philosophers and brought a darker view of humanity in which peace could be won only through violence and the punishment of what they saw as the inherent wickedness of man.

Events of the present do not contradict these fundamental patterns of Chi- nese society. Even with the contradictions in China today regarding the rela- tionship between socialism and capitalism, there is a surprising degree of consensus regarding the validity of a strong central authority that provides moral leadership for the people. Mao Zedong had tremendous moral authority that has been criticized for its cultic qualities and its excesses during the Cul- tural Revolution. But many thoughtful Chinese now worry about the moral vacuum of capitalism and look back with a certain nostalgia on the social morality of Mao’s teachings contained in these words:

We must all learn the spirit of absolute selflessness. . . . A man’s ability may be great or small, but if he has this spirit, he is already noble-minded and pure, a man of moral integrity and above vulgar interests, a man who is of value to the people. (Mao Zedong 1965:337)

As Mao articulated a Communist morality that had strong resonance with themes of Confucian morality while also governing a coercive state, destroying enemies of the state, and suppressing dissident views, he and the Chinese Com- munist Party were following a very old pattern. We turn now to the establish- ment of these patterns in ancient times.

The Beginnings: Xia, Shang, Zhou, and Qin

The Chinese have always been interested in their past—worship of ances- tors is worship of origins—and have put extraordinary effort into recording his- tory in dynastic chronicles, gazetteers, travel accounts, and official records. The twentieth century provided a phenomenal growth of knowledge about the ori- gins of Chinese civilization from a new source, as archaeology opened to view palaces and tombs of the earliest dynasties. But the names of these ancient kings are not new to us; archaeology confirms the existence of rulers already chronicled in the first century B.C.E. by China’s “Grand Historian,” Sima Qian (145–89 B.C.E.). It was Sima Qian who rescued the name of Confucius from oblivion after the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang (259–210 B.C.E.), attempted to obliterate Confucian teachings and texts. Sima Qian gathered all the older doc- uments that were available to him as court historian and archivist to his Han dynasty emperor to write the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), an enor- mous work that would require two to three thousand pages for a complete Eng- lish translation (Wills 1994).

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The Grand Historian wrote of the three earliest Chinese dynasties: Xia, Shang, and Zhou. His accounts of the Xia and Shang were so filled with fabu- lous stories that modern historians tended to discount them and begin their own historical accounts with the Zhou, the dynasty during which Confucius lived. After all, what can you make of the founder of the Shang dynasty, born from a mother who became pregnant after swallowing the egg of a black bird? Sima Qian seems to have told the stories as they came to him without passing judg- ment on their credibility. He had quite a lot of more concrete things to report about specific kings, their characters and actions, and their capital cities. While some records from the Shang exist (see below), the earlier Xia is recorded only through myths, and here the figure of Yu the Great (ca. 2200 B.C.E.) emerges most prominently. This legendary founder of the Xia is significantly remembered for his ability to “tame” the changeable Yellow River through dredging and dike construction. This mighty task has forever been essential to the good governance of northern China, and it became a crucial test of any ruler’s legitimacy.

“The Ruins of Yin”

Three and a half centuries after Sima Qian died, grave robbers plundered a royal tomb in an area long known as the “Ruins of Yin” in the lower Yellow River valley. They found strips of bamboo with writing on them, which made a handy torch while the robbers carted off treasures. Some bamboo strips, how- ever, were rescued; these turned out to be a chronology of Shang kings and became known as the “Bamboo Annals.” Sima Qian’s Shiji and the Bamboo Annals have long been the best sources on the Shang dynasty. But for 3,000 years, fear of ghosts and respect for the graves of the ancestors prevented any serious efforts at investigating the “Ruins of Yin,” leaving to twentieth-century archaeologists the discovery of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 B.C.E.). The scholar Wang Yirong (Yi-jung) tracked “dragon bones” to the town of Anyang in the first years of the twentieth century and discovered what proved to be the royal archives of the Shang dynasty. This touched off a frenzy of treasure hunt- ing as well as some of the best archaeological research done anywhere in the world by Western and Chinese scholars.

First excavated in 1928, the Shang capital of Anyang is now one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. It is actually 17 different sites near the modern town of Anyang. One of these sites was the major palace complex; another was the royal cemetery. Several sites are bronze foundries where mag- nificently ornamented bronze vessels were manufactured. Nestled everywhere are humble workshops and residences of artisans and commoners. The old annals identified 12 kings of the Shang, one of whom was burned to death when Zhou invaders conquered Anyang. Imagine the delight of archaeologists to find, along with a thousand humbler graves, the remaining 11 royal tombs at Anyang.

These tombs are not monumental in the Egyptian sense, or even structures at all, but huge burial pits about 10 meters deep with long ramps leading down into the grave. The ramps on the north and south were longer, giving the burial

Figure 7.1 Anyang site map. This cemetery, excavated in the 1930s, con- tained 10 large tombs of Shang dynasty kings. Figure 7.1 is the eastern section of the cemetery. The large cross-shaped tomb (1400) is a royal burial pit (as are 1129 and 1443). All royal tombs were oriented north-south, with ramps to facili- tate descending into the pit where the king was buried with elaborate grave goods (all robbed centuries ago). Additional goods were piled in the ramps. The small graves were related to the big tombs one way or another, probably those of workers who built the tomb and/or sacrificial victims associated with the king’s mortuary rites. Of 643 individuals that could be classified, 209 were skulls only, 192 were bodies without skulls. There were also many horses, a few elephants, and chariots. Almost all were young adults, male and female, aver- aging 15 to 35 years old. The Shang clearly sacrificed live victims to accom- pany Shang kings to the afterlife (and also perhaps to keep the location of tombs secret). This practice was abandoned by the time of Qin Shihuang, who made pottery effigies of his army to accompany him to heaven.

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pits a cross shape. A wooden chamber was built at the bottom with the coffin, also of wood, in the center. Most of the wood has disintegrated, along with the bodies of the kings, but other materials remained. The kings were buried with sacrificial victims, often decapitated and laid out in rows, with their heads arranged tidily elsewhere. Sacrificed dogs protected the entrances along the ramps. Some tombs were better protected; at Royal Tomb 11, eight chariots complete with two horses and two armed charioteers each were interred on the ramps. This king was accompanied to the afterlife by 160 decapitated victims.

In 1976 a new royal grave was discovered, the first one that had never pre- viously been plundered. It was the final resting place of Fu Hao, the favorite consort of the second Anyang king, Wu Ding, in the thirteenth century B.C.E. Lady Hao’s name was already known from oracle bone inscriptions, one of which asked whether she would be in good health after giving birth to her baby. That is typical enough, but Wu Ding also wants to know whether he will have success against the Qiang tribes when he sends Fu Hao at the head of the army. This extraordinary thirteenth-century B.C.E. woman was surrounded by 440 bronze ceremonial vessels, mirrors, bells, and weapons; 590 jades; 560 objects of bone; 7,000 cowry shells, which were probably used as currency; 16 humans; and six dogs.

At the end of the 1936 digging season, archaeologists stumbled on a trove of inscribed tortoise plastrons, though so compacted after millennia under- ground that they could not be removed one by one without damaging them. Instead, they were removed en masse—a three-ton block of 17,096 shells so well preserved that the vermilion sketches put on before they were incised could still be plainly seen. This was the vast official archive of Wu Ding’s reign.

These finds, together with nearly 100,000 written texts from the oracle bones, enable us to know a great deal more about ancient Chinese civilization than we know about Indus Valley civilization, whose script remains undeci- phered, not a single name known, and only a few elusive clues about the nature of their society and religion inferable from the excavations.

The Uses of Bronze

Surely it is appropriate to use the terms “state” and “civilization” to describe the Shang period. The consolidation of power in a single authority, the elimination or absorption of competing polities, and the extraordinary works of art and wealth monopolized by the nobility are evidence of this. The Shang state consisted of numerous walled towns, called yi, controlled by the great clans of the nobility. The state (guo) consisted of a hierarchy: the royal city, the walled towns of the nobility, and the unwalled hamlets of common folk carry- ing on from the earlier Neolithic pattern of life (Keightley 1982). Meanwhile, Shang rulers systematically expanded their domains and founded new towns by sending out populations to settle and begin farming the new regions.

Extreme variations of wealth are apparent in tombs and homes, from the palatial residences of great kings to the humble quarters of commoners. Bronze

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was the key to this difference in wealth. The Shang state sponsored copper and tin mining, and royal establishments monopolized bronze manufactures that, with jade and silk, were the main items of prestige accumulation. Bronze was used for two principal purposes: Weapons, in the form of swords, arrow tips, spears, and execution axes enabled the elite to dominate militarily, maintaining internal con- trol and prosecuting offensive action against external enemies. And bronze was the material for manufacturing the objects necessary to communicate with the ancestors, the spirits, and Heaven; heavily ornamented bronze vessels with tripod feet were used to offer them wine, meat, and other specialties from human society and thus tie them in continuing reciprocal relations with living people. These, too, were the prerogative of the ruling class. A third logical use of bronze comes to mind: bronze tools, like adzes, axes, chisels, and plows, for use in agricultural pro- duction. However, surprisingly few such tools have been found, and those that have were mostly found in royal graves. Keightley believes that even bronze tools were used for ceremonial purposes, such as ritual plowing of the first fields (or the king’s fields) in spring, and for digging royal graves and constructing the coffins and inner walls of the tomb. Thus, the use of bronze was the monopoly of the state, and particularly of the king, who already was known as the Son of Heaven.

Communicating with Heaven

The king’s legitimacy rested on his unique capacity to communicate with Heaven. His own royal ancestors resided there, where their de, their mystical store of power and virtue, remained available to shower blessings on their liv- ing descendants. These ancestors also had access to other heavenly powers that could assure well-being and harmony for all living members of the state. These heavenly powers were sometimes projected into a vaguely conceived “Heav- enly Emperor,” Shangdi (Shang-ti), but conceptions of Shangdi never con- gealed into a single, high, creator god as known in the West. When Shang kings died, they became themselves ancestors who would henceforth rule from heaven. Thus their tombs had to be filled with all the treasures a newly arrived king-ancestor would need, the first of centuries of gifts they would regularly receive from their living descendants. Their obligations to earth and their pow- ers now were greater than ever.

The record of Shang kings’ communications with Heaven can be read on the oracle bones in inscriptions up to 50 characters long. Most tended to be practical questions: “Will we get anything when we hunt at Gui? Will we not get anything when we hunt at Gui?” The heated metal prod was applied to the reverse side; with a “plop” the crackle-response would appear, and later, per- haps, the end result was reported: “On that day we hunted and killed one tiger, 40 deer, 164 wolves, 150 fawns, and a couple of foxes” (Chou 1979). Such accounts give an indirect glimpse of the life of the king and the nobility; it would have been quite a hunting party that killed so much wildlife.

Of course ordinary people did not live like this. Although the nobility was organized in large patrilineal clans held together by wealth, high status, and

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collective worship of ancestors, commoners did not have these mechanisms by which to maintain the memory of long-term kinship connections. Their fami- lies were small and their ancestors forgotten after a few generations. Few grave goods accompanied their dead; the elegant bronze vessels for giving libations to ancestors were too expensive for commoners and probably restricted in any case as a prerogative of great families. Patricia Ebrey writes:

Kings were obliged to offer sacrifices of several kinds of meat to their founding ancestor and four most recent ancestors each month; lords, offi- cials, and officers (shih) could make progressively fewer and less varied offerings to progressively fewer ancestors. Commoners were not to make sacrifices of meat, but they could offer vegetables to deceased fathers once each season. (1991:52)

Idealized Zhou Feudalism

To the west of the major Shang centers were a number of tribal chiefdoms that at times fought and at other times tolerated each other. They made alli- ances with the powerful Shang through tribute and vassalage. The Zhou tribes were among these groups. But Shang rulers gradually became weaker, while the Zhou became stronger, and in about 1045 B.C.E., the Zhou conquered the Shang and established a new capital in the west at Chang’an (now Xi’an).

Where Shang kings had justified their rule through worship of their own divine ancestors, the Zhou invented the Mandate of Heaven (tianming). Although Heaven was not imagined as a creator god or as a divine personality, Heaven was on the side of righteousness and good government. According to Zhou revisionism, Heaven had withdrawn its support from the decadent Shang and bestowed it on them, thus creating the motif of the wicked last emperor of a dynasty gone bad and the virtuous founder-emperor of a new dynasty. In the case of the Shang, the last emperor (Di Xin) embodied all imaginable evils that would become commonplace in dynastic histories for centuries to come. He neglected the affairs of state in favor of the pleasures of his harem, and one wife in particular demanded his attention and matched him in wickedness. Orgies in the palace were hosted with boats floated on pools of wine, as the guests enjoyed the spectacle of diabolical and novel torture methods. These moral transgressions were funded by higher taxes, which led to unrest and eventually the overthrow of the Shang and the founding of the Zhou.

With this strong moral element (perhaps embellished by later historians), Heaven’s favor thus made the new Zhou king the “Son of Heaven.” In his mediating role between Heaven and earth, he represented Heaven on earth in his obligation to provide good government, and he represented earth to Heaven in annual imperial rituals. He worshipped in the “threefold kneeling and nine- fold prostration” to Heaven. Twice a year, at the summer and winter solstices, the king gave a feast for Heaven of wine, soup, various delicious dishes, and animal sacrifice. In the spring he sacrificed on the Altar of Agriculture and

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ploughed the first furrow of the year (a custom still performed by the emperor of Japan and the king of Thailand). If things went well, it was proof that the Mandate of Heaven continued with him. Thus, the Zhou established moral grounds as the test of legitimacy, which became the orthodox view to the pres- ent. The symbolic power of these Zhou royal rites remained central in imperial political theater through all dynasties down to the Qing.

The Zhou dynasty survived almost eight centuries (1040–256 B.C.E.), the longest-lasting dynasty in Chinese history. During the first two and a half cen-

Box 7.2 Cosmological Theater in the Forbidden City

Confucius said, “A virtuous ruler is like the Pole Star that remains fixed while all other stars circle reverently around it.” When the Imperial Palace was begun in Beijing in 1410 during the Ming dynasty it was laid out as the earthly plane of this cosmologi- cal structure. As the Pole Star is fixed in the north of the heavens facing south, the For- bidden City was located in the northern (yang) part of the city facing the south (yin) side, theoretically linked to Heaven by a cosmological axis with the Pole Star at Heaven’s end and the Son of Heaven at earth’s end. The emperor, representing earth, wears earth’s color, yellow (the color of the soil in the Yellow River basin). In the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the emperor always sat on the north facing south toward his min- isters, nobles, and subjects at the Great Audience three times a year and the Regular Audience three times a month.

The Son of Heaven was the only man on earth who could enact the mediating rites for all human society (i.e., for Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom). Just before sunrise on the night of the winter solstice he sacrificed on the Altar of Heaven; at the summer sol- stice he sacrificed at the Altar of Earth. At the spring equinox he sacrificed at the Altar of the Sun and at the Altar of Agriculture; after cutting the first furrow in a ritual field just outside the city, farmers throughout the empire could begin their planting. The empress picked the first mulberry leaves of spring so that women throughout the empire could begin silkworm cultivation. At the autumnal equinox he sacrificed at the Altar of the Moon.

The city was laid out on the five points of the compass with the fifth point being the center of the earthly cosmological plane where the Son of Heaven dwells. The city is a series of cities within cities, each surrounded by a wall. The Forbidden “City” itself is actually a jumble of palaces, gardens, pavilions, and gates, though inside lived sev- eral thousands of the emperor’s children, empresses, consorts, and eunuchs. For them, the Forbidden City was a pleasure palace—and a prison, for they rarely could leave. It nests within the old city laid out like the old Zhou capital, with an Altar of Land and Grain on the west side of the gate and the Imperial Ancestral Temple on the east. This was the structure that was replicated in every Zhou vassal state for centuries.

All gates and altars on the north are devoted to earth, and on the south to Heaven. The Altar to the Sun is in the east, where the sun rises, and the altar to the Moon is in the west where the sun sets. The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen, now Tianan- men Square since the gate was removed) is matched in the north by the Gate of Earthly Peace.

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turies it was called the Western Zhou because the capital was at Chang’an and new forms for organizing the state were worked out by the new elite class, which consisted of the new Zhou leaders and the former Shang nobility who had merged into a single class. For Zhou kings it was easier to capture a region than to govern it. Kinship ties of loyalty, rather than bureaucratic organization, were the cement that held society together. In theory, all the territory con- quered by the king belonged to him, but in order to control his territories, he gave his male kinsmen the right to colonize and govern lands in his name. These bonds of fealty were ritually enacted. At Chang’an, the Zhou king estab- lished an altar to the God of the Soil on the west side of his palace gate and an altar to his ancestors on the right side of the gate. When a younger brother or nephew established a vassal state, he took a clod of earth from the Son of Heaven’s altar to his own capital and built his own local altar to the God of the Soil. In performing rites to his local God of the Soil, he acknowledged the supremacy of the Son of Heaven at Chang’an. But he built a shrine to his own ancestors on the right side of his gate. There was little military force emanating from the capital to hold these vassal states to the center; it all depended on these bonds of loyalty, ritually enacted.

Ancestor worship thus had powerful political significance; only aristocratic lineages were entitled to worship their ancestors, and an elaborate code of rules linked a family’s rank in the Zhou state to the complexity of ancestral rites and the number of generations of ancestors that could be worshipped. Commoners were not entitled to worship ancestors beyond three generations, could not offer meat, and could worship only once each season. Ancestor worship throughout Chinese history changed in response to changes in the state and in the nature of elite classes, as we shall see.

During the last five centuries, called the Eastern Zhou because the capital moved to Luoyang, it all began to unravel. Thoughtful people looked back on those early decades of the Western Zhou when the feudal system still worked as a golden age.

The early Zhou system of linking vassal states to the king through bonds of loyalty and ritual action gradually dissolved as those many secondary states grew larger and more powerful than the Zhou king himself. It was an easy mat- ter to forget the old loyal bonds and begin to act autonomously; a prince had his own shrine to the God of the Soil and his own ancestral shrine outside his palace door. At one point over 170 states were operating independently, form- ing alliances against stronger states and absorbing weaker states until they began to eat one another up. This era, known by the ironically poetic name of the Spring-and-Autumn period (722–481 B.C.E.), gave way to the Warring States period (403–221 B.C.E.), when the competing states had worn each other down to only six. It was not surprising that people looked back with longing on the peaceful times when all states lived harmoniously under a single king.

Clearly the Zhou golden age was over. However, great strides were made in other areas of social life. Iron, a metal strong enough to make plows that could

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be pulled by oxen, was discovered, an invention that fueled another phase of the agricultural revolution and another round of population increase. The canals and irrigation works that had been going on for a very long time got a new boost; new areas came under intensive cultivation. A wealthy merchant class began to be documented in the oldest records, but since merchants pro- duced nothing and only made their wealth by the suspicious and undervalued process of trading things for other things, they were put at the bottom of the emerging class system:

warrior-administrators peasants and primary producers artisans and secondary producers merchants

This class structure remained the frame of reference into the twentieth century, when even the Communists, who received their aversion to the bourgeois mer-

Yan

Jin

Qin

Chu Wu

Zhou

Chen Cai

SongZheng

Lu

Qi

Tan

W ei

C ao

Deng

Xu

Yellow Sea

Map 7.2 Fifth-century B.C.E. China.

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chant class from both Chinese tradition and Marx, tried to eliminate the mar- ket system from society.

Notably, the martial values of the Zhou gave way to the scholarly ideals of Confucianism, and while the highest class of administrators were sometimes trained as military leaders, their main claim to legitimacy was in their excellent mastery of history, ritual, and literary refinement. The greatest gains were intellectual. During the same century that Socrates and Plato were laying down the philosophical foundations for the West, and the Buddha was teaching a new path to salvation in India, Confucius was creating a civil religion for Chi- nese society.

Two Sages: Confucius and Laozi (Lao Tsu)

The times favored ruthless men of action, opportunists ready to use the arts of wu (war) for gain and glory. But everybody had to live in the chaotic condi- tions they created, including two men whose thoughtful reflections long out- lived the brief gains of conquest. Laozi (Lao Tsu) and Confucius, the two preeminent philosophers of ancient China, may have lived at roughly the same period. Their philosophies are opposite in many ways; Laozi’s is so different from Confucius’s that he seems almost Indian in his insistence on realities behind appearances and on relativizing society’s structures and demands.

The historian Sima Qian gives biographical sketches of both men. Some scholars have questioned whether Laozi was a single person or a composite of a number of hill-dwelling sages living disdainfully apart from society. The first part of his name, Lao, means “old and venerated”; the second half of his name, zi, means “master.” According to the Grand Historian, Laozi was the keeper of the imperial archives for the Zhou kings at Luoyang at the time when the emperor was becoming irrelevant and society was decaying around him. Sima Qian describes a visit by Confucius, and later followers record a number of their encounters, which turned out differently depending on who was telling the story. As the Zhou further declined, Laozi resolved to retreat to the moun- tains of the west, but at Hangu Pass the gatekeeper begged him: “As you are about to leave the world behind, could you write a book for my sake?” So he wrote a work in two books, setting out the meaning of the Way (dao or tao) and Virtue (de or te) in 5,000 characters, and then rode off and disappeared without a trace. The result was the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) or “the classic of the Way and Virtue.”

Confucius lived to the east in the state of Lu (Shandong Province) where for a while he held high office. Sima Qian makes a tragic hero of Confucius as well as of himself in the autobiographical portion of the Shiji (Watson 1958:170). Both men were profound critics of the society of their times; one might use the modern term “dissident” to describe them. For while deeply loyal to Chinese civilization, they criticized—delicately—corruption, unjust punishment, and uncontrolled aggrandizement by political leaders. Sima Qian once unwisely defended a general who was in disfavor with the emperor. For

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this offense he was sent to the “Room of the Silk Thread” and castrated. A man of his station would normally commit suicide under such humiliating cir- cumstances, but, as he explains in his history, he stayed alive in order to com- plete this great work.

In Lu Confucius attempted to implement good government by offering his services as advisor to regional rulers, but neighboring rivals plotted his over- throw. Entertainers and dancing girls were sent to distract the Duke of Lu from his responsibilities. Confucius resigned in disgust. For 10 years he and a band of disciples wandered from state to state seeking an opportunity in government service where they might apply their ideals, but they encountered opponents wherever they went whose arguments are recorded as lengthy speeches by Sima Qian. Toward the end of his life Confucius returned to Lu, resigned to political failure, and lived out his life peacefully writing and teaching his disciples. Only after his death, Sima Qian records with bitter irony, did Confucius achieve the respect he deserved. The Duke of Lu, who ignored him in life, sent an extrava- gant eulogy to be read at his funeral, recorded in its entirety by Sima Qian.

The immense Kong family, all descendants of Confucius,

maintains a vast forest of a graveyard in Qufu, in Shan-

dong Province, where graves go back to the Zhou dynasty.

Confucius himself is buried in the hillock behind the stone

column bearing his name (although during the Cultural Revolution, students dug it up

looking for his bones but found nothing). In front of the

inscription is a stone altar on which his descendants sacri-

fice cattle, sheep, and pigs. His direct descendants in the main line now live in Taiwan, where

Kung Tsui-chang, of the 79th generation, is the Sacrificial

Official of Confucius.

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Confucius and Laozi shared a contempt for their times but disagreed philo- sophically on what remedy was called for. Laozi was a mystic who attempted to relativize society much as Hindu renunciants did, holding that society was the sphere of manifest reality—metaphorized as “the ten thousand things”—but true reality was beyond: it was the source, the uncarved block, the way, the dao.

The Dao begot one. One begot two. Two begot three. And three begot the ten thousand things.

Confucius also spoke of the dao, but in a less metaphysical way than did Laozi, giving it less centrality in his philosophy, which focused instead on the morally perfectible person.

For Laozi, the relationship between the “uncarved block” (the dao) and the “ten thousand things” is or should be a natural, harmonious common identity. “The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang. They achieve harmony by combining these forces.” All manifest things form a unity with the dao; because they come from that Nameless Source, they model it and operate by its same principles. There should be no tension between them. However, Laozi did not view the ten thousand things as dangerous illusion, as Hindus did, but as good and natural manifestations of the dao. The only danger was in forget- ting the Source beyond; trouble comes from thinking the ten thousand things exist in and of themselves, disconnected from their Source.

What difference should this viewpoint make to the person living in the world? You should not forget that you, too, come from the dao:

Empty yourself of everything. Let the mind become still. The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return. They grow and flourish and then return to the Source.

Since the Self is also one of the ten thousand things, you, too, have a natural way of being:

Better stop short than fill to the brim. Oversharpen the blade, and the edge will soon blunt. Amass a store of gold and jade, and no one can protect it. Claim wealth and titles and disaster will follow. Retire when the work is done. This is the way of heaven.

Traditionally the 81 verses of the Daodejing were divided into two sections, the dao (1–37) and the de (38–81). De is usually translated as “virtue,” which in English has lost most of the Socratic impact it once had. De is written as a com- pound with, in part, the element for person and the element for heart; it implies inner strength of character, or even in the daoist view, a mystical store of power in the person of extraordinary virtue and wisdom. It is often used with the

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founder of a new dynasty, or the sage-ancestors of society. In focusing on de in the second half of the Daodejing, attention turns to rulers and the state. “All things arise from dao. They are nourished by virtue (de).”

The role of rulers to use their de is depicted in verse 39:

These things from ancient times arise from one: The sky is whole and clear. The earth is whole and firm. The spirit is whole and full.

The ten thousand things are whole and alive. Kings and lords are whole, and the country is upright. All these are in virtue of [the de of] wholeness.

The clarity of the sky prevents its falling. The firmness of the earth prevents its splitting. The strength of the spirit prevents its being used up. The fullness of the valley prevents its running dry.

The growth of the ten thousand things prevents their dying out. The leadership of kings and lords prevents the downfall of the country.

Therefore the humble is the root of the noble. The low is the foundation of the high.

Laozi does not question the right of rulers to exist but reminds them of the natural limits of their powers within a universe ordered by the dao. He trusts the dao in all things to make society function well: “If you want to be a great leader, you must learn to follow the dao. Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself.” Or more simply and memorably, there is the image of the fish: “Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking.”

For Confucius, the central concept was not dao, but ren: man or humanity. “It is man that can make the dao great.” Ren is even less translatable than dao and de. It carries the sense of human moral perfectibility, of human potential, of the potent goodness of human beings who have been loved, nourished, and appropriately socialized. Confucius believed that humans are born with the potential for great goodness, and it is within a well-ordered society that human goodness flourishes.

The Analects of Confucius where his words are held to be preserved most authentically has nothing of the eloquence of the Daodejing. If one goes to the Analects—as to the Bible or Quran—expecting to hear the voice of divine authority, one will be disappointed. They are mostly pithy statements from a man who made no claims of divinity. Interpretation of his words was what later Confucian scholarship was all about. His ideas are most often embodied in little stories, such as the following:

17:6 Zizhang asked Confucius about humaneness (ren). Confucius said, “A person who can exercise these five things in his dealings with the world is acting humanely (ren).”

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When Zizhang asked what “these five” were, Confucius said, “Cour- tesy, tolerance, trustworthiness, diligence, and kindness. Be courteous, and you avoid disrespect. Be tolerant, and you win over the multitude. Be trust- worthy, and you are trusted by others. Be diligent, and your work will go well. Be kind, and you will be able to employ others.” (Watson 2007:121)

The commonsense decency in this explanation of ren might mistakenly portray Confucius’s thought as little more than platitudes, which indeed is how he often comes across in older translations. But his thought is far more subtle, and far more Chinese, than merely an exotic version of the Golden Rule.

If ren is a state of moral awareness and cultivation, one achieves ren through li. Li is the distinctly Chinese concept giving Confucian thought the tremendous impact it had in Chinese civilization. The following passage from the Analects shows Confucius trying to explain the behavioral aspect of ren:

12:1 Yan Yuan asked about humaneness. The Master [Confucius] said, “To master the self and return to ritual (li) is to be humane (ren). For one day master the self and return to ritual (li), and the whole world will become humane (ren). Being humane (ren) proceeds from you yourself. How could it proceed from others?

Yan Yuan said: “May I ask how to go about this?” The Master said, “If it is contrary to ritual (li), don’t look at it. If it is

contrary to ritual, don’t listen to it. If it is contrary to ritual, don’t utter it. If it is contrary to ritual, don’t do it.” (Watson 2007:80)

What could li mean in the above passage? Translators attempt to make Confucius (or anyone being translated) speak English, but there are different “deep habits” of the two languages that make translation more difficult than just finding the right English word. So Confucius may sound pompous or the- atrical when a translation is too close to the original. In the case of li, the deep habits of English have changed in the last two centuries. The nineteenth-cen- tury translator, James Legge, translated li as “righteousness,” which gives the above passage a piety that sounds more Victorian than Chinese. (Try reading the passage again, inserting “righteousness” for li.) Still, righteousness is a valid sense of the meaning of Confucius.

More recent scholarship has focused on li as “ritual.” Western culture hardly knows what to make of a worldview in which “righteousness” and “ritual” could be squeezed into a single word, but that is exactly what makes the Confucian worldview so distinctive. Li, ceremonious conduct, is the behavioral expression of the inner moral quality of ren. “It regulates one’s daily life and interactions with others, channels emotions properly, distinguishes civilized patterns of behavior, and maintains the political order” (Chow 1994:10). When Confucius said in the passage quoted above, “to subdue oneself and return to li is ren,” he was suggest- ing that through self-governing by ritual, one transforms one’s own nature. Thus, ritual and righteous action are the same thing: a remedy for moral crisis.

The thing that a Westerner might object to in ritual—that its form is pre- scribed by society and the past—is what makes li so very Confucian. Westerners

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are apt to describe ritual as “empty” and thus “inauthentic” to the self, or merely “going through the motions.” But for Confucians, the authority of society and the ancients is what constitutes morality, and the rituals that have come down from them to us are empowered by that authority and by Heaven itself. Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi) said: “Ritual is the manifested authority of Heavenly principle.” There is no value in any “authentic selfhood” that does not come from these sources. The young may be born with the potential for goodness, but that poten- tial is not fulfilled in a vacuum. It is fulfilled in the moral forms given by society.

It is the rituals of social life that bind society together and bind individuals to the social order. It is the same li that structures society into a hierarchy of authority and power. “The order that li ought to bind together is not simply a ceremonial order—it is a sociopolitical order in the full sense of the term, involving hierarchies, authority, and power. The li must themselves support this authority and power” (Schwartz 1985:68). This fundamental and far-reaching system is summarized in the “Three Bonds”: official to monarch, son to father, and wife to husband. Li governed them all. Family and state were part of the same moral structure; all were ordained by Heaven. The man of virtue, who fulfilled li and ren, Confucius called by the term junzi (chun-tzu). Prior to Confu- cius, this was a title given to the hereditary nobility, a word meaning “prince,” but Confucius held that any morally cultivated person could become a junzi; thus it took on an individualistic, achieved sense. (Victorian translators used “gentleman,” another archaism to modern ears.) The junzi conducts himself morally and according to li in all his roles: as son, as father, as husband, as offi- cial. Women should also conduct themselves according to li, which limited their possibilities to daughter, wife, and mother. Much later, in the eighteenth century, Confucians began to obsess about women, and a cult of women’s purity arose, but Confucius himself had very little to say about women.

Confucius and Laozi provided the dominant strands coming down from the Eastern Zhou to later ages. It may have been the extraordinary influence of Sima Qian’s great history, the Shiji (Shi Chi), which kept them alive after the brief dark times to come in the Qin dynasty. Sima Qian brings their differences alive in stories, probably apocryphal, about their meeting. According to him, Confucius once went to Luoyang to consult with Laozi about the li of the ancients. Laozi scoffed that the ancients were now nothing but decaying bones. He said, “I’ve heard that merchants keep their goods buried deeply to make it look as if they have nothing, and that a junzi will pretend to be stupid. So give up your pretenses, your mannerisms, and your extravagant claims. They won’t do you any good. That’s my advice to you.” Confucius returned to his students and said: “I know that birds can fly and fish can swim and beasts can run. Snares can be set for things that run, nets for those that swim, and arrows for whatever flies. But dragons! I shall never know how they ride wind and cloud up into the sky. Today I saw Laozi. What a dragon!”

If, to Confucius, Laozi, with his lofty indifference to society, was an ungraspable dragon, Confucius’s legacy was far greater. His teachings became

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a civil religion that formed the moral foundation for Chinese civilization throughout the ages. But this did not happen immediately. His followers over the next several centuries kept his teachings alive by compiling his sayings and writing extensive commentaries on his insights. Eventually his tomb became a shrine, a center where lectures, festivals, sacrifice, and worship were conducted by his later followers, including princes and ministers from Han times onward, right up to the present. But before Confucian teachings came to dominate social values, a major political upheaval was to occur: the conquest of all the small, bitterly contesting domains and the founding of “China” as a centralized state under the genius of Qin Shihuang.

The First Emperor and the Unification of China

The First Emperor has always had a venerable place in Chinese history, but he came alive in our age in 1974 when members of an agricultural commune were digging a well not far from Xi’an. Thirteen feet down they were aston- ished to encounter a life-size terra-cotta warrior. This was not the first time farmers had encountered buried warriors. In 1914, as a farmer and his son were digging a well in the same place, a terra-cotta warrior emerged from the mud. As they kept digging, they broke through a watertight layer into an empty chamber, causing the water to suddenly drain away. Thinking they must have uncovered a demon, they dug it out and left it to decay in the elements. But by 1974 Chinese farmers were less worried about demons. Excavations began two years later, and eventually 1,100 warriors emerged into daylight after 22 centu- ries. They were the army of Qin Shihuang.

This site has been only partially excavated, awaiting better methods as archaeology continues to mature as a science, and also out of respect for the dead emperor. Probably an additional 5,000 soldiers are still buried. But of those already excavated, the world has been astonished. Two hundred are the vanguard of the emperor’s army, armed with crossbows. There were squads of spearmen, and files of archers, some resting on their knees. There are chariots, infantry, and cavalry, the horses and chariots at half-size scale. Most remark- ably, each face is unique, as if every soldier had stood for his own sculpture. This diversity, however, was the ingenuity of ancient Chinese craftsmen who worked from a number of separate molds for eyes, mouths, noses, beads, head shapes, and the like. By mixing and matching they made it look like thousands of distinct individuals. Qin Shihuang’s actual tomb under a nearby earthen pyr- amid has not been opened, though ancient historians described its contents:

The tomb was filled with models of palaces, pavilions, and offices, as well as fine vessels, precious stones, and rarities. Artisans were ordered to fix up crossbows so that any thief breaking in would be shot. All the country’s streams, including the Yellow River and the Yangzi, were reproduced in quicksilver [liquid flowing mercury] and by some mechanical means made to flow into a miniature ocean. The heavenly constellations were shown above and the regions of the earth below. (Topping 2013:5)

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Who was the man for whom this astonishing tomb was built? By the third century B.C.E., the many competing small states had worn themselves down to six main survivors, each heavily armed and capable of fielding armies of 100,000 men. The western-most of these domains was the large state of Qin, which encompassed the old center of the Western Zhou. New ideas had been implemented in Qin to reduce the power of the hereditary aristocracy by creat- ing a bureaucracy of appointed officials dependent on the king for their power and survival. The ruler of Qin set out to conquer the other kingdoms, accom- plishing this by 221 B.C.E. He gave himself the name Qin (for his state) Shi (“First”) Huang (“Sovereign,” a replacement for wang, “king”), the First Emperor, and his name, became the name for China itself (Qin = China). He imagined he was founding a line of emperors to be numbered consecutively for- ever. By the Third Emperor, his dynasty was ripped apart by violence, but the title “huangdi” remained a title for the Chinese emperor until 1911.

He ruled only a little over a decade; so brief a reign might be dismissed as a historical blip, but he accomplished a restructuring of China whose basic out-

The army of Qin Shihuang was discovered by farmers digging a well in 1974. The terra-cotta army, more than 1,100 of them (and possibly 5,000 more), were a replacement for the living companions in the journey into the otherworld who accompanied earlier rulers. Qin himself remains respectfully unexcavated in his tomb nearby.

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lines remained until the twentieth century. Determined to reduce the power of local lineages that might later form separatist regional states, he divided the realm into 36 districts. To administer these regions, he rejected the old aristoc- racy and instituted a meritocracy of men who had earned his respect by their work for him and had no power bases other than the emperor’s approval. This new class of administrators was appointed by the emperor and responsible to him. If they displeased him, they were easily removed. He attempted to solve the problem of the existing elites in the old feudal states by forcing 120,000 of these families to move to his capital. He saw that primogeniture—passing all a family’s property to its eldest son—was a means of accumulating wealth and consolidating power across a number of generations. To reduce such dangerous concentrations, he required families to divide their property when male chil- dren came of age (Chow 1994).

Those huge standing armies out in the old states were defanged by confis- cating and melting down their weapons, then using the metal to create 12 enor- mous human statues of 32 tons each. Believing that people needed clear laws, he codified them and had them inscribed on pillars. Believing laws were obeyed if penalties were severe, relatively light offenses (by current standards) brought flogging, mutilation, forced labor, castration, and decapitation. The emperor himself—as lawmaker, chief executive, and court of last appeal—was above and outside the law. He began the systematic registration of the entire population, encouraging families to adopt surnames by which they could be identified over subsequent generations; this new custom served to reinforce the patrilineal principle in kinship organization and made it easier to form descent groups based on patrilineality.

By the second century B.C.E., written Chinese had taken many forms, and texts from one place were often unreadable in another. To further unify his state, Qin Shihuang had the script regularized across the country, which accounts for the fact that today, however diverse Chinese “dialects” might be, all literate Chinese read the same script. But Qin Shihuang was determined they would not be reading the Confucian texts. Considering Confucius’s thought too soft-headed and dependent on individual goodness, he had these books burned. When scholars objected, several hundred were buried alive.

Recognizing the importance of trade and communications, he regularized weights and measures, built 5,000 miles of roads, and connected the various pieces of northern walls into the “Great Wall,” while destroying many walls that had divided the Chinese states. (This was only the forerunner of the Great Wall that tourists visit today, which was mainly built during the Ming dynasty.)

The First Emperor was thus an organizational genius as well as a cruel ruler who has been remembered with both pride and horror. He accomplished in 221 B.C.E. what Chandragupta Maurya accomplished in India just one cen- tury earlier: the first imperial unification of the northern portion of the country. In subsequent centuries both countries would suffer “barbarian” (in India, mleccha) invasions from Central Asia and would be linked to each other by

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Buddhist values and text-seeking monks and masters for centuries. Chandra- gupta’s grandson, Ashoka, became a model of the ideal Buddhist king through- out much of the Buddhist world, but his example carried little weight in China. Instead it is the conflicted model of Qin Shihuang, the organizational genius, whose governmental forms imposed on China persisted down to the overthrow the Qing dynasty in 1911 (Dull 1990:55).

To Confucian scholars who would later write the history of the brief Qin, its underpinning philosophy was the brutal and anti-intellectual “legalism” of proponents like Shang Yang, Li Si, and Han Feizi. This much maligned school of thought takes a pessimistic view of human nature and so endorses necessar- ily strict laws and brutal punishments. Confucian scholars would come to argue that human nature was good, and that self-cultivation and the study of the Five Confucian Classics would provide the scholar elites with the founda- tion to rule as paternalistic ministers and magistrates. The legalists had failed in their effort to crush Confucian teachings during the brief Qin, and in the Han, Confucianism would be enshrined as the dominant cultural tradition in Chinese dynasties and would remain so for over 2,000 years to come.

Emergence of the Confucian Elite (Shenshi)

Every large state struggles to keep control of its outer regions, while regional powers want autonomy to solve their own problems. Believing that the greatest danger comes from a powerful center, the founding fathers of the United States created constitutional limits through the tripartite structure of the federal government and by giving to states all powers not specifically allo- cated to the center. Even so, there are periodic ebbs and flows of power between Washington and the states. In China, historians have viewed the prob- lem the other way around; periods of social chaos are identified as those when the center is weak and the regions are strong.

After the excesses (and successes) of the Qin, the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.– 220 C.E.) had to backpedal a bit on the regional kingdoms, for regional loyalties had been partly responsible for the successful overthrow of the Qin. Since much of the old Zhou aristocracy had been destroyed, a new one emerged in the Han and the Tang dynasties out of the “meritocracy” instituted by the Qin. As part of the continuing struggle to limit the power of outlying territories, emperors began to raise up new councilors on the basis of merit and gave them authority over provinces. But especially in times of crisis, power regularly devolved back to the regional rulers. Pig farmers and slaves became imperial councilors and founded lineages, joining the new aristocracy. David Johnson (1977) writes about several hundred great aristocratic clans that composed the top stratum of society from the Qin to the Tang, some of whose genealogies were preserved over a thousand years at Dunhuang. Patricia Ebrey is able to trace the fortunes of the Cui clan of Boling for nearly a millennium from Tang times until they disappear from the scene in the early tenth century (Ebrey 1978).

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Because the newly appointed bureaucrats regularly managed to turn them- selves into an aristocracy capable of eclipsing the emperor, Han emperors began maintaining private secretarial staffs to keep themselves informed. As this private secretariat slowly expanded into a central executive branch of the bureaucracy through the Han and Tang dynasties, many of the palace council- ors were scholars who came from the Hanlin Academy, which had been founded as a center of revived Confucian studies. This was a critical juncture in establishing Confucian scholarship as the basis of the future bureaucracy.

A new stage began with the Song dynasty (960–1279). The emperor’s pri- vate secretariat had continued to grow, with real power in the hands of five to nine grand councilors who supervised the burgeoning administration. As it grew it required an expanded pool of educated persons to fill it. The world’s first civil service system emerged to provide this talent. It was a three-stage pro- cess. Exams were given every three months at the prefecture level, for which youths all over China spent years studying, achieving this first degree around an average age of 24. Those who passed went on to the metropolitan exam in the capital. If you were good enough to pass that exam, the last stage was a pal- ace examination, occasionally even administered by the emperor himself. Every three years about 600 men were granted the most prestigious degree, the “Presented Scholar” (jinshi [chin-shih]). The average age for passing the second level was 30, and for passing the third level was 36—not unlike the BA, MA, and PhD degrees today. The examination system was thoroughly adopted in 605 by the brief Sui dynasty (581–618) and became a central element of the cul- ture and governance of every ensuing dynasty until the exam system’s abolition in 1905.

The social significance of these bureaucratic changes was immense. A whole new elite class emerged, whose philosophy was Confucianism (rujiao [ju chiao], in Chinese, meaning “the doctrine of the literati”). This elite was com- posed of two main privileged groups. One was the shen (official-gentry) who had passed all the exams, acquired degrees, and held government positions. These men were magistrates with typically county-level government posts, although the “law of avoidance” stipulated that a magistrate could not serve in his home county or province and could not even serve in a neighboring county of someone from the same home province. This was intended to prevent cor- ruption and nepotism. As the scholar class grew, the number of successful examinees far outstripped the actual available government posts to be filled; nevertheless, a classical education continued to be the hallmark of the gentry class. The other group consisted of learned men shi (shih, scholar-gentry) who were outside the government, often members of local landowning families. Handbooks prepared for magistrates recommended gaining the cooperation of shis in administering local areas, because they were not subject to the law of avoidance and were the link to common people; “the learned and virtuous scholars are exactly the ones to rely upon in persuading the people to follow the instructions of the officials,” wrote one handbook (Chang 1955:32). They

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could also stir up trouble if annoyed. Together the shen and shi formed a large and influential class that vastly expanded over the next three dynasties—Song (960–1279), Ming (1368–1644), and Qing (1644–1911).

The privileged status of the gentry was signified in their dress. They wore black gowns with blue borders, with various additional markers of rank, up to the nine pythons embroidered on the chest of officials of first rank. Only the gentry could wear sable, fox, or lynx. If a commoner needed to address a mem- ber of the gentry, he could check the buttons on his hat. The simple silver but- ton of the lower gentry required “Excellency” (lao ye). Gold buttons indicated holders of high academic degrees and titles; the wearer of a hat with a gold but- ton, a flower ornament, a ruby, and a pearl was an official of highest rank. All such titled officials were “Great Excellency” (da lao ye). Gentry privilege went beyond wardrobe; if they committed offenses, they could not be humiliated by corporal punishment. If a commoner injured another commoner, the penalty was 10 lashes; if a scholar-official, 70 lashes. Commoners could not testify against gentry in lawsuits. Scholar-officials paid lower taxes or were exempt altogether. They could not be required to perform corvée labor or engage in manual work.

This 1869 photograph by John Thomson, a pioneer

in photojournalism, shows a scholar-official

in elaborate dress.

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Benefits of membership in the shenshi class were immense. Membership required passing at least the first level of examinations. And so sons were set to study hard to pass the examinations that led to official appointments. Because the families of scholar-officials benefited by shared status, wealth, and lineage prominence at local levels, tremendous pressure was placed on sons to succeed. The expansion of the class of scholars was assisted by the invention of the book made with cheap paper and woodblock printing.

We know something about life in the schools of Song China (Lee 1977). When a boy was five or six his family decided whether he was bright enough to warrant the expense of a classical (i.e., Confucian) education. (Girls could not sit for examinations. We return later to the life women led during these years.) The rich hired tutors. Sons of poor relatives might be allowed to study with these rich boys, and sometimes an extended family or lineage group would pool money in support of an especially promising boy’s education. The tutors were often young men further along the examination path. An advanced scholar who needed an income might rent a room or set up in a Buddhist tem- ple and recruit pupils from local families. Men who failed the later stages sometimes made a career of tutoring younger boys. There were a few govern- ment-sponsored elementary schools, such as one in Kaifeng with more than a thousand pupils.

Of course, most peasant boys went straight to the fields, and sons of old gentry families had some advantages over a first-generation scholar, much like today in the United States. Sons of scholar-officials might travel with their fathers and inherit their libraries. But in the end, it depended on the hard work, determination, and abilities of the boys themselves. They lived lives devoted to examinations. Men might sit for the examinations a dozen times or more before finally passing or giving up. A popular nineteenth-century novel describes a large lineage in which only two of 60 to 70 brothers and cousins entertained guests; all the rest stayed behind closed doors, studying for exams (Chang 1955:171).

All the exams were devoted to the Confucian Classics. It was as if the sec- retary of the interior, of treasury, of state, the state governors, and all public officials were appointed to these positions based on their expertise in the writ- ings of Plato and Aristotle. The system produced generalists, not specialists; what was wanted to govern the state were junzi (chun-tzu), morally cultivated gentlemen, not experts in irrigation, international relations, or commerce. “A gentleman is not a pot,” reads one of Confucius’s obscurer statements. He meant that a junzi is not trained to a particular purpose (a pot) but is a general- ist. As Stephen Owen wrote:

The same question resurfaced in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, transformed into the “Red versus expert” controversy, which asked whether public projects should be managed by good communists or by specialists. To the surprise of no one who knew the Chinese tradition, it was concluded that “not pot” communists would be the sounder choice. (Owen 1997:38)

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Much as the middle class (or bourgeoisie) that emerged in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on a capitalist economic base constructed a new set of moral, religious, and cultural values, so the gentry developed its own moral, political, and educational preoccupations. It came in the form of a social conservatism seeking to discover and restore ancient moral practices, particularly in the domain of kinship. These were sufficiently new, and suffi- ciently based in Confucian ideas, that the Song transformations have come to be called Neo-Confucianism. Two features of Neo-Confucianism will interest us here: the new interpretations that linked personal and family morality to the state and the return to emphasis on li in family and lineage ideology. Those changes were triggered by a number of factors, but we will focus on two of them: the Buddhist challenge to Confucianism and the Mongol and Manchu challenge to Chinese cultural superiority.

The Buddhist Challenge to Confucian Civilization

It is unknown who first brought Buddhist ideas to China, but the earliest positive evidence of its existence there comes from the first century C.E. It is fairly certain that the news of this foreign faith would have come from the oasis towns of Central Asia, where Buddhism took root very early and where many important monasteries flourished, above all at Dunhuang. According to tradi- tional accounts, the Han Emperor Ming woke up one morning and called his advisors to him. A “golden man,” a divine being, had appeared to him in his sleep. This must be the Buddha, his advisors marveled. So Emperor Ming sent envoys to India who returned with two Indian masters, a white horse, and the Sutra in Forty-two Chapters. They founded the Monastery of the White Horse at Luoyang, where it exists to this day.

In its first few centuries at the end of the Han dynasty, Buddhism was weak and poorly understood. The Three Jewels of Buddhism—Buddha, dharma, and sangha—were known, but in a simplistic way only. It was a highly sophisti- cated and varied philosophy, but foreign to Chinese assumptions. India was very far away, and there was only a single text, not well translated. Initially, Buddhism was treated like some form of Daoism with its emphasis on purity, simplicity, and nonaction. But as the Han began its disintegration because of, as usual, the rise of regional powers that eclipsed the central dynasty, Buddhism came to have broader appeal. For the next four centuries, a variety of small and local dynasties came and went, while the “barbarian” Tuoba Turks founded the Northern Wei dynasty in the old heartland with their capital at Luoyang.

In both the southern Chinese dynasties and in Northern Wei, Buddhist monasteries sprang into existence. In 400, there were 17,000 monasteries and 80,000 monks and nuns in the south. In the north, Buddhism was even more successful: there were 30,000 monasteries and a million monks and nuns. The “great age of Buddhism” is the fifth to ninth centuries—Northern Wei, Sui, and the first half of the illustrious Tang dynasty—when emperors themselves converted to Buddhism and lavishly patronized Buddhist monasteries, carv-

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ings, works of art, and translations of scriptures. The Tuoba Turks of Northern Wei embraced Buddhism vigorously, partly as a challenge to the Confucian values of the civilization they sought to emulate and control. These imperial sponsors, and later ones, brought to China the Indian practice of hollowing out sanctuaries in steep cliffs: Dunhuang was one example; the vast stone images of Buddha carved into the hills outside Luoyang were another.

It was, inevitably, a series of traveling monks—Indian, Chinese, and Cen- tral Asian—who did the intellectual work of making the full complexity of Indian Buddhism understood in China. Faxian went to India from 399 to 414 in search of texts he was certain must exist in so learned a land. Although he found a thriving Buddhist culture in which kings respectfully bowed down before monks—something that would never happen in China—he found very few texts. Instead, Indian masters orally transmitted the dharma to their follow- ers. But he learned Sanskrit, one of the few Chinese ever to master that difficult language, and managed to bring a few translations back. In the meantime, the great translator Kumarajiva arrived in Chang’an in 401 from Kucha in Central

Beginning in 493 B.C.E., Chinese emperors earned merit by sponsoring rock-carved images of the Buddha near the old capital of Luoyang. The colossal Buddha in the distance is the grandest of over 2,345 images carved into the rock cliff along the Yi River. Many of the images, carved in deep relief, were hacked away from the rock and carried off by European collectors. Fortunately this one, the grandest of all (the face is said to have been modeled after Empress Wu), was too huge to steal.

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Asia. He introduced Madhyamaka philosophy and joined forces with disciples of the Chinese monk Dao’an in the greatest effort of translation in history. A single translation often took four people to divide the work: an Indian monk to orally recite the Sanskrit; another to write it down; another to translate the San- skrit into oral Chinese; and a fourth to record the text in written Chinese. When Xuanzang returned from India in the seventh century, there was another round of vigorous translation, for by then there were many written texts in India for him to collect. By the eighth century there was a canon of over a thou- sand Buddhist texts in good translations, which emperors ordered to be copied by official bureaus set up for the purpose. This became easier after the eighth- century invention of printing. It was first invented to reproduce charms and images cheaply and quickly, but its potential was quickly grasped. In 972 the first printing of the entire Buddhist canon was done by imperial order. The Dia- mond Sutra of 898 still exists in the British Museum (see chapter 2).

Religions grow out of the soil of indigenous social patterns and do not transplant easily. In China, the integration of religion and the sociopolitical order had been refined over a millennium. Buddhism was, first of all, a barbar- ian religion filled with bizarre notions. What did an Indian sage, this Buddha, have to teach a civilization that had Confucius and Laozi? Confucius had placed all emphasis on human life in society. Each person had one life to live, to be fulfilled in the community of family, lineage, and the state. He had refused to speculate on the gods, on Heaven, on the fate of the soul, or whether ancestors were actually sentient and capable of enjoying the gifts that must nev- ertheless be offered them. But here were Buddhists, denying the existence of all the here and now, proclaiming the utter unreality of all phenomena, plus a host of other outlandish ideas.

Monasticism was particularly un-Chinese. A monk was guilty of cutting off the family line, a sin against the ancestors and the height of social irresponsibil- ity. The exemplary Indian story of Prince Sudana shocked Chinese. Prince Sudana, like the Buddha himself, renounced his kingdom by giving his father’s property away, giving the war elephants to the enemy, and putting his wife and son into the care of others. The Chinese viewed this as not filial, not li, and not ren. Interpreters tried to explain: Sudana realized the world is transitory and wealth and properties do not truly belong to the self, which, incidentally, does not really exist, either. By giving all away and seeking enlightenment, he reached the point of becoming a Buddha. Then, through his enlightenment, he brought salvation to his parents, brothers, wife, and son. Is this not the epitome of filial devotion and humaneness?

The idea of reincarnation was particularly troublesome. The Chinese felt the soul was too tied to the body to survive its death. Further, the idea of rein- carnation was a big problem for ancestor worship; how could an ancestor return as someone else’s descendant? The concept of the Pure Land eventually solved that problem; instead of reincarnation into a new existence, one was reincarnated into the Pure Land, Heaven, a suitable abode for ancestors.

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Buddhism in its second 500 years in India had developed ideas that made it appeal more to the masses than did earlier Buddhism. The Mahayanist notion of salvation through the intercession of bodhisattvas had powerful appeal to all classes. The theory that merit could be transferred from one person to another made this possible. Bodhisattvas could compassionately bestow some of their enormous stores of merit on their devotees. In China, the most beloved of all bodhisattvas was and is Guanyin, the beautiful Goddess of Mercy, portrayed in thousands of paintings and images. Her name means “taking heed of the

The most popular bodhisattva in China is certainly Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. She is the Chinese form of Avalokiteshvara, who probably merged with a popular Daoist goddess to become the most beloved bodhisattva in China.

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sound,” the one who hears the cries of the suffering world and responds with compassion. In India she was the male bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara who merged with an early Daoist goddess to become Guanyin. In Japan she became Kannon. The other well-known Chinese Buddha, the slightly ridicu- lous “laughing Buddha,” developed in late imperial times. He began as the Buddhist messiah Maitreya who became identified with a tenth-century monk named Budai (Pu-tai), “Hemp Sack,” who had claimed to be an incarnation of Maitreya. “Hemp Sack” replaced Maitreya in the popular imagery of the pot- bellied Buddha who resembles the Hindu elephant-god Ganesh more than he does the great Buddha-to-come. Perhaps due to his statue’s ubiquity in the West, the plump tenth-century monk is often incorrectly identified in popular culture as being the Gautama Buddha, or Siddhartha Gautama, the original “awakened one” and first teacher of Buddhism, who of course lived 1,500 years earlier.

The Tiantai (Tien-t’ai) sect made the Lotus Sutra the most beloved of all Buddhist texts in East Asia. Though the central narrative of the Lotus Sutra is the Buddha Sakyamuni revealing a new, more authentic truth, the text was not written in India but in Central Asia some time before 250 B.C.E. This new truth is that there is only one path to salvation, not three as previously revealed. The one path lies in the heretofore unrevealed fact that everyone—not just monastic virtuosos—have the Buddha-nature and all will be saved and become Buddhas. Nirvana gets redefined; it is not extinction of existence at death, but extinction of ignorance in this life; that is, Enlightenment. And this enlightenment comes in the simplest of ways, by casting one’s faith in the Buddha. Long passages of the Lotus Sutra describe the people who have already received Buddhahood. There are the traditional hard ways: learning the law, practicing charity, per- fecting self-discipline, enduring forbearance and humiliation. But there are sim- pler ways: boys at play, making Buddha pagodas in the sand; installing Buddha images in the home; embroidering Buddha pictures; or singing the glory of the Buddha, even with a small sound. The simplicity of these teachings brought Buddhism to the common people and made the Lotus Sutra an icon as much as a sacred text.

One other development needs mention, since it became so important when borrowed by the Japanese. Early in the sixth century a mysterious Indian med- itation master named Bodhidharma visited China. Whatever it was he taught quickly blended with a fundamental Daoist idea: that ultimate truth is beyond words. “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.” But how can one reach that ineffable truth beyond words, beyond rationality, beyond the ten thousand things that distract us? Obviously all the words printed in books, even sacred ones, are beside the point; in fact, they obstruct the truth. Bizarre new forms of meditation were devised to break through the constructed world of words and reason to reach the intuitive, wordless, “no-mind” reality beyond. They meditated on paradoxes and non sequiturs in an effort to unravel the intellect in a sudden, explosive, obliterating breakthrough to radical unity of

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being. Ironically, the anti-intellectualism of this approach was of great interest to intellectuals, while uneducated people found it unfathomable. Known as Chan Buddhism in China, it still exists and has tremendous cross-cultural appeal today as Japanese Zen Buddhism.

Despite the glory days of Buddhism during the Sui and the Tang dynasties, Buddhism eventually began to fade. It never really stood a chance against Con- fucianism. It did not end because of persecution, though there were major per- secutions in 446, 574, and 845 when stupas were destroyed, monasteries were looted, and monks and nuns were “secularized” or killed. Even at its height, and with the support of many emperors, state and sangha had a natural antipa- thy. For one thing, the conceptual structure of the Chinese state did not leave room for institutions existing outside it, as Buddhist monasticism claimed to do. The life of idleness and begging for food was much criticized as parasitic on society; monasteries were criticized for hoarding copper, silver, and gold in rit- ual objects. The monasteries amassed enormous wealth through gifts from rich donors; they owned huge tracts of land that produced income through the labor of temple serfs and slaves. Using this wealth for moneylending and pawn- broking, monks who had taken vows of poverty played a significant role in the development of banking and established commercial enterprises like oil presses and water-powered mills. In Tang times Buddhists responded to these criti- cisms with practical ways of enacting Buddhist compassion; they founded clin- ics and hospitals, provided aid for the poor, and distributed food in famine times. Though the vinaya rules forbade manual labor, gathering firewood and drawing water became a central feature of Chan Buddhism.

With all this wealth, and close ties to emperors and rich patrons, it was inevitable that the sangha would be used for political purposes. Most notori- ous, perhaps, was Empress Wu, the only woman in all of Chinese history to rule as the supreme monarch. She spent seven years after her husband’s death inventing ways to justify her succession (rather than her sons’), then finally did rule from 690 to 705. First, she had a white stone “discovered” in the Luo River that, when cracked open, contained an inscription: “A sage Mother shall come to rule mankind; her rule shall bring eternal prosperity.” She then installed her commoner lover as the abbot of the venerable White Horse Mon- astery. He proceeded to recruit a thousand bodyguards whom he ordained as monks. As abbot, her lover proclaimed that the Great Cloud Sutra had prophe- sied the reincarnation of the Bodhisattva Maitreya as a woman, who would bring an era of peace and plenty. “All her subjects will give their allegiance to this woman as the successor to the imperial throne. Once she has taken the Right Way, the world will be awed into submission.” She immediately ordered a Great Cloud Temple to be built in every prefecture of the empire (Wills 1994:142–143). Although Empress Wu appears to have been a good adminis- trator, she was loathed by Confucians for the intolerable innovation of a woman ruling, executing her competitors, having affairs in old age just like a man, and of course her patronage of Buddhism. That she could manipulate

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Buddhist symbols so boldly and successfully was simply one more thing wrong with Buddhism.

In late Tang times, the state was impoverished by civil war and turned to the wealth of Buddhist monasteries to replenish the treasury. At the same time, a more fundamental shift was taking place toward older Chinese values, Con- fucian ones. As Zurcher writes:

[Buddhism’s] decline was a gradual process—it petered out and slowly lost its intellectual vitality and creativity, and its social status, in a world in which the educated elite more and more turned away from it, and in which the best minds were attracted to the examination hall rather than to the monastery. (1984:205)

Buddhism continued to function more marginally in Chinese society. The theme of the messiah, Maitreya, was rich in revolutionary possibility. Secret sects formed, like the “White Lotus Society,” which played a role in the down- fall of the Yuan dynasty. Martial monk-heroes, such as the kung-fu monks of the Shaolin Monastery in Henan, became a theme in popular lore (bequeathed to modern action films), and came close to toppling the Qing dynasty at the begin- ning of the nineteenth century. However, even though the People’s Republic of China has liberalized its policies toward religion, most observers of China today view the prospects of a strong comeback of Chinese Buddhism as unlikely.

Neo-Confucianism

In the eleventh century Zhu Xi wrote in the part of Family Rituals devoted to funerals:

Do not perform Buddhist services. . . . If heaven’s palace does not exist, then that’s that. If it does, then men of virtue will ascend there. If hell does not exist, then that’s that; if it does, then inferior men will enter it. Contempo-

Is this Empress Wu? The main figure at the

Luoyang caves is said to have been modeled after the

empress, who devised prophe- sies about herself as a “sage Mother come to rule man-

kind” and a reincarnation of the bodhisattva Maitreya.

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raries, when a man dies, pray to the Buddha. This is assuming one’s parent was not a person of virtue but an inferior person who had accumulated bad deeds and sins. Could there be a less kind way to treat one’s parents? And if in fact one’s parents had accumulated bad deeds and sins, how could they escape the consequences by your bribing the Buddha? (Ebrey 1991:79–80)

That Zhu Xi wrote his famous Family Rituals at all was part of the Confu- cian backlash. Patricia Ebrey, the translator, describes the work as “a militantly Confucian book to combat Buddhist rites and other non-Confucian practices.” The glitz of Buddhist culture—all the temples, images and icons, works of art, and showy festivals—prompted a Confucian response. Confucianism had mostly dwelt in the home, in public courtesies, in the texts, the examination halls, and in the discourse of the intellectual class. But in 630, at a time when there were well over 50,000 Buddhist monasteries, Emperor Tang Taizong ordered all counties and prefectures to erect temples for the worship of Confu- cius. The most famous one of all was at Qufu, in Confucius’s own hometown in Shandong Province. In 1684, Emperor Kangxi described visiting Qufu and meeting Confucius’s 64th-generation descendant, Kong Shangren, and being shown the wall where Confucius’s ninth-generation descendant hid the Clas- sics when Qin Shihuang burned all the books. During the Cultural Revolution, Qufu would have been destroyed by the Red Guards but for the intervention of Premier Zhou Enlai. It is once again a place of pilgrimage, now for “Confucian Capitalists” from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore. It would be as great a mistake to write off Confucianism in the twenty-first century as it was in the seventh century.

During Kangxi’s visit early in the Qing dynasty, Confucius’s descendants had a problem that was a typical preoccupation of the gentry during the seven- teenth century. They had maintained their large lineage ties so diligently for so many generations that they had now run out of burial space in the family cem- etery. There was simply no room to expand into lands registered to others (Spence 1974). The Kong family was the classic great lineage idealized by the Confucian elite throughout the centuries, although the actual existence of such lineages varied tremendously throughout Chinese history. Beginning with the Song dynasty, it had another period of flourishing, thanks to Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals. This movement was fueled during the Song as an answer to Buddhism, and during the Ming and Qing as an answer to successful invasions by Mon- gols and Manchus.

It may be a little hard to understand how China, at a cultural peak during the Song dynasty, could have been so easily conquered, first by the Jurchen Jin, then by the Mongols (1279). Chinese intellectuals, looking back on their own history during the Ming and Qing, also brooded about it but came to a different conclusion than modern historians. For the latter, the explanation, or part of it, lies in the emphasis on high culture, on virtue, and on peace in the thought of the shenshi and in the disdain in which wu, force or military prowess, was held. Warfare and military might was what had always troubled society from antiq-

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uity on; the well-ordered, ideal society was a society at peace. The military was so devalued by the Confucian elite that it does not even have a place in the four- class structure: shi (scholar), nong (farmer), gong (artisan), shang (merchant). The brightest young men would not dream of going into the military; they studied for exams to become scholar-officials. Even the great technological invention of gunpowder, permitting tossing small bombs and fire lances at the nomadic enemy, was never integrated in a larger military strategy capable of keeping them out of China. All this meant that China was easy prey to aggressive tribal societies whose nomadic and hunting lifestyles made them excellent warriors.

China’s Yuan dynasty had its roots in a great gathering of Mongol tribes on the Kerulan River in Central Asia in 1206. One of the Mongol chiefs, Genghis Khan, was confirmed as “universal ruler” over all the Mongol tribes, the Mon- gol equivalent of Qin Shihuang’s great unification in 221 B.C.E. (see chapter 3). Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, conquered China and established the Yuan dynasty. Needing a capital more central to his empire, Beijing in the north of modern China became the seat of Yuan power, laid out in the classic style of the Chinese imperial capitals at Chang’an and Luoyang, and remains the capital to this day.

The Mongol Empire was a religiously diverse place; there were Muslims, Buddhists, Nestorian Christians, Jews, and now Confucians. Kublai Khan embraced Tibetan Buddhism but was tolerant of other faiths. Confucianism now came to have a strong ethnic component; it was the “faith” of the Han Chinese.

Given the Confucian paradigm of the civilized state that left warfare and military might out of the scheme, perhaps it is not surprising that many scholar-officials went to work with great diligence and loyalty to their Mongol sovereigns. Yes, they hated them; they were “pockmarked and foul-smelling”; one did not want to be downwind of them. Yet, as de facto rulers, they had the Mandate of Heaven. John Langlois (1978) describes the life of one high-rank- ing official, Yu Ji (Yu Chi), in great detail. He helped the nine Mongol rulers whom he served understand the Confucian Classics, hoping this would lead to better administration of the realm. He covered over an ugly struggle among three brothers for succession to the throne by drafting an edict announcing the winner, laying “a polished veneer of Chinese civility and brotherly deference on the surface of the violent power struggle that had taken place.” Ultimately, it was not the gentry but the peasants who brought down the Mongols; peasant rebels led the movement that overthrew the Yuan dynasty after only 88 years; the Ming, a Han Chinese dynasty, would survive 276 years, before again being severely destabilized by peasant rebellions. Manchus (more barbarians) were invited from the northeast to Beijing to throw the rebels out, but decided to stay and found the Qing dynasty.

Scholars analyzing their own history were perplexed: Why did barbarians so easily conquer China? From the Song through the Qing, situations were somewhat different and a variety of analyses were put forward, but a major theme of all of them was “nativist,” a return to the morality and the social struc-

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tures of antiquity. The Confucian revival that began during the Song dynasty reached its peak in the wholesale social reform movement led by the gentry dur- ing the Ming (1368–1644) and the Qing (1644–1911). This movement, imagined as a return to the social morality of antiquity, required a flurry of scholarship to discover what morality had actually been during the Zhou and Han dynasties. What were the “authentic rituals” of the sages? It came to focus on three core values: filial devotion expressed in family and lineage rituals, loyalty to the mon- arch, and wifely fidelity that became a cult of female purity (Chow 1994).

The Confucian Model for Kinship and Gender

The Chinese family system has had to respond to innumerable pressures over the centuries, not least in the turbulent decades since the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Any kinship system is molded by a vari- ety of forces. Family is, at bottom, the basic social unit of human survival; it must be an all-purpose institution for reproduction, child rearing, emotional support, and care for the elderly. During most of human history it has been the basic unit of production and consumption, playing a fundamental economic role. Through marital ties, it links groups together. It may be a family militia in troubled times. Thus, economic, military, and political factors are conditions families must respond to by formulating strategies for survival, for prosperity, and for achievement of prestige. Finally, family cultures are products of specific historic ideologies; families receive from the past sets of ideals—kinship ideolo- gies—for organizing biological relationships. These ideals may or may not be realizable in particular periods under particular circumstances, and they can change over time. It is essential to understand the ideals that people hold and try to emulate, as well as the conditioning factors that determine the empirical shape of families at given historical moments.

In China, patterns for organizing kinship have been decisively shaped by Confucian ethics. The moral imperative of xiao (hsiao), filial devotion, carried obligations between fathers and sons further in China than perhaps in any other Asian society. Even in Japan, to which these concepts were carried, loy- alty to one’s lord might require a suicide that left one’s parents destitute. But for Confucians in China, as Gilbert Rozman (1991) has put it, the debt to one’s parents can never be repaid. The debt goes on after death, manifested in the child’s obligation to parents to produce at least one son to continue the family line and to revere them as ancestors with gifts, with reports of current goings- on in the family, and, especially among common folk, with invitations to return in spirit form during the holidays.

The ideology of the family was decidedly patriarchal in that control of resources and the structure of authority were in male hands. Patricia Ebrey identifies four key features of Chinese patriarchy: (1) The conception that prop- erty, especially land, belongs to the family, not the individual. (2) This property belongs to the men of the family and must be divided equally among brothers,

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Plate 2 The Fourteenth Dalai Lama. The exiled Dalai Lama, head of Tibetan Buddhism and believed to be an incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, teaches from a throne in Bodh Gaya, India (see pp. 102–104).

Plate 3 Tibetan Buddhists listen to Dalai Lama. Crowds of Tibetan Buddhists listen to teachings of the Dalai Lama in Leh, India. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet in 1950; the Dalai Lama fled in 1959 (see pp. 102–104).

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Plate 4 Miao in Guizhou, China. There are more than 9 million Miao in China, the fifth largest

of China’s official 56 minzu (nationalities). This is more

than Uighurs (8 million) and Tibetans (5.4 million), though all

are overshadowed by the 1.16 billion Han (see pp. 111–115).

Plate 5 Ram Lila performance, Mumbai. “Ram Lila” is a folk

reenactment of the Ramayana story where actors play all the

main roles and scenes may move around a number of sites.

Afterward, the actors are revered as the gods they are portraying. Here, Ram, Sita, and Hanuman are worshipped at the end of a

recent performance (see p. 160).

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Plate 6 Krishna and Arjuna. The gods seated in the clouds observe the savagery of cousins killing cousins. Prince Arjuna (with bow and arrow in chariot) has been reassured by Krishna (the charioteer) that “they are already slain by me” (see Box 5.3, pp. 161–163).

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Plate 7 “What Should Happen But Never Does.” This contemporary Mithila painting deals with a very modern social problem.

A young wife is about to be murdered by her husband and mother-in-law when neighbor women arrive to rescue and avenge her (see Box 5.8, p. 187).

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Plate 8 Confucian scholars. Painting on silk by Ch’iu Ying, Ming dynasty, sixteenth century. Young Confucian scholars await the posting of the results of their civil service examination (see pp. 263–267).

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Plate 9 Thousand Hands Guanyin at Lushan Temple, Yuelu Mountain, Changsha. Guanyin (aka Avalokiteshvara) is the most variable of all the bodhisattvas. Images portray particular stories, such as this one about princess Miaoshan who attempted to cure her sick father, offering up

her eyes and arms for a medicine. She was transformed into the Thousand Armed Guanyin, and vowed never to leave the world until all suffering has ended (see p. 270 for another version of Guanyin).

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Plate 10 Khoo Kongsi clanhouse and temple, Penang, Malaysia. Although the PRC made every attempt to stamp out the large clans in China, they have survived in many Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. This is the richly ornamented clanhouse for descendants of the Khoo clan, wealthy seventeenth-century Chinese traders. The clanhouse was built in 1851 and rebuilt in

1906 when the Khoos were at their peak of wealth and influence (see pp. 276–285).

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Plate 11 Chinese clan jetties, Penang, Malaysia. Poorer members of a handful of Chinese clans still live on the jetties once built to receive trade goods (see pp. 276–285).

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Plate 12 Scroll of the Lotus Sutra, twelfth-century

Japan. Sutra copying became an art form and

an act of piety in China and Japan. This hand scroll was dyed indigo and inscribed in gold and silver ink. It is

unrolled and read from right to left, with a frontispiece at the beginning. This is from

the Devadatta chapter of the Lotus Sutra, in which the

dragon girl gives a jewel to the Buddha and instantly achieves Buddhahood.

(She is at center with rays exuding from her.)

(See pp. 314–318.)

Plate 13 Genji Viewing Snow from a Balcony,

1867. A woodblock print on paper by Toyohara Kunichika. The tenth-

century novel of life in the Heian court, The Tale of

Genji by Murasaki Shikibu was a popular source of

themes for Japanese artists working in many styles

(see pp. 320–325).

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Plate 14 Engraving of Angkor Wat from Exploration de l’Indo-Chine, by Louis Delaporte, Cambodia. The French launched an expedition in 1866 exploring the Mekong River from its delta to its source in China.

This took them through the many Cambodian temple complexes. Louis Delaporte, a young artist, created this engraving of Angkor Wat as it might have looked before it fell into ruins (see pp. 386–388).

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Plates 15 and 16 Two Views of Cambodian Temples: Ta Prohm Temple [top] and Angkor Wat Complex [bottom]. The jungles have torn apart temple complexes that once attempted to replicate the eternal Himalayan abode of the Hindu gods (see pp. 386–388).

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Plate 17 The Emerald Buddha, Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok. A properly Buddhist royal city must copy elements of the Buddhist hear tland in India onto local soil, which then protects the state. The Emerald Buddha was passed

from capital to capital until being installed in Bangkok by the new Chakri dynasty in 1784. Three times a year, the Thai king washes and changes the clothing of the Buddha, here in rainy season attire (see pp. 394–395)

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Plate 18 Rumah Uluyong, a traditional Iban longhouse, Kapit,

Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia. Many Iban continue to live in longhouses

like this one. Longhouses are actually individual family apart-

ments with a long connecting verandah (see pp. 417–422).

Plate 19 Mortuary rites, Borneo. Secondary treatment of the body,

a year or so after death, when the bones are removed from the

coffin, washed, wrapped, and returned to the longhouse for

final ceremonial honoring, during which the soul is directed to its

final abode in the ancestral village (see pp. 418–421).

Color Insert.indd 15 4/23/2018 11:06:26 AM

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if divided at all. (3) Fathers have legal authority over women and children, including the right to arrange the marriages of their children, sell their children, and dispose of their labor. (4) These structures are underwritten by the notion that women are morally and intellectually less capable than men and therefore must be under male control (Ebrey 1990).

The hierarchies that characterized Chinese society at large began in the family; everyone had a unique place in a domestic hierarchy whose two orga- nizing principles were age and gender. Xiao applied proportionately to relations between elder and younger siblings. Respect is due to anyone older than one- self, including the twin who was born five minutes ahead of you; kinship termi- nology distinguishes elder brother and younger brother, with many Chinese terms for the English “cousin,” “aunt,” “uncle,” and other relations, depending on gender and seniority. Traditionally and ideally, all the sons of a man con- tinue to live with him in a patrilocal joint family until he dies, at which time the sons divide the property equally and the process starts over again. This family, called jia, thus has a natural life cycle: a man and his wife have their children, hopefully many; as sons reach adulthood, wives are brought in for them, while daughters are married out to other households. Eventually a number of nuclear families are all living together in one large, well-ordered, and clearly hierarchi- cal household. The men are a tightly bonded unit of fathers and sons. The women who begin as strangers brought in from the outside to share their lives as mothers- , sisters- , and daughters-in-law become the loyal and fertile moth- ers of the lineage and eventually ancestresses as well.

The benefits of such great households were many. They shared a common budget with the expenses of a single household. The eldest male was the chief executive officer of this family corporation, using the capital of several sons’ labors to make investments and expenditures for the welfare of the whole. This included a great house with four connected wings around a central courtyard, perhaps double-storied as well, allowing apartments for each married couple and their children. There was certain to be an ancestral shrine in a prominent location in the main hall. The fund of family capital may be used to buy land, invest in a business, educate the sons, provide dowries for all the daughters, support servants to do much of the labor, and perhaps provide an unofficial second “wife,” a concubine, for the head of household. Such a family, fulfilling the Confucian ideal, was what most Chinese aspired to throughout the ages; however, empirical studies suggest that this ideal was never within reach for most Chinese families. The ideal was far more frequently achieved in gentry families than in peasant families. If a family was poor, sons had to leave in search of work; a daughter might be sold into servanthood or given as a child- bride to another poor family who would bear the cost of feeding her to ensure a farm son would get a wife at all. Mortality rates, alone, were stacked against the ideal Confucian great family; the chances of a couple surviving to old age with several adult sons and many little grandchildren who survived the perils of infancy were a demographic long shot.

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Ancestor Worship

Ancestor worship was not left to custom by the shenshi. Detailed manuals pre- scribed each movement, garment, offering, and placement of ritual objects. Most authoritative of all was Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals written in the twelfth century. According to French missionary Jean-Francois Foucquet (1665–1741), it was to be found in every home in China, second only to the Analects in popularity (Ebrey 1991). The purpose of family rituals, according to Zhu Xi, is to “preserve status responsibilities” and to “give concrete form to love and respect through cappings [at age 20, an adulthood ceremony], weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites.” He hoped, he wrote in the preface, that this book might “make a small con- tribution to the state’s effort to transform and lead the people” (Ebrey 1991:4).

The book begins with detailed instructions on construction of the ancestral hall in the home.

When a man of virtue builds a house his first task is always to set up an offering hall to the east of the main room of his house. For this hall four altars to hold the spirit tablets of the ancestors are made; collateral relatives who died without descendants may have associated offerings made to them there according to their generational seniority. Sacrificial fields should be established and sacrificial utensils prepared. Once the hall is completed, early each morning the master enters the outer gate to pay a visit. All com- ings and goings are reported there. On New Year’s Day, the solstices, and

This preserved ancestral hall was once a mandarin’s home, where the family formally worshipped their ancestors according to principles laid down by Zhu Xi.

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each new and full moon, visits are made. On the customary festivals, sea- sonal foods are offered, and when an event occurs, reports are made. Should there be flood, fire, robbers, or bandits, the offering hall is the first thing to be saved. The spirit tablets, inherited manuscripts, and then the sac- rificial utensils should be moved; only afterward may the family’s valuables be taken. As one generation succeeds another, the spirit tablets are rein- scribed and moved to their new places. (Ebrey 1991:14)

The ancestors, clearly still members of the family, required almost as much attention now that they were dead as they did when living. They needed to be checked in on daily by the head of household, who was to don a special robe and light incense. The offerings of tea, wine, and fruit were for the relatively simple fortnightly offerings. On major occasions such as New Year’s they had to be served rice, soup, vegetables, and several kinds of meat. The ancestors had to be informed of every significant event in the life of the family. Zhu Xi even provided some sample reports. Did a member of the family receive a promo- tion? Then they should say:

On such a day of such a month we received an edict conferring on such rela- tive such office . . . A, due to the instructions he received from his ancestors, holds a position at court beyond what he deserves. Through the grace of the sovereign, this honor has been conferred. A’s salary comes too late to support his parent, which leaves him unable to choke back his tears. (Ebrey 1991:19)

Occasionally, reporting to the ancestors was a form of confession. Did you lose your job? You should say you were “dismissed from such a post, that having dis- carded the ancestral teachings, one is in trepidation and uneasy” (Ebrey 1991:18).

The most significant feature of this mode of worship is the way in which it reinforced family hierarchies. A Western family might simply “gather round” the grave of a departed grandfather (probably only once). The Chinese did it in rank order, and with men and women segregated. When a man died, his eldest son became the presiding man at all ancestor worship, and his wife became the presiding woman. There might, however, be living family members who were senior to the presiding couple; if so, they stood in front of them. Behind them was everyone junior to them, in rank order. Family hierarchies, impressed on each person’s psyche through these somber rituals dozens of times every year, had sacred power. This was the power and force of li.

Though every family needed an ancestral altar in the home, everyone did not have the same ritual obligations. Different ranks of gentry had different authority to perform rites: the higher the rank, generally, the heavier the ritual obligations; of course, this was also a matter of prestige. The eldest son wor- shipped on behalf of his brothers, and this right was passed down in the senior line. The youngest son of youngest sons never did ancestor worship by himself but had to join the senior men of the family at their household. When the next generation of elders died, the ancestors moved up, too; the ancestral tablets were shifted to the table to the west (to the left), while great-grandfather and

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great-grandmother’s tablets were taken out to the gravesite and burned or deposited in the ancestral hall of the larger lineage, if there was one.

Wealth, Power, and Morality in the Large Lineage

In a famous eleventh-century essay philosopher Ouyang Xiu (Ou-yang Hsiu) urged that the hold of Buddhism should be loosened by local officials promoting Confucian rituals, including weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites. He blamed the decay of these rituals on allowing Buddhism to reach into the hearts of the common people. Instructing people in Confucian rituals “not only would prevent disorder but also would teach them to distinguish superior and inferior, old and young, and the ethics of social relations” (Ebrey 1991:xix). Buddhism’s efficient organization in monasteries, temples, charitable organiza- tions, and schools came to be countered by a truly Confucian institution: the large corporate lineage. This form of organization, though sanctioned by the Classics, had not been cultivated intensively during the centuries of Buddhism’s peak in China. The Confucian reforms of the Song dynasty, and later reforms in the Ming and Qing, emphasized lineage organization and Confucian rituals. Kinship had work to do, and a revival of the old large lineage took place.

According to the new kinship ideology, the lineage and the state were com- plementary to each other, not competitive. When lineages diminished in power, argued Gu Yanwu in 1652, so did the emperor’s control over the realm (Chow 1994:84). Remember that emperors from Qin Shihuang on did all they could to minimize the competing power of large regional aristocracies, which were kinship based. Now, it was theorized, the Ming had collapsed because of the failure of local resistance to the peasant rebellions and to the Manchus, which might have been mounted by powerful local lineages had they existed. Thus, unlikely as it seems, some gentry did in fact go about establishing lin- eages in these centuries. These social units represented the values of the state to the common folk, tutor them in Confucian ideals, and compete with Buddhist institutions as the case study of the He lineage will demonstrate.

Local lineages were also found to be effective strategies for economic enhancement. Between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries, powerful lin- eages were established at local levels where they controlled land and resources. These lineages were first studied by British anthropologist Maurice Freedman, who seemed to have said the last word on them in a number of publications in the 1950s (Freedman 1958). However, after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, access to archives was revived, and scholars have been able to enrich our under- standing of these great families.

A team of historians and anthropologists including David Faure, Helen F. Siu, Ye Xian’en, and Liu Zhiwei undertook a major research endeavor in the Pearl River Delta area in southern China. This area lies in the heart of the vast Hong Kong-Guangzhou development region. In presocialist times there were huge corporate lineages each containing thousands of members and control- ling enormous wealth in lineage trusts called tangs. These scholars have traced

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the history of several important lineages and uncovered the territorial bases of their wealth and power. By the late Qing (late nineteenth century) people with the He surname were the largest and wealthiest of half a dozen major lineages in the Shawan sands region southeast of Guangzhou in the Pearl River delta. The founding ancestor of He lineage, He Renjian (see figure 7.2), settled there in late Song times on 50 acres of land that he soon extended by another 50 acres. His descendants cultivated the river marshes, expanding their holdings by a variety of ways, but most remarkably and successfully by reclamation of the sands deposited naturally by the river. Laborers were hired to drop stones from boats, build dikes, and add upper layers of soil on which fruit trees were grown until the reclaimed land was suitable for cultivation. This land was regis- tered with the government when tax dodging became impossible and then leased out to cultivators of other surnames and to non-Han minority ethnic

1st gen

He Chang of Nanxiong

Nanxiong BranchHe Renjian Bought first land as

common lineage property

He Qilong Earned first jinshi title

First ancestral hall built

Major peasant uprising decimates He lineage

Coastal evacuation

He Zihai Earned jinshi title Wrote geneology for previous five generations

He Ziyi First mention of

He Chang of Nanxiong

He Guangzhen “Discovers” He Chang of Nanxiong

He Jieli and He Zhiming Restore ancestral hall

Song Dynasty

Yuan Dynasty

Ming Dynasty

Qing Dynasty

2nd gen

3rd gen

4th gen

5th gen

6th gen

9th gen

13th gen

15th gen

Figure 7.2 Construction of He lineage by members of the literati.

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groups. The wealth in land was held in a lineage trust, the Liugeng tang. By the Republican period (1911–1949), the He lineage owned over 10,000 acres and was one of the richest lineages in the delta with vast ancestral estates.

The first step in founding a great lineage was establishing local wealth. He Renjian began the family fortune, but according to old lineage documents, it was his great-grandsons who built the first ancestral hall to honor this ancestor recent enough to be personally remembered by most people living. The family quickly moved into the shenshi or gentry status, with degree holders and wealth. Part of the family fortune was used to educate the sons, and this paid off in the achievement of jinshi status by the second generation. Most famous was He Zihai in the fifth generation. He Zihai wrote the first genealogy, going back only five generations to He Renjian, the empirical founder of the local lineage. In cit- ing the glories of the He lineage, he wrote: “several tens of descendants have written poetry, practiced the rituals, and served as officials. Other lineages have not been able to surpass this record” (Liu 1995:25). In the same passage he scoffs at some lineages who were creating fictional ancestors by searching out “reputable and virtuous people of past ages to serve as their ancestors” and refrained from doing so himself. Later descendants during the Ming heard rumors of people of the He surname elsewhere, most intriguingly at Nanxiong, and as scholar-officials they traveled frequently enough to have visited there and met some of them. However, nothing came of these discoveries immediately.

Besides genealogies, great lineages needed ancestral halls where collective rites to the ancestors could be performed. The first ancestral hall, built in the fourth generation, was destroyed by warfare at the end of the Yuan dynasty, so it fell to the fifth generation in the early Ming—the same generation that pro- duced the first genealogy—to build a new ancestral hall. The fifth generation was the first to produce scholar-officials of high enough rank to be entitled by law to worship their ancestors farther back than the third generation.

People who worshipped their ancestors beyond their station could be punished and their temples destroyed, as the He lineage did to upstart servant lineages who tried to build an ancestor hall in the nineteenth century. Common people generally had no knowledge of their ancestral origins, no lineage organizations, no ancestral halls, and could not name their ancestors four generations back (Liu 1995).

But a new interpretation of the Classics allowed an innovation for the gen- try; this was the annual worship of the First Ancestor. This provided an institu- tional basis for a much larger kinship group than previously allowable (Chow 1994). It was not immediately clear who the “First Ancestor” would be in spe- cific cases, but it generally came to mean the first forebear to migrate to a locale: for example, He Renjian in 1223. This meant that as generations came and went and the number of He Renjian’s descendants multiplied, they continued to be linked by common worship activities and by shared membership in the ancestral estate. Any number of additional ancestor shrines to lower-order ancestors could theoretically be built, but this was expensive and was only accomplished by very wealthy lineages like the He, who had at least 87 ancestral halls. By the end of

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the Ming dynasty the thirteenth generation had been reached, still keeping alive their sense of common descent and still sharing in the growing profits of the ancestral wealth; thus the lineage was “corporate” in a very real economic sense.

But the transition from Ming to Qing was devastating to the He lineage. The peasant rebellions in the north that led to the Manchu takeover had paral- lel movements in Guangdong Province; the He chronicler wrote of the “smell of blood” on the Shawan sands:

The bondservants who had belonged to the various surnames turned upon their masters. . . . Fierce young men in seven villages followed them, set up camps and walled compounds, robbed, and could not be controlled. . . . Every family departed from the village to escape their wrath. . . . They plundered our houses, slew our kin, burned our ancestral halls and turned our pavilions into ashes. (Liu 1995:30)

Social upheaval was followed by natural disaster. Severe floods required coastal evacuation that lasted from 1663 to 1669. Homes, villages, and ancestral halls were left in ruins, followed by looting and destruction by soldiers and robbers.

As conditions stabilized after 1669, the He lineage had a great deal of rebuilding to do. In 1700 they built a lavish new temple with entrance hall, rit- ual gate, middle hall, back bedchamber, side halls, bell and drum tower, kitchen, and servants’ quarters. They also began tinkering with the written genealogy and produced a new apical ancestor. Fifteenth-generation He Guangzhen uncovered old documents referring to a He branch in Nanxiong and an even older “ancestor,” He Chang. He was identified as originally being from Kaifeng and dying in the service of the emperor in Guangdong. He Chang had everything needed in an ancestor: as an official at the court of the emperor, one could not ask higher origins or credentials. His Han ethnicity was certain, establishing that the He lineage folk were not non-Han parvenus from the south trying to become Han. And He Chang was the first forebear to estab- lish a line in Southern China, a true shizi. Finally, there were He living in Nanxiong to fuse with, and there was already a famous temple built to him because of the virtue (de) that allowed his corpse to flow upstream for 30 li at his death. One could not ask for a better First Ancestor. The details between He Chang and He Renjian were left to genealogists to fill in as best they could.

In this way great lineages were constructed in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Several facts are noteworthy: (1) They were constructed post hoc, by descen- dants who projected their line backward in time according to strategies allowed by existing cultural rules. (2) Large lineages grew by fusion as well as by fission; that is, they sought out distant branches to join with even in the absence of ver- ifiable links, while also growing ever more complex as new generations and new branches emerged. (3) They were subject to state-sponsored Confucian rules about who was entitled to specific rights of worship and group formation. Nongentry families were not allowed to form large lineages, even though a gen- try lineage could have segments that included commoners. (4) Even if all the class-based entitlements to play by these kinship rules were in place, it was the

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successful marshaling of economic resources, especially control of land, which enabled corporate lineages to grow large and survive over time.

The advantages of being a member of the He lineage are obvious. Members received regular income from lineage holdings; expenses of births, weddings, funerals, and education and examination costs were subsidized by the ancestral trusts (see box 7.3). The lineage maintained armed guards and a defense corps to patrol the sands and protect lineage property and members. They set up schools, hospitals, and orphanages. The lineage was a quasi-government that dominated the official government of the region, with many of its members serving on both sides. The security, prosperity, and prestige benefited everyone.

The Family in the Twentieth Century

The second half of the twentieth century was a rare historical moment of rapid-fire and sweeping interventions in the lives of a billion people. Prior to the 1949 Communist revolution, forms of kinship we call “traditional” were in place; these forms survived in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Following the revolu- tion, drastic reforms were initiated in the name of socialism under the moral inspiration of Mao Zedong, going much further than comparable movements in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In stages, private property was elimi- nated; the market was suppressed; all land and labor were collectivized; bureau-

Box 7.3 He Lineage Worships Its Ancestors

According to the recollections of some older people, about 15 days after the Qing- ming festival every year, lineage members would visit the graves in Guangzhou. After lineage heads decided on a date, they sent people to Guangzhou to hire a fleet of col- orful boats (known as the boats from Zidong, a village in Nanhal county) in which the literati types would sail to Guangzhou. The rest of the entourage would go in large fer- ries. Together they formed an elegant fleet, escorted by four armed boats equipped by the He lineage itself. They sailed to Guangzhou in this grand fashion and moored at a berth they had built for themselves. In the evening, they stayed at the four acade- mies, the four martial arts schools, and the Chang’an Inn, all of which belonged to the He lineage; some people would stay at the homes of relatives or friends. They would also have bribed the city guards to open the Small Northern Gate in the city wall ear- lier than usual at the fifth watch (just before dawn) the next day. Almost all the sedan- chair bearers in the city flocked on the occasion to provide service and were paid by the lineage managers. The entire group paraded through the Small Northern Gate to the Grave of the Sisters-in-Law to perform the grave rites. On the third day, they repeated the ceremonies at the graves of He Renjian and others. According to a 1911 record, the lineage spent more than 6,000 taels of silver for the grave visits that year. These extravagant public displays became important rallying points for the collective identity of the lineage as well as for demonstrating to others its power and influence.

Source: Liu Zhiwei 1995:39.

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cratic control by the Chinese Communist Party replaced traditional private entrepreneurial and kinship structures. The full socialist era lasted from 1958 to 1978. Family and lineage were decisively reorganized during those times; the great lineages were special targets of those reforms. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tried to destroy lineage solidarity by assigning each villager to a class category: poor peasant, middle peasant, rich peasant, landlord. The lower statuses were then made to attack, humiliate, and seize the property of the rich peasants and landlords who were their kinsmen. Ancestor worship was declared a superstition and forbidden. Cremation rather than burial was encour- aged, to save land and to undermine reverence of ancestors. Large expenditures for kinship ceremonies like weddings and funerals were harshly discouraged, and no one could afford them in any case. The Marriage Law of 1950 prohib- ited concubinage and child betrothal, which disappeared almost immediately, and permitted women to sue for divorce, prompting two million divorces in the first three years. Putting everyone to work in communes gave women the eco- nomic security to take advantage of the new opportunity for divorce.

All of these changes reduced or eliminated the economic logic of the tradi- tional family system, as well as rendering its ideology politically incorrect. Par- adoxically, however, some of these changes brought core family ideals within the grasp of many who had never managed to realize them before. Access to health care reduced mortality rates, which meant most people actually had larger kin networks than before. Restrictions on internal migration kept men in their home towns or villages; in the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian where large lineages had been most common in the past, these restric- tions on movement and the collectivization of citizens put kinsmen who sur- vived the earlier struggles to work in the same communes, thus preserving them, even though ancestral halls had been turned into work unit headquarters and genealogies had been burned. A few old women still worshipped their ancestors by burning mosquito coils, but in the early years of Communist rule, most people seemed to give up the old customs rather easily.

The next round of kinship changes, following the death of Mao in 1976, offered thrusts in two opposite directions. First, decollectivization in the early 1980s returned 80 percent of all agricultural lands to farm families on 15-year leases, and rural markets were reopened. Once again, farmers had economic incentives to work hard, invest in their farms, and raise livestock. Graham E. Johnson describes the effects of liberalization on lineage practices in the Pearl River delta:

While the full elaboration of all aspects of the operation of lineage cannot be contemplated, many of them are once again practiced. Graves have been repaired, rituals are performed at the graves of apical ancestors, ancestral halls are being restored, ritual feasts occur in the halls once more, lineage libraries are being refurbished, and lineage officers have begun to act as agents for mem- bers of the lineage, similar to the way the administrators of lineage trusts inter- vened on behalf of members in the period before 1949. (Johnson 1993:132)

Box 7.4 Confucianism in a Tumultuous Era

Confucius (Kong Fuzi, 551–479 B.C.E.) did not have a good twentieth century. The final years of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) brought the abolition of the Confucian civil service examination system in 1905, the 1,300-year-old narrow path to cultural status and political power in imperial China. Then in the 1910s, after the fall of the Qing, the New Culture and May Fourth movements were led by students whose main goal was the eradication of traditional Chinese culture including Confucianism, in favor of new and radical ideas, from democracy and socialism, to pragmatism and feminism.

Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), the military and political ruler of the Republic of China from 1927 until 1949 (and thereafter ruler of Taiwan until his death in 1975) tried to revitalize Confucianism in his New Life movement of the 1930s, even enshrining Confucianism as the state religion. But this effort fizzled with the urgency of revolution and resistance of the Japanese invasion. Following the victory of the Chinese Com- munist Party in 1949, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and all other faiths and tradi- tional cultural remnants, were targeted in political campaigns by the revolutionary, atheistic party.

Perhaps most devastating to Chinese culture was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution launched in 1966. Begun as an effort by Party Chairman Mao Zedong (1893–1976) to reassert his primacy by appealing to radical youngsters, the move- ment quickly spun out of control into a period of chaotic violence, score settling, and arbitrary persecution. Confucius was brought back only to be “struggled” against and rebuked by the Red Guards, the hastily assembled brigades of students from college, high school, and middle school. It seems that the fortunes of Confucius and Confu- cianism could not get any worse until Red Guards even desecrated the Kong lin- eage’s family tombs and shrines in Qufu, Shandong Province.

The chaos of the Cultural Revolution eventually subsided in the early 1970s, and then ended completely with Mao’s death in 1976. The “reform and opening” period of the 1980s and 1990s brought the People’s Republic of China onto the global stage as an economic powerhouse. The twenty-first century has already proven considerably better than the twentieth for Confucius. Confucianism has been revived in many aspects of Chinese life, with the revitalized study of Confucius and Confucianism, the reopening and refurbishing of Confucian temples, the observation of traditional holi- days like the Tomb-Sweeping Festival, and more recently with the establishment of Confucius Institutes around the world by the Chinese Ministry of Education.

These institutes, comparable in some ways to the Écoles Françaises and the Goethe Institutes, develop in bilateral agreements with hundreds of international part- ners, mainly universities around the world. They are a soft power initiative of the Chi- nese government to help cultivate a positive image of the PRC and to encourage the study of the Chinese language and culture among thousands of people around the world who would not otherwise have access to these studies. While controversy about Chinese government control has followed some of these institutes, the considerable matching financial commitments of the Ministry of Education are a very appealing prospect to institutions where Chinese language instruction and an infusion of fund- ing are welcome. After the buffeting that Confucius endured in the twentieth century, it is striking that a massive international goodwill initiative like the Confucius Institutes should bear his name.

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Box 7.5 Qingming Festival

The Qingming Festival (literally “pure brightness”) is a centuries-old tradition of rit- ual mourning that falls in the first week of April every year. Although the festival is one of remembrance of deceased ancestors and family members, it is not necessarily bleak or joyless. Flying kites and enjoying a spring outing are common ways to pass the holiday. It is sometimes known as Tomb-Sweeping Day, because the living family visits the graves of the dead to tidy up and decorate it. Offerings are placed at the graves, including food, cigarettes, and liquor. Family members burn ceremonial money and other useful objects for the ancestors in the unseen world. This custom is as old as the ancient practice of sending servants, horses, and terra-cotta warriors into the afterlife with a dead king.

In 2008, the festival was officially reinstated as a national holiday, after having been banned following the 1949 ascension of the Chinese Communist Party, which attempted to stamp out all traces of ancestor veneration and Confucianism.

The festival survived and became especially important in the overseas Chinese community. The commemoration of ancestors is especially poignant when the living are not able to be near the ancestral home in China. One of the simplest and most beautiful Tang poems captures this bittersweet sentiment, and Chinese schoolchil- dren still memorize it as a lesson in beauty and concision.

“Quiet Night Thoughts” Li Bai (Li Bo, 701–762 C.E.) Before my bed there is bright moonlight So that it seems like frost on the ground: Lifting my head I watch the bright moon Lowering my head, I dream that I’m home.

Poem source: Arthur Cooper, tr. Li Bo and Du Fu. London: Penguin, 1973, 109.

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The other change, however, was the most repressive intervention in private reproductive lives the world has ever seen; 100 million couples were affected. The one-child policy, begun in 1979 and formally ended on January 1, 2016, aimed to keep China’s population at 1.2 billion by 2000. In effect, however, it decreed that henceforth “only half of all families would have a son to carry on the family name, the sibling relationship would disappear, and failure to use contraceptives would be a capital offense” (Harrell and Davis 1993). Through much of rural China, bargaining between village families and local cadres resulted in softening the enforcement of the one-child policy, though in urban areas, the state more successfully enforced it. The total fertility of Chinese women—that is, the number of children a woman has over her reproductive years—dropped from about six to less than three. The outcomes of the reduc- tion in family size are evident in a number of ways today. The widespread new phenomenon of the “only child” has resulted in another new phenomenon, the spoiled child. And the traditional Chinese preference for males, which stimu- lated in vitro gender tests followed by abortion of female fetuses, produced a shortage of women at marrying age. Now we are seeing responses as varied as urban young women demanding good education and being choosy about whom they marry, to the sale of kidnapped girls as brides in remote and impov- erished areas. Patriarchal tradition still persists, however, with men being averse to marrying women who are wealthier or better educated than they are. This has led to a phenomenon known as “leftover women,” in which women who choose advanced education and a career may find it difficult or impossible to find a partner when they choose to do so. In 2015–2016, Beijing revised the one-child policy to allow couples to have two children, as an effort to address the rapidly aging population and the strain that this could put on the economy.

Women in Confucian China

The Chinese theory of gender differentiation is founded not in biology—a man’s body, a woman’s body—but in a more fundamental polarity, that of yin and yang, the complementary binary opposites that are the dynamic of the entire cosmos. The “ten thousand things” come swirling into existence through the tumbling energy of yin and yang. Gender is only one category of existence; yin is everything dark, cold, female, coarse, water, earth; yang is everything light, bright, heat, male, fire, heaven. Even the soul has a yin part, the po, the heavy, material, fetid part that sinks in the earth with the decaying body, capa- ble of becoming an angry ghost, and a yang part, hun, the light, spiritual part that floats heavenward and becomes a beneficent ancestor. Male and female bodies, natures, and appropriate social roles all follow from this cosmic dynamic. The rightness of male authority, of patriarchy, is thus derivative of the dominance of the strong, active principle of male yang over the passive gentle- ness of yin.

This is not to say that gender relations have been unchanging throughout Chinese history or that they ride above the flux of changing political and eco-

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nomic realities; gender is as susceptible to reconstruction as other domains of culture. The nature of the ideal female, and thus the life experience of actual Chinese women, began to change during the Song dynasty, producing a pattern in late imperial times a good deal more extreme than in earlier periods.

As we have already seen, various changes in state policy nurtured an ever more defined patrilineal and patriarchal thrust in Chinese society. The spread of surnames aided the remembering of kinship bonds through males, with a corresponding weakening of bonds through female lines. Neo-Confucian revi- talization of ancestor worship spread patrilineality more broadly through elite classes and even among commoners, ritually reinforcing ever larger patrilineal descent groups. Confucian values supported by state regulation vested owner- ship of land in fathers and sons. This Confucian world was a “world authored by men,” in C. Fred Blake’s phrase (Blake 1994); everything that strengthened it rendered women correspondingly “other” and outside the structure.

For example, patrilineality often renders women nameless and identity-less. There is no pool of personal names (like Bella, Jacob, Michael, . . .). Instead everyone gets a surname (Cheng, Li, Wang, etc.) plus one or two characters as an individual name, which are generally poetic, descriptive, or even political: Blue Sky, Lotus Blossom, East [is] Red. In a study of naming customs in rural Hong Kong New Territories, Rubie Watson (1986) found that men gained a variety of names over a lifetime; a diviner may recommend adding wood, fire, or another element to the name of a sickly child to strengthen him. A man takes a marriage name in a ceremony on the first day of wedding rites. He may earn a nickname from the community that interacts with him; at middle age, if he is successful, he may acquire other names, called “courtesy” (hao) names, and a great man receives additional honorific names at death. These names convey a man’s many public identities and achievements; they are recorded on his tablets and in lineage genealogies and so remembered by posterity.

But for women, identity was different. A woman was given a name at the age of one month, which ceased to be used when she married. At marriage, as her husband received his marriage name, she learned all the kinship terms in her husband’s family and henceforth was called by his kinship terms. Her name may never have been written down, not on birth certificates or legal documents or in genealogies or ancestral tablets; it often was not clear what characters would be used if her name were to be written down. In old age she was known as ah po (“old woman”); when she died only her father’s surname was written on her tablet (“Family of Lim”). Not even a name survived as testimony of her exis- tence as a person. While these practices were in flux, as seen in Watson’s study, they certainly were carried well into the Communist era and the recent past.

The decline in the status of women during the Song received further impe- tus after the conquest of China by the Mongols. The same reforms that brought social conservatism and a new preoccupation with Confucian rituals focused moral concern on women. A new cult of women’s purity urged widows not to remarry, exhorted women not to read novels, watch dramas, or go out in pub-

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lic, extolled female self-sacrifice in widespread morality tales, encouraged ultrafeminization of women, and supported a widening custom of foot bind- ing. The causes of these changes were various and are in dispute among schol- ars, but a few likely causes can be mentioned.

The successful Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century, followed by the Manchu invasion in the seventeenth century, each resulting in alien dynasties, put Han Chinese culture on the defensive and generated various cultural responses. Even earlier, the cosmopolitan Tang with its prevalent (foreign) Bud- dhism was also a major source of anxiety and identity crisis for Confucian Chi- nese elites. What did it mean to be Chinese after the Tang and in contrast with later Mongol and Manchu rulers? In what did Chinese cultural superiority con- sist, if not in the political strength to resist invasion? New notions of both male- ness and femaleness emerged, according to Patricia Ebrey; male models characterized by barbarian men were replaced by a new literati male “who could be refined, bookish, contemplative, or artistic but need not be strong, quick, or dominating” (Ebrey 1990:221). Hunting declined in popularity. As males moved toward the “effeminate” pole, women became even more deli- cate, reticent, and confined. Women became visible symbols of Han identity, vulnerable to rape and pillage by aggressive, ultramasculine warrior cultures.

A recognizable genre emerged in the late Ming: the young heroine who is dedicated to Confucian virtues and undergoes horrific ordeals in their defense. Katherine Carlitz recounts some of these stories in “Desire, Danger, and the Body: Stories of Women’s Virtue in Late Ming China” (1994). In a fifteenth- century play called Five Relationships Completed and Perfected, a concubine travel- ing to join her master is captured by an invader who demands her in marriage. Her mother exclaims that no Chinese can marry a barbarian; she bites her fin- ger, writes a poem of fidelity in blood, then drowns herself. A late Ming wife, touched on the arm by a bandit, bites off and spits out the flesh of her arm. These motifs were not random themes; a Qing dynasty bibliography lists 36,000 stories of virtuous women, one-third of whom commit suicide or are murdered while resisting rape.

There were not just stories but actually recorded increases in suicide among women. In 1405 a Confucian conduct book for women included detailed instructions on self-immolation. Thirty-eight concubines committed suicide at the death of the first Ming emperor. Resisting rape and resisting pres- sures to remarry were other idealized reasons for committing suicide. As Cor- litz argues, “woman’s body is a site or theater used by the imperium to constitute itself, asserting the impenetrability of its borders, undergirding the idealized Chinese pyramid of loyalties” (1994:104). Woman’s body was “a site where the drama of resistance to invasion could be acted out.”

But the most renowned stage for the enacting of culture on the woman’s body in late imperial China focused on the foot. In western Hunan, little girls, like little boys, were presented with writing brushes. For the boy, it represented the beginning of his life as a reader, writer, scholar, speaker: the power of the

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word. For the girl, it signified the tiny points of her three-inch “lotus blossom” feet as they would look when finished at puberty: the power of her body when fully refashioned for her role in the Confucian household. Daughters, like sons, submitted to a Confucian world of obedience, self-discipline, and self-sacrifice

Box 7.6 Toes Like Dead Caterpillars

Born into an old-fashioned family at P’ing-hsi, I was inflicted with the pain of foot binding when I was seven years old. . . . Binding started in the second lunar month; mother consulted references in order to select an auspicious day for it. I wept and hid in a neighbor’s home, but mother found me, scolded me, and dragged me home. She shut the bedroom door, boiled water, and from a box withdrew binding, shoes, knife, needle, and thread. . . . She washed and placed alum on my feet and cut the toe- nails. She then bent my toes toward the plantar with a binding cloth 10 feet long and two inches wide, doing the right foot first and then the left. She finished binding and ordered me to walk, but when I did the pain proved unbearable.

That night, mother wouldn’t let me remove the shoes. My feet felt on fire and I couldn’t sleep; mother struck me for crying. On the following days, I tried to hide but was forced to walk on my feet. Mother hit me on my hands and feet for resisting. Beat- ings and curses were my lot for covertly loosening the wrappings. The feet were washed and rebound after three or four days, with alum added. After several months, all toes but the big one were pressed against the inner surface. Whenever I ate fish or freshly killed meat, my feet would swell, and the pus would drip. Mother criticized me for placing pressure on the heel in walking, saying that my feet would never assume a pretty shape. Mother would remove the bindings and wipe the blood and pus which dripped from my feet. She told me that only with removal of the flesh could my feet become slender. If I mistakenly punctured a sore, the blood gushed like a stream. My somewhat-fleshy big toes were bound with small pieces of cloth and forced upwards, to assume a new moon shape.

Every two weeks, I changed to new shoes. Each new pair was one- to two-tenths of an inch smaller than the previous one. The shoes were unyielding, and it took pres- sure to get into them. Though I wanted to sit passively by the k’ang, Mother forced me to move around. After changing more than 10 pairs of shoes, my feet were reduced to a little over four inches. I had been binding for a month when my younger sister started; when no one was around, we would weep together. In summer, my feet smelled offensively because of pus and blood; in winter, my feet felt cold because of lack of circulation and hurt if they got too near the k’ang and were struck by warm air currents. Four of the toes were curled in like so many dead caterpillars; no outsider would ever have believed that they belonged to a human being. It took two years to achieve the three-inch model. My toenails pressed against the flesh like thin paper. The heavily creased plantar couldn’t be scratched when it itched or soothed when it ached. My shanks were thin, my feet became humped, ugly, and odoriferous; how I envied the natural-footed!

Source: Quoted in Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom. New York: Walton Rawls, 1967, pp. 26–28

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for the larger group. A Confucian proverb encouraged mothers to oversee both protracted struggles: “If you care for your son, care not that he suffers in his studies. If you care for your daughter, care not that she suffers in her feet” (Blake 1994). As boys suffered to join in the authoring of the world, girls suf- fered to submit to it.

The custom of foot binding may have begun among dancers during the Song dynasty. In one of the earliest references, eleventh-century writer Su Shi (Su Shih) found a dancer’s bound feet objects of wonder and wanted to hold them in his hand to get a better look. The foot was deformed to feed male erotic fancy; it took years of “painful, bloody, and terrifying labor [to make] the brute nature of her feet materialize into an object of beauty, mystery, and discipline” (Blake 1994:688). A man longed to touch the “golden lotus” of his lover; sexual play included kissing and nibbling on the curved toe; he might wash her feet or sip wine from her three-inch slipper. He rhapsodized over them as “bamboo shoots in winter.”

The girl’s ordeal finished about the time she reached puberty and thus was a prelude to sexual maturation. It was thought to enhance fertility by concentrating blood in the upper legs and pelvis, working like pruning of trees to concentrate the sap for production of fruit. Soon she was ready for mar- riage in a family of good standing, and it was this essential goal of making a

This photograph from 1874 depicts a servant in a rich house, whose tiny “golden lotuses” may be seen beneath her robe. A three-inch foot was achieved only with years of painful binding of the feet of young girls, which resulted in breaking the arch and the loss of several toes. Beautiful handmade slippers were worn by women who could barely walk. The custom began among elite women who were not expected to work but gradually spread to the servant and peasant classes.

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good match that impelled a woman to inflict such pain on her daughter. It was not overtly the eroticism of the bound foot but the virtue of a disciplined daughter that Neo-Confucianism valued. Women were so severely crippled by foot binding that they could barely walk; it served much the same function as purdah in India, keeping women invisible inside the family compound and their virtue incontestable.

The practice that began as a trademark of dancers, something like the Western ballerina’s painfully acquired grace on a single point, was by 1900 practiced among all classes of Chinese, even spreading among farm families where, although women’s labor was needed, her feet were bound anyway as a sign of beauty and virtue and in the hopes of improving her marriage pros- pects, forcing her to a lifetime of painful hobbling as she swept her courtyard, carried rice and babies, spun, embroidered, and wove. In one study of 1,736 women in 515 families in a network of rural villages north of the Yellow River, 99.2 percent of women born before 1890 had bound feet. In Southern China, on the other hand, foot binding was actively resisted by peasants as impractical and pretentious. Further, non-Han women, including Mongols, Manchus, and the migratory Hakka (kejia), never adopted the practice.

However, it would be misleading to focus so heavily on these customs that we miss other aspects of women’s lives in traditional China. While it may be true that obedience, self-sacrifice, and purity were emphasized by neo-Confu- cians and that submission to male authority was both idealized and demanded, recent scholars have looked beyond these restricting social structures to the accomplishments of women artists, poets, and writers within them. The Con- fucian literati were not guilty of ignoring women’s contributions, either, but praised them among themselves and included them in their many voluminous catalogs of poetry and art.

Members of the literati who served in the government or at least prepared for official careers often did educate their daughters, even though those young

In the fourteenth or fifteenth century, a military officer died and was buried

in his uniform. His concubine was strangled, her forehead was bashed in,

and she was buried with him in the same coffin. He was in his 60s and

she in her 20s. She had “golden lotuses,” and this unusual photograph

allows a view of the skeletal changes wrought by the binding of feet.

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women were not eligible for the examinations and the government careers that were their purpose. Chinese culture valued the private life spent in scholarly or artistic pursuit for both men and women; a bureaucrat dreamed of retiring to become a private man of letters, even while women were potentially born to this life. In the field of painting, the work of amateurs was considered superior to professional painting, which meant that women could become accom- plished artists and gain fame by the same route as the scholar-official who painted, wrote poetry, or did calligraphy.

After the sixteenth century there were rising female literacy rates and women both wrote and enjoyed novels, poetry, and plays. Susan Mann docu- ments a lengthy debate in the late eighteenth century on what women should learn, and why. Some women were writing poetry admired by men who were attracted to female sensuality. “Whether in the palace or in pleasure boats, whether at courier outposts or in the heart of the court, women’s talents were mainly devoted to singing and dancing, all to please men,” complained one critic (Mann 1994:31). But many other women poets were writing about their own lives as gentry women; the subject of death in childbirth, from illness, and by suicide recurs in women’s writings in the eighteenth century. Mature women plumbed emotions born of empty marriages and cloistered lives. There was a “poetry of desire” that lifted women from their actual lives to imagined lives. Even very young women and girls earned fame as poets and lived writers’ lives. The poet Jin Yi brought her inkstone and brushes into her marriage as part of her dowry and within a few days turned the bedroom into a study.

Women of literati households formed poetry and painting societies, such as the Banana Garden Poetry Society formed in the early Qing in Hangzhou by Gu Yurui. They were painters as well as poets; Xu Can, one member, painted female figures, images of the goddess Guanyin, flowers, and plants. Ju Qing, a member of a famous painting family in nineteenth-century Guang- dong, captured a mood of tranquility and leisure in “Lady with Fan.”

REFERENCES CITED Blake, C. Fred. 1994. Footbinding in Neo-Confucian China and the Appropriation of

Female Labor. Signs 19(3): 677–712. Carlitz, Katherine. 1994. Desire, Danger, and the Body: Stories of Women’s Virtue in

Late Ming China. In Engendering China; Women, Culture, and the State, eds. Christina K. Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel and Tyrene White. Pp. 101–124. Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press.

Chang, Chung-li. 1955. The Chinese Gentry; Studies on Their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Chou, Hung-hsiang. 1979. Chinese Oracle Bones. Scientific American 240(4): 135–149. Chow, Kai-wing. 1994. The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China; Ethics, Clas-

sics, and Lineage Discourse. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Dull, Jack L. 1990. The Evolution of Government in China. In Heritage of China; Con- temporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, ed. Paul S. Ropp. Pp. 55–85. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. 1978. The Aristocratic Families of Early Imperial China: A Case Study of the Po-Ling Ts’Ui Family. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1990. Women, Marriage, and the Family in Chinese History. In Heritage of China; Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, ed. Paul S. Ropp. Pp. 197–223. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 1991. The Chinese Family and the Spread of Confucian Values. In The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation, ed. Gilbert Rozman. Pp. 45–83. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fairbank, John King, and Merle Goldman. 2006. China: A New History. 2nd ed. Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Freedman, Maurice. 1958. Lineage Organization in Southeastern China. London: Athlone Press.

Harrell, Stevan. 1995. Civilizing Projects and the Reaction to Them. In Cultural Encoun- ters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, ed. Steven Harrell. Pp. 83–88. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Harrell, Stevan, and Deborah Davis. 1993. Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era. Berke- ley: University of California Press.

Johnson, David G. 1977. The Medieval Chinese Oligarchy. Boulder: Westview Press. Johnson, Graham E. 1993. Family Strategies and Economic Transformation in Rural

China: Some Evidence from the Pearl River Delta. In Chinese Families in the Post- Mao Era, eds. Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell. Pp. 103–138. Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press.

Keightley, David N. 1982. Shang China is Coming of Age—a Review Article. Journal of Asian Studies 41(3): 549–557.

Langlois, John D., Jr. 1978. Yu Chi and His Mongol Sovereign: The Scholar as Apolo- gist. Journal of Asian Studies 38(1): 99–116.

Lee, Thomas H. 1977. Life in the Schools of Sung China. Journal of Asian Studies 37(1): 45–60.

Legge, James, Transl. 1885. The Li Chi. Vol. 27. In The Sacred Books of the East. P. 229. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Liu, Zhiwei. 1995. Lineage on the Sands. In Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China, eds. David Faure and Helen F. Siu. Pp. 21–43. Stanford: Stanford Univer- sity Press.

Mann, Susan. 1994. Learned Women in the Eighteenth Century. In Engendering China; Women, Culture, and the State, eds. Christina K. Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel and Tyrene White. Pp. 27–46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mao Zedong. 1965. In Memory of Norman Bethune. In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. 4 vols. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

Owen, Stephen. 1997, May 5. Master and Man. The New Republic, 36–39. Rozman, Gilbert. 1991. The East Asian Region in Comparative Perspectives. In East

Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and Its Modern Adaptation. Pp. 3–44. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schwartz, Benjamin. 1985. The World of Thought in Ancient China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Spence, Jonathan D. 1974. Emperor of China; Self Portrait of K’ang-Hsi. London: Pimlico. Topping, Audrey Ronning. 2013. China Mission: A personal History from the Last Imperial

Dynasty to the People’s Republic. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press. Van Slyke, Lyman P. 1988. Yangtze; Nature, History, and the River. Menlo Park, CA:

Addison-Wesley. Watson, Burton. 1958. Ssu-Ma Ch’ien, Grand Historian of China. New York: Columbia

University Press. ———. 2007. The Analects of Confucius. New York: Columbia University Press. Watson, Rubie S. 1986. The Named and the Nameless: Gender and Person in Chinese

Society. American Ethnologist 13(4): 619–631. Wills, John E., Jr. 1994. Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press. Zurcher, Erik. 1984. Beyond the Jade Gate: Buddhism in China, Vietnam, and Korea.

In The World of Buddhism, eds. Heinz Bechert and Richard Gombrich. Pp. 193–11. London: Thames and Hudson.

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8 JAPAN

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CHRONOLOGY OF JAPANESE HISTORY

2000 B.C.E.

250 B.C.E.

250 C.E.

552

647

794

1185

1333

1392

1573

1615

1868

Jomon period

Yayoi period (ca. 250 B.C.E.–250 C.E.)

Kofun period (Old Tombs) 250–550 C.E.

Asuka period (552–710) Yamato State

Nara period (710–794)

Heian period (794–1185)

Kamakura period (1185–1333) Shogunate

Nambokucho period (1333–1392)

Muromachi period (1392–1573)

Momoyama period (1573–1615)

Edo period [Tokugawa] (1615–1868)

Modern period (1868–present) Meiji period 1868–1912 Taisho period 1912–1926 Showa period 1926–1989

Heisei period 1989–present

Hunting and gathering 660–585 legendary first emperor Jimmu 350 B.C.E. introduction of wet-rice cultivation

Rice cultivation, bronze

183–248 Queen Himiko (Chinese texts) Monumental tombs Building of Ise Shrine

552 arrival of Buddhism from Paekche (Korea) 574–622 Prince Shotoku 607 first embassy to China 645 Taika reform

710 founding of Nara 712 Kojiki 720 Nihon Shoku

Assimilation of Buddhism 837 end of embassies to China Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji 1180–1185 Gempei War

1185 founding of Shogunate by Minamoto no Yoritomo at Kamakura

The monk Eisei (1141–1215) introduces Zen Buddhism 1274 and 1281 Mongol invasions repelled

Rise of powerful daimyos challenge the Shogun 1467–1477 Onin War 1568 invasion of Kyoto by Oda Nobunaga

Tokugawa Shogunate founded at Edo (Tokyo) 1853 Perry Expedition

1867 end of Shogunate; return to power of emperors; Emperor Meiji

Rapid modernization and industrialization

1937 War with China 1939–1945 WWII 1989 death of Emperor Hirohito

A n

c ie

n t

P e

ri o

d C

la s s ic

a l P

e ri

o d

M e

d ie

va l P

e ri

o d

E a rl

y M

o d

e rn

M o

d e

rn

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first glance at a map of Japan shows 3,000 islands (but four main ones) strung along the 135th and 140th lines of east longitude and swinging westward toward Korea in the south, suggesting a north-

south axis. But the Japanese have always thought of their history unfolding east-and-west: The 35th parallel falls just south of Tokyo, cuts right through Kyoto, skims the lowest tip of Korea, and then cuts westward across China’s ancient capitals: Kaifeng, Luoyang, and Chang’an (Xi’an). (Beijing rides higher on the 40th latitude.) Latitude-wise, at least, ancient Japan and ancient China were on a par.

The drama of Japanese history was enacted on two main geographical stages, a western one with a Kyoto focus and an eastern one with a Tokyo focus. The western region is the most ancient, woven into the mythology of a Sun Goddess who sends her grandson to the southern island of Kyushu, carry- ing rice shoots; his grandson conquers areas to the northeast through the Inland Sea (the Seto Sea) to the coastal shores of Honshu at modern Osaka, and then inland to the Nara Basin. The Yamato River drains this region from eastern hills, where sacred mountains rise, and gives its name to the highlands known as the Yamato Peninsula; beyond them toward the sunrise, at the east- ern coast, is a sacred place called Ise. From Osaka Bay to Ise is the oldest heartland of Japanese culture. For many centuries rice cultivation went no far- ther north than modern Nagoya. But by the twelfth century, a new, vigorous provincial society had emerged in the west, where later extensions of rice culti- vation had made the land valuable to people from the imperial court. Land had value in those days only to the extent there were peasants to make it pro- duce; by the twelfth century the fertile regions lying in a rough oval, with mod- ern Tokyo at the bottom, supported an aristocratic rural elite, many of them descendants of junior lines of the imperial family with names like Taira and Minamoto. Kyoto in the west was culturally refined, spiritually rich with many sects of Buddhism and Shinto temples, but effete and without even a standing army. Tokyo did not yet exist, but there in the region known as “the Kanto,” powerful military leaders and a class of aristocratic warriors estab- lished a second center of power. Until 1867 a dual system of government and an increasingly complex culture fused into modern society, which, after the transformations of the Meiji period, made Japan the richest and most powerful Asian nation of the twentieth century. (China has surpassed Japan on many dimensions in the twenty-first century.)

A

Chapter opener photo: A Japanese girl dressed in a traditional kimono prays in a Kyoto shrine.

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The Yamato State

At the time of the Qin Unification, 221 B.C.E., Japan’s southern regions had had wet-rice agriculture less than a century and a half; the population growth that accompanies intensive agriculture was only beginning; the emer- gence of any social formation we would call a state was still several hundred years off. The Japanese could not yet write down the stories of their tempera- mental deities, Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, or Susanoo, the god of storms, because no one had invented a script for their language.

Map 8.1 Japan.

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Chinese and Early Japanese Sources

During these centuries the Chinese were diligently writing about all matter of practical things, as we saw in the previous chapter, with special interest in the various barbarians on their borders. Among the eastern barbarians were the Wa people who occupied mountainous islands to the southeast of their Chinese commandery at Taifeng (now Incheon in Korea). The Chinese got a closer look at Japan after the breakup of the Han dynasty when the Wei dynasty exchanged emissaries with the islands to the east; but shortly after, China broke down into several centuries of disorder and the record goes dead. They knew about many “countries” in the islands, and in the book Wei zhi, composed in 297 C.E., we get a fascinating account of the largest of these, a place called Yamatai ruled by Queen Himiko. Her name meant “sun-shaman” or “shamaness of the sun” (hi = sun; miko = shaman), and she occupied herself with magic and sorcery, remained unmarried, and was served by a thousand female attendants. The only male allowed to come near her was her brother, who served her food and drink and assisted her in ruling the country. Her palace was surrounded by lookout towers and stockades manned by armed guards.

Queen Himiko was involved in disputes with rival rulers, and in this con- text she sent a delegation to Taifeng to request an audience at the court of Luoyang, the Wei capital. In 239, the Wei Emperor Ming received her delega- tion and issued an edict in which he acknowledged her as a vassal state, bestowing on her the title of “Queen of Wa friendly to Wei” (see box 8.1). As signs of their sovereign–vassal relationship, they exchanged gifts of slaves, silk, swords, jade, gold, and bronze mirrors. A few years later Himiko used this rela- tionship to request Chinese support in a dispute, whereupon China sent an offi- cer to mediate, who stayed on for years. Himiko died in 248 and was buried in a mounded tomb, accompanied in death by a hundred slaves. A man suc- ceeded her but could not maintain order, and so was replaced by a 13-year-old girl, a shamaness like Himiko, whose legitimacy was acknowledged by the Wei court with further exchange of gifts. After that, the Chinese record ends.

Queen Himiko lived in the protohistorical period defined by Japanese scholars as Yayoi (250 B.C.E.–250 C.E.) and just before the Kofun, or the “Old Tombs” period (250–552). This was the crucial period of state formation, docu- mented archaeologically and in Chinese texts, though there are no contempo- rary Japanese accounts. There are, however, two extraordinarily important Japanese chronicles written 170 years after the end of the period, the Kojiki (712 C.E.) and the Nihon Shoki (720 C.E.), which describe events of this era in important detail, with a great deal of mythology about the origins of the cos- mos, the gods, and the Japanese islands. Mysteriously, there is not a hint of Queen Himiko. Could the Nihon Shoki, a huge work in 28 books, which describes the reigns of each “emperor” from Jimmu in 660 B.C.E. to the sixth century, have forgotten a powerful queen with ties to China who lived a mere 500 years earlier? Or was something else going on? We will return to this ques- tion later.

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Archaeologists studying the Japan of the Yayoi and Kofun periods find the largest polities on the island of Kyushu and the southern regions of Honshu. This is not surprising, since rice cultivation, probably introduced from the Yangzi delta region of China around 350 B.C.E., would have permitted popula- tion increase and thus the need for more complex forms of social organization. We know that a very ancient people, the Ainu, were probably the islands’ earli- est settlers, though where they came from is unknown. Their remnants now are mostly located in the far northern island of Hokkaido. The Japanese language has linguistic affinities to Korean, and the most logical route of settlement appears to have been through Korea to Kyushu, then a northward progression in claiming the entire chain. However, a look at the broad curve of China’s coast and the islands just eastward suggest other possible sources of settlers in the distant past. Just as populations of southern China settled in Taiwan, tak-

Box 8.1 Edict to Queen Himiko from Emperor Ming 239 C.E.

Herein we address Himiko, queen of Wa, whom we now officially call a friend of Wei. The governor of Tai-fang, Liu Hsia, has sent a messenger to accompany your vassal, Nanshomai, and his lieutenant, Toshi Gyuri. They have arrived here with your tribute, consisting of four male slaves and six female slaves, together with two pieces of patterned cloth, each twenty feet in length. You live very far away across the sea; yet you have sent an embassy with tribute. Your loyalty and filial piety we appreciate exceedingly. We confer upon you, therefore, the title of “queen of Wa friendly to Wei,” together with the decoration of the gold seal with purple ribbon. The latter, properly encased, is to be sent to you through the governor. We expect you, O Queen, to rule your people in peace and to endeavor to be devoted and obedient.

Your ambassadors, Nanshomai and Gyuri, who have come from afar, must have had a long and fatiguing journey. We have, therefore, given to Nanshomai an appoint- ment as commandant in the imperial guard. We also bestow upon them the decora- tion of the silver seal with blue ribbon. We have granted them audience in appreciation of their visit, before sending them home with gifts. The gifts are these: five pieces of crimson brocade with dragon designs, ten pieces of crimson tapestry with dappled pattern, fifty lengths of bluish red fabric, and fifty lengths of dark blue fabric. These are in return for what you sent as tribute. As a special gift, we bestow upon you three pieces of blue brocade with interwoven characters, five pieces of tap- estry with delicate floral designs, fifty lengths of white silk, eight taels of gold, two swords five feet long, one hundred bronze mirrors, and fifty catties each of jade and of red beads. All these things are sealed in boxes and entrusted to Nanshomai and Gyuri. When they arrive and you acknowledge their receipt, you may exhibit them to your countrymen in order to demonstrate that our country thinks so much of you as to bestow such exquisite gifts upon you.

Source: Okazaki Takashi, “Japan and the Continent,” in The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 1, Ancient Japan, transl. Janet Goodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 288.

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ing rice cultivation with them, and then moved south into the Philippines (at least on linguistic evidence; see chapter 2), there is reason to suppose that the Ryukyus, Okinawa, and Japan itself may also have received immigrants from the Chinese coast.

In the gap between Queen Himiko in the third century and the powerful Empress Suiko (reigned 592–628) who reestablished relations with China in the early seventh century, the Yamato State flourished. Its center in the beginning was the Nara Basin, a region of 720 square miles from crest to crest of the fring- ing mountains. The Yamato River drains the basin into Osaka Bay directly to the west, and five peaks rise from the circle of hills; the most important one, then and now, is Mt. Miwa. The Yamato kings established ritual ties with local deities known as kami, probably carrying on very ancient folk beliefs and practices but now investing them with political significance. The kami of Mt. Miwa spoke to kings through royal women, even as Himiko had had paranormal connections to the kami. The Nihon Shoki tells of a love affair between the kami of Mt. Miwa and Princess Yamato Totohi Momoso. And Emperor Sujin received a revelation from a kami transmitted to him through a princess demanding worship to avoid future calamities. The Kojiki tells of a sacred marriage of the Miwa kami to a female rel- ative of an early Yamato king from whom was born a son who founded the Miwa line of kings and worshipped the Mt. Miwa kami (Brown 1993:117–118). Shrine attendants later at Ise were called miko (shamaness) and were unmarried imperial princesses, like Himiko herself, and even today, young unmarried girls called miko dance for the kami at village shrines on festival occasions.

As the Yamato state became more vigorous, new institutions emerged, which further strengthened it. One of these was the development of powerful clans, called uji, among the chieftains close to the king. Some of these uji took on specialized functions in relation to the king; for instance, the eldest son of Emperor Suinin founded the Mononobe clan, which became the military arm of the kingdom, while his younger brother became Emperor Keiko. This mili- tary arm made expeditions northward and carried out strikes against Korea over several centuries of successful expansion. They had their own kami cult at Isonokami, located in the Nara Basin region, whose worship included weap- ons as the shrine’s principal treasures. At the Isonokami storehouse today is a famous slightly rusted, gold-inlaid sword called the shichishito, or the “seven- pronged sword.” A high priest at the Isonokami shrine in 1873 discovered it had inscriptions on it, which turned out to bear a date, 369 C.E., and a state- ment that it was forged in Paekche (Korea) for presentation to the king of Yam- ato. (Unfortunately, seven of the characters were too rusty to read, the very ones that would clarify whether the gift was tribute to a superior state or a token of honor bestowed on an inferior state.)

Just as we saw in China, where large lineages came into existence only in certain kinds of economic and political contexts, the uji came into existence after the fifth century among expanding elite families who were branching out to con- trol ever larger and more distant areas. In the Nara Basin, each clan appears to

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have had its own territory. As clans acquired territory, the kami residing there and associated with the region came to be honored as the tutelary deities of the uji and were sometimes even claimed as ancestors. Thus primitive Shinto expanded and was incorporated into the growing hierarchy of the Yamato state.

Men of the elite uji were granted honors according to a system of titles, the highest being “great omi.” These titled families all had kinship ties to the Yamato king; families who gave daughters in marriage to the king would be grandfathers and cousins of the next king, their powers magnified. Beneath the elite uji, and supporting them, were occupational specialist groups, or guilds, who monopo- lized skills like ironworking, horse training, and weapons manufacturing.

Shinto, Folk and Imperial

The woods, streams, mountains, and coasts of Japan are not only lovely but sacred, according to the most ancient spiritual ideas of Japanese tradition. In natural spaces beyond the household and village there are powers and spir- its, life-giving but also dangerous, which live alongside and overlap the lives of humans. This is the realm of the kami:

This other world is variously placed—across the sea, in the woods or hills or mountains—but in any case beyond the normal purview of civilized humanity. It is from the other world that fertility is introduced in the spring, and it is against the chaotic forces of this other world that various seasonal rites are invoked. It is, then, the prototypical locus of unrefined power according to the horizontal worldview of traditional Japan. The other world that I am referring to is the locus and source of extraordinary, unpre- dictable power, both constructive and destructive, and it is the regulation of intercourse with this other world that lies at the heart of all popular festi- vals. (Gilday 1993:276)

Archaeology attests to continuity with historic Shinto assumptions. Sacred sites are marked in the archaeological record by caches of bronze bells, which were ceremonial instruments in the Nara Basin in Yayoi and Kofun times. They are invariably found on hilltops overlooking plains and fertile agricultural land. The bells were ornamented with signs of prosperity: storehouses, grain pounding, and the hunting of boar and deer (Barnes 1988:176). The distribu- tion of the bells suggests they were the focus of community ritual activities, even as Shinto shrines today are centers of communal festivals, matsuri. But why are they located so far from human communities? What is their relation to human communities? The Chinese character for the word “shrine” (mori) includes the character for “woods” or “forest.” Often there is no structure at all, for it is the space itself that is the kami. But there will invariably be the ubiq- uitous marker of a sacred space, a simple gate, the famous shape of the torii that has come to symbolize Japan itself in some ways.

An eighth-century provincial gazetteer, the Hitachi Fudoki, is among the oldest documentary sources on folk Shinto in early Japan. It tells a legend asso- ciated with the first encroachment of human farmers into the wild lands of the

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kami. A cultivator named Matachi went to work clearing new land for rice fields. But this land was the home of terrible horned serpents, the Yato no kami, who attempted to halt this expansion of the human domain. So Matachi put on his armor and went to battle against them, driving them back to the surround- ing hills. Then he dug a ditch at the foot of the hills and placed boundary stakes to mark the division, saying: “Above this line shall be the land of the kami; below it shall be the rice-fields of humans.” But he built them a shrine and promised to serve them forever to prevent their curses, which, according to the Hitachi Fudoki, his descendants faithfully did (Gilday 1993).

Antipestilence festivals are found as early as the Nara period, when people suffered from a variety of troubles that have always plagued people: pests that ruin the crops, epidemics that bring disease and death, warfare and violence that cause untimely death. These various calamities were somehow equated in the popular mind, so that swarming insects and malevolent spirits bitter about their unexpected deaths all needed to be controlled by community ritual action enlisting the powers of the kami. (See box 8.2 on the next page for description of a contemporary folk Shinto festival.)

In the Nara (710–794) and Heian (794–1185) periods, Shinto began to do another kind of work for the body politic. A variant form of Shinto was created by the Yamato court to provide a cosmological underpinning for the imperial line’s authority to rule. In one of the great accomplishments in the history of the premodern state, myth, legend, and political ambition were pulled together into a single text, which for 1,500 years was accepted as political doctrine and cosmo- logical truth and played a significant role in the astonishing continuity of the imperial family down to Emperor Akihito, the present 125th emperor of Japan (who plans to abdicate in 2019, to be succeeded by Crown Prince Naruhito). This text was the Nihon Shoki (“Chronicles of Japan”). A Korean scholar named Wani had arrived from Paekche early in the fifth century bringing 11 volumes of Chinese books, including the Analects of Confucius and the Thousand-Character Classic, that is, Confucian and Buddhist texts. Another of the books he brought may have been the Shiji of Sima Qian. Then or later, the Shiji gave the Japanese court the idea of a dynastic history that tells the story of the past—as they wanted it told. They must have recognized the tremendous power that lies in recording the past and the prestige that histories can give to kings, living and dead. But, if scholarly independence of mind is evident in Sima Qian’s history, where some rulers were praised, others vilified, and all by a mere scholar who watched from the sidelines, inserting his own personality into the text, these flaws were not allowed to mar the Nihon Shoki. It reveals nothing of its authors’ personalities but is an official version of the past written by several imperial princes and a staff of 10, completed and presented to Empress Gensho in 720 C.E.

The following summarizes the basic mythology for an Imperial Shinto:

In the beginning the world was in a state of chaos, but gradually the light par- ticles of matter rose to form heaven and the heavy particles settled to become the earth. Kami materialized and, after the passage of seven generations, the

Box 8.2 The Bug Festival

Anthropologist Edmund Gilday describes a cycle of rituals in Hiroshima Prefecture in which the ancient patterns are still visible. It begins in the spring after the rice fields have stood silent and barren throughout the winter. The kami are invited from the hills to the sanctuary zone at the edge of the village and then into the rice fields where essential exchanges between kami and humans can take place. In Shinto, rice itself is sacred; each rice grain has a soul and rice is alive in its hull. The soul of the rice grain is identified as a kami called Uka no kami (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993). Of all grains, rice alone requires ritual performances. Each planting season, the power of the kami must be lured into the rice fields and brought to fruition in the summer crop, which transfers the power (nigimitama) of the kami to the growing rice, and thus to humans who must eat rice to live. Therefore, essential interconnections of kami and humans have their most crucial intersection in rice cultivation. The festivals (matsuri) honoring the kami are human gifts to them; the kami give back life in the form of rice.

Come summer, the nigimitama (power) of the kami has nourished the young rice shoots and has brought the monsoons, raising the humidity; life is swelling and burst- ing everywhere, including among insect populations, which pester people and threaten the rice crops. The kami can overdo it, and in fact, there is always danger as well as blessing in the presence of the kami. Throughout rural Japan there is a mid- summer festival known as musi-okuri, the Bug Festival. There are local variations in how this festival is enacted, but the goal is to expel the pests that threaten the fields. The entire community and sometimes neighboring hamlets and even towns cooper- ate in the festivities. Certain elements of these Shinto festivals will be the same: an effigy of the kami is made and presented at the shrine where the kami—often a named figure such as Sanemori—resides, luring him out with a splendid and noisy celebra- tion with drums, flutes, and bells. The major actors are the Shinto priests and musi- cian-dancers whose performance is to entertain the kami. They circle the temple precincts or parade through village streets and out into rice fields, carrying the effigy and waving banners and poles that purify the spaces they move through and dispatch the bugs. The procession may end at a stream, where the effigy is thrown in, or it may be transferred to the next village and then the next until it ends at the sea.

The whole village turns out to chase away insects from the rice fields in this popular midsummer Shinto festival.

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brother and sister gods Izanagi and Izanami were instructed to create a “drifting land.” Izanagi thrust his spear into the ocean below, and as he withdrew it brine dripping from the tip formed a small island. Izanagi and Izanami proceeded together by means of a heavenly bridge to the island and there begot the remainder of the islands of Japan and a vast number of other deities. In the process of giving birth to the fire deity, Izanami was badly burned and descended to the nether world. Izanagi went to fetch her but was so repelled by the appearance of Izanami’s decaying and maggot- infested body that he hastily retreated. To purify himself, Izanagi went to a stream and, as he disrobed and cleansed his body, he produced a new flock of kami. Among these was the Sun Goddess, who sprang into being as Izanagi washed his left eye, and Susanoo, the god of storms, who appeared from his nose.

The Sun Goddess was appointed to rule over the plain of high heaven, and thus became the preeminent figure in the Shinto pantheon. Her brother Susanoo was given dominion over the sea. A fretful and ill-tempered crea- ture, Susanoo insisted upon visiting the Sun Goddess in heaven to say good-bye before taking up his post. Upon arriving in heaven, he committed a series of offenses against his sister, such as breaking down her field-divid- ers, destroying her looms, and defecating in her palace. Outraged, the Sun Goddess secluded herself in a cave and plunged the world into darkness. To lure her out, the other deities of heaven gathered in front of her cave with laughter and merry-making. A shamaness deity danced seminude, causing uproarious laughter. They hung a mirror from a branch in front of her cave and shouted that there’s a superior deity out front. Curious, she peaked out and saw her own reflection. As she emerged, another kami grabbed her and dragged her out, so the universe was again bright with sunlight.

The ancient myths of Izanagi, Izanami, and Amaterasu have been a popular theme for artists over the centuries, above all this moment when the Sun Goddess Amaterasu is lured out of a cave by scheming deities, thus restoring light to the world. (Utagawa Hiroshige, 1847–1852, woodblock.)

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This part of the myth is filled with identifiable elements of folk Shinto. There is the horror of death and the decaying body when Izanagi tries to rescue his sis- ter, requiring purification in the nearest stream. There are the ritual offenses that outrage the greatest kami, the Sun Goddess, which threaten survival of the world when she hides in a cave. The first matsuri is held to lure her out, filled with the same kind of riotous entertainment featured at modern kami festivals.

The Sun Goddess then dispatched her grandson, Ninigi, to the “land of luxuriant rice fields,” commanding him to govern it. “Go! And may pros- perity attend thy dynasty, and may it, like Heaven and Earth, endure for- ever.” To seal her command, the Sun Goddess bestowed upon Ninigi a sacred regalia: a bronze mirror, a sword, and a curved jewel. Ninigi descended from heaven to a mountaintop in southeastern Kyushu, but did little to assert his rule. His grandson Jimmu conducted a campaign in the central provinces, destroyed aboriginal enemies, performed rites to his ancestress, the Sun Goddess, and became the first emperor of Japan.

Myths must be read in the context of the cultures in which they live, as that is how they are written. The myth of Izanagi and Izanami accounts for the ori- gin of many essential features of Shinto and of the Japanese state, and in the process of explaining origins it gives a cosmic sanction to those beliefs and ide- ologies. How could you overthrow a dynasty descended from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu herself ? There is a political genius at work in the myth—or “mythistory”—that we might wonder about from the political cynicism of our age. It is certain, of course, that the princes and scribes who produced the 30 books of the Nihon Shoki drew on a large body of preexisting mythology, but it is unlikely that that mythology, coming down from earlier prestate societies, would have had such a political endpoint in mind; people do not put kings in their myths before kings have emerged in their society. And the compilers of the Nihon Shoki were almost certainly guarding against any appearance in Japan of China’s concept of the Mandate of Heaven, whose political repercussions were so apparent in Sima Qian’s history of the fall of dynasty after dynasty that grew corrupt and were replaced by new, righteous founder-emperors. And so they have Amaterasu say: “May prosperity attend thy dynasty, and may it, like Heaven and Earth, endure forever.” We see why there is no mention of any Queen Himiko, so clearly documented in Chinese sources; she was not part of the successful ruling line; thus she has disappeared from Japanese historical memory. Clearly this was a construction intended to validate an existing power structure and underwrite its authority forever, as Ebersole writes:

The legitimation of the Temmu-Jito line of the imperial family was one of the primary intentions behind the commissioning of the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki, and the Man yoshu. In the process of the realization of the historio- graphic project of the imperial family, the editors of these texts had avail- able for their use not only written documents and various clan histories but also oral histories, myths, legends, and a large corpus of poetry. We can assume that if their history was to be believable, they could not use a crude

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“cut-and-paste” method with complete abandon. Rather, certain narrative structures and paradigms were culturally available when these texts were committed to writing and given their final textual form. One such structure or paradigm was the ordeal at the time of the niiname-sai that proved the legitimacy or illegitimacy of an individual’s claim to the throne. (1989:122)

It is an early example of the “invention of tradition,” which wonderfully suc- ceeded, for the divinity of the emperor, or tenno, himself a living kami, has been treated as truth itself until the postwar period when Emperor Hirohito renounced all claims to divinity in 1946.

Prior to the triumph of the Yamato line, other great families had similar myths of the kami origins of their ancestors. For instance, the Mononobe clan had an ancestral kami who descended from heaven in a stone boat bringing 10 treasures, including two mirrors, a sword, jewels with magical powers, and a scarf that repelled insects. He landed on Mt. Ikaruga in Kawachi Province. Archaeology supports the ritual ties of powerful uji to sacred spots in the hills where objects like those described in the myths (bronze mirrors, swords) have been found, and many of the hill locations are still sacred. However, it was the myth version and rituals of the Yamato line that won the day—and history.

The Yamato state’s competition with Korea was very much a part of the picture at that time. Sun worship was important in the Korean courts, and founders of royal lines were often named children of the sun. The Yamato uji thus abandoned their earlier tutelary kami, Takamimusubi, and turned to a lit- tle-known deity worshipped since ancient times by fishermen. Happily, this was to the east of Nara Basin—the direction of the rising sun—and there was a spot there where fishermen worshipped Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. The Nihon Shoki’s version of what happened goes like this: Amaterasu was first wor- shipped in the royal palace, but in the reign of Sujin her sacred mirror (her shin- tai) was enshrined in a humble village. In the next generation a more suitable place of worship was sought, so an imperial princess was sent around the coun- try and finally reached Ise. The Sun Goddess said she wished to be worshiped here, and so the Grand Shrine of Ise was built. The structure, which was built for her, probably in the sixth century (though said to be the first century in the Nihon Shoki), was anomalous at the time, for structures were not part of kami worship until Buddhism arrived with its own distinctive architecture. What kind of building would be appropriate for a kami? They settled on something that looked like a Yayoi grain storehouse, a simple one-room raised structure of unpainted cypress, built among tall evergreens near the Isuzu River on a dou- ble compound. Every 20 years a new shrine is built on the adjacent empty com- pound and the old one is destroyed. The last rebuilding was in 2013 (see the photos on the following page).

The myth of Amaterasu sanctions rites of succession that have been fol- lowed right down to the death of Emperor Hirohito, the Showa Emperor, on January 7, 1989, and the installation rites of Emperor Akihito in 1990. Over 1,500 years have elapsed since these rituals were initiated. At several critical

Ise Shrine and Horyuji Temple. The simplicity of the Grand Shrine of Ise [top] masks its imperial significance as the central state Shinto shrine. It is built on the model of a Yayoi grain store- house; every 20 years, with elaborate ceremonies involving the emperor, it is rebuilt on the adja- cent empty compound. The last rebuilding was in 2013. In contrast to the simple architecture of the Ise Shrine, the Horyuji Temple was built by Prince Shotoku in the Chinese style, although Japanese adaptations can be seen in it already.

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junctures the dynasty itself was threatened with destruction, including most recently after the defeat of Japan in World War II. The Allied powers were determined to punish Japan not only by outlawing military forces but by abol- ishing the imperial line. It was General Douglas MacArthur who successfully argued for maintaining Hirohito as the symbol of the Japanese nation around whom Japanese society could be reconstructed. The new constitution created under General MacArthur’s guidance severely redefined relations between the Japanese state and the throne, making the emperor a constitutional monarch much like Elizabeth II, and prohibited any support, control, or dissemination of Shinto by the government. According to Article I, “the Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power.” Sovereignty is now invested in the people, not in the divine descendant of the Sun Goddess.

Yet, the death of an old emperor and the accession of a new one could be accomplished only by the known and ancient patterns of Shinto, which were simply declared to be a private matter of the imperial household, not acts of state, even though they were extensively covered by television and attended by heads of state from all over the world, including President George H. W. Bush.

In rites followed since ancient times, the initiation of an emperor goes through three stages:

1. Senso, the rites of accession. Immediately after the death of an emperor, the new emperor is announced, not to the people but to the Sun God- dess. In the precincts of the imperial palace there are three shrines, one to the ancestors, one to the kami, and one, a shrine that is portable for reasons we shall see, containing a replica of the very bronze mirror said to have been given to Ninigi by Amaterasu herself when she sent him to earth to found the Japanese royal line. The original is perpetually housed in the inner shrine at Ise. The new emperor is announced at this portable shrine, and then he receives the sacred sword and the jewel, also given by Amaterasu, which have been passed down from one emperor to another since the time of Jimmu, according to the Nihon Shoki, in 660 B.C.E. Prior to the 1947 constitution the emperor also received the State seal and the Imperial seal, signifying his position as head of state. Senso concludes with the first official audience with mem- bers of court and government. Meanwhile, the body of the dead emperor still lies in state.

The mortuary rites for a dead emperor usually went on for two years, and sometimes longer, although in the case of Hirohito, he was buried a mere 48 days later near the final resting place of his four immediate ancestors. In ancient Japan, secondary burial was practiced; the emperor’s body reposed in a specially built mortuary house (the mogari no miya) where the empress and all consorts and concubines, all surviving sexual partners, were secluded with him for an unspecified period. It was their role to sing laments and attempt to hold the soul (tama) of the emperor, for death was not seen as immediately perma-

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nent or irreversible. At the end of the mourning period the body received its second and final burial. This practice is also alluded to in the Izanami story when Izanagi tries to retrieve her horribly decaying body; she finally closes her- self in the other world by rolling a stone into the entrance; Izanagi then goes to a stream to ritually purify himself. While the dead emperor lay waiting for the final burial the court was often filled with intrigue as various claimants to the throne attempted to advance themselves. One way, apparently, was to push one’s way into the mogari no miya in an effort to take possession of one of the imperial concubines.

2. The sokui no rei. In January 1990 the Japanese government announced that installation rites for the new emperor would be the traditional ones; sokui no rei would be on November 12, 1990, and daijosai would be the night of November 22–23, 1990. Observers were taken by surprise, since the daijosai is so clearly Shinto and certainly seems to assert the emperor’s kinship with Amaterasu. This was the first opportunity to perform this rite by a new emperor since Hirohito’s renunciation of divinity and the new constitution of 1947 (Crump 1991).

The sokui no rei requires an imperial procession from Tokyo to Kyoto, the ancient capital, taking along the bronze mirror of the Sun Goddess in its porta- ble shrine; that is, the Sun Goddess is taken to Kyoto. In Kyoto, the emperor is seated in a temporary hall along with the portable shrine of Amaterasu repre- sented by her bronze mirror. Then the sacred sword and jewel are brought in, thus reuniting the three sacred objects with the person of the new emperor for the first and only time in each reign. He then worships the Sun Goddess.

In the afternoon of the same day there is a ceremony copied almost whole- sale from China in a hall called shishen. In China, the shishen were the pole-star and the stars surrounding it, symbolizing the authority of the emperor. The emperor enters from the north and ascends the throne, facing south to receive congratulations from the court, the government, and the people, who give three shouts of “Banzai!” Simultaneously all over the nation people shout “banzai!”

3. The ceremony that really counts is the daijosai. In the Nihon Shoki records of reign after reign, the new emperor had to have everything in his con- trol by the autumn rice harvest festival, the niiname matsuri, on Novem- ber 23, for the emperor played a crucial role in it. The new emperor’s first participation ended the liminal period of transition with his assumption of spiritual responsibility for rice production. The logic of the ceremony is that Amaterasu, who sent her grandson with rice for the people of Japan, continues to nurture rice growth and harvesting through her embodiment in her imperial descendants. Her importance to rice cultivation continues as the Sun Goddess who makes the crops grow; above all she must not become angry again and reenter the cave, which would destroy crops and bring destruction and death to the peo- ple of Japan.

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Ten days after sokui rei, Emperor Akihito performed daijosai in the ancient manner. A more ancient ceremony surviving into the twentieth century can hardly be imagined. A whole agricultural cycle is caught up in this ceremony. It begins in the preceding New Year, when a divination hut is built in the Impe- rial Precinct. Two ancient kami are summoned. The priest builds a fire, then performs a divination by holding a shell above the flames until cracks appear; it is interpreted and the answer written down and put in a box. The informa- tion from the kami names two prefectures where the special rice for daijosai will be grown.

Every step of rice production in the two sacred fields is accompanied by rit- ual, until its ceremonial harvesting by virgins (now by rice farmers). During daijosai the emperor repeats the pattern of Amaterasu, who was herself per- forming daijosai before being interrupted by her brother and hiding in the cave. The emperor must be purified and protected against the wandering of his spir- its; nine kami are summoned for his protection the night before daijosai. A priest claps while a priestess, waving bells and a vine-draped spear, performs a dance like the dance performed for Amaterasu outside her cave. Knots are tied in a silk rope to keep his soul from wandering; meanwhile an identical rope is put across Amaterasu’s actual cave in Kyushu.

Then there is a totally private communal meal of rice between the emperor and the kami of rice. Black and white sake (rice wine) and boiled rice and millet are offered to the kami and then eaten by the emperor. Only the occasional entry of a serving priest witnesses the event. These are the first fruits of the year’s harvest; they are offered to the kami and to the emperor in whose body now reposes the rice-souls, which must be carried over to the next season; for every year during the winter, when the sun retreats, the rice dies but must be safeguarded until spring when it will, with the help of the kami, grow again. This is the emperor’s sacred office for the people of Japan.

The China Connection:

Asuka, Nara, and Heian Periods

Beyond a few stepping-stone islands and the Korean peninsula lay a civiliza- tion vastly different from Japan and viewed with awe by the Japanese. By the end of the sixth century, the Asuka court (named for its new location) had become far more sophisticated. There were people at court who could read and speak Chinese (though most of them were Koreans or Chinese); Chinese books had been known for a century; and China itself was emerging from the disorder of the Six Dynasties period. It was time to approach China directly. The first official Japanese mission was dispatched to China in 607, and it didn’t start well. The letter from Prince Shotoku was addressed with elegant symmetry from “the emperor of the sunrise country” to the “emperor of the sunset country.” The Sui emperor was not charmed; insulted to be addressed as an equal by the ruler of a small and uncultured barbarian state, he refused to accept the letter.

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Between 607 and 837, 19 formal missions were sent from Japan to China. These voyages were extremely hazardous, especially when they took the longer route to the mouth of the Yangzi; masts broke, ships went down, passengers were washed overboard, sometimes by the dozen. Many of these travelers stayed on in China for decades before returning home with deep knowledge of Buddhism, the Chinese classics, and the workings of the Chinese state. The period spanned two of China’s most glorious epochs, the Sui (581–618) and the Tang (618–906). During the Tang dynasty China’s frontiers reached westward as far as lands claimed by Persia, and if one wanted a metropolitan city in those days, Chang’an was the place to be: “Buddhist monks from India, envoys from Kashgar, Samarkand, Persia, Annam, Tonkin, Constantinople, chieftains of nomadic tribes from Siberian plains, officials and students from Korea and, in now increasing numbers, from Japan” (Sansom 1952:84).

Though Japan was awed by Chinese civilization, they refused to accept a tribute-state relation to the great empire in the direction of the setting sun. About the time of the first missions to China, they began calling their country Nihon, written with the Chinese character for “sun” and “source.” (The name Japan derives from the Chinese pronunciation of these characters, which is roughly “Juhben” (Riben) and probably became “Japan” via Portuguese mer- chants in China.)

The three eras—Asuka, Nara, and Heian—form what is called Japan’s clas- sical age, when shameless copying of Chinese culture and brilliant adaptations of it produced a court culture profoundly different from previous periods and also unlike transformations to come after 1185. We must call this “court culture” because the aristocratic structure of society combined with the new world of lit- eracy, learning, and art set it apart as never before from the lives of ordinary peo- ple—about which very little is known for this period. But the new possibilities for preserving the lifestyle of the elite provided by the script borrowed from China (see chapter 2), along with graphic images in painting, sculpture, and bronze casting, also from China, preserve this life in astonishing detail. We see a society embracing a new religion rich in emotion and aesthetics while having to mollify the jealous and still-powerful kami; we see a dangerous court politics of intrigue and assassination carried out by scheming great families while filling their leisure moments with social exchanges in a refined cultural idiom of moon viewing, poetry writing, nuance, and sensuality; and we see a gendered world where men scheme and carry on a Chinese philosophical discourse while women adapt the new script to their own lives of refined inactivity and romantic intrigue.

Buddhism Comes to Japan

For several hundred years prior to the major embassies to China, Japan had been receiving predigested chunks of Chinese culture via the Korean states of Silla and Paekche. From the latter had come in 552 an image of Buddha, several volumes of sutras, and a recommendation that the Japanese emperor adopt Buddhism.

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No Japanese could read the sutras, but the Buddha image aroused intense interest and controversy. Here was a god whose form could be seen. No one had ever “seen” a kami or made an image of one; they were visible only as natural spaces of great imagined power or in mysterious symbols like the bronze mirror of Amaterasu, but here was a serene, human-like deity, a halo around his head and sitting cross-legged on a lotus blossom. This god’s origin in a great civiliza- tion to the west added to his appeal, as did his association with sacred texts and beautiful works of art. The kami had no sacred texts and no art but nature.

But—would the kami be angry? The emperor was uncertain what to do about the Buddha image and the

religion that came with it. He consulted his courtiers. The heads of the two most powerful clans, the Nakatomi and the Mononobe, were dead set against it. The Nakatomi were chief ritualists at court, and the military Mononobe were closely aligned with them. But they had a competing clan in the Soga, who administered the crown estates and had begun marrying their daughters to emperors. Looking for more opportunities to advance themselves, they seized on the new religion. The emperor presented the Buddha image to them, and they set it up in a shrine in their palace. But shortly after the enshrinement of the foreign god, there was a smallpox epidemic, and people had second thoughts about the stranger-god. The angry kami were getting their revenge. The image was thrown into a canal near modern Osaka.

But the Soga had now thrown their fortunes in with Buddhism. The next emperor, Yomei, brought in more holy relics from Korea, and with the political support of the Soga clan, temples and monasteries began to be built. The first worship of Buddha was mostly empty of actual spiritual or philosophical con- tent. The Buddha was treated like a powerful foreign kami who could be peti- tioned for things. Sutras were recited like magical formulas, and the most lavish ceremonies were to heal sick kings or bring rain. Yakushi, the “King of Medi- cine,” was the most popular bodhisattva in the beginning.

If Japan had its King Ashoka, it was probably Prince Shotoku. He was never emperor himself but was regent under Empress Suiko after her hus- band—and Shotoku’s father by a different wife—was murdered in 593. It was he who sent the first several embassies to China, beginning in 607, but long before that, he had been raised with Korean tutors who had taught him the Buddhist sutras and the Chinese classics in, of course, Chinese. He was among the first to truly grasp the depth of both Buddhist and Confucian thought, and the first to make serious efforts at restructuring Japanese society along Chinese lines. There still exists a commentary on the Lotus Sutra thought to be in the prince’s own handwriting with the introductory remark: “This is compiled by the crown prince of the country of Yamato. It is not a foreign book,” and it con- tains his own comments on the Chinese commentaries, like: “My own inter- pretation differs slightly,” or “This view is no longer accepted” (Sansom 1952:119). He lectured on the scriptures, patronized Buddhist art, and spon- sored the building of temples.

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In the same year as his first embassy to China he had con- structed the Horyuji Temple. This spectacular temple, parts of which still exist, was built by Chinese and Korean architects in the Chinese style, although Japanese adaptations can be seen in it already. It contrasts greatly to the simple, grain-stor- age style of the Grand Shrine at Ise. The portions that survived a fire in 670, the Golden Hall con- taining the Buddha images, is said to be the oldest wooden building in the world. The main image in Horyuji Temple is the “Shaka Trinity,” figures of the historical Buddha, Gautama (known as Shaka in Japan), flanked by two bodhisattvas. It was cast in bronze by an artisan of Chinese descent and dedi- cated in 623 to Prince Shotoku, who had died the previous year. Like many things borrowed directly from China in this early period, it hasn’t the sensuous- ness of later Japanese adapta- tions, but a beautiful wooden sculpture of Miroku (Maitreya, the Buddha of the future bodhi-

sattva) in a nearby nunnery is pensive and evocative, already showing signs of later directions of Japanese aesthetics.

The building of temples became a source of competition among the power- ful clans and a great drain on national resources. By 640, 46 temples had been built in Japan. In 741 the imperial government got involved; each province was ordered to install a temple and a seven-story pagoda, with a monastery for 20 monks and a nunnery for 10 nuns. Each temple was allotted 60 acres of rice land and 50 households to support the temple.

The many provincial temples all required copies of the sutras, which were scarce and valuable in the beginning. The government established offices for copying the sutras in major temples around Nara and paid scribes to do the copying. Devout individuals would sponsor the copying of sutras in order to

Crown Prince Shotoku (574–622), the seventh-cen- tury regent, with his two sons. Woodblock Reproduc- tion from the eighth-century painting: Hanging scroll, Ink and Colors on Paper, Imperial Household Collec- tion: one of the treasures from Horyu-ji. 101.3×53.5cm. (Artist unknown)

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earn merit, and there are still in existence copies commissioned by Emperor Shomu, the Empress Komyo, the daughter of Fujiwara Fusasaki, and the Empress Shotoku (Tanabe 1988:32).

Sutra copying as an act of piety and as an industry continued throughout the eighth and ninth centuries, as scrolls gradually became works of art as much as competent texts. Paper was dyed indigo and characters written in gold ink, with illustrated frontispieces attached to the beginning of the scroll. A one- copy commission was no longer enough; when Emperor Shomu’s beloved aunt died in 748, he had a thousand copies of the Lotus Sutra made to ensure her happiness in the next world, and soon everyone who could afford it was doing the same. The entire 5,000-volume canon was copied 56 times during the Heian period, and ceremonies of dedication were held at court with prayers, music, and dance. Sutra copying reached an extravagant extreme.

Then a custom called gyakushu developed: one could have one’s funeral carried out ahead of time, in your own lifetime, to be sure it was done right. These, of course, required 49 copies of the sutra for the 49 days of the cere- mony. Finally, there were sutra burials. The doctrine of mappo held that a Bud- dhist Dark Age would descend 1,500 years after the life of the Buddha, when enlightenment would become impossible and dharma would go into oblivion until the coming of Maitreya. This period of mappo was thought to begin in the eleventh century. In 1007, Michinaga was the first to bury eight sutras to ensure his return from Paradise to hear Maitreya’s sermon, and this began a rush of sutra burials all over Japan.

It is clear from this and much else that Buddhism was becoming a state religion, but the conflict with the native religion, now needing a name to con- trast it with Buddhism and so called “Shinto” (from the Chinese word shen for “spirits” and dao (tao), “way,” thus “the way of the kami”), had to be resolved. Shinto also was the state religion; remember that among the very first books written in Japan with the newly available script were the Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720), and this in the very century that Buddhism was peaking in popu- larity. Revering the Buddha in no way reduced belief in the powers of the kami, and a way had to be found to integrate the two religions.

The ancient records describe a rapprochement between Amaterasu and Buddha. In 742 a monk named Gyogi carried a sacred relic of the Buddha to the shrine of the Sun Goddess at Ise to get her opinion about a great Buddha image, which the emperor was planning to install in the capital. He prayed at her shrine for seven days and nights until finally she spoke to him. The Sun Goddess proclaimed (in classical Chinese verse and in Buddhist metaphors!) that “the sun of truth illumines the long night of life and death and the moon of reality disperses the clouds of sin and ignorance.” And, yes, she was delighted with the building of a great Buddha image in Nara. Shortly afterward she con- firmed her approval by appearing to the emperor in a dream in the form of a radiant disc, proclaiming that she and the Buddha were one. In time, the high Shinto deities were redefined as avatars of bodhisattvas—Hachiman, the

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Shinto god of war, became a bodhisattva of high rank—and Buddhist monks began to participate in Shinto shrines.

The Buddha image that was the object of concern was the Daibutsu, the “Great Buddha” planned by Emperor Shomu for the new Todaiji Temple at Nara. (See image 11 in Buddhist Iconography, chapter 6.) It was an enormous undertaking, containing over a million pounds of copper, tin, and lead for an image 43 feet high. Gold was needed to gild the image, and just in time, gold was miraculously discovered in eastern Japan. At the eye-opening ceremony for the Daibutsu, the eyes were painted by an Indian monk named Bodhisena, 10,000 monks were feasted, Emperor Shomu declared himself a servant of the Three Jewels, and then abdicated in favor of his daughter to become a Buddhist monk. Buddhism had come a long way in the 200 years since the first Buddha image had to be tossed into a canal.

The Failure of the Centralized State

It is easier to borrow a religion than a government, but the Japanese did make a brief, and ultimately ineffectual, effort to copy the Chinese system of government. It must be remembered how the centralized state first was intro- duced to China: by ruthless and revolutionary alterations carried out by Qin Shihuang after first conquering all the competing territories and lords. The Qin had not been softened by Buddhist compassion (which did not meaningfully arrive in China until the first century C.E.), nor rendered temperate by Confu- cian ethics. Qin Shihuang made no claims of divine descent; he was a con- queror and a dictator, pure and simple. He had no equivalent in seventh- century Japan.

The first efforts at reform in Japan were attempted by Prince Shotoku. He is better compared, as we have already done, to Ashoka, not Qin Shihuang. Like Ashoka, he attempted to reform the Yamato state, bringing personal eth- ics and civic responsibility to what had been, and unfortunately continued to be, rule by competing heads of great families motivated by clan loyalties, com- petition for honors at court, and claims to semidivine status. However, unlike Ashoka, he did not attempt to reform the state on Buddhist values alone, for he also had access to the very sophisticated—by Sui and Tang times—Chinese model of the state, with its mix of practical bureaucratic centralization and Confucian ethics. He promulgated a “constitution” in 17 articles, which advo- cated such Buddhist values as reverence for the “Three Precious Things” (i.e., the Three Jewels: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha) and avoidance of gluttony and covetousness, as well as Confucian ones like reciprocal duties between superior and inferior governed by “ceremony” (li), hard work by officials, reward of merit and punishment of faults, and filling positions by merit, not patronage.

Next, Shotoku attempted to regularize honors at court by a system of rank indicated by colors and styles of caps and robes as was practiced in China for scholar-officials. This got tinkered with over the next several decades and is one piece of the reforms that did survive.

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The efforts to reform the state are tied up with the fortunes of the Soga clan. They rose with the coming of Buddhism in 552 and exercised powerful behind-the-scenes control over seven emperors, except during the regency of Prince Shotoku from 593 to 621. After his death, the Sogas again showed their claws, making and deposing rulers and committing murder when necessary. Meanwhile, the Nakatomi, pushed off center stage, had a brilliant son in Kamatari, who devoted his time to studying the political doctrines of the Chi- nese sages and eyeing the various imperial princes for an ally. He made friends with Prince Naka no Oe, and in 645 they moved against the Soga. In an assas- sination attempt, Prince Naka no Oe attacked Soga no Iruka with a spear in the presence of the empress, and when the empress left the room, palace guards finished the job. The events led to the empress abdicating and to the burning of the imperial residence where all the state papers were being held. Eventually in 661, Prince Naka no Oe became emperor, and now it was through him that Kamatari was the supreme power, continuing a pattern—which already had several hundred years precedent and would continue for a millennium more— where real power was exercised in the background.

Kamatari passed the Taika Reforms of land tenure to bring everything under the ownership of the emperor, at least theoretically. Local magnates were deprived of their estates and serfs. Provinces were divided into districts and townships, with governors appointed from the local gentry. Townships con- sisted of 50 households under a headman who was responsible for crops, main- tenance of order, and levying and collecting taxes. Population registers were to be drawn up and account books maintained so that more taxes could be col- lected more reliably. Land was redistributed among the cultivators depending on the number of mouths in a family to be fed; the system was called literally the “mouth-share fields.” The registers were necessary to ensure that peasants didn’t escape payment of taxes and that officials didn’t embezzle any. All of these reforms were attempts to centralize the country under the control of the emperor and raise revenues for the state, collected by appointed officials accountable to him; it was the Chinese system.

But it did not work in Japan, for two reasons. First, the great aristocratic families were too powerful at court and too much in control of their territories to be easily shoved out. Second, a great deal of rice land was made exempt from payment of taxes. Rice land owned by shrines and temples and rice land granted to officials in lieu of a salary, which included large amounts to support great families, made for huge exemptions from tax rolls. Over the next two cen- turies, the system slowly collapsed. At every level of the hierarchy, from peas- ant to local official to regional lord to the central government, people managed to take shares from below without passing them up. The throne’s share decreased, demands on peasants increased, and a larger and larger nonproduc- tive, exploitive middle class prospered. “Despite all the efforts of the central authority to check the expansion of tax-free estates, there grew up once more a class of hereditary chieftains whose power rivaled that of the throne and in the

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course of some centuries finally overtopped it” (Sansom 1952:106). No scholar-official class like the Chinese shenshi ever emerged, for the hold of aris- tocratic territorial clans was never broken.

More successful, however, was the building of cities on the Chinese plan. Chang’an was the largest city in the world at this time, and its centrally planned, grid-like layout with the imperial palace in the north-central portion of the city was simply what a city should be, to the Japanese, who had none. Their administrative centers had been wherever the residence of a clan chief or a Yamato ruler might be; the Shinto horror of death pollution required that res- idences be pulled down and destroyed at death, so no permanent court had emerged; instead, their traces remain archaeologically all over the Nara basin.

So the eighth-century Japanese built themselves a city like Chang’an called Nara. This was a space to fill with the new culture coming from China, though Japan’s total population of six million at that time could hardly sustain a major urban complex. Perhaps 20,000 people lived there during its peak. Only the eastern half of the planned city was ever built, and this was filled with temples, monasteries, and mansions in Chinese architectural styles. It must have seemed a marvelous and foreign place to humble Japanese who came to behold it or to work there: there were new gods whose forms were visible, language was cap- tured in the strange markings of the Chinese script, and men of high status wore their rank visibly on Chinese-style robes.

But Nara remained the seat of government and learning for a mere 75 years; the capital then moved twice, first to Nagaoka (784 to 794) then, more enduringly, to Kyoto (794–1869). Some have supposed the move was decided because of the increasing power of the monastic establishment at Nara, or it may have been linked to some intrigue of the Fujiwaras. In any event, it was a hugely expensive undertaking. All the provinces were required to send all their taxes for the year to build the city, plus all the material needed for construction. Much of this income went to compensate the nobility, who also had to relocate to the new city. Then, after only 10 years in Nagaoka, they picked up and moved again, to Kyoto, this time because a series of inexplicable deaths of peo- ple of high rank was understood to be caused by angry spirits, of whom there continued to be tremendous, unreserved fear. Kyoto was sited based on Chi- nese geomancy (fengshui), carefully announced to Amaterasu at Ise, and then, again, built on the Chang’an plan, with the imperial residence in the north-cen- ter, a wall with 14 gates, and a temple of Confucius. Here in Kyoto the cultur- ally splendid Heian or Fujiwara period unfolded. (Heian was the old name for Kyoto; the Fujiwara were a powerful clan closely intermarried with the impe- rial line.) It remained the residence of the imperial line until the Meiji Restora- tion of 1868.

Romance at Court

We probably know more about the life of women at the Heian court than about any comparable class of women in any other premodern state. There are

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several remarkable things about this. The first is that women were allowed to learn to read and write. The second is that our view of their lives is not filtered through the imaginations of male authors writing about women but through women writing about themselves and their times. And most remarkable of all, since there were no established indigenous genres to channel their self-expres- sion, they had the freedom to make up their own.

We see women enjoying liberties that elite women of many later periods would envy, yet qualities of masculine and feminine were clearly drawn and their worlds finely demarcated. Learning, as it came to Japan, was Chinese learning, and only men were thought to be capable of the years of study required, first to master Chinese, then to master the script and the difficult liter- ature that came from China. Men of standing attempted to speak Chinese, quoted Chinese sayings, and attempted to write philosophy and poetry in Chi- nese. The situation was much like the role played by Latin in European societ- ies for many centuries. However, very early, perhaps through later acquaintance with Sanskritic syllabic scripts, Chinese characters were modified to produce a syllabic form, called kana. The fairly simple phonemic system of Japanese could be handled completely in kana, but by then the language had been so enriched with Chinese loanwords and the evocative quality of Chinese charac- ters themselves, that written Japanese never did abandon kanji (“Chinese writ- ing”). Kana, then, became a kind of private, vernacular script for writing about personal things, the emotions, the inner life, in the Japanese language. This sim- plified script was easy to learn and was eagerly adopted by women at court while not threatening status distinctions between men and women.

Women at court kept diaries and wrote about the life around them; in their writings we have the wonderful reversal of a male world portrayed through women’s eyes. The best and deservedly most famous of these works is The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. It was written about 1000 C.E. as a 54-chapter novel which is thought to be the first novel ever written anywhere. The first English translation by Arthur Waley was published in six volumes; because of its length, most people know the work in various abridgments. Lady Murasaki was from a junior line of the great Fujiwara family whose father lamented that his brilliant daughter was not born a boy. He was not of high enough rank to give her a serious career at court, but she went into the service of Empress Akiko for several years and then retired from court and wrote her novel.

The novel is a form of prose fiction that even the Chinese had not devel- oped. Its emphasis is on characters more than plot; the main character of The Tale of Genji is “the shining Genji,” a dazzlingly handsome, romantic lover, poet, calligrapher, musician, and dancer: “A slight flush from too much drink made Genji even handsomer than usual. His skin glowed through his light summer robes.” We trace the life of Genji through episode after intense epi- sode, most of them romantic intrigues triggered by the sight of a silken sleeve and expressed in eloquent exchanges of poetic couplets under autumn moons. Beneath the refined surfaces of Heian life—layered silk in matching pastels,

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perfumed notes, the 13-stringed koto—were intense emotions: longing for past lovers, melancholy on briny shores, status jealousies, fear of exposure of indis- cretions, laments for the dead. Good breeding made itself visible in exquisite taste and polished manners. You could tell a person of third rank from a person of first rank by their conduct, and did, but never rudely.

In this world, there were careers for ladies at court. But ladies, as well as men, needed good family connections to really have a chance. Genji’s mother was beloved by the emperor, but being the emperor’s favorite, without impor- tant kinship connections, subjected her to jealous torment from others until she retired from court and died. Even being the emperor’s favorite son, as Genji was, was not enough without powerful maternal relatives; princes were regu- larly reduced to commoner status to minimize the number of royals competing politically with the Fujiwara regents. Princes needed support, and a popular

surname for them to take (since the imperial family has no sur- name) was Genji, a Chinese form of Minamoto. Women’s careers, however, were never of- ficial posts in government; no Minister of the Left or of the Right or other positions were available to them. A royal prin- cess was always appointed as High Priestess at Ise, and women could retire to become Buddhist nuns and read the sutras, but Lady Murasaki was largely interested in that other career, the life of romantic in- trigue. These court women had the freedom to write love letters, welcome men into their bou- doirs, initiate affairs, and often gave birth to babies with danger- ous resemblances to men at court. These intrigues were po- etic and emotional, every flirta- tion was a sincere one and even lapsed affairs retained a melan- choly emotional integrity. The love affair now over is like the fallen blossom, beautiful, tran- sient, sorrowfully and irretriev- ably lost.

The “shining Genji,” the dazzling prince who is the main character in The Tale of Genji, was a poetic soul who enjoyed moments like this one, viewing the snow drifting down over the lake.

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A major subplot is the love of Genji for Fujitsubo, his father’s favorite con- sort who later was promoted to empress. His one-night tryst with her results in a young prince with all of Genji’s charms, who is thought by the emperor to be his own son, so he is made crown prince and eventually becomes the Reizei emperor, thinking all along that Genji is his half-brother rather than his father. Throughout the book, Fujitsubo is terrified the truth will come out, which would threaten her son’s prospects and bring her shame. Their occasional later meetings (see box 8.3) are filled with the romantic tension known later in Japan as iki. In another episode, Genji’s wife has a child by another man, and, when rumor circulates, rather than being angered by her infidelity, Genji is touched and sympathetic to her intense shame and seeks a way to ease her unhappiness.

Box 8.3 Genji’s Exile to Suma

For Genji life had become an unbroken succession of reverses and afflictions. He must consider what to do next. If he went on pretending that nothing was amiss, then even worse things might lie ahead. He thought of the Suma coast. People of worth had once lived there, he was told, but now it was deserted, save for the huts of fisher- men, and even they were few. The alternative was worse, to go on living this public life, so to speak, with people streaming in and out of his house. Yet he would hate to leave, and affairs at court would continue to be much on his mind if he did leave. This irresolution was making life difficult for his people.

Fujitsubo, though always worried about rumors, wrote frequently. It struck him as bitterly ironical that she had not returned his affection “earlier, but he told himself that a fate which they had shared from other lives must require that they know the full range of sorrows.”

On the night before his departure he visited his father’s grave in the northern hills. Since the moon would be coming up shortly before dawn, he went first to take leave of Fujitsubo. Receiving him in person, she spoke of her worries for the crown prince. It cannot have been, so complicated were matters between them, a less than deeply felt interview. Her dignity and beauty were as always. He would have liked to hint at old resentments; but why, at this late date, invite further unpleasantness, and risk adding to his own agitation?

He only said, and it was reasonable enough: “I can think of a single offense for which I must undergo this strange, sad punishment, and because of it I tremble before the heavens. Though I would not care in the least if my own unworthy self were to vanish away, I only hope that the crown prince’s reign is without unhappy event.”

She knew too well what he meant, and was unable to reply. He was almost too handsome as at last he succumbed to tears. “I am going to pay my respects at His Majesty’s grave. Do You have a message?”

She was silent for a time, seeking to control herself.

“The one whom I served is gone, the other must go. Farewell to the world was no farewell to its sorrows.”

(continued)

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The Tale of Genji, as Paul Varley writes, illustrates the value of mono no aware—“sensitivity to things,” or “capacity to be moved by things,” a distinc- tively Japanese aesthetic value. “The Japanese are . . . essentially an emotional people . . . who have always assigned high value to sincerity as the ethic of the emotions” (Varley 1984:57–64). This sensitivity is tinged with sadness because much of what is lovely and moving is also transient, such as the perishable beauties of nature. Genji, in exile from court at a remote seaside village in the Suma chapter, hears the call of geese winging overhead and says in one of the many couplets that ornament the prose: “Might they be companions of those I long for? Their cries ring sadly through the sky of their journey.”

The great novel was frequently illustrated by Japanese artists. One popular medium was the hand scroll, which contained both text in beautiful pure-kana calligraphy and illustrations, which was read by unrolling across a table. Often members of the aristocracy worked on these scrolls themselves. One of the ear- liest and best of the Genji hand scrolls was done in 1120–1130 and survives in

But for both of them the sorrow was beyond words. He replied:

“The worst of grief for him should long have passed. And now I must leave the world where dwells the child.”

Her face was with him the whole of the journey. In great sorrow he boarded the boat that would take him to Suma. It was a long spring day and there was a tall wind, and by late afternoon he had reached the strand where he was to live. He had never before been on such a journey, however short. All the sad, exotic things along the way were new to him. The Oe station was in ruins, with only a grove of pines to show where it had stood.

“More remote, I fear, my place of exile Than storied ones in lands beyond the seas.”

The surf came in and went out again. “I envy the waves,” he whispered to himself. It was a familiar poem, but it seemed new to those who heard him, and sad as never before. Looking back toward the city, he saw that the mountains were enshrouded in mist. It was as though he had indeed come “three thousand leagues.” The spray from the oars brought thoughts scarcely to be borne.

“Mountain mists cut off that ancient village. Is the sky I see the sky that shelters it?”

This is what he wrote to Fujitsubo:

“Briny our sleeves on the Suma strand; and yours In the fisher cots of thatch at Matsushima?”

“My eyes are dark as I think of what is gone and what is to come, and ‘the waters rise.’ ”

Source: Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, Edward G. Seidensticker, Transl. New York: Random House, 1986.

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fragments that are now in the Tokugawa and Goto Museums. The artists sought to portray the most emotionally intense moments—the moment the Reizei emperor confronts Genji, having just learned Genji is his father, or the moment Genji’s wife is prostrate on the tatami, unable to tell her father, the retired emperor, the truth of her child by Kashiwagi or to face her husband Genji. We view these intense scenes from surprising angles, often looking down into rooms with their roofs removed, always with strong diagonal lines representing the architecture of interiors and people separated by walls and screens. Emotional turbulence is expressed by ribbons hanging in disarray and by the sharp tilt of the composition itself (Baker 1984).

Warrior Culture in Feudal Japan

Attention must turn to the provinces in order to understand Japan from the twelfth century onward. This was the realm of the Japanese peasant and a landed class of elite families, many of them provincial branches of great court families. The Taiho Reforms imposed on this old system a new system of pro- vincial governors (zuryo) whose job it was to raise income for the imperial gov- ernment. They fulfilled this responsibility, in many cases so rapaciously, and were themselves so greedy to acquire land however they could, that there was a

Lady Murasaki Shikibu was lady-in-waiting to Empress Shoki,

where she was an insider to the seductions, heartbreaks, styles, and

tastes of the Heian court. Descended from poets, she wrote The Tale of Genji from her retreat at Lake Biwa, where

she is often portrayed receiving inspiration from the moon.

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saying, “When a zuryo falls down, he comes up holding dirt.” Everyone, peas- ants and aristocrats, hated the zuryo, and the system they administered, and worked to find ways to undercut it in self-protection. Peasant men who were forced into military service for indefinite periods simply disappeared. From the official point of view, a whole class of “missing persons” had emerged—real people but without registered identities—who came to be called ronin. The new system that had been imposed from the center was apparently experienced by people in the provinces as an early version of odious “Big Brother” centralized control. Every household, once blissfully autonomous, was registered by the state, their land was allotted by the state, taxes due were determined and rigor- ously collected, and theoretically every six years all the land could be redistrib- uted. Never had the state been so intrusive.

The system was equally despised by local elites, who developed their own brand of evasion. Some of them—the old court families who had been too powerful to be dispossessed—had been allowed to keep their lands tax free. Many of the aristocratic families in the provinces were descendants of emper- ors who were victims of “dynastic shedding”; that is, they, like Genji, lost their princely titles and were given surnames (Minamoto, Taira, Tachibana, Ari- wara) and estates in the provinces, where they were free to make their fortunes as best they could. These estates were called shoen. Buddhist monasteries and Shinto temples also had shoen, often extensive tracts of land that came with cul- tivators to work them. The rest of the population was at the mercy of the despised zuryo.

To protect themselves they began “commending” their lands to local shoen, religious or aristocratic, that is, attaching themselves in vassal-like relationships to the shoen overlord, the daimyo (“great name,” a term applied to any lord who controlled lands producing more than 50,000 bushels of rice a year). This prac- tice was so widespread that it drastically altered the nature of Japanese society and its power structure within a couple of centuries. By the twelfth century, nearly all the rice lands of the country had been gathered into huge private estates, and the capital was close to bankruptcy by loss of revenue. Further, because the court had no standing army, all the military muscle was in the pro- vincial estates where overlords were able, with the growing wealth of their estates, to raise their own armies. Since the conscription of peasants had proved a failure, warriors were recruited from the rural elite, and this gradually turned into a permanent class of mounted warriors known as the samurai. The word means “to serve”; its earliest use was for domestic servants at court, and it later came to be used for the imperial guardsmen. With the growth of feudal society the samurai became an elite class that formed its own code of honor based on courage, loyalty, and martial skills. The “Way” (-do) of the warrior (bushi) was not originally codified, but its ideals were enshrined in sung and acted war tales. Only later, as the samurai class began to sense its own decline, were works such as The Code of the Samurai by Daidoji Yuzan written down. Thus, greatly simplified, arose the feudal society of Japan’s middle period.

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The Shogunate

Three great families emerged and competed in the Heian period: the Fuji- wara, the Taira, and the Minamoto; the latter two, and especially the Mina- moto, which branched into regional groupings, dominated Japan until the nineteenth century. In the beginning the Fujiwara were vastly more powerful, exercising regency over a succession of emperors who were never allowed to govern, were often forced to abdicate, and invariably were married to Fujiwara daughters. Their zenith was the eleventh century, when the funeral of Fujiwara Michinaga was as splendid as for an emperor: 10,000 priests prayed for his recovery, a general amnesty was declared, and back taxes were forgiven throughout the country (Sansom 1952:265). But elsewhere things were falling apart. The Fujiwara strategy was to control emperors and parcel out honors at court, which in the good old days mattered more than anything else. They did not bother with warriors.

But out in the chaotic provinces, armed power mattered, and other sym- bols of prestige came to be valued more than titles and the color of caps and robes. The Taira and Minamoto were chief rivals in bloody battles fought between 1156 and 1160. In 1160 Taira Kiyomori moved in on the Fujiwara to settle an imperial succession dispute; then, following the usual strategy, he married his daughter to the emperor, and 20 years later put his grandson on the throne. It looked for two decades as if the Taira had won; two young Mina- moto boys barely escaped with their lives, but the young and brilliant Yoritomo put together an alliance of warriors and military leaders, moved on Kyoto in 1185, drove out the Tairas, and put an end to the Fujiwaras.

This terrific struggle to the death between rival houses established the dom- inance of the military families and produced an elite warrior class that, under the stress of danger and conflict, developed a special code of behavior, a special morality. The events of those years have left deep marks upon the imagination of the Japanese, and the rise and fall of the two clans is perhaps Japan’s true epic. This history abounds in heroic legends of loyalty and courage and sacri- fice, which have inspired art and literature.

Yoritomo set up his headquarters 300 miles to the east of Kyoto at Kamak- ura to be near his estates and vassals, where he went about establishing a rival power to the imperial establishment in Kyoto. But as these vassals were armed and ambitious, how would he maintain their loyalty and prevent the rise of other clans that would keep the culture of clan rivalry going? His solution was ingenious; he did not attempt to overthrow the imperial dynasty in Kyoto but continued to use the monarchy as the source and authority for honors and titles, beginning with himself: he had the emperor grant him a defunct title, sho- gun, formerly used by generals fighting the northern barbarians; it meant supreme commander of all military forces. The government he founded at Kamakura had the flavor of a field encampment; it was called the bakufu, or “tent government.” All over Japan, holders of shoen transferred their allegiance to him.

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This was the system of government until 1867: under the title shogun, con- trol was exercised by a military government from Kamakura and later Edo (Tokyo), while the emperors carried on with their refined court culture, their Shinto state rituals, and their Buddhist retirements in Kyoto. From Kamakura, warrior clans dominated the next 400 years. Then when the Tokugawas (a branch of Minamotos) came to power in 1600, there were another 250 years of a warrior regime until the Meiji Restoration.

The Samurai Class

The samurai class came into existence, flowered, and disappeared in 600 years, marking the imagination and character of modern Japanese and, it must also be said, of the world. The code of honor of the samurai warrior, which came to be known as bushido—a blend of Confucian, Zen Buddhist, and mar- tial values—dignified militarism in the first half of the twentieth century, leav- ing traces in modern popular culture (Karate Kid, Ninja Turtles) and, it is sometimes speculated, in the psyches of the salarymen and executives of corpo- rate Japan.

If there is a “key scenario” of samurai culture, it is captured in a true event of 1701, which was preserved and reenacted (and embellished) in play and story and film, The Tale of the 47 Loyal Ronin. In 1701 Lord Asano, daimyo of the Ako domain, was assigned to perform ceremonial duties at the shogun’s court in Edo. Because he was unfamiliar with court practices, he offended an official named Kira who insulted him in return. Lord Asano was a rough and ready daimyo from the provinces and drew his sword to avenge his honor against Kira. But this was a violation of a strict law at the shogun’s court for- bidding the drawing of weapons, and as punishment he was ordered to commit suicide. He promptly complied. When word of his death reached his domain at Ako, 47 of his vassals, who were rendered masterless by the death of their mas- ter and confiscation of his lands, formed a secret covenant to avenge him. Knowing that Kira would be expecting such an attack, they plotted to behave like lawless and dissolute ronin, wandering, drinking, and gambling until the moment of revenge. On a snowy morning in 1703, they attacked and killed Kira at his residence in Edo and carried his head to the temple where their lord had been buried. But they had broken Tokugawa law against vengeance killings and were condemned to die. They did so by committing suicide in the honor- able manner.

By the time of the 47 ronin, the samurai class had been transformed into a cultivated, bureaucratic elite, who still carried the best swords ever made at their waists but hardly ever drew them, being put to work instead by the Tokugawa shogunate running a unified and—at last—peaceful Japan. Tokugawa Ieyasu moved to Edo in 1590 as the daimyo of the eight Kanto prov- inces. He unified the country and was appointed shogun, and from this time, Edo has been the capital of Japan. (Its name was changed to Tokyo, the “Kyoto of the East,” during the Meiji era.)

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The contrasts with Kyoto were great; whereas Kyoto was laid out like a Chinese city on a north-south axis and grid plan, Edo had a concentric circle plan with Edo Castle high on a plateau at the center. Edo had no resident divine monarch but was a fortress surrounded by a wall and a moat to protect the shogun. The central plateau was carved by ravines, which left five terraces splayed like fingers on a hand. On these terraces the three great daimyo allies of the Tokugawa built their residences to protect the shogun, and over the next half century all the daimyo in Japan, including Lord Asano, were required to build mansions in Edo. They were allowed to spend alternate years in Edo; the second year they could return to their affairs back in their domains, but they were required to leave their wives and children in permanent residence in Edo. By the eighteenth century, Edo was a city of a million people, half of them war- riors (Nishiyama Matsunosuke 1997:23–40).

It was in Edo that samurai culture shifted from a martial culture to a martial arts culture, quite a significant shift. To know the samurai at their most dra- matic and idealized, one must back up to rougher times; say, the twelfth through fourteenth centuries.

The actor Bando Minosuke in the role of Rikiya, by Utagawa Toyokuni

(1777–1835). Woodcut print published between 1801 and 1810. This

Tokogawa-era woodcut illustrates a character in the Bunraku play

Chushingura. The play is based on the vendetta of the 47 ronin of 1702. The

names and dates in the play had to be altered because of censorship by the ruling Tokugawa government in the

early nineteenth century.

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Warfare was a highly ritualized affair in the beginning of the samurai period. As seen in war tales like the Konjaku Monogatari, Heike Monogatari, and the Taiheiki, armies would first arrange a time and date of battle; they would exchange envoys as the armies faced each other in the field and they would fire “humming arrows” to announce the commencement of fighting; as the armies moved together, at first they exchanged volleys of arrows, and finally warriors paired off sword-to-sword for the climax of the fighting. Rank counted even in battle, for you had to find someone of your own rank, as evidenced by insignia on armor, to slug it out with. You might need to shout out one’s own name and genealogy to attract an opponent of suitable rank, but there were other reasons for shouting your name. You might need to establish witnesses for later claims to reward or promote the fame of yourself and your family.

The victorious shouting of one’s name (kachi-nanori) was a ritual formula that included one’s genealogy. Varley records the following exchange between a Taira and a Minamoto, whose parties encounter each other at the entry to the capital:

[I am] the police lieutenant of Aki, Motomori; descended in the twelfth generation from Emperor Kammu; a distant relative in the eighth genera- tion of the Taira general [shogun] Masakado; grandson of the minister of punishments, Tadamori; and second son of the governor of Aki, Kiyo- mori.” Not to be outdone, Chikaharu then recites his lineage: “I am the res- ident of Yamato province Uno no Shichiro Chikaharu; descended in the tenth generation from Emperor Seiwa; a distant relative of the Sixth Grand- son Prince; five generations removed from the governor of Yamato, Yor- ichika, the younger brother of the governor of Settsu, Raiko; grandson of the vice-minister of central affairs, Yoriharu; and oldest son of the governor of Shimotsuke, Chikaharu.” (Varley 1994:60)

In the Hogen, a 19-year-old warrior is initiated into battle during the attack on Shirakawa Palace. He wrestles with two brothers who are famous for their strength and stabs them to death. Taking their heads and remounting his horse, he shouts:

I, Kaneko no Juro Ietada, a resident of Musashi province, have come forth, before the renowned Tametomo of Tsukushi, and with my own hands have taken the heads of two noted warriors (samurai). Observe this, both enemy and ally! A feat rarely achieved either in ancient times or the present! . . . I am the Ietada who wishes to bequeath his name (na) to generations to come. If there are warriors among Tametomo’s band who feel they are my match, let them come and grapple with me! (Varley 1994:61)

At the end of the battle, a few hours or a day later, enemy heads were cut off and carried to Kyoto or Kamakura for display. This was bloody and defiling work, so usually servants did the actual decapitation, and the head was carried at the end of a sword stuck into the victim’s topknot. Part of the system of honor of the samurai was to prevent comrades’ heads from falling to the enemy. In Heiji there is a story of a commander in flight from Kyoto along with his injured son. Seeing that his son cannot continue traveling, he kills him and takes his head to keep it from falling into enemy hands (Varley 1994:27).

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Vassal loyalty is the principal theme of the war tales: absolute self-sacrific- ing loyalty of a warrior for his lord. The 47 ronin exhibited this kind of ulti- mate loyalty, and also another trait: the blood revenge (katakiuchi). Intent on following their lord into death, they could not do so until they had rendered him the final service of avenging his death. Samurai justified the vendetta by quoting Confucius:

Tzu-hsia [Zixia] asked Confucius, saying, “How should [a son] conduct himself with reference to the man who has killed his father or mother?” The Master said, “He should sleep on straw, with his shield for a pillow; he should not take office; he must be determined not to live with the slayer under the same heaven. If he meets with him in the market-place or court, he should not have to go back for his weapon, but [instantly] fight with him.” (Varley 1994:33)

Loyalty meant to the death. Daidoji Yuzan’s Code of the Samurai begins with the famous words: “One who is a samurai must before all things keep constantly in mind, by day and by night . . . the fact that he has to die.” This point was not just a theoretical one; hostilities frequently interrupted the unsta- ble peace of the first four centuries of shogun rule. One entire century, known as the “Era of Warring States” (1467–1568), was given over to a “culture of lawlessness” (Berry 1994). The era is known in part through the diaries of per- sons who lived through, and tried to make meaning of, the destruction of Kyoto as sometimes hundreds of thousands of warriors fought in its streets and savaged its neighborhoods, reducing the city to isolated, fortified pockets of townspeople and the imperial compound to a weedy wasteland. In romanticiz- ing samurai culture, we must remember all its modes.

Mary Elizabeth Berry opens an account of this century with the diary entries of a Kyoto aristocrat:

Yakushiji Yoichi Motoichi, the deputy governor of the province of Settsu, who is a retainer of Hosokawa Ukyo Daibu Minamoto Masamoto Ason, has rebelled against Masamoto and turned enemy. He is marching toward Yodo in our province. All of Kyoto is in an uproar over these events; the exodus of residents carrying their valuables is shocking, people say.

Seventeen days later, the day-by-day descriptions of the havoc wreaked by this adventurer ends with the following:

The castle at Yodo fell at daybreak. The principal in this affair, Yakushiji Yoichi, whose formal name is Motoichi, has been captured; the leader of the Shinomiya house and his son have cut their bellies. They say one hun- dred fourteen heads collected during this incident have been brought back to Kyoto. The unexpectedly swift victory is miraculous.

And finally:

I hear that the prisoner [Yakushiji] Motoichi, age twenty-nine, cut his belly at dawn. (Berry 1994:2)

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Samurai culture required the willingness to follow one’s lord into death, as we saw in The Tale of the 47 Loyal Ronin; in the face of defeat, pride in name required a death made heroic by the ritual of suicide. Lord Asano, the 47 ronin, the Shinomiya lord, and finally Yakushiji Motoichi “cut their bellies.”

Often, as in the cases described above, seppuku or hara kiri (the latter term is considered vulgar; both mean disembowelment or “cutting the belly”) was a spontaneous act of the autonomous samurai. In Tokugawa times it also became an elite mode of execution for a member of the samurai class to spare him the humiliation of a common public beheading. In the nineteenth century, there were occasional European witnesses, such as the execution described by A. B. Mitford in Kobe in 1868. The condemned man had purified himself and dressed in white, the color of death, and then was ushered into a sand-covered room in a Buddhist temple. He knelt before a tray containing a sharp, 12-inch knife, and his kaishaku knelt beside him with a sword. The charges were read by an official, and the samurai said: “I, and I alone, unwarrantedly gave the order to fire on the foreigners at Kobe, and again as they tried to escape. For this crime I disembowel myself, and I beg of you who are present to do me the honor of witnessing this act.” Then:

Bowing once more, the speaker allowed his upper garment to slip down to his girdle, and remained naked to the waist. Carefully . . . he tucked his sleeves under his knees to prevent himself from falling backward; for a noble Japanese gentleman [samurai] should die falling forward.

Deliberately, with a steady hand he took the dirk that lay before him; he looked at it wistfully, almost affectionately; for a moment he seemed to col- lect his thoughts for a last time, and then stabbing himself deeply below the waist on the left hand side, he drew the dirk slowly across to the right side, and turning it in the wound, gave it a slight cut upward. Through this sick- eningly painful operation he never moved a muscle of his face. Then he drew out the dirk, leaned forward and stretched out his neck [for the swordsman to strike]; an expression of pain for the first time crossed his face, but he uttered no sound. At that moment, the kaishaku, who, still crouching at his side, had been keenly watching his every movement, sprang to his feet, poised his sword for a second in the air; there was a flash, a heavy, ugly thud, a crashing fall; with one blow the head had been severed from the body. (King 1993:152)

Seppuku continued in the twentieth century to be a rare, shocking, yet still heroic act carried out by individuals. When Emperor Meiji died in 1912, on the final day of his funeral ceremonies, just as the cortege was preparing to leave the palace, the hero of the Russo-Japanese War, General Nogi Maresuke, and his wife Shizuko seated themselves in front of the emperor’s portrait and com- mitted suicide, he by disemboweling himself and she by stabbing herself in the heart. The act shocked the Japanese nation; it aroused tremendous controversy, and it was said of the event: “Nothing has so stirred up the sentiments of the nation since the vendetta of the forty-seven ronin in 1703” (Gluck 1985:221).

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Until the Edo period, no two elite cultures could have been more divergent than that of the Chinese scholar-official class and the Japanese samurai. Under the Tokugawas, however, samurai culture began to change, and the warrior cul- ture of the previous four centuries began to shift to resemble in some ways their equivalent elite class in China, the shenshi. Remarkably, both were based in Confucian values, which goes to show how structures of power and historically embedded social actors can utilize philosophies in tremendously diverse ways. Neo-Confucianism and samurai culture were developing over roughly the same centuries but took very different courses. However, the gap began to close in the seventeenth century, as the Tokugawa regime needed to turn warriors into administrators, and samurai lifestyles were increasingly urban and cultured along lines that would be recognized in, and were again influenced by, China.

The Confucian influence is strong in the ethical injunctions for warriors in Daidoji Yuzan’s Code of the Samurai, written in the eighteenth century. He was a member of the Taira family; his father was a vassal of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s son, and Yuzan became an orthodox Confucian scholar and expert on military af- fairs. He wrote the text (see box 8.4) for young samurai at a time when the samu- rai class was seen as falling away from the austerity and simplicity of the old days, but it was also a time when Confucian values borrowed in the eighth century were getting reinforcements from the Neo-Confucianism of the seventeenth and

An unknown Japanese artist portrays the ritual of seppuku. 1867.

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Box 8.4 Excerpts from The Code of the Samurai

by Daidoji Yuzan

On what should a samurai focus his mind? One who is a samurai must before all things keep constantly in mind, by day and by

night, from the morning when he takes up his chopsticks to eat his New Years break- fast to Old Years night when he pays his yearly bills, the fact that he has to die. That is his chief business. If he is always mindful of this, he will be able to live in accordance with the paths of Loyalty and Filial Duty. . . .

One who is a samurai should base his conduct on a strong sense of filial duty. And however capable and clever and eloquent and handsome one may be born, if he is unfilial he is of no use at all. For Bushido, the Way of the Warrior, requires a man’s con- duct to be correct in all points.

It is most important that one who is a samurai should never neglect the offensive spirit at any time and in all matters. For our country is different from other lands in that even the least of the people, farmers, merchants, and artisans, should all cherish some rusty blade, wherein is revealed the warrior spirit of this Empire of Nippon. . . . Much more must the higher samurai. . . . When you leave your gate, act as though an enemy was in sight. So since he is a samurai and wears a sword in his girdle he must never for- get this spirit of the offensive. And when this is so, the mind is firmly fixed on death.

What is jin [ren] for the samurai? For Bushido the three qualities of Loyalty, Right Conduct, and Bravery are essential.

We speak of the loyal warrior, the righteous warrior, and the valiant warrior, and it is he who is endowed with all these three virtues who is a warrior of the highest class.

How do you show respect for your lord? In Bushido, however loyal and filial a man may be in his heart, if he is lacking in the

correct etiquette and manners by which respect is shown to lord or parent, he cannot be regarded as living in proper conformity with it. . . . Wherever he may be lying down or sleeping, his feet must never for an instant be pointing in the direction of his lord’s presence. If he sets up a straw bale for archery practice anywhere, the arrows must never fall toward the place where his lord is.

How does a samurai treat his wife? One who is a samurai should, if he finds in his wife matters that do not please him,

admonish her to agree with him by reasonable argument, though in trifles it is well that he be indulgent and patient with her. But if her disposition is consistently bad and he considers she will be of no further use, he may divorce her and send her home to her parents under exceptional circumstances. But should he not do this but keep her as his wife so that people address her by the respectful titles of okusama and kamisama, and then shout her and revile her with all sorts of abusive expressions he is behaving in a way that may be suitable to hirelings and coolies who live in the back streets of the business quarter but is certainly not proper for a samurai. Much less is it fitting for such a one to lay his hand on his sword or menace his wife with his clenched fist, an outra- geous thing that only a cowardly samurai would think of doing. For a girl born in a war- rior house and of age to be married would never, if she were a man, for a moment tolerate being threatened by the fist of anyone. It is only because she is unfortunately born a woman that she has to shed tears and put up with it.

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eighteenth centuries. We see the ethics of filial piety, though the recipient of loyalty and devotion is the lord, not the parents; of cor- rect conduct and “etiquette” (li— ritual); of “benevolence” (ren— humaneness). But there is an- other dimension to Bushido as enunciated by Daidoji Yuzan, a single-minded concentration on death. We will need to return to Buddhism for clarification.

Zen Buddhism and

Samurai Culture

There was a saying during the Kamakura period: “Tendai is for the imperial court, Shingon for the nobility, Zen for the war- rior class, and Pure Land for the masses.” The saying reflects high consciousness of a class structure and of a multistranded Buddhism, diverse enough to provide disciplines and doctrines suited to the very different social locations of its devotees.

Tendai was founded by the monk Saicho (767–822), who traveled to China and returned to open a monastery at Mt. Hiei. He attempted to synthesize all the sects of Buddhism that perplexed the court with their various claims, teach-

How does a samurai face death? The samurai has to set before all other things the consideration of how to meet his

inevitable end. However clever or capable he may have been, if he is upset and wanting in composure and so makes a poor showing when he comes to face it all, his previous good deeds will be like water and all decent people will despise him so that he will be covered with shame. For when a samurai goes out to battle and does valiant and splen- did exploits and makes a great name, it is only because he made up his mind to die. And if unfortunately he gets the worst of it and he and his head have to part company, when his opponent asks for his name he must declare it at once loudly and clearly and yield up his head with a smile on his lips and without the slightest sign of fear.

Source: Daidoji Yuzan, The Code of the Samurai, A. L. Sadler, Transl. North Clarendon, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1941.

This evocative 1860 photograph of a young samurai captures an expression of dignity and endurance as the samurai class came to an end. The Meiji Reforms abolished the samurai class in the 1860s.

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ing a form of universal salvation with the notion that Buddhahood is found in all sentient beings. This is the teaching of the Lotus Sutra, which, as we have seen, so captured the imagination of the court.

Shingon was founded by the brilliant monk, Kukai (775–835), whose mon- astery on Mt. Koya may still be the most flourishing monastery in Japan. Shin- gon means “True Word”; its focus is the Bodhisattva Vairocana, known in Japan as Dainichi, the supreme Buddha from whom emanates all the others. Shingon took the lead in assimilating the major Shinto deities by equating Dainichi with Amaterasu. Shingon believers are helped toward enlightenment with a rich array of talismans, mantras, rites, and symbolism.

Pure Land has a simple message that accounts in part for the spread of Buddhism, which had been a faith of the elite, to the peasants and townspeople of Japan. In the degenerate post-1052 age of mappo, only the saving grace of Amida Buddha can bring salvation and rebirth in the Pure Land (jodo). Salva- tion requires the simple initiative of calling on the name of Buddha by chanting the nembutsu (literally, “recollection of the Buddha”).

Zen, however, was the Buddhism of the samurai. This presents something of a puzzle, most famously posed by the great popularizer of Zen in the West, D. T. Suzuki: Buddhism is a religion of compassion, of love and peace, which has never been engaged in warlike activities. How is it that Zen came to acti- vate the fighting spirit of the Japanese warrior (Suzuki 1959)?

It was pure historical coincidence that when the monk Eisai returned from his studies with Chinese masters of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in 1191, a new polit- ical order had emerged in Japan. The government was now divided between Kyoto and Kamakura, and finding Kyoto uninterested in his new ideas, Eisai pushed on to Kamakura. There Minamoto Yoritomo had just died, but his widow took a deep interest in the new ideas. She built him a temple and brought attention to his teachings, which became the Rinzai school of Zen. The next important convert was the fourth Hojo regent, Hojo Tokiyori, who was certified by a Chinese master as having attained enlightenment. Soon sam- urai were going to Zen monasteries for training and discipline to make them better warriors. Half a century after, another monk, Dogen (1200–1253), went to China and came back to found a competing branch, Soto Zen. Soto and Rinzai became and remain the two principal forms of Zen Buddhism.

Because of Zen’s stress on self-discipline and control, it appealed to the warriors of the samurai class. It emphasized religious values that harmonized with the spartan warrior values of simplicity, asceticism, discipline in the mar- tial arts, single-minded devotion to one’s lord, and willingness to risk all and even to die for him. Takeda Shingen (1521–1573), one of the great warlords, admonished his followers to practice Zen by quoting an old saying: “The prac- tice of Zen has no secret except standing on the verge of life and death.” There was a kind of salvation in dying for one’s lord. “He who dies for the sake of his lord does not live in vain, whether he goes to the sea and his corpse is left in a

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watery grave, or whether he goes to the mountain and the only shroud for his lifeless body is the mountain grass” (Bellah 1957:93).

But samurai could not become full Zen monks except, as they often did, in retirement. One might suppose there was insuperable conflict between the life devoted to meditation and the activism of the warrior’s life, and indeed Yoshida Kenko wrote critically of the monk Shinkai that

he was wont to sit all day long pondering on his latter end; this is no doubt a very suitable attitude for a recluse but by no means so for a warrior. For so he would have to neglect his military duties and the way of loyalty and filial piety, and he must on the contrary be constantly busy with his affairs both public and private. But whenever he has a little spare time to himself and can be quiet he should not fail to revert to this question of death and reflect carefully on it. (Bellah 1957:92)

Something that can be identified as “Zen culture” emerged from these spar- tan, martial, and Buddhist values. It included a valuation of death, a romantici- zation of the withered, the cold, the lonely; the tea ceremony for its simplicity; sumi-e painting for its monochromatic abstraction, austerity, and tranquility; the severe Zen landscape of rocks, gravel, and natural arrangements; and the self- abnegation of the Zen monkhood. All this is far from the hedonism and desire for plunder usually associated with warrior cultures; the samurai warrior, like the Buddhist monk, lived a life of selfless devotion to his ideals.

The Practice of Zen

Zen rejected the popular Buddhist views that salvation can come from faith in a savior (Amida Buddha) or a magical book (the Lotus Sutra) or recitation of mantras like the nembutsu, and it returned to an older Buddhist view that enlightenment can only happen through the focused, committed effort of the seeker. Two concepts from very early Indian Buddhism became central fea- tures of Zen. From the writings of Nagarjuna (ca. 150–250) the doctrine of sun- yata, or emptiness, urges recognition that nothing has origination, dissipation, permanence—nothing has existence in and of itself. This is true as well for fun- damental Buddhist doctrines, which, to use modern language, he “decon- structed”: karma, self (atman), the fully enlightened one, and nirvana. This view was wedded to a second ancient tradition, the practice of rigorous meditation (dhyana, from which derives the Chinese term, Chan, and the Japanese Zen). On what does one meditate? Not on the image of Buddha, not on the Lotus Sutra, not on the nembutsu, but on emptiness itself. The goal remains attain- ment of Buddhahood, but what Buddhahood might be is, of course, the prob- lem. According to the seventeenth-century Diamond-Hard Wisdom of Mind, by Suzuki Shosan, “What we call Buddhahood is the fact that all things are origi- nally empty. Fundamentally, there is no me, no you, no Dharma, no Buddha. Buddhahood is complete separation from everything, letting go and being free” (Braverman 1994:29).

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The doctrine of emptiness swept aside almost all other doctrines (paradox- ically, it was itself a doctrine); it removed the need for texts and creeds. Texts, creeds, doctrines, and relics were, in fact, part of the illusory nonreality of the world. They took special aim at the intellectual world of ideas, categories, logic, and reason. The “wisdom of the belly” (hara) was superior to any wis- dom of study, preaching, reciting, or rites. This wisdom was gained by “sitting in oblivion,” that is, by meditation on emptiness. The Zen form of enlighten- ment is known as satori. For Zen masters, it was the intellect, more than the body (which perplexed Hindu mystics), that stood in the way of enlightenment. Zen masters were keenly aware that breaking the hold of the structured world of ideas and concepts, of reason itself, to get to the state of emptiness that is satori is extraordinarily difficult. Thought keeps creeping back in. If reason is the problem, then perhaps deliberate, befuddling un-reason was the way to break its hold. So at the early stages of movement toward satori, when empti- ness is still a distant goal, Zen novices are given intellectual puzzles called koan to meditate on. These are very far from the kinds of mantras and sutras used in meditation in other forms of Buddhism. Koan once meant an authoritative pub- lic document (gong’an or “public case” in Chinese) but changed to mean obscure, illogical little stories presented as “puzzles” to “solve” or interpret, such as “the sound of one hand clapping.” D. T. Suzuki provides some exam- ples; one is an exploration of the nature of Self:

Ki of Unryu-in monastery:

Q: “What is my Self ?”

A. “It is like you and me.”

Q: “In this case there is no duality.”

A: “Eighteen thousand miles off !”

The goal is not to solve the koan-puzzle in the way one would solve a mathe- matical formula or a logical puzzle; its goal is to break through thought-barri- ers to the direct existential insight of satori itself.

The nature of satori has always been a mystery, perhaps the key mystery of Zen. It is a postulated reality that hardly anyone ever successfully attains or maintains. By definition it is indescribable—anything capturable in words can- not be the wordless experience of Zen. (The influence of Daoism is evident here; “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao” could also be said of the elusive experience of satori.) Nevertheless, there are some descriptive accounts to inspire seekers, such as the one below, followed by a visual expres- sion of Zen Buddhism.

Kensho (seeing into one’s own nature), too, is something I have experi- enced. From the twenty-seventh to the twenty-eighth day of the eighth month of my sixty-first year, I felt completely detached from life and death and in touch with my true nature. I danced with gratitude, feeling that nothing existed. At that time, you could have threatened to cut off my head and it wouldn’t have meant a thing. Yet after thirty days like this, I decided

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it didn’t suit me. It was nothing more than a realization based on a particu- lar state of mind. So I discarded it and returned to my previous state. I filled my heart with death and practiced uncompromisingly. As I might have known, it had all been a big delusion. And here I am now, treasuring this bag of manure called Shosan. (Braverman 1994:36)

An attempt is sometimes made to capture the state of satori in a curious English term: is-ness. That is, pure being; “a direct pointing to the soul of man”—but not soul in any Western or Hindu sense, only seeing into one’s nature, that pure, empty, inner core. The emphasis in the statement should be on “direct,” unmediated by concepts, words, symbols, or images.

One of the most beloved attempts to visually rather than verbally express the nature of Zen enlightenment is the ox-herding tale, which is a sequence of 10 drawings first conceived in China during the Song dynasty. An ox-herd boy searches for his lost ox. The ox, a simple and common farmer’s companion, symbolizes the boy’s own nature. In the first six images the boy holds the rope and looks for his ox, spots footprints, catches sight of his ox, gets the rope round his neck, and finally masters him. This much represents the seeker’s effort through self-discipline and meditation to grasp his true nature. In the sev- enth scene, the ox is now forgotten; “you are a man of no-Mind.” The eighth is an empty circle; the boy and ox have both disappeared. The ninth is a scene of pure nature, trees, streams, hills, with neither boy nor ox; and finally in the last scene the boy has returned to the world, and we see him in a marketplace as an old man carrying his few belongings on a pole, indistinguishable in appearance from other persons still fully embedded in their lives, far from encounters with satori. As Shosan comments on the tenth picture:

“Entering the Marketplace with Giving Hands” depicts a selfless person with outstretched hands. For him, delusion and enlightenment, the igno- rant and the saintly, are all the same. Whatever he does, nothing obstructs him. Evil becomes good. Liquor stores and fish markets become places of conversion to Buddhahood. (Braverman 1994:97)

Reality has now been grasped fully and it seems the boy is back to the beginning, but not exactly. The Japanese term kono-mama means “this-ness” and sono-mama means “that-ness.” Mama means something like “as it is-ness.” Or, we might use a somewhat better English term for “is-ness”: “immediacy.” There is nothing beyond, and one directly connects to the immediate reality of trees, streams, fish markets, and other people.

Zen Buddhism’s Institutions

Somehow one doesn’t expect Zen’s anti-intellectual, antistructural, and antirational philosophy to be embedded in a rigid hierarchy of monasteries, a specific lineage of patriarchs, and highly regimented monastic culture. Yet that is another of Zen’s strange contradictions: the contradiction between direct unmediated experience and a high degree of institutionalization. During the

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period of the formation of Zen as a warrior’s religion, the four large Kyoto tem- ples and five large Kamakura temples were given first-rank status. A second- level class of 60 temples was then established, and there were 200 additional temples scattered elsewhere. Monks and warriors who had achieved enlighten- ment were given written certificates in proof of their status!

The Zen monastery is a severe place to which one does not easily gain admission, and the discipline practiced there bears traces of the warrior culture it was once linked to. In The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, Suzuki describes what it is like (with another series of parable-like illustrations). The would-be monk arrives and begs to be let in but is told to go away. He spreads out his cloth near the door to meditate and wait. Sometime later, maybe in the middle of the night, they let him into the lodging room. He spends the night inside in medita- tion. The rejection and humiliation may go on for days. Finally he will be given a place in the zendo (meditation hall) and given initiation into the brotherhood. But he has still to meet the master (roshi). Finally he is taken to meet the roshi and allowed to join the other monks in evening zazen (seated meditation). Medi- tation may be overseen by a monk with a whip to give a warning lash to the nov- ice whose back slumps in sleep. The real beginning of his Zen life is when the master gives him his first koan. But the relation between him and the master may be filled with tension, for the master’s task is to monitor the breakdown, sometimes compared to a psychological breakdown, of the false structures of the mind. The time not spent in meditation is devoted to simple, menial, real- life tasks like sweeping, carrying water, chopping wood, and gardening.

Zen Culture: Zen and the Arts

The interwoven culture of Bushido and Zen produced corresponding expressions in the arts for the aristocratic samurai class. If the soul is identified with the entire universe, then one has, or should develop, a close affinity to a hummingbird hovering at a spring blossom or to a length of bamboo under a new fall of snow. Looking closely at the small, the insignificant, the fleeting, brings you closer to yourself and your own impermanence, linking your death to myriad small deaths of all beings and all moments, and gives you tranquility in its contemplation. Zen painters aimed to capture such moments in spontane- ous ink on silk paintings known as sumi-e.

The Zen garden is not like any other garden style in the world. Forget the luxurious density of flowers in an English country garden; forget even Japan’s own glorious landscapes of coast and hillside; a Zen garden may be three care- fully arranged stones in the middle of a bed of raked gravel. The most famous Zen garden is one created at Ryoanji in Kyoto in 1499 for monks to view while meditating. It consists of 15 rocks of immense value (huge sums can be paid for the perfect aesthetically shaped rock) arranged in five groups in a “sea” of per- fectly raked white sand.

An aesthetic value came to the fore during the feudal period that gives con- ceptual unity to the various cultural strands coming down to the present: the

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austere lifestyle of the warrior, the severity of Zen Buddhism, the starkness of the Zen garden, the typical themes of haiku and sumi-e:

The concept of wabi . . . was linked to various traditions—classical and medieval poetry, noh drama, Zen Buddhism, eremitic practices. It was glossed by a rich, not specifically artistic, vocabulary—by words like chill, withered, rustic, lonely, pure, austere, lowly, and imperfect. Descriptive of pecu- liar objects (crudely lacquered caddies, celadons with yellow-brown glazes, storage or water jars of rough workmanship), it also evoked a mentality. (Berry 1994:277)

Perhaps the tea ceremony best came to embody wabi, though as Berry has said, the value permeates Japanese culture. Tea was brought to Japan by the monk Eisai in 1191 in the form of seeds that he planted on the hillside outside Kyoto. Tea drinking began in temples and quickly spread in all social direc- tions, first among the elite at the shogun’s court and soon to the urban mer- chant class. Tea’s practical function is captured in a legend of its origin. Bodhidharma (Daruma), the first Zen patriarch, spent nine straight years med- itating before a blank wall, struggling constantly against falling asleep. Finally in exasperation he ripped off his eyelids and threw them on the ground. Where they fell, the first glossy-leaved tea plants grew. Later when his disciples also had trouble staying awake in meditation, they began making a drink of the leaves of the tea plant. This kept them awake.

In the chaotic sixteenth century, Berry writes, elite Japanese in Kyoto and Kamakura began keeping tea diaries to record details of the parties they attended, the names of the hosts and guests, details about objects in the rooms (generally works of art from China), and menus of the food served afterward. Tea drinking became a social passion, which more resembled a modern gallery opening than our image of the “Japanese tea ceremony.” People milled around, were served tea by servants, and admired the art. The best known of such par- ties were those given by military men of highest rank, including the shogun.

But a social transformation occurred in the sixteenth century as tea was appropriated by commoners and a group of experts eventually founded “schools” of tea practice and “lineages” of tea masters who carried specific tea traditions forward in time. Under these experts, tea was transformed from a vehicle for elite communication and a respite from war to a ritual in which a host himself humbly prepares the tea in the presence of his guests and serves them. Special rooms or buildings were created just for the serving of tea in a standard four and a half mat room. Tea parties became more intimate and less a show of one’s Chinese paintings than a place to value a few simple, perhaps even rustic, functional items: a rude kettle, a bamboo whisk, a roughly glazed cup. Thus the simple act of drinking a cup of plain tea was raised to an art form, a ritual, and an embodiment of a unique Japanese aesthetic.

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REFERENCES CITED Baker, Joan Stanley. 1984. Japanese Art. London: Thames and Hudson. Barnes, Gina L. 1988. Protohistoric Yamato: Archaeology of the First Japanese State. Ann

Arbor: The University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies. Bellah, Robert. 1957. Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan. Boston: Bea-

con press. Berry, Mary Elizabeth. 1994. The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto. Berkeley: University of

California Press. Braverman, Arthur, Transl. 1994. Warrior of Zen: The Diamond-Hard Wisdom Mind of

Suzuki Shosan. New York: Kodansha International. Brown, Delmer M., Editor. 1993. Ancient Japan. The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 1.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crump, Thomas. 1991. The Death of an Emperor: Japan at the Crossroads. New York: Oxford

University Press. Ebersole, Gary