Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West (Studies in Comparative Early Modern History)

Religion and the Early Modern State

Views from China, Russia, and the West

How did state power impinge on the religion of the common people? This perennial issue has been sharpened as historians uncover the process of confessionalization or acculturation, by which state and church officials collaborated in ambitious programs of Protestant or Catholic reform, intended to change the religious consciousness and the behavior of ordinary men and women. For England, in particular, the debate continues as to whether a reformation in this broad sense, up and down the social ladder, was in the end able to prevail over the stubborn resilience of ancient habits and beliefs. In the belief that specialists in one area of the globe can learn from the questions posed by colleagues working in the same period in other regions, this volume sets the topic in a wider framework. Thirteen essays, grouped in themes affording parallel views of England and Europe, Tsarist Russia, and Ming China, show a spectrum of possibilities for what early modern governments tried to achieve by regulating religious life and for how religious communities evolved in new directions, either in keeping with or in spite of official injunctions.

James D. Tracy teaches in the history department of the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War (Cambridge, 2002) and Europe’s Reformations, 1450–1650. He is the editor of City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2000), The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and Global Trade, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, 1991), and of the Journal of Early Modern History. Marguerite Ragnow is the associate director of the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota.

Studies in Comparative Early Modern History Center for Early Modern History University of Minnesota Cambridge University Press

Previously published in series: I. The Rise of Merchant Empires, edited by James D. Tracy (1990) II. The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, edited by James D. Tracy (1991) III. Implicit Understandings, edited by Stuart B. Schwartz (1994) IV. City Walls, edited by James D. Tracy (2000)

RELIGION and the EARLY MODERN STATE views from china, russia, and the west

Edited by

JAMES D. TRACY University of Minnesota

MARGUERITE RAGNOW Center for Early Modern History, University of Minnesota

published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon ´ 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 2004 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2004 Printed in the United States of America Typeface Palatino 10/12 pt.

System LATEX 2ε [TB]

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Religion and the early modern state : views from China, Russia, and the West / edited by James D. Tracy, Marguerite Ragnow. p. cm. – (Studies in comparative early modern history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-521-82825-2 1. Religion and state – History. I. Tracy, James D. II. Ragnow, Marguerite, 1955– III. Series. BL65.S8R445 2004 322 .1 09–dc22 2003068731 ISBN 0 521 82825 2 hardback

In honor of STANFORD E. LEHMBERG on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Minnesota

Contents

Contributors Acknowledgments Preface

page xi xiii xv

Thomas Mayer

Introduction

Stanford E. Lehmberg and James D. Tracy

PART I: LIVED RELIGION AND OFFICIAL RELIGION 1 The Alternative Moral Universe of Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

Richard Shek

2 Ecclesiastical Elites and Popular Belief and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Russia

Robert O. Crummey

3 The State, the Churches, Sociability, and Folk Belief in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

Willem Frijhoff

4 Communal Ritual, Concealed Belief: Layers of Response to the Regulation of Ritual in Reformation England

Caroline J. Litzenberger

PART II: FORMS OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY 5 Spirits of the Penumbra: Deities Worshiped in More Than One Chinese Pantheon Romeyn Taylor

121

Contents

6 Orthodoxy and Revolt: The Role of Religion in the Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

154

Frank E. Sysyn

7 The Huguenot Minority in Early Modern France

185

Raymond A. Mentzer

8 State Religion and Puritan Resistance in Early Seventeenth-Century England

207

Paul S. Seaver

PART III: THE SOCIAL ARTICULATION OF BELIEF 9 False Miracles and Unattested Dead Bodies: Investigations into Popular Cults in Early Modern Russia

253

Eve Levin

10 Liturgical Rites: The Medium, the Message, the Messenger, and the Misunderstanding

284

Susan C. Karant-Nunn

11 Self-correction and Social Change in the Spanish Counter-Reformation

302

Sara T. Nalle

12 The Disenchantment of Space: Salle Church and the Reformation

324

Eamon Duffy

AN EPILOGUE AT THE PARISH LEVEL 13 Popular Religion and the Reformation in England: A View from Cornwall

351

Nicholas Orme

Selected Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Works Index

377 387

Contributors

Robert O. Crummey University of California at Davis Eamon Duffy Magdalene College, Cambridge University Willem Frijhoff Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Susan C. Karant-Nunn University of Arizona Stanford E. Lehmberg, emeritus University of Minnesota Eve Levin University of Kansas Caroline J. Litzenberger Portland State University Thomas Mayer Augustana College Raymond A. Mentzer University of Iowa Sara T. Nalle William Paterson College

xii

Contributors

Nicholas Orme University of Exeter Paul S. Seaver Stanford University Richard Shek California State University at Sacramento Frank E. Sysyn University of Alberta Romeyn Taylor, emeritus University of Minnesota James D. Tracy University of Minnesota

Acknowledgments

T his

volume represents the work of many hands and voices. The conference on which it is based had financial support from the University of Minnesota’s Department of History, the College of Liberal Arts, the University’s McKnight Special Events Fund, and the Center for Early Modern History. This made it possible to include colleagues from England in our discussions: Eamon Duffy, Nicholas Orme, and Pamela Tudor-Craig, Lady Wedgewood. To assist the presenters in revising their papers, several of our graduate students kept a pr´ecis raisonn´e of the discussion: Jodi Campbell, Noel Delgado, Jonathan Good, Don Harreld, Diana Laulainen-Schein, Dorothea Sartain, Anne Thompson, and Jennifer Turnham. The conference ran smoothly thanks to Debra Salata, then the assistant director of the Center for Early Modern History. Editorial assistance was ably provided by Noel Delgado. Finally, the volume presented here is a small but heartfelt thanks to a friend and colleague of many years whose hard work, natural graciousness, and keen wit have sustained us in times good and bad: Stanford Lehmberg.

xiii

Stanford Lehmberg, at the lych-gate of St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, St. Paul, MN, where he was organist and choir director for many years. Photo by Mike Long.

Preface STANFORD E. LEHMBERG, HISTORIAN

A lthough officially a student of Christopher Morris at Cambridge, Stan Lehmberg was really the first Ph.D. of the dean of Tudor historians in the second half of the twentieth century, Sir Geoffrey Elton, if indeed it is not closer to the mark to speak of the two as fellow laborers at that early stage in both their careers. Like Elton, Lehmberg made his mark on Tudor history by importing the methods pioneered by medievalists in the study of English history, replacing the heavy reliance on printed sources characteristic of earlier generations of historians of the sixteenth century, including Elton’s teacher Sir John Neale, with the gospel of original documents and their careful exploitation. In part, Lehmberg’s and Elton’s careers ran parallel in their emphasis on political and administrative history, but in an equally large part they diverged in two significant ways: the importance of ideas and of religion. While Elton was never entirely comfortable in – or persuaded of the centrality of – either domain, not even in the case of his hero Thomas Cromwell, Lehmberg made them both very much his own. This process began with Lehmberg’s first book on Sir Thomas Elyot, best known for his Book named the governor, which Lehmberg edited at the same time for Everyman. In the early sixties, it was daring to work on Elyot, in part because Pearl Hogrefe had already laid claim to him, in part because intellectual history was fading fast. And it has always been dangerous for historians to venture into biography. None of this deterred Lehmberg, no more than it did when he later added a major study of the Elizabethan minister Sir Walter Mildmay. In tandem with these works, Lehmberg published a series of articles on early Tudor humanism, especially its relation to nascent Henrician state religion. A similar concern with the exercise of authority, especially over religion, came through in a pair of ground-breaking articles, one on the use of parliamentary attainder in Henry VIII’s reign and another on the exercise

xvi

Thomas Mayer

of the royal supremacy through the king’s vicegerent, his chief minister Cromwell. Lehmberg’s most important work, like these early biographies and articles, comes in pairs. First, at Elton’s urging, were two volumes on the Henrician parliaments from 1529 to Henry’s death, excluding the earliest ones for which insufficient evidence survives. (One of Lehmberg’s Ph.D. students would nonetheless complete a thesis on this topic, especially Cardinal Wolsey’s role.) The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (1970) adopted a novel approach to this well-known turning point in English history by treating all of the parliament’s work, not just the cataclysmic legislation ushering in the break with Rome, and all of the parliament, that is, including the House of Lords, which in the past usually had been ignored completely, as well as the southern convocation of the clergy, which met in conjunction with parliament. Eschewing the statistical analysis of parliamentary behavior then in vogue, Lehmberg chose a basically narrative approach, supplemented with analysis of the membership. A second volume, The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1536– 1547 (1977), completed the legislative history of this turbulent reign. Both books adhered fairly closely to the now under pressure Eltonian line that the 1530s saw a revolution in English history, engineered by Cromwell. Perhaps more important, if almost subconsciously, the volumes on parliament demonstrated how a medieval occasion for taking counsel, the literal meaning of parliament, gradually became an institution with a self-conscious identity founded in procedure, helping to explain Elizabeth I’s epic struggles with her parliaments as well as the English Civil War. These books have a permanent place in the study of Tudor history as they have already helped to reorient the study of parliament as demonstrated in the work of Jennifer Loach, Michael Graves or Norman Jones, and David Dean. Perhaps nearer to Stan’s heart and likely to be even more enduring, is his second duo, two studies of the English cathedrals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: The Reformation of Cathedrals: Cathedrals in English Society, 1485–1603 (1988) and Cathedrals under Siege: Cathedrals in English Society, 1600–1700 (1996). Here again, Lehmberg extended the medievalists’ work into a period about which very little had been known, linking the well-studied medieval cathedrals to the magisterial work of Norman Sykes and other works on the eighteenth-century English church. Following much the same approach as in the books on parliament, Lehmberg tried to get at how these great churches worked. He assembled a massive prosopography of all cathedral clergy, ransacking the archives of every cathedral in England in the process. Focusing once more on institutional change, including a

Preface

xvii

fascinating investigation of cathedral finance, Lehmberg yet made room for a good deal of attention to perhaps his first love, cathedral music and musicians, as well as writing by the clergy. His abiding passion for his adopted church comes through in both, perhaps especially in the lavish illustrations, many of which he provided. Finally, in both volumes, Lehmberg pioneered for professional historians the now very important study of funeral monuments. The conclusion of the second volume is tinged with melancholy in the judgment that the cathedrals had lost a great deal of ground by the year 1700. His is an imposing if somewhat elegiac corpus of work. It may yet be that Stan had his most important impact as a teacher of both undergraduate and graduate students. A gripping lecturer who always had time for questions and made himself easily approachable, he achieved great renown on the first score. His lunches with particularly favored students are legendary. He fostered many an incipient interest in Tudor England into nearly his own intense involvement with it. The collapse of the job market for Ph.D.s, which coincided almost exactly with Lehmberg’s move to Minnesota, limited his success in maintaining the university’s proud tradition of international leadership in his field, stretching back to Wallace Notestein at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Stan managed to attract good students and make them better. He treated them all with the same affection he showed for his undergrads and, perhaps most important, allowed them sufficient latitude to make their own mistakes on the way to finishing their degrees (and after!). This is a rare quality among teachers of graduate students and another mark of Stan’s stature as a historian, secure in his own work and the knowledge that he has contributed a great deal to the study of state and religion in early modern England. Thomas Mayer Augustana College, 2002

Religion and the Early Modern State

Views from China, Russia, and the West

Introduction stanford e. lehmberg and james d. tracy

T his book owes its origins to a desire to bring together two divergent approaches to the English Reformation. Early writers, most notably John Strype, viewed the Reformation primarily as an event in political history; they collected and analyzed the documents which established the independent Church of England.1 Writing in 1936, Sir Maurice Powicke went so far as to say that “the one definite thing which can be said about the Reformation in England is that it was an act of State.”2 The classic modern account of Reformation politics is that by A.G. Dickens, first published in 1964.3 This approach remained dominant through the 1970s. Several of Sir Geoffrey Elton’s magisterial works described the religious policies of Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell,4 while the statutes passed by Henry VIII’s parliaments to regulate religion were studied by Stanford Lehmberg in his books The Reformation Parliament and The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII.5 Biographies of Thomas Cranmer naturally emphasized the primary role of the archbishop of Canterbury in enforcing reforms.6 Works of this sort see the Reformation as coming rapidly and being imposed from the top down. But another sort of historiography, gaining popularity in the 1980s, viewed Reformation as a slow process working its way up from the bottom as Lutheran, Zwinglian, and Calvinistic 1 2 3 4 5 6

John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (London, 1721); Annals of the Reformation, 4 vols. (London, 1709–31). Sir Maurice Powicke, The Reformation in England (Oxford, 1941), 1. A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London, 1964; 2nd ed., University Park, PA, 1989). G.R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge, 1972); Reform and Renewal (Cambridge, 1973). Stanford E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970) and The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII, 1536–1547 (Cambridge, 1977). Jasper Ridley, Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1962); Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996).

Stanford E. Lehmberg and James D. Tracy

views gradually gained acceptance by common people.7 Another perspective on popular belief emphasized the reluctance of many men and women to abandon their traditional Catholic beliefs. J.J. Scarisbrick and Robert Whiting were among the early exponents of this argument; Scarisbrick providing a general account and Whiting a more specialized examination of the southwest of England.8 The finest study of “Traditional Religion in England 1400–1500” – that is its subtitle – is The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy.9 Despite some attempts to draw these different approaches together,10 they have tended to remain separate. Historians of official religion do indeed talk with their colleagues examining popular belief and culture,11 but they have not yet attempted a synthesis of their work. It may be that the time has come for such a comprehensive new interpretation to gain acceptance. In any case, it was our hope that pulling together a series of essays by leaders of both camps might be an appropriate step in that direction. Each section of this volume includes a study of a part of England. Interestingly enough, these are pieces of local or regional history, a fact suggesting the growing importance of local studies upon which more general future accounts can be based. Eamon Duffy considers the changes in a single church, Salle in Norfolk; Caroline Litzenberger deals primarily with the diocese of Gloucester and its bishop, John Hooper; and Nicholas Orme examines popular religion and the Reformation in Cornwall. Paul Seaver’s study of state religion and Puritan resistance in the early seventeenth century, while it has a broader context, is based on events in London. All of these suggest fascinating comparisons and contrasts, some of them purely English but some with theoretical implications stretching far beyond the British Isles. Memories of England’s Reformation traveled around the globe, carried by the agents of Tudor–Stuart England’s commercial outreach. During the period when Iran’s Shah ‘Abbˆas I (ruled 1587–1629) was extending the trading network of his Shi’ite kingdom – while fighting wars with the Sunni sultans of the Ottoman Empire – Anthony Sherley arrived in 7

8 9 10 11

The distinction between these two approaches was first set out in “The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation” by Christopher Haig, in The English Reformation Revised, ed. Haig (Cambridge, 1987), 19–33. J.J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984); Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People (Cambridge, 1989). Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992). The most important is Christopher Haig, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993). Lehmberg and Scarisbrick were both students of Elton and for a time corresponded occasionally.

Introduction

Iran as a merchant adventurer (1598). With an implicit bow to Elizabeth I’s success in repressing Catholic worship in Protestant England, Sherley regarded with approval the shah’s policy of enforced religious uniformity in Iran, dictated, he assumed, by reasons of state: “On the one hand, the shah thus eliminated internal division within his realm; on the other, he strengthens himself against the Turk.”12 Nearly sixty years later, Paul Rycaut began a long period of service as English consul in Smyrna. During England’s Civil War, members of Rycaut’s family lost their offices because of their adhesion to the royalist cause; Rycaut was reminded of these events by a zealous mufti who had persuaded the grand vizier (1662) to raze all Christian churches that had been rebuilt in Istanbul after the fire of 1660: “Thus we may see how troublesome Hypocrisie and Puritanism are in all places where they gain a superiority.”13 As these comments suggest, observers of politics in the early modern era took it for granted that a state conscious of its own interests would or at least ought to guide the religious behavior of its subjects. Until fairly recently, similar assumptions about the primacy of state policy in religious affairs have informed historical writing about Europe’s Protestant and Catholic Reformations. For example, Karl Brandi’s German History in the Age of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation covers much of the same ground as his monumental Emperor Charles V, stressing conflicts between Charles V (ruled 1519–1555) and Germany’s Protestant princes.14 But scholarship of the last four decades or so has made it abundantly clear that one cannot imagine the religious life of the people as simply decided for them by their rulers. The term “popular religion” seemed useful for differentiating the beliefs of ordinary men and women from those of the governing elite, until it was pointed out that the common folk and their betters often shared the same religion, even if each locality preserved usages frowned on by church authorities.15 “Folk belief” is perhaps a better way of describing the whole complex of traditional thinking and ritual against which reformers of all persuasions directed their fire.

12 13

14 15

Antony Sherley, Opmerckelijke Reistochten na Persien (Leiden, 1706), 14; copy in the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota. Paul Rycaut, A History of the Turkish Empire, from the Year 1623 to the Year 1673 (London, 1680), 104–5; copy in the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota. Cf. sig. B-Bv, where Rycaut mentions having served for eighteen years as consul in Smyrna, “prior to which my loyal family was banned from office.” K´arl Brandi, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation und Gegenreformation (Munich, 1928/1942/1960); Kaiser Karl V (Munich, 1938). William A. Christian, Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981).

Stanford E. Lehmberg and James D. Tracy

But if the “lived” religion of the people was somehow different from the “official” religion promoted from on high, what was the relation between the two? As Willem Frijhoff notes in this volume, scholars pursuing “a narrative that tries to get hold of neglected dimensions” in religious history have conceptualized this relationship in several different ways. “Protestantization” is a good description of the aims of the reformers in Calvinist areas like the Dutch Republic, where the aim was to expunge altogether the idea that prayer and worship could ever be instruments for inducing the Lord God to intervene directly in human affairs. “Acculturation” points to the fact that religious reform was often a program of social elites, aiming to raise the uneducated and unwashed to their own higher level.16 “Confessionalization” defines a paradigm especially appropriate for small and medium-sized princely territories in Germany – whether Lutheran, Calvinist, or Catholic – where civil and ecclesiastical authorities worked hand-in-glove to instruct the people in the doctrine of the chosen confession and to make them conform to its way of life.17 But though each of these categories has merit, none of them recognizes the common folk who were the object of various meliorative ministrations as having an active will of their own. Hence three of the authors represented here – Willem Frijhoff, Caroline Litzenberger, and Susan Karant-Nunn – prefer to characterize the relationship between “lived” and “official” religion as a process of “accommodation,” in which people took what they wanted from the message of reform, and reshaped it according to their own needs. But a clarification of concepts only permits the real questions to emerge more sharply. If (as seems to be the case) programs of religious change were pushed through most thoroughly where state and church authorities worked closely together, what was the basis of their collaboration? In particular, what was the state’s perceived interest in religious reform? And if the objectives of state officials and zealous pastors differed – as surely they must have – how did they differ? As for the commoners, one would like to know which parts of the message of reform they found appealing, and why. But since most inhabitants of most European countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were illiterate peasants, how does one determine what they thought one way or the other? Perhaps the first step toward an answer is to accept the idea that the religious individualism 16 17

Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge, 1985). Wolfgang Reinhard, Heinz Schilling, Die Katholische Konfessionalisierung (Munster, ¨ 1995); Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” in Handbook of European History, 1400– 1600, Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy eds., 2 vols. (Leiden, 1994), II: 641–82.

Introduction

of these early modern centuries seems now to have been overrated by earlier scholars – on this point see Eamon Duffy’s essay. This means that questions about the beliefs and behavior of ordinary men and women have to focus on the communities in which they lived.18 But here further questions arise: are we to believe that villages and small towns of four or five hundred years ago were communities in a moral sense, as well as a physical or legal sense? Or were they merely collections of warring factions and competing material interests, each seeking to cloak its private purposes under the mantle of the common good? Paradoxical as it may seem, one can sometimes see complex issues more clearly by raising the complexity to a higher level. When Antony Sherley and Paul Rycaut compared their home country to one or another Islamic realm, they applied familiar categories to a new and unfamiliar situation, as travelers invariably do. But is it not also possible that each gained a sharper view of England’s experience by observing what seemed to be analogous phenomena in a strange land? The premise of this volume is that students of religious history in a given area can indeed gain perspective from the findings of colleagues working on what seem to be analogous problems in different parts of the globe. The point is perhaps easiest to grasp in reference to the Christian tradition. Just as much has been gained by moving beyond the denominationally oriented historiography of an earlier era, as proponents of the “confessionalization” thesis do by discerning common patterns in Catholic and Protestant efforts at reform, there is much to be gained also by looking for common patterns at a deeper historical depth, between Eastern and Western Christianity. There are elements of religious life that transcend the limits of any particular tradition. China’s imperial government shared with European states an interest in promoting orthodoxy, even if the respective definitions of orthodoxy were quite different; and its subjects shared with Europeans a remarkable facility for interpreting religious teachings in their own way. The essays are grouped under three major headings. In keeping with the volume’s focus, each section concludes with an essay on England. Part I, “Lived Religion and Official Religion,” frames the basic contrast between the two. Richard Shek’s “The Alternative Moral Universe of Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China” defines orthodoxy in China as having a “social-ethical” content that all of the officially approved 18

Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, ed. and tr. H.C. Erik Middlefort, Mark U. Edwards (Durham, N.C. 1982). Prof. Moeller’s essay, originally published in German in 1961, launched a whole subfield of scholarship on the urban Reformation, especially in Germany.

Stanford E. Lehmberg and James D. Tracy

religious traditions promoted; accordingly, adherents of the “Eternal Mother” tradition were persecuted for refusing to conform to these behavioral norms. Robert Crummey’s “Ecclesiastical Elites and Popular Belief and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Russia” examines the complex reasons for resistance to the imposition of uniform service books by Tsar Aleksei and his reform-minded churchmen; the “Old Belief” movement rested on popular attachment to specifically Russian ritual gestures, the courage of martyrs, and apologetic writings circulated by dissident monastic communities. Willem Frijhoff’s “The State, the Churches, Sociability, and Folk Belief in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic” distinguishes the aims of the Dutch Reformed Church from those of the magistrates; while the former struggled to root out the “instrumental religion” that was a legacy of the Catholic era, the latter supported the “official church” for reasons of social control, while seeking also to build “civic values” that transcended sectarian differences. Caroline Litzenberger’s “Communal Ritual, Concealed Belief: Layers of Response to the Regulation of Ritual in Reformation England” centers on what the reformers sought to change, as exemplified by two episcopal visitations of the diocese of Gloucester; so as to school the people to trust in God’s Word alone, no traditional gesture or cult object that suggested the old idea of the efficacious power of ritual was to be allowed to continue. In fact, since compliance depended on the cooperation of local parish leaders, worship spaces were changed a good deal less than ardent reformers desired. Part II, “Forms of Religious Identity,” gets at the collective aspect of religious behavior by looking at some of the ways in which shared belief and worship can form a sense of group identity. Romeyn Taylor’s “Spirits of the Penumbra: Deities Worshiped in more than one Chinese Pantheon” starts from a distinction between popular religion broadly understood and no less than four forms of worship officially promoted by imperial officials (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and an officially sanctioned form of popular belief). The “spirits” of the title are witness to the flexibility of religious practice, as supernatural beings keep their names (but not much else) when cultivated in nonofficial places of worship. Frank Sysyn’s “Orthodoxy and Revolt: The Role of Religion in the Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Uprising Against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth” traces the emergence of a sense of distinctiveness among Ruthenians or Orthodox Ukrainians to their disadvantaged position in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania; when the accommodation with the state sought by church leaders was frustrated by the rising zeal of the Counter-Reformation, the hierarchy turned to the cossacks, defenders now not just of their own interest

Introduction

but of the Ruthenian people and their faith. Raymond Mentzer’s “The Huguenot Minority in Early Modern France” explores what it meant for France’s Protestants to live under an increasingly hostile Catholic state: Huguenots lacked the state support that promoted implementation of moral reform in Calvinist lands, and their numbers were depleted through intermarriage. Yet official measures directed against them seem to have combined with their own internal discipline to create a community strong enough to withstand persecution, including Louis XIV’s Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Paul Seaver’s “State Religion and Puritan Resistance in Early Seventeenth-Century England” examines a case in which state pressure was even less effective in discouraging beliefs deemed undesirable; efforts by England’s bishops to discipline wayward Puritan preachers had the full backing of the crown, especially under Charles I (1625–1642), but failed utterly to suppress a movement that had strong social roots, especially among lay leaders at the parish level. Part III, “The Social Articulation of Belief,” gives examples of how religious belief is itself shaped and reconfigured by being implanted in a given social framework. Eve Levin’s “False Miracles and Unattested Dead Bodies: Investigations into Popular Cults in Early Modern Russia” deals with eighteenth-century efforts to impose limits on the popular credulity that allowed saints to sprout up in great profusion; though supported in their efforts by Tsar Peter the Great, the churchmen who tried to channel popular belief within canonical rules of scrutiny were not always consistent among themselves, partly because of sharp divisions between men who quite consciously drew their ideas of reform from Protestant or Catholic sources. Susan Karant-Nunn’s “Liturgical Rites: The Medium, the Message, the Messenger, and the Misunderstanding” broaches the question of how reforms of worship were received by ordinary men and women. If Lutheran pastors in Germany had the firm intention of counteracting all vestiges of the Catholic belief that ritual might influence God, their success was only partial, for worshipers clung stubbornly to their belief in the warding-off of evil through ritual, especially the ritual of baptism. Sara Nalle’s “Self-Correction and Social Change in the Spanish Counter-Reformation” takes a more optimistic view of what the reformers could accomplish, at least in the sphere of behavior. In keeping with the new idea that sexual relations between engaged couples were sinful, one finds a decline in the rate for first children born sooner than nine months after marriage; and in keeping with an emphasis on the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, the faithful spent more on soul-masses for their dear departed and less on the elaborate funeral processions dating back to pre-Christian times. Eamon Duffy’s “The

Stanford E. Lehmberg and James D. Tracy

Disenchantment of Space: Salle Church and the Reformation” shows in detail what the Protestant program of worship meant at the parish level. Instead of a worship space marked by “multiple corrals” for gild and family chapels, there was but the one space, for the hearing of God’s Word; instead of a congregation compartmentalized as the village itself was, with groups like plough-boys and village maidens each having a role, there was but the one parish community, in which no one but the traditional lay leaders had a specific function. Finally, by way of an Epilogue, Nicholas Orme’s “Popular Religion and the Reformation in England: A View from Cornwall” takes a longterm view of religious life in a part of England where many people still spoke the Celtic language of their ancestors. The Reformation had real popular support in Cornwall, and it changed the landscape of worship forever: as opposed to multiple chapels scattered throughout the parish, devoted to multiple saints, there was now only the parish church itself, in keeping with the reformers’ aim of “emphasizing the community of the people of God, rather than allowing it to divide into coteries” centered on the cults of different saints. But people did not so readily abandon their social habits; well into the eighteenth century, each parish still had its annual church-ale, and the festival of the patron saint was still observed, albeit now in private houses, not in public. Quite apart from the division of the volume into three parts, there are many points at which essays on different parts of the world link up with one another, of which three might be mentioned by way of illustration. The first is the tendency of ordinary worshipers to attach more importance than their religious superiors do to the “instrumental” or apotropaic properties of ritual action. To undermine this common belief was a major aim of Protestant reformers, regardless of their theological differences (Litzenberger, Karant-Nunn); Dutch Calvinists took the same view, while their Catholic rivals saw this aspect of folk belief as “recoverable, within an ecclesiastical strategy” of emphasizing Catholicism’s distinctive features (Frijhoff). In Russia, where Christianity was “a religion of the sign, not the word,” the fact that one was now commanded to make the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two became a matter of utmost seriousness for seventeenth-century believers from all levels of society (Crummey). In the next century, the question of how vigorously to pursue the offensive against popular superstition was one that divided reformers of “Catholic” and “Protestant” sympathies (Levin). In China, officially approved teachers of religion, though often (at least in the Confucian tradition) deeply skeptical of popular superstition, were venerated among the people not as men of learning,

Introduction

but as men “endowed with numinous powers to command the spirits” (Taylor). Second, it seems that state attitudes toward religion may have something in common in different parts of the world. Russian historians have found it useful to adopt the paradigm of “confessionalization” (Crummey), developed by historians of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in Germany as a way to describe the interest of the state in correct religious observance. The Chinese officials for whom orthodoxy had a “social-ethical content” (Shek) would perhaps not have found it so difficult to understand the magistrates in the Dutch Republic, whose commitment to the official church was more a matter of “social control” than of doctrine (Frijhoff). Third, it is apparent that differing ways of worship express differing understandings of community, and vice versa. In China, where the pluralistic official religion “constituted the social order,” it nonetheless “provided no socially inclusive space” where men and women and young and old of high and low social standing could all worship together (Taylor). This was surely one of the attractions of the cult of the Eternal Mother, for the bonds that socially heterogenous devotees formed among one another were “much stronger” than those formed among worshipers at the same temple or shrine, always segregated according to age or station (Shek). In Europe during roughly the same period, the long Catholic–Protestant struggle for the allegiance of the faithful turned in part on two competing visions of community, one in which the whole parish came together to form a single body of believers, the other in which the worshiping community was a coming-together of smaller communities defined by affinities of various kinds (Duffy, Litzenberger, Orme, Seaver). Readers will no doubt find their own connections among the essays, perhaps even more intriguing than those just listed. Despite such parallels, however, this volume is not conceived as a step toward a generalized science of past belief; rather, it is a shared conviction among the authors represented here that our knowledge of the past advances by differentiation, not by hom*ogenization. Our hope is thus that the consideration of phenomena that are properly analogous – that is, somewhat alike, but simply different – will help to bring out for each area those features that stand out more sharply by virtue of comparison.

part i

Lived religion and official religion

chapter i

The alternative moral universe of religious dissenters in Ming-Qing China richard shek

E lsewhere in this volume, Professor Romeyn Taylor offers a nuanced portrayal of Chinese religions.1 He identifies four traditions, with overlapping deities and shared common assumptions, but with different rituals and varying degrees of “officialness.” There is, however, a fifth tradition in the Chinese religious world, one that is qualitatively different from the other four. One can argue that the other four traditions are expressions of one orthodox camp, while this fifth tradition is indisputably heterodox by contrast. It is the late imperial version of this fifth tradition, making its appearance at the beginning of the sixteenth century in China, that is the focus of this essay. Couched in the framework of orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, this chapter attempts to establish the following points: (1) an orthodoxy existed in China since the middle of the second century before the common era and lasted until the turn of the present century; (2) this orthodoxy was not articulated by a religious authority, but rather by a political authority; (3) the content of this orthodoxy, sociopolitical and ethical in emphasis, was defined not by narrow sectarian doctrines but by a compromise consensus among all the major religious traditions in China; (4) challenge to this orthodoxy, long-lasting and variegated in nature, crystalized at the turn of the sixteenth century into a potent tradition revolving around a central matriarchal deity and a strong millenarian and eschatological vision; (5) this heterodox tradition, though similarly socioethical in content, was by definition

See Chapter 5: “Spirits of the Penumbra: Deities Worshiped in More Than One Chinese Pantheon.”

Richard Shek

also politically subversive and occasionally erupted into antidynastic rebellions.

moral orthodoxy and religious pluralism In his seminal study of the religion of China, the early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber offered an instructive, though ultimately misinformed, framework of analysis. He proposed that China could be understood most usefully when Confucianism was regarded as the orthodox tradition, while Daoism was deemed its heterodox counterpart. In this analysis, Confucian doctrines, buttressed by political authority, served as the official ideology of the land. Daoism, on the other hand, played a subversive role throughout Chinese history, offering an alternative view of the world that engaged in a protracted struggle with Confucian orthodoxy. In this struggle, Weber further observed, the Chinese emperor, unopposed by an independent church, was the pontifex maximus who stood at the head of this Confucian orthodoxy.2 This analytical scheme is attractive because of its simplicity, as well as its apparent validity. After all, Confucianism and Daoism often have been seen as the yang and the yin, respectively, of Chinese religion, and as such they meet the dualistic expectations of those familiar with the monotheistic traditions. Since Confucianism had been closely related to the power of the state from the Han dynasty on (205 b.c.e.–220 c.e.), its orthodox status was assumed. By contrast, Daoism had been associated with antisocial and countercultural ideas and behavior as well, thus its heterodox nature also seemed to be beyond question. What this Weberian thesis seems to have failed to take note of, however, is that numerous rulers in imperial China have been ardent supporters of Daoism and have used Daoist doctrines as the guiding principles of the state. Moreover, this framework also ignores the prominent role played by Buddhism and other faiths in traditional China, which on numerous occasions also served as the dominant ideology. Overall, Weber’s analysis suffers from a simplistic approach that sees only the dichotomy between Confucianism and Daoism as relevant, thereby being unable to account for Buddhism’s place in Chinese society, while at the same time treating both of China’s indigenous traditions as monolithic entities devoid of internal tensions and variations. A recent study of the same subject is far more nuanced and complex. In his symposium volume on Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, 2

Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, trans. Hans Gerth (New York, 1951), esp. 152–67.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

Kwang-ching Liu offers a richly textured and far more suggestive discussion of Chinese orthodoxy.3 Liu argues from the outset that, just as Max Weber had observed, the espousing of “right and correct teaching” (zheng)4 in China was undertaken and enforced by the state, namely the imperial ruler, precisely because of the absence of a distinction between political and religious authorities. The Chinese monarch during the entire imperial period performed dual roles as both caesar and pope. As such, he viewed as his prerogative the imposition of a normative teaching on his subjects, one that supposedly would induce them toward proper understanding and ideal behavior. This normative teaching, however, should not be seen merely as an official ideology because it was deeply rooted in the religious beliefs and values of China since the classical period. Liu calls this teaching lijiao – “doctrine of propriety-and-ritual.”5 It is grounded in familial and political assumptions and expressed in interpersonal conduct. It is encapsulated by the cardinal prescriptive behavior demanded by the Three Bonds (sangang), that is, obligations of subject to ruler, child to parents, and wife to husband. These obligations, along with the relationships between juniors and seniors and among peers, are enacted through a set of behavioral patterns generally referred to as li – rituals. These rituals are in turn governed by the principles of propriety, decorum, deference, and harmony. This orthodox tradition maintained that it is through performance of such situational rituals that one’s authentic humanity can be established. It is precisely at this juncture that the religious nature of such ritual behavior can be discerned. Herbert Fingarette has contended elsewhere that these rituals contain elements of the numinous.6 For behind these rituals, Fingarette maintains, lies the ultimate entity known as Tian – Heaven. Tian is the Will that presides over both the natural and the social cosmos, ordaining the functions of nature as well as human society. It is, moreover, a Will that controls not only the fate of the universe but also the destiny of humanity, and it demands goodness and harmony for all to survive and prosper. Proper and ritualistic human behavior, therefore, is mandatory to attain a good and harmonious cosmos, as well as community. In this connection, such ritual and ethical conduct in social intercourse is fraught with religious implications, as human behavior 3 4 5 6

Kwang-ching Liu, ed., Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, 1990), esp. the introduction and 2. This term, interestingly, has a cognate word and hom*ophone which means “politics” and “the affairs of the people.” Liu, Orthodoxy, 53. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius – The Secular as Sacred (New York, 1972).

Richard Shek

is now linked inextricably to the ultimate concern of Tian. Ritual, seen in this light, is holy rite;7 the secular is indeed sacred. Tian is the thisworldly transcendental being that makes every human act a religious act. Thus loyalty to the monarch, filial piety to the parents, and wifely submission are religiously sanctioned behavior and are themselves holy and numinous in nature. It is by according oneself to these providential social conventions that one aspires to accord with the Will of Tian. While Confucianism was principally responsible for the articulation of such a view, it was by no means alone in its effort. Despite intrinsic doctrinal differences and even fundamental incompatibilities, Daoism and even Buddhism have, over the course of the imperial period, come to embrace just such a view and have contributed to upholding its validity and immutability. Both the Daoist and the Buddhist establishment have produced learned texts as well as moral exhortations of behavior to lend support to the sanctity of the Three Bonds.8 Whether they came to this position out of expediency or through strong conviction remains to be debated. What is noteworthy is the apparent accommodation agreed upon by the three major religious traditions. Diversity in doctrine and belief might be tolerated, but there was a convergence and unanimity among the three on matters relating to social morality and ethical behavior. Different deities, or none at all, could be worshiped; the world could be understood alternatively as ultimately illusory or concrete and real. Yet with respect to social and ethical conduct, a rigid and axiomatic insistence on loyalty, filial piety, and wifely submission was shared by the three mainstream religions. Liu calls this phenomenon “religious pluralism and moral orthodoxy,”9 a unique Chinese feature that the aforementioned Weberian thesis has failed to capture. Having thus defined China’s moral orthodoxy, which, as indicated, was formulated during the Han dynasty (third century b.c.e. to third century c.e.), persisted through the invasion of Central Asian tribes and the importation of Buddhism in the subsequent centuries, and finally was consolidated and provided with an elaborate metaphysical underpinning by the Neo-Confucians of the Song-Ming era (tenth through sixteenth centuries), it becomes easy to see how heterodoxy can be identified. It is the defying of the ritual propriety and social morality ordained 7 8

Fingarette, Confucius, Chapter 1. For Daoism’s subscription to this ethical convention, see Akizuki Kan’ei, Chugoku kinsei Dokyo no kenkyu – Jomyodo no kisoteki kenkyu [A Study of Early Modern Daoism – Basic Research on the Pure and Brilliant Sect] (Tokyo, 1978). For Buddhism’s similar conversion, see Michibata Ryoshu, Bukkyo to Jukyo rinri [Buddhist and Confucian Ethics] (Kyoto, 1968) and Kenneth Ch’en, The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism (Princeton, 1973). Liu, Orthodoxy, 2.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

by Tian to be universally valid and perennially immutable that makes one deviate from orthodoxy and verge on heterodoxy. In other words, it is the espousal of an alternative moral universe in which the Three Bonds have no relevance that makes one a true heterodox dissenter. This heterodox tradition came into being as soon as orthodoxy took shape, paralleling the experience of Christian Europe. In some sense, the need to define orthodoxy was prompted by the awareness of the existence of heterodoxy. Thus from the Han dynasty onward, numerous individuals, groups, movements, and traditions had rejected the essentialness of one, or another, or all of the Three Bonds. Some Buddhists had waged a protracted battle with imperial authority on the issue of clerical autonomy and their refusal to pay obeisance to the monarch. Some Daoists had steadfastly shown their aversion toward social obligations as a result of their firm belief in spontaneity and ethical relativity. Others, such as the Maitreyans, Manichaeans, and numerous chiliastic groups, had subscribed to a radical eschatological doctrine that envisioned the impending demise of the existing order, thereby depriving it of any claim of immutability and permanence. Yet the vast majority of these individuals and groups were scattered and sporadic in their opposition to orthodoxy. By their very nature, there was no sense among them of belonging to or drawing from a common heterodox tradition.10

the eternal mother tradition By the sixteenth century, however, both orthodoxy and heterodoxy in China had solidified into distinct camps with clear lines of demarcation between them. By then the phenomenon of “religious pluralism and moral orthodoxy” had become fully entrenched. The imperial ruler as arbiter and articulator of moral orthodoxy was unrivaled; likewise, the heterodox tradition had coagulated around a definable set of doctrines that espoused an alternative moral universe. In what follows I will discuss the nature and development of this tradition. The most characteristic feature of this tradition is the worship of a central supreme female deity named Wusheng laomu (Eternal Venerable Mother). Her appearance, most noticeably around the turn of the sixteenth century, signaled a new and more mature version of unorthodox beliefs. She herself symbolized all of the ideas and practices that could be considered “heterodox.” Superseding, but by no means totally displacing, the Maitreya Buddha as the ultimate source of eschatological 10

Kwang-ching Liu and Richard Shek are co-editing a volume entitled Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (Honolulu, 2004) in which several of these groups are studied.

Richard Shek

salvation, the Eternal Mother inspired numerous rebellious movements throughout the Ming-Qing period. For this, the government chose to call her believers White Lotus sectarians, as the White Lotus was the most feared and notorious of all sectarian organizations since the Yuan dynasty.11 In actuality, however, few if any of her followers used the name White Lotus. Instead, they adopted a plethora of names and showed much diversity in their practices.12 For a more accurate description, therefore, I have decided to refer to them here as Eternal Mother sects and the religion they subscribed to as the Eternal Mother religion. The central vision of these sects was salvation through the Eternal Mother and her emissaries. But how did the figure of the Eternal Mother originate? In what manner did the myth surrounding this deity evolve? What messages did she have for her believers and what implications did these messages have for orthodoxy?

the origin of the eternal mother While most historians of Chinese sectarianism speculate that the Eternal Mother myth may be traced to Luo Qing, a Shandong man who lived between 1443 and 1527 in the Ming dynasty, there are arguments advanced that point to a much earlier appearance of the deity, perhaps going back to the beginning of the thirteenth century.13 The Chinese scholar Ma Xisha has located a sacred scroll in the Shanxi Museum that he determines to have first appeared in 1212, to be reprinted in 1290.14 Entitled Foshuo Yangshi gui xiu hongluo Huaxiange baozhuan [Precious scroll on the Buddha telling the story of the ghost of Lady Yang embroidering red brocades and her son Huaxiange], this text contains interesting 11

13 14

Susan Naquin has followed this designation and refers to all the Eternal Mother cults since 1500 as White Lotus religion. See her article, “The Transmission of White Lotus Sectarianism in Late Imperial China,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn Rawski eds. (Berkeley, 1985), 255–91. However, as B.J. Ter Haar has recently argued in his monograph, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Leiden, 1992), this designation is extremely problematic. I concur with Ter Haar’s concerns. The Longhua jing (Dragon Flower Sutra), one of the most important sectarian texts belonging to the Eternal Mother tradition, lists eighteen sects in the mid-nineteenth century, none of which used the name White Lotus. A printed copy of the text is in the possession of Richard Shek. See also, Sawada Mizuho, Kochu haja shoben [annotated edition of the Poxie xiangbian] (Tokyo, 1972), hereafter referred to as Kochu. Susan Naquin distinguishes between two major types of Eternal Mother sects, which she calls, respectively, “sutra-recitation sects” and “meditational sects.” See her “Transmission of White Lotus Sectarianism,” 260–88. See the article by Ma Xisha, “Zuizao ibu baozhuan de yanjiu” [A study of one of the earliest precious scrolls], Shijie zongjiao yanjiu [Study of World Religions] (January 1986): 56–72. Ma Xisha, “Zuizao ibu baozhuan de yanjiu,” 59.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

references to the Wusheng laomu and the need for all believers to return to the native place (jiaxiang).15 Yet these references have no organic relationship to the rest of the text, and even Ma, himself, now suspects that they may be later interpolations.16 In the absence of further and irrefutable evidence that puts the appearance of the Wusheng laomu belief at a time before Luo Qing, therefore, we are compelled to regard Luo as the precursor in articulating the notion of the Eternal Mother. A soldier turned religious teacher, Luo was the grand patriarch who gave both direction and content to much of Chinese folk sectarianism from the sixteenth century on.17 His complete writings, known as Wubu liuce (Five books in six volumes), were published as a set for the first time in 1509. They served as model for many later sectarian texts and inspired a whole new brand of beliefs, namely, the Eternal Mother religion. To be sure, he never mentioned the Eternal Mother as a saving deity, nor did his writings provide any concrete details of her personality. Yet an examination of his Wubu liuce will reveal that most of the basic ideas of the Eternal Mother myth were adumbrated by him. It took only a little imagination on the part of his followers to translate them into fullscale, vivid images. In what follows I will show how these ideas were originally presented and later transformed. Luo Qing’s writings include the following titles: (1) Kugong wudao zhuan [The text of attaining enlightenment through rigorous discipline]; 15 16 17

Ma Xisha, “Zuizao ibu baozhuan de yanjiu,” 70–1. Mr. Ma raised this suspicion in a March 14, 1993, conversation with me in Davis, California. For a rather complete bibliography of studies on Luo Qing in Japanese, see Sawada Mizuho, Zoho hokan no kenkyu [An Expanded and Annotated Study of Precious Scrolls] (Tokyo, 1975), 458–9, hereafter referred to as Zoho. For more recent works in Japanese, see Asai Motoi, Min-Shin jidai minkan shukyo kessha no kenkyu [Study of Folk Religious Associations in the Ming-Qing Period] (Tokyo, 1990), esp. 23–113. For works on Luo in English, see Daniel Overmyer, Folk Buddhist Religion (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 113– 29; also his “Boatmen and Buddhas: The Lo Chiao in Ming Dynasty China,” History of Religions 17.3–4 (February–May 1978): 284–302. Also see Richard Shek, “Elite and Popular Reformism in Late Ming: The Traditions of Wang Yang-ming and Lo Ch’ing,” in Rekishi no okeru minshu to bunka [The Common Masses and Culture in History, Festschrift Commemorating the Seventieth Birthday of Prof. Sakai Todao] (Tokyo, 1982), 1–21; and David E. Kelley, “Temples and Tribute Fleets: The Luo Sect and Boatmen’s Associations in the Eighteenth Century,” Modern China 8.3 (1982): 361–91. The most detailed study of Luo Qing in Chinese is Zheng Zhiming’s Wusheng laomu xinyang suoyuan [Exploring the Origins of the Eternal Mother Belief] (Taipei, 1985). See also Song Guangyu’s earlier article, “Shi lun ‘Wusheng laomu’ zongjiao xinyang de I’xie tezhi” [On Some Characteristics of the Religious Belief in the Eternal Venerable Mother], Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 52.3 (September 1981): 559–90. See also Yu Songqing, Ming-Qing bailianjiao yanjiu [Study of White Lotus Sects in Ming and Qing] (Chengdu, 1987), and the most recent compendium by Ma Xisha and Han Bingfang, Zhongguo minjian zongjiao shi [History of Chinese Folk Religion] (Shanghai, 1992), esp. 165–339.

Richard Shek

(2) Tanshi wuwei zhuan [The text of lamentation for the world and uncontrived action]; (3) Poxie xianzheng yaoshi zhuan [The text on the key to refuting heresy and revealing the truth], in two volumes; (4) Zhengxin chu’i wuxiuzheng zizai baozhuan [The self-evident precious scroll, needing no cultivation, that rectifies belief and dispels doubts]; and (5) Weiwei budong Taishan shen‘gen jieguo baozhuan [The precious scroll, imposing and unperturbed as Mt. T’ai, which has deep roots and bears fruits]. The Kugong wudao zhuan was the first completed and is thematically the most coherent, with the remaining four providing sometimes rambling expositions of the ideas mentioned in it. Moreover, the Kugong zhuan documents the religious odyssey of Luo Qing, describing in graphic detail the arduous path by which he arrived at his spiritual awakening. The following analysis of Luo’s religious search relies chiefly on the Kugong text, with the discussion of key concepts supplemented by quotations from Luo Qing’s other books. ∗∗∗∗∗ The driving forces behind Luo Qing’s spiritual quest were his realization of the impermanence of life and his feeling of anxiety caused by the awareness of his own ephemeral self. Subscribing to the conventional Buddhist notion of samsara, Luo was troubled by the gnawing thought of endless and meaningless existences of births and deaths, rebirths and redeaths: “Where can this soul of mine attach itself? Since eons ago it has gone through innumerable births and deaths, in various shapes and forms. Though assuming human form this time, its life-span of at most a hundred years is nothing more than a dream, while its next incarnation as another suffering creature is yet to be decided. . . . This incessant samsaric transmigration is truly frightening!”18 From this disturbing observation, he concluded that all beings are cut adrift and have gone astray from their native place ( jiaxiang).19 This conclusion prompted Luo to embark on a religious journey to find a solution to this perennial problem and to put an end to this wandering of his soul. His first teacher was apparently a Pure Land monk20 who, after putting him through a half-year apprenticeship, taught him the technique of reciting the Amitabha Buddha’s name. His 18 19 20

Kugong zhuan, 1:12b. (The edition used in this study is the 1596 reprint, with commentaries.) Kugong zhuan, 1:14b, 16a; see also Taishan zhuan, Section 23. Pure Land is a mature form of the Mahayana (Great Vehicle) tradition of Buddhism, which emphasizes the Buddha’s compassion and the believers’ dependence on it.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

master explained that by incessantly and earnestly invoking the name of Amitabha Buddha, one could stop the samsaric migration and attain rebirth in the Western paradise. What was unusual about this Pure Land master’s teaching was, however, his identification of Amitabha Buddha as the Eternal Venerable Parent (Wusheng fumu) and the believer as infant ( ying’er).21 This represents the earliest recorded usage of the term Wusheng fumu, a term that would come to assume great significance in sectarian belief, and one that later would be changed to Wusheng laomu by Luo’s followers. From the context in which it occurs, however, it is obvious that Luo Qing did not invent this term, but merely repeated what must have been a common or popular reference to the Amitabha Buddha among certain Pure Land groups in the second half of the fifteenth century. These Pure Land believers must have employed this parent-child motif to characterize the intimate relationship between the Amitabha Buddha and the human race. In any event, Luo Qing followed the instruction of his master faithfully and devoted himself wholeheartedly to the chanting of the Amitabha Buddha’s name with vigor. Thus the text reads: With utmost effort, I utter the single cry of Wusheng fumu, lest the Amitabha Buddha will not hear me! I single-mindedly recite the name of the Amitabha Buddha, thinking that if I say it too slowly, my Wusheng fumu in heaven will not hear me!22

For Luo, and perhaps for some Pure Land practitioners of his time as well, Amitabha Buddha was the Eternal Parent who would deliver the children from endless suffering. Luo Qing’s experimentation with nianfo (chanting the Buddha’s name) lasted eight years. Yet he confessed that his devotion did not bring him the peace of mind and liberation from anxiety he sought. He was still filled with doubt and restlessness. How could one be sure that one’s earnest chanting actually would be heard? When one was old and near death, would one not slacken in vigor while chanting, thereby missing the opportunity for deliverance? In what manner would this final encounter with the Eternal Parent take place? These concerns were causing him doubts about nianfo devotionalism altogether. In the end, the dependence on the saving grace of a deity, however compassionate, was for Luo too uncertain and risky. Luo Qing’s next religious search was triggered by a death in a neighbor’s family, when a group of Buddhist monks came to recite sutras 21 22

Kugong zhuan, 1:18a. Kugong zhuan, 1:19a, 20b.

Richard Shek

for the deceased. The sutra used on that occasion happened to be the Jingang ke’i, a simplified version of the Diamond Sutra that had been popular among the lay and less educated Buddhists since its compilation in the Song dynasty. When Luo heard the recitation of it from the street late one night, he was deeply moved and resolved to study this sutra intensively to probe its meaning. This account of Luo’s introduction to the Diamond Sutra is certainly reminiscent of a similar experience of Huineng (638–713), the Sixth Patriarch of the Chan School.23 It may be indicative of Luo’s conscious, or at least subconscious, attempt to imitate Huineng and to enhance his own stature among fellow religious teachers. The episode is, moreover, a clear indication of Luo’s transition from Pure Land to Chan in his search for salvation and enlightenment. Luo’s intensive study of the Diamond Sutra continued for three years, during which time he read the text with devotion by day and practiced quiet-sitting by night. Yet complete understanding of the text still eluded him. This distressed him tremendously, as he believed that only through genuine comprehension of this text would he achieve enlightenment. With no prospect for any quick comprehension and therefore illumination, he became almost neurotic, forgetful of food and drink. Meditation, gong’an puzzles, and other religious practices he found too restrictive and confining. His anxiety reached the breaking point. It was at this particular juncture that Luo redirected his inquiry. Instead of preoccupying himself with his own salvation, he now focused his attention on the question: What was it like before Heaven and Earth were created?24 His answer was a surprising discovery and a real breakthrough for him: Before the creation of Heaven and Earth, there existed only the unchanging Vacuous Emptiness (xukong), or True Emptiness (zhenkong).25 This Emptiness antedated the universe and would last longer than it. Limitless and inexhaustible, it was the source of all beings. In a flash of insight, Luo found in this True Emptiness a new focus of his religious quest. At the same time, it gave him a new challenge: How could one attach oneself to this Emptiness? How could one enter or return to it? His rumination and musing on such questions led him to the startling but pleasant realization that True Emptiness is ultimately omnipresent and pervasive. It already exists in all things, therefore there is no need

24 25

In contrast to Pure Land, Chan Buddhism stresses the completeness of each individual believer’s buddhahood. It calls for self-reflection and quiet meditation to rediscover one’s original perfection. Kugong zhuan, 1:33a, 34b. Kugong zhuan, 1:34a–36a.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

to seek attachment or entry to it. It is, moreover, all things – from the time of their very creation! This realization resulted in Luo’s euphoric proclamation: All of a sudden, during my meditation, I experience great joy in my heart. Not belonging to Being, and not belonging to Non-Being, I am True Emptiness. The Mother (niang) is me, and I am her – there is originally no distinction. With Emptiness within and without, I am True Emptiness!26

The reference to the Mother here is most intriguing. In Luo’s usage, the Mother is another name for True Emptiness, which, as the source of all things, has a mother-like quality. For Luo Qing at this time, however, this Mother has no personality and is certainly no deity. She is the generative and transformative force in the universe, very much like the Daoist usage of the term in the Daodejing, the Daoist classic reportedly authored by Laozi. It can thus be seen that Luo’s religious quest was not confined to Buddhist motifs but was instead quite eclectic, involving native Daoist notions as well. Once this highly emotive image was used, however, its personification was only one step away, as we shall see. As a matter of fact, Luo himself was the one who initiated this process of personification, although the term he personified was “True Emptiness” rather than “Mother.” This occurred in his recounting of his final and thorough awakening, which came two years after his insight into True Emptiness and thirteen years after he first began his spiritual search. As he described it, the “Venerable True Emptiness” (Lao zhenkong), showing pity on his sincerity and devotion, enlightened him on the ultimate reality of things by shining on him a stream of white light while he was absorbed in meditation, facing the southwest.27 This brought about an immediate opening of his mind and the complete illumination of all things. He experienced a total sense of unity with all the myriad phenomena around him, which he described as the sensation of “absolute freedom and ease” (zongheng zizai). This awakening brought Luo Qing’s spiritual odyssey to an end. From then on he felt so sure and confident of his religious understanding that he became a teacher himself and propagated his new found faith among the people. His teaching, which he called the wuwei fa (teaching of 26 27

Kugong zhuan, 2:44b. This episode is given much significance by most scholars studying Luo Qing’s thought. See, in particular, Kaji Toshiyuki, “Raso no shinko no seisei katei to ‘hikari’ ni tsuite” [On the ‘Light’ and the Process of Formulation of the Cult of Luo Qing] in Chutetsu bungaku kaiho no. 10 (1985); also his “Sen yonhyaku hachijyuni nen no ‘hikari’ – futatabi goburokusatsu o yomu” [The ‘Light’ of 1482 – Again on Reading the Five Books in Six Volumes], in Yamane Yukio kyojyu taikyu kinen Mindaishi ronso [Essays on Ming History in Honor of Professor Yamane Yukio’s Retirement] (Tokyo, 1990), II: 1151–70.

Richard Shek

actionless action), dispensed with all outward forms of religious piety and theoretical discourse, but insisted only on self-reflection and intuitive understanding.28 The most interesting part of his teaching, for our purposes at least, remains his discussion of the ontological source and the creative progenitor of the myriad things and how human salvation could be effected with knowledge of it. In my view, Luo Qing’s elaboration on this subject in the Wubu liuce provided all the groundwork for the later evolution of the Eternal Mother belief. In addition to the terms “Vacuous Emptiness” and “True Emptiness,” Luo Qing used a variety of labels to refer to the ontological entity which is the source and origin of all creation: “Original Face” (benlai mianmu),29 “Authentic Self” (zhenshen),30 “Light” (guang) or “Sentient Light” (lingguang),31 “Native Place” ( jiaxiang),32 “Mother” (niang or mu),33 “Nonbeing” (wu),34 “Eternal Unbegotten” (wusheng),35 and “Ultimate of Nonbeing” (wuji).36 All of them were used as interchangeable terms to denote the “First Cause” or “Unmoved Mover” from which all beings are created and to which all existences shall return. The last named, however, was also portrayed by Luo as a personified deity, the Sagely Patriarch (or Matriarch?) of Ultimate of Nonbeing (Wuji shengzu).37 As the unbegotten origin of the universe, the deity was the creator of all the buddhas, the myriad worlds, the heavenly bodies and the earthly mountains and oceans, the grains and all vegetation, the human race, and the teachings of the Three Religions.38 But more significantly, this Wuji shengzu was a conscious supreme deity, who showed boundless compassion for the virtuous and administered stern punishment to the wicked. Furthermore, the Wuji shengzu had undergone numerous transformations and manifestations as a shining embodiment of morality to enlighten the human race. In Luo Qing’s mind, this understanding of the ontological basis of all existences carried with it a simple solution to his quest for the cessation 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

For a discussion of Luo’s religious iconoclasm and his Chan affinity, see Shek, “Elite and Popular Reformism in Late Ming,” esp. 7–11. See also Zheng Zhiming, Wusheng laomu xinyang suoyuan, esp. Chapters 3–5. Taishan zhuan, Sections 4, 6, 7. Poxie zhuan, Section 4. Tanshi zhuan, Section 1. Kugong zhuan, 2:59b–60a. Tanshi zhuan, 44–5. Kugong zhuan, 2:73a, 74a–75b. Poxie zhuan, 2:17, 22. Zhengxin zhuan, 42. Poxie zhuan, Sections 4, 7. Zhengxin zhuan, Section 13. Kugong zhuan, 2:59b– 60a, 73a. Kugong zhuan, 2:44b, 63b. Taishan zhuan, Section 4. Kugong zhuan, 2:55a. Poxie zhuan, 21. Poxie zhuan, Section 4. Zhenxin zhuan, Prologue, Sections 1, 5. Taishan zhuan, 1. Zhengxin zhuan, Prologue, 1, 16, Section 5. Taishan zhuan, Section 17.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

of suffering and for salvation. Since all things are the manifestations and transformations of Wuji, they are equal to and unified with one another. At the same time, they are all as exalted and complete as Wuji itself. This led Luo to declare with perfect conviction that “Before creation I already existed; before Heaven and Earth came into being I was already there!”39 Thus salvation involves nothing more than the removal of all previous ignorance and the recognition of one’s identity with this ontological source before creation – one’s equality with the buddhas, and one’s unity with all things. Having thus thought through the nature of the human predicament and its resolution, Luo was able to draw the conclusion that all the teachings and practices of the other schools were superfluous, if not inimical, to salvation. He felt particularly compelled to reject the earlier instruction he had received, which compared the Amitabha Buddha to the Eternal Venerable Parent. In his Zhengxin zhuan, he derided the “ignorant simpletons who say that our nature is the Infant and the Amitabha Buddha is the Eternal Parent.” Reasoning that the Amitabha Buddha was a man and not a woman, he asked rhetorically, “How could he have given birth to you?”40 On the other hand, the Wuji shengzu was more appropriate as the progenitor, not only of the human race, but also of all the buddhas as well. In fact, this generative and procreative ability of Wuji was very much mother-like. “The names of all the buddhas, the scriptures, the human race, and the myriad things originate from a single word. This word is ‘Mother’. The Mother is the Patriarch (Matriarch?), and the Patriarch (Matriarch?) is the Mother (mu ji shi zu, zu ji shi mu).”41 Luo Qing’s religious views can thus be summarized as follows: All creatures and beings originate from, and partake of, the same source. This source has various names, including zhenkong and jiaxiang. Moreover, it is understood to be Eternal and Unbegotten (wusheng) and is the Parent or Mother ( fumu or mu) of the universe and the myriad things. Separation from and ignorance of this origin constitute human suffering, while a return to and unity with it signal salvation. It is thus apparent that Luo’s religious writings supplied all the key terms for the later sectarian chant of zhenkong jiaxiang, wusheng fumu (Native Land of True Emptiness, Eternal Venerable Parent). To this chant the Ming-Qing sectarians added a whole new mythology of the Eternal Mother and her salvational message for her prodigal children. Yet in an amazing way, 39 40 41

Poxie zhuan, Sections 2, 7. Zhengxin zhuan, Section 16. Taishan zhuan, Section 4.

Richard Shek

Luo Qing had already drawn the broad outline of this mythology in his Poxie zhuan: Wuji gives birth to Heaven and Earth, regulates them, and provides for the human race. The people of the Earth are the poor children: you have been admonished to return home; yet you lack faith. Wuji is our original forebear, Wuji the elder is thinking of her/his descendants. The people of the Earth are the poor children; they have experienced numerous kalpas and are lost, failing to recognize their parents. With faith, the poor children can return home and occupy an exalted position in this vast universe. There will be boundless joy; yet you are not returning. Instead you go through endless samsara in the sea of suffering. With faith, the poor children can return home and fulfill the vow of the elder. The people of the Earth are the poor children, while the elder is the Buddha. The Buddha on Mt. Ling is originally me; when I realize this wusheng, I can avoid hell. Wusheng is True Thusness (zhenru), I myself am originally the Amitabha Buddha.42

This depiction of the human predicament and the nature of salvation anticipates much of the Eternal Mother myth that came to be developed later. The human race is alienated from its creator, ignorant of its divine origin, and mired in samsaric suffering. On the other hand, the creator cares for the well-being of her/his children and is distressed to see them suffer. She/he seeks to enlighten them and beckons them to return. Their reunion with this unceasing, unbegotten, and eternal ground of being marks a genuine salvation. It can be seen that while the later sectarian myth has a much stronger eschatological theme and contains more pronounced personality traits for the Eternal Mother, Luo Qing has essentially formulated the main story line.

the eternal mother Indeed, the emotive image of a divine mother who tearfully awaits the return of her estranged and suffering children is so appealing that it did not take long for some sectarians, inspired by Luo Qing, to propose it.43 This took place even before Luo’s death in 1527, as evidenced by 42 43

Poxie zhuan, Section 24. The motif of the reunion between mother and child may have received inspiration from the Manichaean cosmogonic story. See my article on “Maitreyanism, Manichaeanism, and Early White Lotus,” in Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

a sectarian text “reprinted” in 1523.44 The text is Huangji jindan jiulian zhengxin guizhen huanxiang baozhuan [Precious scroll of the golden elixir and nine lotuses of the imperial ultimate, which leads to the rectification of beliefs, the taking of refuge in truth, and the return to the native place], hereafter, the Jiulian baozhuan.45 A text composed during the lifetime of Luo Qing, the Jiulian baozhuan represents both a continuation of his main themes and the addition of new ones. Written probably by a follower of Luo Qing’s daughter, it makes frequent references to his teaching. The progenitor of all things, for example, is referred to at one point as “Venerable True Emptiness,” even though she is more commonly addressed as the Eternal Mother. Moreover, the method of cultivation to prepare oneself for the return to the Native Place is described as wuwei fa, a direct echo of Luo’s teaching. In deference to him, the principal expositor of the Eternal Mother’s salvational message is referred to in this text as the Patriarch of Wuwei, who is in turn the incarnation of the Amitabha Buddha. This clearly indicates that Luo Qing was regarded with high esteem by the author of the text. The identification of Luo Qing with the Amitabha Buddha is interesting, as Luo himself repeatedly insisted that when one is truly enlightened, one is the equal of all the buddhas, especially Amitabha, because one embodies the same buddha nature.46 Yet the Jiulian baozhuan is more than a text that simply repeats or parrots Luo Qing’s teaching. It takes Luo’s characterization of the ontological ground of being for all things as “Parent or Mother” as a point of departure and ingeniously creates a vivid, emotive, and homey picture of a mother who tearfully awaits reunion with her estranged children. In a remarkably well-developed form, the Eternal Mother myth, which was later the shared belief of so many Ming-Qing sectarian groups, unfolds enthrallingly before the reader and the listener. She is portrayed as the matriarch of all the gods, buddhas, and immortals; the progenitor 44 45

It is more likely that it was the first printing of the text, which had previously existed in manuscript form, as Susan Naquin suspects. Apparently the text has another name, Wudangshan xuantian shangdi jing [Sutra of the august lord of mysterious heaven from Mt. Wudang]. Mt. Wudang has been a major Taoist center since the early Ming. It was associated with the Taoist adept Zhang Sanfeng and the Ming court’s fascination with him. See Anna Seidel, “A Taoist Immortal of the Ming Dynasty: Chang San-feng,” in Self and Society in Ming Thought, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary (New York, 1970), 483–516. See also Mano Senryu, “Mincho to Taiwazan ni tsuite” [The Ming Dynasty and Mt. T’aihe (Wudang)], Otani gakuho 38.3 (1959): 59–73; also his “Mindai no Butozan to kangan no shinshutsu” [Mt. Wudang in the Ming and the Ascendancy of the Eunuchs], Toho shukyo 22 (1963): 28–44. For access to the sutra I would like to thank Susan Naquin, who kindly allowed me to photocopy her copy of it, which she had acquired from Mr. Wu Xiaoling, Peking, 1981. See Poxie Zhuan, Section 6, and Zhengxin zhuan, Section 12.

Richard Shek

of the cosmos and the myriad things; and the compassionate savior of the faithful. In addition, the text introduces a distinct eschatological scheme not present in Luo Qing’s writings. Finally, the text reveals a much more complex sectarian organizational structure, as well as a far more pronounced sectarian mentality. All these will be discussed in the following pages. The Jiulian baozhuan opens with the assembly of all the buddhas and immortals called by the Eternal Mother.47 The gathering notices a distinct fragrance, which is called the Trefoil Nine Lotus Fragrance of the Three Phases (Sanyuan ru’i jiulian xiang). The presence of this fragrance signals an impending change in the kalpa, as it did on two previous occasions, when Wuji and Taiji (Supreme Ultimate) took their turn to be in charge of the world. Whereupon, the Amitabha Buddha is summoned before the Eternal Mother, who explains to him that he shall descend to earth to save the divine beings created originally by the Eternal Mother to populate the world. Ninety-six myriads in number, they are mired in worldly passions and are totally forgetful of their sacred origin. Four myriads of them have reunited with the Mother when two previous kalpic changes occurred. Now it is Amitabha’s turn to locate the rest of the lost souls and to bring them back to her. When they do return, they will escape the Three Disasters of flood, fire, and wind, which will scourge the world. Unable to disobey this command given by the Mother, the Amitabha Buddha reluctantly leaves this blissful heaven and prepares for his descent. To better enable him to identify the divine beings and facilitate their return, the Eternal Mother entrusts the Amitabha Buddha with numerous “tools,” including: hunyuan ce (Roster of undifferentiated origin), guijia biaowen (Document for returning home), jiulian tu (Nine lotus diagram), sanji xianghuo (Incense of the Three Ultimates), shibu xiuxing (Ten-step method of cultivation), touci shizhuang (Oaths of allegiance 47

Jiulian baozhuan, Section 1. The possible Manichaean influence on the Eternal Mother myth should not be overlooked. As I have shown in my essay on the Maitreyan and Manichaean challenge, Mani’s original teaching contains the story of the “Mother of Life” who, having given birth to the Primeval Man, sent him into battle against the forces of Darkness. Primeval Man was defeated, his armor of light stripped away, and he lay in a stupor. Later, he was rescued by the Living Spirit and was reunited with his Mother in a moving scene. The rest of the Manichaean story involves complicated efforts undertaken to retrieve all the light particles left behind by Primeval Man, leading up to the climatic conclusion of the second Epoch in cosmic history. Although the main thrusts of the two myths differ, the Manichaean motif of the rescue of Primeval Man, the union with the Mother, and the retrieval of the rest of the light particles lost in Darkness bears a striking resemblance to the later Eternal Mother story of the return of the primordial beings, their union with the Mother, and the deliverance of other primordial beings still mired in ignorance and suffering.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

and submission), and mingan chahao (Overt and covert checking of signs).48 The rest of the text describes how the incarnated Amitabha Buddha, now appearing as the Patriarch of Wuji, explains and elaborates on the Eternal Mother’s message of salvation to the faithful. With much verbiage and repetition, this message is delivered. The following is typical: From the beginningless Beginning until now, the Eternal Mother has undergone numerous transformations. She secures qian and kun (male and female), administers the cosmos, and creates humanity. The divine beings are qian and kun. They come to inhabit the world. Entrapped by passions, they obscure their original nature and no longer think of returning. . . . The Eternal Mother on Mt. Ling longs for her children, with tears welling up in her eyes whenever she thinks of them. She is waiting for the day when, after I have descended to this Eastern Land and delivered this message for her, you will return home to your origin and to your matriarch.49

The Amitabha Buddha ends his explanation with the admonition for everyone to “head for Mt. Ling, return home, meet with the Mother, have a reunion between mother and child, and smile broadly.”50 In the course of acting as the Eternal Mother’s messenger, the Amitabha Buddha gives expression to several noteworthy themes. First and foremost is the three-stage salvational scheme. Historical time, according to this scheme, is marked by three great kalpas, each with its respective buddhas in charge. The past age, the age of Wuji, is ruled by the Dipamkara Buddha (Lamp-lighting Buddha), who sits on a threepetaled lotus flower and hosts the Yellow Sun Assembly (huangyang hui). The present age, the age of Taiji, is under the control of the Sakyamuni Buddha, who sits on a five-petaled lotus flower and convenes the Azure Sun Assembly (qingyang hui). The future age, the age of Imperial Ultimate (huangji), will be dominated by the Maitreya Buddha, who is seated on a nine-petaled lotus flower and summons the Red Sun Assembly (hongyang hui).51 This scheme establishes the basic eschatology of Eternal Mother sectarianism and promises that the salvation of the believers will take place in the near future. 48 49 50 51

Jiulian baozhuan, Section 2. Jiulian boazhuan, Section 4. Jiulian boazhuan, Section 12. Jiulian boazhuan, Sections 4, 10, 12. It should be pointed out that earlier in the text, the Amitabha Buddha is referred to as the Future Buddha (Sections 1, 2, 3). It is only later that the more standard version treating the Maitreya Buddha as the future buddha is presented. It is equally interesting that the Amitabha Buddha is at one point called the Sanyang jiaozhu [Patriarch of the Three Suns]; see Section 2.

Richard Shek

Second, Amitabha’s teaching reveals a highly “sectarian” character, warning that only the predestined faithful will be saved, while the unbelieving are doomed. Repeatedly such terms as “fated ones” (youyuan ren), “primordial beings” (yuanren), “remnant sentient beings” (canling), “worthies” (xianliang), and “offspring of the imperial womb” (huangtai) are used to refer to the religious elect who alone will heed the message of the Mother and return to her. The rest of humanity are expected to perish at the time of kalpic change.52 Third, the later sectarian organizational pattern and initiation practices are already mentioned in this text. The terms “sanzong wupai” (Three schools and five factions), as well as “jiugan shibazhi” (Nine poles and eighteen branches), characteristic of the organizational structure of later sectarian groups such as the Yuandun (Complete and Instantaneous Enlightenment) Sect in the seventeenth century,53 occur numerous times in this text.54 Moreover, the practices of “registering one’s name” (guahao) and “verifying the contracts” (dui hetong),55 both performed at the time of initiation by numerous sectarian groups in the Qing dynasty to ritualize and guarantee the salvation of their members, are also mentioned frequently throughout the text. The Jiulian baozhuan thus reveals unmistakably that as the Eternal Mother myth was formulated, the attendant cosmology and eschatology so characteristic of this belief were also developed. At the same time, the sectarian nature of this religion, together with much of its organizational framework and many of its initiation practices, also made their appearance.

further development of the eternal mother myth The Jiulian baozhuan was followed by a long tradition of sectarian writing that repeated and expanded on the Eternal Mother motif, although in both doctrine and style there was much diversity. A datable text after the Jiulian baozhuan is the Yaoshi benyuan gongde baozhuan (Precious scroll on meritorious deeds based on the original vow of the Buddha of Medicine, or Baisajya-guru), published in 1543. It echoes much of 52 53

54 55

Jiulian baozhuan, Prologue, Sections 6, 15. See Richard Shek, “Religion and Society in Late Ming: Sectarianism and Popular Thought in 16th and 17th Century China,” Ph.D. dissertation (University of California– Berkeley, 1980), 287–301. Jiulian baozhuan, Sections 9, 20. Both practices are designed to give the impression of official and bureaucratic recognition of the believers’ confirmed status as the saved elect.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

the language found in the Jiulian text, with the same promise of returning home and salvation by the Eternal Mother. Much emphasized is the joy of reunion with the Mother.56 In 1558, the Puming rulai wuwei liaoyi baozhuan (Tathagata Puming’s precious scroll of complete revelation through nonaction) was completed by the founder of a Yellow Heaven Sect (huangtian dao), whose background and religious awakening bore a strong resemblance to those of Luo Qing.57 The text also preaches the now familiar theme of salvation by and reunion with the Eternal Mother. It contains vivid descriptions of the encounter between Mother and child, and the following passage is representative: When I finally come before the Eternal Mother, I rush into her embrace. Together we weep for joy at our reunion. Ever since our separation on Mt. Ling, I have been left adrift in samsara because of my attachment to the mundane world. Now that I have received the family letter from my Venerable Mother, I have in my possession a priceless treasure. Mother, listen to me! Please deliver the multitudes from the sea of suffering!58

In 1562, a text entitled Erlang baozhuan [Precious scroll on Erlang] appeared, providing further information on the emerging Eternal Mother myth. Based on the story of Erlang’s valiant fight with the Monkey King, a famous and entertaining episode from the classic novel Journey to the West (which, incidentally, was given the finishing touches around the same time), the Erlang baozhuan describes the final subjugation of the Monkey King by the semidivine Erlang, thanks in large measure to the assistance provided by the Eternal Mother.59 This text also seems to presage the legend surrounding the building of the Baoming Si, Temple Protecting the Ming dynasty, as described later. In it the story of the Bodhisattva Guanyin incarnating as a nun by the name of Lu is first being told. According to this text, the nun had tried unsuccessfully 56 57

58 59

See Shek, “Religion and Society in Late Ming,” 226. See also Zheng Zhenduo, Zhongguo suwenxue shi [History of Chinese Folk Literature] (Peking, 1954), 2: 312–17. For a detailed study of the Yellow Heaven Sect, see Richard Shek, “Millenarianism without Rebellion: The Huangtian Dao in North China,” Modern China 8.3 (July 1982): 305–36. See also Sawada Mizuho, “Shoki no Kotendo” [The Early Yellow Heaven Sect], in his Zoho, 343–65. For a reproduced and annotated version of the Puming baozhuan, see E.S. Stulova, Baotszuian o Pu-mine [The Prescious Scroll of Puming] (Moscow, 1979). The most recent study of this sect is done by Ma Xisha; see his chapter in Ma Xisha and Han Bingfang, Zhongguo minjian zongjiao shi [History of Chinese Popular Religion] (Shanghai, 1992), 406–88. See Stulova, Baotszuian o Pu-mine, 80. The content of this precious scroll is given brief description by Wu Zhicheng in his “Bailianjiao de chongbaishen ‘Wushengmu’ ” [The Eternal Mother – A Deity worshiped by the White Lotus], Beijing shiyuan xuebao [Journal of the Peking Normal College] 2 (1986): 46.

Richard Shek

to dissuade Emperor Yingzong from fighting the Oirat Mongols prior to his debacle at Fort Tumu in 1449. When Yingzong was restored to the throne in 1457 after his long captivity, he rewarded the nun for her loyalty and courage and built a temple for her, naming it the Baoming Si.60 The temple had been reportedly in existence since 1462. By the late Jiajing reign (1522–67), however, it came under the sway of believers in the Eternal Mother religion. In the 1570s, a sectarian group composed primarily of nuns and affiliated with the Baoming Si in the western suburb of Beijing created a sizable corpus of texts to dramatize its intimate relationship with the Eternal Mother. One of the nuns was a young girl by the name of Guiyuan [Returning to perfection], who produced a set of texts circa 1571–3, when she was only twelve years old. Modeling after Luo Qing’s collected works, she also named them “Five books in six volumes.” The following passage from the Xiaoshi dacheng baozhuan (Explanatory precious scroll on the Mahayana teaching), one of her five books, is revealing: To illuminate the mind and look into our nature, let us discuss a wondrous teaching. When we return home, there will no longer be any worry. We will be free and totally unimpeded, for we have probed the most mysterious teaching. Let us deliver all the infants and children and return them home. When we return home, the way will be fully understood and immortality will be secured. We sit upon the lotus flower, enwrapped in a golden light. We are ushered to our former posts; and the children, upon seeing the Mother, smile broadly. The Venerable Mother is heartened to see you, for today is the time of reunion. We walk the path of enlightenment to attend the Dragon Flower Assembly. The children will rush into the Mother’s embrace. They will sit on the nine lotus seat, being free and joyful, with bright illumination all around them. This trip leads us to extreme bliss; the children, upon seeing Mother, burst out laughing!61

Other texts written by this group of Eternal Mother believers at the Baoming Temple include the Pudu xinsheng jiuku baozhuan [Precious 60

For a history of the Baoming Temple, see Thomas Shi-yu Li and Susan Naquin, “The Pao-ming Temple: Religion and the Throne in Ming and Qing China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 48.1 (1988): 131–88. Quoted in Sawada, Zoho, 47–8.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

scroll of the new messages of universal salvation from suffering] and the Qingyuan miaodao xiansheng zhenjun Erlang baozhuan [Precious scroll of the perfect lord Erlang, who is of pure origin, teaches the wondrous way, and manifests sageliness].62 Both of them link the nun Lu, founding abbess of the Baoming Temple and now respectfully referred to as Bodhisattva Lu, with the Eternal Mother. In fact, she is asserted to be the incarnation of the Eternal Mother. This group continued to produce texts well into the seventeenth century,63 when it was known as the West Mahayana Sect (Xi dacheng jiao). Yet another sectarian group active in propagating the Eternal Mother faith was the Red Sun Sect (Hongyang jiao) founded by Han Piaogao, probably in the 1580s.64 Central to this group’s teaching is the doctrine of linfan shouyuan [descending to earth to retrieve the primordial beings]. Elaborating on the basic Eternal Mother motif, this group asserted that its founder was the youngest son of the Eternal Mother, who had been sent into the world to help with the salvation of the original beings before the world was to be devastated by kalpic disasters. It contributed to the Eternal Mother tradition by standardizing the three-stage scheme, making it a progression from Azure Sun (qingyang) to Red Sun (hongyang) and finally to White Sun (baiyang).65 This was the scheme accepted and shared by all Eternal Mother sectarians in the Qing dynasty.66 Perhaps by far the most successful and influential sectarian group around the turn of the seventeenth century was the East Mahayana Sect (Dong dacheng jiao) founded by Wang Sen of Northern Zhili. Also known as the Incense-smelling Sect (Wenxiang jiao), Wang Sen’s organization at one point boasted a following of more than two million. It was the most systematically organized sect at the time, with a clear division of labor and specific titles for different levels of sect leadership.67 It is interesting 62 63 64

65 66

Whether this latter text is identical to the one bearing a similar title but appearing earlier is uncertain. See note 46 in this chapter. Sawada, Zoho, 278–9. See Shek, “Religion and Society in Late Ming,” 276–87. See also Sawada Mizuho, “Koyokyo sh*tan” [A preliminary study of the Red Sun Sect], in his Zoho, 366–408. Ma Xisha has also written extensively on this group. See his Zhongguo minjian zongjiao shi, 489–548. See the quote from Hunyuan jiao hongyang zhonghua baojing in Sawada’s Zoho, 397. Actually, as early as 1579, a certain Wang Duo was known to have organized an Assembly of Three Suns between Heaven and Earth [Tiandi sanyan hui] and had a following of six thousand. He was later captured and executed. See Ming shilu [Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty], 83:5a, Wanli 7/1/23. The most thorough study of Wang Sen’s sect has been undertaken by Asai Motoi. His recent work, which is the culmination of over a decade of research and writing, is Min-Shin jidai minkan shukyo kessha no kenkyu [Folk Religious Associations in the MingQing Period] (Tokyo, 1990), esp. 133–310. Yu Songqing is also an ardent student of this

Richard Shek

to note that this sect subscribed to the Jiulian baozhuan,68 as its leaders were found to have in their possession numerous copies of the text each time the sect was investigated. Wang Sen himself was arrested in 1595, released through the payment of bribes, and arrested again in 1614. He died in prison in 1619; his preachings, however, lived on. The apocalyptic message he taught generated a full-scale rebellion in 1622, headed by his follower Xu Hongru and Wang’s own son Haoxian.69 The rebellion lasted three months but was ruthlessly suppressed by the Ming government after heavy fighting. Even then Wang Sen’s teaching survived this setback, for his descendants continued to be sectarian practitioners and leaders for the next two hundred years.70 It was through one of the off-shoots of Wang Sen’s organization that the Eternal Mother cult was brought to a fully mature form. This was the Yuandun Sect mentioned earlier. Founded by one Gongchang (splitcharacter version of the word Zhang) in the aftermath of the 1622 rebellion, this sect was responsible for the compilation of the Gufo tianzhen kaozheng longhua baojing [The heavenly perfect venerable Buddha’s authenticated dragon flower precious sutra], the most doctrinally developed text on the Eternal Mother religion in Ming-Qing China.71 Published in the 1650s, this text contains the most mature form of the Eternal Mother myth. It describes the familiar three-stage salvational scheme, the Dragon Flower Assembly, the procreation of humanity by the Eternal Mother, the trapping of her children in the samsaric world, and the joyful return she prepares for them. It also mentions the organizational structure of sanzong wupai (Three schools and five factions) and jiugan shibazhi (Nine poles and eighteen branches), which made their first appearance in the Jiulian baozhuan, as observed earlier. It stresses

68 69

70 71

tradition; see her Ming-Qing bailianjiao yanjiu. Ma Xisha also has substantial chapters on this group and its off-shoots in his Zhongguo minjian zongjiao shi, 549–652, 859–907. Finally, Susan Naquin also studies the later transmission of the Wang Sen tradition in her “The Transmission of White Lotus Sectarianism,” as well as her “Connections between Rebellions: Sect Family Networks in Qing China,” Modern China 8.3 (July 1982): 337–60. See Naquin, “Connections between Rebellions,” 340. For a detailed description of this rebellion, see Shek, “Religion and Society in Late Ming,” 352–67. See also Xu Hongru’s biography by Richard Chu in Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York, 1976), I:587–89. Noguchi Tetsuro also has a substantial chapter on this rebellion in his Mindai byakurenkyoshi no kenkyu, 255–68. See Yu Songqing, Ming-Qing bailianjiao yanjiu, 37–56, 131–62; Ma Xisha, Qingdai bagua jiao [The Eight Trigrams Sect of the Qing dynasty] (Beijing, 1989), esp. 36–44. For an analysis of the Dragon Flower Sutra, see Shek, “Religion and Society in Late Ming,” 176–92. A more recent brief treatment is given by Daniel Overmyer in his “Values in Chinese Sectarian Literature: Ming and Ch’ing Pao-chuan,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, 238–43. See also Sawada Mizuho, “Ryugekyo no kenkyu” [A study of the Dragon Flower Sutra], in his Kochu, 165–220.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

the importance of the rituals of “registration” (guahao) and “verifying the contracts” (dui hetong), as does the Jiulian baozhuan. But what is most characteristic about the Longhua jing is its preoccupation with kalpic disasters, which are asserted to be imminent. Three disasters will take the form of famines and floods, avalanches and earthquakes, pests and epidemics. There is a palpable sense of urgency in preparing oneself for this cataclysmic devastation not present in other texts. The Eternal Mother cult thus reached its mature form by early Qing. Thereafter, partly because of governmental vigilance and partly because of the loss of creative momentum, few new sectarian texts were composed. Sometime in the eighteenth century, however, the Eternal Mother belief came to be encapsulated in the eight-character chant of zhenkong jiaxiang, wusheng laomu [Native land of true emptiness, the Eternal Venerable Mother]. Thus the vague and hazy ideas that began with Luo Qing finally reached their culminated form as a creed-like chant, binding all the believers of the Eternal Mother into one nebulous but potentially powerful community. When sectarian writing was resumed in fits and starts in the late nineteenth century, particularly through the bailuan (worshiping the phoenix) techniques, it seldom surpassed the grandeur and sophistication of the earlier texts. The scriptures of the Iguan dao (Unity Sect) and the Longhua zhaihui (Dragon Flower Vegetarian Assembly) invariably portray a teary-eyed Eternal Mother, wringing her hands and anxiously waiting for her estranged children to come home. The following passage from the Jiaxiang shuxin [Letters from home] of the Iguan dao is representative: In her heavenly abode the Venerable Mother lets out a cry of sadness, with tears running continuously from her eyes and drenching her clothes. This is all because the children of buddhas are attached to the samsaric world. The ninety-six myriads of the imperial womb’s offspring know not how to return home. . . . The people of the world are all my children. When they meet with disaster, the Mother is distressed. She dispatches immortals and buddhas to the human world below to set up the great way in order to convert people from all corners. The Venerable Mother cries in a heart-wrenching way. Is there any way to call her children back?72

In the preceding pages, the genesis and development of the Eternal Mother myth have been traced in some detail. What impact did this myth have upon state and society? What kind of challenge, however potential and theoretical, to orthodoxy did it pose? What were the 72

See Song Guangyu, “Shi lun ‘Wusheng laomu’zongjiao xinyang de I’xie tezhi,” 575.

Richard Shek

implications of the Eternal Mother belief in ethics and in rituals?73 These are the questions to be explored in the remainder of this chapter. Three aspects of the Eternal Mother religion will be examined: its challenge to state authority, its eschatological salvationism, and its challenge to patriarchal-familial authority.

challenge to state and political authority By its very nature, folk sectarianism presented a “competing hierarchy of authority” to the government.74 On this point Max Weber’s observation is instructive: “The Confucian subject was expected to practise virtue privately in the five classical social relations. He did not require a sect for this and the very existence of a sect violated the patriarchal principle on which the state rested.”75 Sectarian membership was regarded as dangerous and subversive precisely because “the value and worth of the ‘personality’ were guaranteed and legitimated not by blood ties, status group, or publicly authorized degree, but by being a member of and by proving oneself in a circle of specifically qualified associates.”76 In other words, the sect had usurped the prerogatives of the state and family to provide meaning and value for the life of the sect member, a decidedly intolerable situation for the authorities. Even more worrisome was the crowd-gathering propensity of the sects. As shall be explained more fully later, folk religious sects performed numerous social functions for their members, including mutual aid and mutual protection. This was particularly popular among the dispossessed and deprived segments of society, which needed these services the most to counter exploitation and other economic hardship. As such, these sectarian groups offered themselves as “alternatives” to the state and local communities.77 Furthermore, the sectarian nature of the organization of these groups created a far stronger sense of identity and solidarity among 73

74 75 76 77

It should be pointed out that there is no consensus among students of the Eternal Mother tradition over the issue of the political and ethical nature of its doctrine. Daniel Overmyer, for example, prefers to focus on the “orthodox” and accommodating nature of sectarian thought. He also downplays the “subversive” potential of the sects. See his “Attitudes Toward the Ruler and State in Chinese Popular Religious Literature: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Pao-chuan,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44.2 (1984): 347–79. What I am offering here is an alternative assessment of the same tradition. Borrowing David Kelly’s characterization in his “Temples and Tribute Fleets,” 370. Weber, Religion of China, 215, 216. Weber, Religion of China, 218. On this point even Overmyer agrees. See his “Alternatives: Popular Religious Sects in Chinese Society,” Modern China 7.2 (April 1981): 153–90.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

the members than existed among ordinary temple- and shrine-goers. This “congregational” power of the sects was potentially troublesome for the government. The statement made by Huang Yubian, the Qing magistrate who zealously hunted down sectarian groups and confiscated their scriptures in the nineteenth century, bears eloquent witness to this official concern. In his celebrated Poxie xiangbian [Detailed refutation of heterodoxy], Huang unequivocally declared: “The texts of the heterodox sects make no overt references to sedition and rebellion, yet why is it that members of these sects invariably end up becoming rebels? The cause of rebellion lies in the assembly of large numbers of people.”78 Seen from this standpoint, any sect was potentially threatening to the stability that orthodoxy strove to maintain, regardless of its belief. The subversive nature of the sects should not, however, be determined by their inherent power to attract crowds. Their challenge to the state was evidenced by some outright cases of disregard for the government’s penal sanctions.79 It was, of course, the monarch’s prerogative to inflict punishment on transgressors of the law. Usually his threat of punishment was enough to deter most people from breaching the law, given the severity of the penal code. But when applied to some Eternal Mother believers, this threat became empty and ineffectual. In the late Wanli period of the Ming dynasty (1573–1620), officials of the Ministry of Rites complained in one of their memorials: “The sects avoid using the name White Lotus, yet in practice they espouse White Lotus teaching. For every sect there is a different patriarch, and ignorant men and women delude themselves and spread the sects’ doctrines. . . . They would rather be executed [by the government] than dare to disobey the order of the sect master.”80 This is a strong indication that some sectarians had turned to another locus of authority – their sect master – and that the emperor had lost his sway over them. Huang Yubian also made the following observation: The sectarians blatantly claim that all men who become believers are incarnated buddhas and that all women who become believers are incarnated buddha mothers. . . . Ignorant men and women, who have swallowed the charm water [of the sects], become convinced that they are indeed buddha incarnates. They are 78 79

Sawada, Kochu, 67, 113. It should be noted that most of the records of the activities, behavior, and beliefs of the sectarians come from hostile sources written by government officials and unsympathetic literati. There is a decided bias there. Nevertheless, whether real or perceived, these descriptions do point to the subversive or heterodox nature of such allegations. Ming shilu, Wanli 43/5/gengzi.

Richard Shek

therefore eager to return to heaven. Thus they earnestly practise their religion. Even after they have been apprehended by the authorities and sentenced to decapitation and slow-slicing, they show no regret.81

In other words, some of the sectarians did not fear death because they were convinced that they could benefit from it. For them, death would hasten the recovery of their original divinity. Indeed, it would enable them to return to their paradise once lost. There was also a sectarian claim that the heavier the punishment one receives at death, the more glorious one’s ascent to heaven will become. “Non-capital punishment will enable one to avoid hell, but not enough to reach heaven. Death by strangulation will enable one to ascend to heaven; there will be, however, no red capes [to wear in celebration]. Death by decapitation will enable one to ascend heaven wearing a red cape. Death by slow-slicing will enable one to enter heaven wearing a red gown.”82 Huang Yubian thus acknowledged in despair: “Ignorant men and women are not fearful of violating the law or committing seditious acts. As they are eager to return to heaven, they are happy to face capital punishment. Thus penal sanction is useless in deterring them.”83 This sectarian denial of government authority in enforcing the law, admittedly commented upon with some exaggeration by Huang, was nevertheless a principal factor in earning for the sects the label of heterodoxy. Their supposed zealous commitment to their religious beliefs had made them unaccommodating to the rules and regulations of the state. Yet their unregulated congregation and their disregard for state authority, serious as they were, paled in comparison to their central beliefs and practices in terms of the potential challenge they posed to orthodoxy.

challenge to patriarchal and familial authority It has been observed earlier that the sects, by virtue of their organization, conferred upon their members a new identity and a sense of separateness from the rest of society. This new identity as one of the religious elect, moreover, set the sect member apart even from parents, spouse, children, other relatives, and friends unless, of course, they became members of the sect. The sect member’s loyalty was now transferred to the family of the religious elect, together with whom he or she awaited the arrival of the millennium. This disruption to familial and lineage 81 82 83

Sawada, Kochu, 130. Sawada, Kochu, 113, 152. Sawada, Kochu, 152.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

cohesion and the transferring of obligation to a surrogate kinship group was cited, for example, in a memorial to the throne in 1584: Nowadays heterodox sects are proliferating. Their assembly places and chanting halls increase in number rapidly. These sectarians would rather be remiss in paying taxes to the government, but dare not be parsimonious in making financial contributions to their sects. They would rather be negligent in keeping appointments with the officials, but dare not be absent from sect meetings. Through incurring debts and selling their valued belongings, they try to meet the demands of their sects.84

An official investigating sectarian activities in 1615 charged that the sectarians regarded their fellow believers as more important than their kin: “Though unwilling to contribute to the public coffer, the sectarians support their own organizations with enthusiasm. They treat their own kin with indifference, but embrace their fellow believers with devotion.”85 What these reports indicate was a new ethics that belittled obligations to the state and kin, but instead stressed solidarity with the community of fellow religionists. The bond forged by one’s religious affiliation now took precedence over the ties to lineage as well as loyalty to the state. The charge that such severance of traditional ties had resulted in tax resistance is most intriguing, as it certainly brought home to the government how potentially destabilizing and subversive such sectarians could become. Yet even more serious was the charge of unfiliality leveled against the sectarian followers. The late Ming scholar Fan Hen reported in his Yunjian jumu chao [Eyewitness accounts from Yunjian] that followers of the Wuwei Sect refused to perform the prescribed funeral rites for their deceased parents and ancestors.86 A local gazetteer of Wuxi (in presentday Jiangsu), compiled in 1574, contains the following description of another Wuwei Sect: The people of Kaiyuan and Yangming are fairly affluent. Since the Jiajing period (1522–1566), they have come to embrace the Wuwei belief . . . and refuse to worship their ancestors. Men and women mingle together to burn incense and take vegetarian meals.87 84 85 86 87

Ming shilu, Wanli 12/12/xinyu. Ming shilu, Wanli 43/6/gengzi. Swada, Zoho, 61. Quoted in Kawakatsu Mamoru, “Minmatsu Nankyo heishi no hanran” [The Nanking army mutiny in late Ming] in Hoshi hakase taikan kinen chugokushi ronshu [Essays on Chinese History in Commemoration of the Retirement of Dr. Hoshi Ayao] (Yamagata, 1978), 198.

Richard Shek

Zhu Guozhen, an observant late Ming essayist, noted in his Yongchuang xiaopin [Short essays from the Yongchuang studio] that Wuwei sectarians in the Wenzhou area in Zhejiang did not worship their ancestors or any other deity.88 Though admittedly fragmentary, these accounts appear to be compatible with the basic belief of the Ming-Qing sectarians regarding the relative importance of the Eternal Mother as compared with their own ancestors. Their basic eight-character chant of zhenkong jiaxiang, wusheng laomu is indicative of this ethical heterodoxy. One’s ultimate native place is not the village or county where one was born and reared, but is the realm of True Emptiness where one originated and eventually will return. Thus the attachment to the locality and submission to the village power structure is weakened. Moreover, one’s ultimate parents are not the biological father and mother, but instead the Eternal Mother who makes life possible in the first place. One’s obligation to the earthly family and ancestry is therefore undermined and made relative. This subversive attitude toward family and lineage is further illustrated by the precious scrolls of some sects. One Xiaoshi zhenkong saoxin baozhuan [Precious scroll on True Emptiness and the sweeping of the mind], possessed by a late Ming Wuwei Sect, relates that its patriarch attained enlightenment despite his total ignorance of and disregard for human relations (renlun) and ethical proprieties (liyi).89 Another, the Hongyang tanshi jing [Red Sun text of lamentation for the world], contains a picture of Piaogao the patriarch receiving kowtow from his eighty-oneyear-old grandfather. This led Huang Yubian to complain vehemently that Piaogao was totally devoid of human feelings, that he knew of no hierarchical distinctions in the family, and therefore in the state as well, and that he deserved the severest punishment in hell.90 Such an iconoclastic attitude toward patriarchal authority and the traditional practice of ancestor worship had serious religious and political implications. In religious terms, it was heterodox to deny the validity of the most exalted and lasting aspect of Chinese religious behavior. Politically, it was seditious to dissent from the patriarchal form of authority on which Chinese polity was based. As Weber has so pointedly observed: To reject the ancestor cult meant to threaten the cardinal virtue of politics, i.e., piety, and on this depended discipline in the hierarchy of offices and obedience of subjects. A religiosity which emancipated [the subjects] from believing in the 88 89 90

Zho Guozhen, Yongchuang xiaopin (Shanghai, repr., 1959), 777. Swada, Kochu, 161. Swada, Kochu, 133–4.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

all-decisive power of imperial charisma and the eternal order of pious relations was unbearable in principle.91

This countercultural iconoclasm was reflected in another feature of Ming-Qing sectarianism: the disproportionally heavy participation of women and the relative equality they enjoyed with their male counterparts.92 Though most of the sects had male leaders, it remains true that they were the only voluntary organization in traditional China that had a sizable female membership. Indeed, some sects such as the Red Sun Sect (Hongyang jiao) were comprised predominantly of women believers.93 This substantial female participation in sectarianism is also evidenced by the often-cited official charge against the sects: “gathering at night and dispersing at dawn, with men and women mingling together” (yeju xiaosan, nannu hunza). The fact that women could intermingle freely with men in sectarian worship was decidedly objectionable to the guardians of orthodoxy. In their opinion, such unsegregated assembly at night was an open invitation to all kinds of immoral and illicit sexual contacts. Indeed, government sources do contain allegations of lustful behavior and even sex orgies performed by the sectarians.94 While some of the allegations may not have been groundless for some groups, for the majority of the female followers of the Eternal Mother faith, deeper and more fundamental reasons for joining the sects can be identified. The female, motherly character of the supreme deity of the believers was a factor that must be reckoned with. In her mature form, the Eternal Mother was no mere goddess who answered people’s dire calls for help, as in the case of the Bodhisattva Guanyin or the folk goddess Mazu. Instead, she was matriarch of the pantheon of buddhas, gods, and immortals, as well as supreme savior of the human race. In the mature Eternal Mother cult, her position was even more exalted than that of the Jade Emperor, an assertion against which Huang Yubian railed with particular harshness.95 At her command, awe-inspiring deities such as the Maitreya Buddha would descend to earth to scourge it of all evil elements. Yet her power was tempered by her matronly compassion. 91 92

93 94 95

Weber, Religion of China, 216. For a discussion of this interesting subject, see Kobayashi Kazumi, “Kozoteki fusei no hanran” [The rebellion of the structurally antithetical elements]; Rekishigaku no saiken ni mukete [Towards a review of historiography] 4 (1979), and his “Chugoku byakurenkyo hanran ni okeru teio to seibo” [Sacred mothers and imperial monarchs in White Lotus rebellions in China], Rekishigaku no saiken ni mukete 5 (1980). See also Yu Songqing, Ming-Qing bailianjiao yanjiu, 295–311. Swada, Zoho, 402–3. Suzuki Chusei, Chugokushi ni okeru kakumei to shukyo [Rebellion and religion in Chinese history] (Tokyo, 1974), 212. Suzuki, Chugokushi ni okeru kakumei to shukyo, 193; Sawada, Kochu, 30, 57, 64. Swada, Kochu, 38.

Richard Shek

In sectarian literature, she was portrayed as the concerned mother who tearfully awaited the return of her wayward offspring. Her superiority over all deities, combined with her motherly character, must have formed an extremely appealing image to women who were by and large dissatisfied with their lot in life or unfulfilled in their aspirations. More importantly, the Eternal Mother motif must have provided a sense of equality, worth, and liberation for the female followers, a feeling that was denied them by society at large. Numerous precious scrolls make reference to this equality between women and men. The Longhua jing, for example, declared: “Let it be announced to all men and women in the assembly: ‘there should be no distinction between you.’”96 Similarly, the Jiuku zhongxiao yaowang baozhuan [Precious scroll on the god of medicine who is loyal, filially pious, and who delivers people from suffering] proclaims emphatically that “Men and women are originally not different. Both receive the pure breath of Prior Heaven (xiantian i’qi) from the Venerable Mother.”97 Finally, the Pujing rulai yaoshi tongtian baozhuan [Precious scroll by the Pujing Buddha on the key to reaching heaven] voices a similar theme: “In the realm of Prior Heaven, there are five spirits of yin and five pneuma of yang. When men gather the five spirits of yin, they become bodhisattvas. When women collect the five pneuma of yang, they become buddhas.”98 To each of these passages, in particular to the last one, Huang Yubian reacted with moral outrage. He vehemently accused the sectarians of making a mockery of the proper separation between the sexes. He further charged that these statements were an open invitation to lustful behavior and sexual promiscuity among the sect members.99 Whether or not these statements encouraged licentiousness is beside the point. What is noteworthy is their insistence that men and women are no different and are equally worthy of salvation. To be sure, such equality may be only theoretical and may exist only in the future world. Yet this admission alone is a stark contrast to the orthodox maxim of “distinctions must exist among the sexes” (nannu youbie). In actuality, some sects did implement, up to a point, this egalitarian notion. The Huangtian Sect in the seventeenth century referred to its female members as the “alternative way” (erdao).100 In view of the orthodox claim of “under heaven there is no alternative way (tianxia wu erdao), 96 97 98 99 100

Swada, Kochu, 30. Swada, Kochu, 97. Swada, Kochu, 57. Swada, Kochu, 30, 57. Yan Yuan, Sicun pian [Four Preservations] (Hong Kong, repr., 1978), 152–3.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

this play on words was clearly not accidental, but was meant to tease the orthodox authority. Yan Yuan was adamant in his criticism of this blurring of sexual distinctions. He accused the sectarians of “destroying the way of humanity and disrupting established customs.” This, he declared, “was utterly shameless.”101 Prosper Leboucq, a French Catholic missionary who traveled extensively in North China in the 1860s and reported on the activities of the sects in his letters, noted that women were very active in most of the sects. His explanation was that women were given a status equal to men. He further observed that if a wife joined a sect earlier than her husband, then in sectarian matters she would have superiority over him, as seniority within the sects was determined by length of membership.102

sectarian apocalyptic eschatology and salvationism The one truly distinguishing feature of the belief in the Eternal Mother is its apocalyptic eschatology. By that I mean an acute, burning vision of the imminent and complete dissolution of the corrupt, existing world and its replacement by a utopian, alternative order. Furthermore, this esoteric knowledge is shared only by a religious elect whose faith and action will guarantee their exclusive survival of this cosmic event.103 Basic to the Eternal Mother belief is the idea of the kalpa ( jie), a drastic and cataclysmic turning-point in human history. Originally a Buddhist notion that marks the cyclical passage of time on a cosmic scale, kalpa for the Eternal Mother believers assumed an immediacy and urgency that it originally did not possess.104 The belief in an eventual occurrence of kalpic crisis was commonly shared by the Ming and Qing Eternal Mother followers. Virtually all the sectarian texts from the sixteenth century on subscribed to a three-stage salvational scheme in which heavenly emissaries would descend to earth at predestined times and at the command of the Eternal Mother to deliver the faithful. While the first two stages, representing past and present, excited little interest, it was the third stage, the stage to come, that created apprehension and fired the imagination of the believers. After all, it was their anticipation that the arrival 101 102 103

104

Yan Yuan, Sicun pian, 152–3. Prosper Leboucq, Association de la Chine (Paris, 1880), 11–12, 19. For a comparative framework, consult Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London, 1982) and D.S. Russell, The Divine Disclosure: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic (Minneapolis, 1992). For the early history of eschatological notions among Buddho-Taoist groups, see Chapters 1 and 2 in Liu and Shek, eds., Heterodoxy.

Richard Shek

of this third stage would signal their return to and reunion with the Mother. The third stage, it was widely believed, would be ushered in by a messianic figure (usually the Maitreya Buddha, but in some cases the founding patriarchs of the various sects) whose coming would be accompanied by an unprecedented wave of natural and social upheavals so catastrophic that the heavenly bodies as well as human society would be literally torn asunder and then reconstituted. The following description of the honors and devastation of the kalpic turmoil, related with apparent relish by the compilers of the Longhua jing, is illustrative: In the xinsi year [1641?] there will be floods and famines in North China, with people in Shantung being the hardest hit. They will practise cannibalism upon one another, while millions will starve to death. Husbands and wives will be forced to leave one another, and parents and children will be separated. Even those who manage to flee to northern Zhili will be afflicted by another famine and will perish by the roadside. In the renwu year [1642?] disasters will strike again with redoubled force. There will be avalanches and earthquakes. The Yellow River will overflow its banks and multitudes will be drowned. Then the locusts will come and blanket the earth, devouring what little crop that remains. Rain will come down incessantly and houses will crumble. . . . In the guiwei year [1643?] widespread epidemics will occur.105

Keeping in mind that the Longhua jing was compiled during the MingQing transition, and assuming that the specific years mentioned in the text refer to that critical period as the Ming dynasty was about to fall, the devastation and misery described here may indeed be offering an uncannily authentic picture of the real situation itself. Thus the kalpic change, for some of the sectarians at least, was not an event that might happen in some distant future eons from the present but was in fact taking place right before their very eyes and being confirmed by their own experience! Their overriding concern was to “respond” to this kalpic disaster (yingjie) and to survive it. The urgency for action was understandable. Equally noteworthy in this apocalyptic vision of the sectarians is the notion of their own “election.” Not only was the apocalyptic conflagration impending, it would at the same time separate the elect from the doomed. The Eternal Mother believers were convinced that they belonged to a minority of “saints” destined to survive the cataclysm that would terminate the existing order. Indeed, they and they alone would 105

Longhua jing 3:21. I would like to thank Prof. Overmyer for supplying me with a photocopy of an early twentieth-century edition of this text. For the apocalyptic beliefs of some later sects, see Susan Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven, 1976), 12.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

inherit the new age that was soon to dawn, when they would enjoy the fruits of reunion with the Eternal Mother. All their religious practices were designed to confirm their election, to ensure their survival in the final moments of this doomed order, and to prepare themselves for the eventual admission into the new one. A corollary of this view was the expected annihilation of the nonbelievers (the wicked and evil ones) prior to the arrival of the millennium. Since the onset of the new age would confirm the salvation of the elect, it was not surprising that some sectarians would look forward to its early arrival when the saved and the doomed would be separated and the latter would be destroyed and cast away without mercy. The notion of election figures prominently in sectarian texts. The elect are variously referred to as youyuan ren (predestined ones), huangtai zi (offspring of the imperial womb), and a host of other names.106 The Longhua jing, in particular, contains a pronounced theme of election for the Yuandun Sect members. Describing the Dragon Flower Assembly after the kalpa, the text mentions “city in the clouds” (yuncheng) where it will be held. The survivors of the apocalypse will proceed to enter the city gate, where their identity will be individually checked before admission. Those who fail to produce a valid registration or contract will be turned away and cast into oblivion.107 While this portrayal reveals glimpses of the bureaucratic tendency in Chinese folk mentality – salvation is seen here as “certified” by registration slips and “confirmed” by admission through the city gate – it nevertheless highlights the sense of solemnity and pride felt by the elect. For this reason, the initiation rituals of guahao (registration), biaoming (submitting names), and dui hetong (verifying contracts),108 performed by the novices at the time of their admission into the sect, assumed great significance. These rites not only ritualistically conferred upon the members a new identity but also dramatized their election as the destined remnant of humanity after the kalpa. Assured of their salvation, many Eternal Mother followers thus concerned themselves with “the life to come” (laishi), which meant both “the life one might expect after death and the millennium one might experience in this world.”109 When captured and interrogated, these people repeatedly insisted that the principal motivation for their conversion to sectarianism was to “pray for 106 107 108 109

See Longhua jing 2:29; 3:21a–b, 22a–b, 23a–b, 24a–b. See also the Puming baozhuan in Stulova, Baotszuian o Pu-mine, 10, 62, 130, 207. Longhua jing, 2:15; 3:16b; 4:5b, 8b. Longhua jing, 1:24b; 2:6, 12b, 13b, 14b, 18b; 4:21, 25. See also Sawada, Kochu, 63. Naquin, “Transmission of White Lotus Sectarianism,” 279.

Richard Shek

protection in the life to come.” They were confident that they would get it too. This sense of election was evident in many Eternal Mother sects. An untitled precious scroll in Huang Yubian’s Poxie xiangbian declared that “All non-believers are destined for hell. Only devout sect members will have direct access to the Celestial Palace, not be condemned to descend into hell.”110 At the time of the Eight Trigrams uprising in 1813, one of the faithful claimed, “In the future, those who are not in our assembly will meet with disasters accompanying the arrival of the kalpa.” Another put it more bluntly, “If you join the sect, you live; if you don’t, you die.”111 Members of a Yuan Chiao Sect [Perfect completion] in the early part of the nineteenth century held the belief that “when the Maitreya comes to rule the world, there will be chaos for forty-nine days. The sun and moon will alter their course, the weather will change and only those who adhere to the Yuan Chiao will be saved from the cataclysm.”112 It was precisely this exclusionist view of election that made the sectarians stand apart from their local communities and even kins; their commitment to the existing order came under doubt. When, and if, they did survive the catastrophic disasters of the kalpa, some sectarians expected to find a radically changed cosmos with a totally different time scale and alternative calendar. The Puming baozhuan of the Yellow Heaven Sect, the first edition of which probably appeared in 1558, has a vivid description of this new world: The land is rearranged; the stars and constellations re-established. Heaven and earth are put in order again. Oceans and mountains are relocated. After nine cycles, the elixir [of life] is refined. Together humans reach the other shore. The compass stops and the two unbroken lines [of a trigram] meet. The eighteen kalpic disasters have run their full course, and the form of all things is about to change. Eighteen months will make one year, and thirty-six-hours constitute a day. There will be forty-five days in a month. One day will have one hundred and forty-four quarter-hours, and eight hundred and ten days form one year.113

This vision of a reconstituted cosmos with an altered time scale appears to have been shared by other sectarians as well. During the early Daoguang reign in the Qing dynasty (1821–51), a White Sun Sect espoused a similar belief in a thirty-six hour day for the new age. Moreover, its members claimed that “The hongyang [red sun] age is about to have run its full course. It is time to prepare for the arrival of baiyang 110 111 112 113

Swada, Kochu, 116, 152. Quoted in Naquin, Millenarian Rebellion in China, 113. Adopted with emendation from Overmyer, Folk Buddhist Religion, 160. See Stulova, Baotszuian o Pu-mine, 223–5.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

[white sun]. In the present age, the moon remains full until the eighteenth day of each month. When it stays full until the twenty-third day, the kalpa is upon us.”114 It is thus obvious that some sectarians were not content with the thought of a new cosmos, but were actively observing phenomena in the night sky, ever ready to detect the first signs of the arrival of the new age. Another sect displayed keen interest in astronomical matters: the Imperial Heaven Sect (Huangtian dao) of the seventeenth century.115 The famous neo-Confucian scholar Yan Yuan (1635–1704) has left a brief account of this group: In my native province of Zhili, the people’s mores were uncontaminated prior to the Longqing (1567–1572) and Wanli (1573–1620) periods [of the Ming dynasty]. Since the last years of Wanli, however, there appeared a Huangtian Sect which has become very popular. From the capital to the neighboring prefectures and counties, and even down to the distant villages and mountain retreats, members of this sect can be found. . . . They rename the stars Can and Shu “Cold Mother” and the two constellations Fang and Xin “Warm Mother.”116

The entire eschatology of the Eternal Mother sectarians, represented by the concepts of kalpa, election, and cosmic reconstitution, was most threatening to orthodox thinking. The notion of kalpa, to begin with, was predicated on the assumption that the existing order, with its ethical norms and sociopolitical institutions, was finite, mutable, and destined to be replaced. Moreover, the new age promised to be a far better substitute. This kind of thinking might create a frame of mind that expected, even welcomed, the demise of the present age. It would at least render untenable the orthodox claim that “Heaven is immutable, so also is the Way” (tian bubian, dao yi bubian). The notion of kalpic upheaval ran directly counter to this claim of immutability, for it called for total, cosmic, cataclysmic change. The validity of the present age, including the existing moral authority, was at least theoretically undermined, since moral norms must rest on certain assumptions of stability and continuity. The threat of the kalpa was further aggravated by its urgency. It was expected to take place at least in the foreseeable future, if not here and now. It was to be accompanied by a series of disasters so severe that the entire realm would become one big chaos (tianxia daluan). To survive it one could no longer rely on one’s own efforts alone, but must 114 115 116

Swada, Kochu, 67. See also his “Doko Byakuyokyo shimatsu” [The Full Story of the White Sun Sect of the Daoguang Period], in his Zoho, 434–5. It is highly probable that it is merely another name for the Yellow Heaven Sect, as “imperial” and “yellow” are hom*ophones in Chinese. Yan Yuan, Sicun pian, 152–3.

Richard Shek

entrust oneself to a savior or deliverer, follow his injunctions, and completely suspend all personal values and judgment. This abandonment and surrender ran counter to the orthodox teaching that prevailed at the time, made popular by morality books and religious instructions, that one could shape one’s own destiny and receive karmic rewards through moral behavior. For some sectarians, this salvational path of conformity to the moral norm was no longer acceptable. They believed instead in redemption through a messianic figure whose deliverance they eagerly awaited. For the guardians of orthodoxy, this sectarian view of messianic salvation meant total contempt for their teaching and authority. The idea of election was equally unacceptable to orthodox belief, which subscribed to a universalist approach to salvation. The infinite compassion of the Amitabha Buddha or of the Bodhisattva Guanyin was believed to be available to all. Similarly, the saving power of Laozi and the other Daoist deities was all-embracing. The sectarian view that sect membership alone could guarantee salvation was thus assailed with vehemence by the orthodox-minded. Huang Yubian thus asked teasingly in his Poxie xiangbian: “If those who are practising heterodox religion are the children of the Eternal Mother, then whose children are those who do not follow such deviant ways?”117 A few paragraphs later, Huang again attacked this sectarian view: “If indeed there is a compassionate Eternal Mother up in Heaven, she should certainly not be discriminating in extending her saving grace, and should treat everyone equally. Why should she be so partial toward the heterodox sectarians?”118 The sectarian attention to astronomical matters was found most troubling by the state. The changes in time scale, the alteration in calendrical calculations, the predicted deviation in the movement of the heavenly bodies, and the renaming of the stars all infringed upon the prerogatives of the emperor as the supreme astronomer and diviner. In a culture in which the Son of Heaven claimed a monopoly of interpretation of all astronomical phenomena and of all calendrical calculations, and in an agrarian economy in which such powers conferred enormous control over the timing of planting and harvesting, such sectarian concerns carried serious ethical and political implications. Chinese monarchs had traditionally warned that “those who recklessly talk about astronomical phenomena are to be executed” (wang tan tianxiang zhe zhan). It is small wonder that orthodoxy would find this sectarian interest in celestial matters most disturbing. 117 118

Sawada, Kochu, 61. Sawada, Kochu, 63.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

All in all, the sectarian espousal of an eschatology and the attendant millenarianism posed a direct, frontal challenge to orthodoxy. With little to lose and all the fruits of the coming millennium to gain, some sectarians might be psychologically disposed to take drastic, even violent, action to usher in the new era. Seen in this light, Huang Yubian’s bitter attack on the sectarian millennial yearning becomes understandable: For those who do not practise heterodox religion, men till the land and women weave their cloth. Food will be plentiful and clothing will be abundant. Is it not delightful? . . . The joy of this world is concrete and tangible, while the bliss of heaven is illusory and unreal. The heterodox sects focus their attention on heavenly bliss, but in the end they lose even the joy of the human world. . . . When they say that they are going to enjoy their blissful paradise, who can prove it? Their claim is not to be believed.119

concluding remarks The first part of this chapter attempts to establish the fact that an orthodox tradition existed in China. Socioethical in content, this orthodoxy can be characterized as “religious pluralism and moral orthodoxy.” Next I try to define heterodoxy in light of this Chinese orthodoxy. I identify the Eternal Mother belief as the mature and coherent version of heterodoxy in late imperial or early modern China. I then examine the genesis and development of the Eternal Mother belief. It has been demonstrated how certain originally abstract and disparate ideas were transformed into vivid imagery and even concrete objects of worship. The argument is advanced that Luo Qing played an important role in the final emergence of the Eternal Mother motif, although he was by no means the first person to have used the term or its variant. Furthermore, it is asserted that once formed, this Eternal Mother cult began to inform the religious content of most Ming-Qing sectarian groups. The last part of this essay is concerned with the implications and the heterodox nature of this myth. A number of the sects at different times implicitly or explicitly challenged the power of the monarch through casual discussion of astronomical matter, deliberate defiance of law and punishment, evasion of taxes, and arrogating the power to bestow titles and princely honors on the faithful. Some sectarians also undermined patriarchal and kinship authority with their creation of a new sense of community based not on blood relationship but on religious commitment, as well as their advocacy of the theoretical equality of the sexes. Their otherworldly 119

Sawada, Kochu, 37.

Richard Shek

salvational goals, in the last analysis, were not compatible with the existing social and cultural order. Through their religious affiliations, they subverted the control of society through familial and monarchical authority, replacing the orthodox moral norm with their alternative socioethics. The most heinous crime in the Chinese tradition was “disloyalty and unfiliality, having no regard for monarch and father” (buzhong buxiao, wufu wujun). The sectarians discussed in this study fit this description of heterodoxy rather well, even though the vast majority of them never raised the banner of rebellion. When describing the Wuwei Sect in the Wenzhou area in Zhejiang, Zhu Guozhen noted that “some of the curses these sectarians heaped upon monarch and father are unbearable when heard by loyal subjects and filial sons.”120 Commenting on the Huangtian and several other sects, the philosopher Yan Yuan remarked, “When their houses are temples or nunneries which observe no monastic rules, when they themselves are untonsured monks and nuns, it is rare that they do not worship evil spirits who show contempt for ruler and father; it is also rare that they do not chant heterodox slogans which show contempt for ruler and father.”121 Likewise, Huang Yubian noted repeatedly that sectarian beliefs would result in disloyalty and unfiliality.122 Seen from the perspective of orthodoxy, these sects would have to be regarded as heterodox. If one may borrow the title of Christopher Hill’s famous work on the English sectarians, one can indeed say that many of the Ming-Qing Eternal Mother followers had conceptualized a world “turned upside down.” Commenting on the precious scroll, Huang Yubian made the following observation: The sectarians consider those who lead a tranquil, stable life as “having gone astray from home.” . . . They make other people abandon their parents, spouse, and children to join them, and call this “return home.” They regard prosperous, law abiding, and peaceful life as “suffering in samsara,” but refer to punishments received after their arrest, including decapitation, slow-slicing, and slaughter of family and lineage members, as “returning to Pure Land and Mt. Ling.” What is heterodox they maintain as orthodox, evil as moral, transgression as merit, misfortune as blessing, harm as benefit, and disaster as fortune.123

Although the sectarians only infrequently took up arms to overthrow the existing government, the reversal of values inherent in their belief was what made the sects so threatening to the guardians of orthodoxy. 120 121 122 123

Zhu Guozhen, Yongchuang xiaopin, 77. Yan Yuan, Sicun pian, 152–3. Sawada, Kochu, 33, 65. Sawada, Kochu, 160.

Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China

The current value system simply lost its validity and immutability when these sectarians subscribed to an alternative system. Their antinomian values, combined with an intense eschatological vision, had made them suspect in the eyes of orthodoxy. To be sure, most of the sects did not translate this alternative value and practice system into radical political action. In fact, it would be safe to say that the vast majority of the sects remained docile and pacific throughout their history, while their organization remained quite hierarchical and authoritarian. Nevertheless, the existence of this potentially subversive tradition in direct opposition to the orthodox mode of thinking must be recognized, and some sectarians did use this radical tradition to realize their political goals. The resilience and tenacity of this tradition must not be underestimated. Indeed, in studying the historical origins of revolutionary movements such as the Taipings in the nineteenth century and perhaps even the Chinese communists in the twentieth, the Eternal Mother tradition needs to be carefully examined for comparison.

chapter ii

Ecclesiastical elites and popular belief and practice in seventeenth-century Russia robert o. crummey

T he Russian church schism of the seventeenth century is the focal point of this brief examination of popular belief and practice and the struggles of ecclesiastical elites to shape, control, and change them. The chapter will review and reflect on the most important phases of the interaction between the leaders of Russian Orthodoxy and ordinary parishioners between the late 1630s and the beginning of the eighteenth century in light of recent studies of Christian communities elsewhere in early modern Europe. It contains no new archival discoveries: Most of the documents and monographs on which it draws have long been familiar to historians of Russia. These sources, moreover, reflect the perceptions of government officials or ecclesiastical polemicists. Thus, as Eve Levin cautions, when describing popular religious beliefs and practices, they are likely to focus on “the most heterodox elements” that diverge most dramatically from established norms.1 In spite of the country’s enormous territory, the discussion will consider Russia as a single unit for two reasons. First, even a glance at scholarship on Western and Central Europe shows how limited and scattered are the surviving sources on Russian parish life and popular religious practice.2 For one thing, historians of Russia must live without systematic parish records. Second, in spite of the Muscovite monarchy’s vast size, movements of popular religious protest spread quickly, in large measure through the efforts of itinerant agitators and exiles. 1

Eve Levin, “Supplicatory Prayers as a Source for Popular Religious Culture in Muscovite Russia,” in Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine, Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann eds. (DeKalb, IL, 1997), 96–114, here p. 96. As compared, for example, with England. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992).

Belief and Practice in Russia

What then is the purpose of this reexamination of familiar territory? First, in recent years, scholars – Vera Rumiantseva3 and Georg Michels,4 in particular – have uncovered new sources, primarily reports of governmental investigations, on religious movements in the seventeenth century. Their publications have added significantly to our knowledge of popular movements of religious dissent and the enforcement of the Nikonian liturgical reforms and resistance to them. Second, recent writing on the development of religious communities elsewhere in Europe provides a stimulating conceptual vehicle on which to revisit the Russian scene. As we shall see, in Russia, as elsewhere on the continent in the early modern period, the government and the ecclesiastical leadership collaborated in maintaining confessional uniformity and enforcing “decency and good order” in worship and public morals.5 Indeed, the concept “confessionalization” and its implications have long been axiomatic to historians of Russian religion and society. In undertaking comparative analysis, we must of course keep in mind that Russian Orthodoxy is, above all, a religion of the sign, not of the word. Believers communicate with God primarily through their

V.S. Rumiantseva, Narodnoe antit*erkovnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v XVII veke (Moscow, 1986) and two collections of archival documents she has edited, Narodnoe antit*erkovnoe dvizhenie v Rossii XVII veka. Dokumenty Prikaza Tainykh Del. 1665–1667 gg. (Moscow, 1986) and Dokumenty Razriadnogo, Posol’skogo, Novgorodskogo i Tainogo Prikazov o raskol’nikakh v gorodakh Rossii. 1654–1684 gg. (Moscow, 1990). Georg Michels’s publications include “The Place of Nikita Konstantinovich Dobrynin ´ in the History of Early Old Belief,” Revue des Etudes slaves 49 (1997): 21–31; “Muscovite Elite Women and Old Belief,” in Rhetoric of the Medieval Slavic World: Essays Presented to Edward L. Keenan on his Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students (Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19), 428–50; “The Violent Old Belief: An Examination of Religious Dissent on the Karelian Frontier,” Russian History 19 (1992): 203–29; “The First Old Believers in Ukraine: Observations about their Social Profile and Behavior,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 16 (1992): 289–313; “The Solovki Uprising – Religion and Revolt in Northern Russia,” Russian Review 51 (1992): 1–15; “Myths and Realities of the Russian Schism: The Church and its Dissenters in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Harvard University, 1991); and his book, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, CA, 1999). For treatments of “confessionalization” that are helpful from a Russian perspective see Duffy, Stripping the Altars; R. Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe, 1550–1750 (London and New York, 1989); R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk. Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge, 1981); Heinz Schilling, “Between the Territorial State and Urban Liberty: Lutheranism and Calvinism in the County of Lippe,” in The German People and the Reformation, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 263–83 and “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich. Religioser ¨ und Gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620,” Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988): 1–45; Wolfgang Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Pro¨ Historische legomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift fur Forschung 10 (1983): 257–77; and Jean Delumeau, “D´echristianisation ou nouveau mod`ele de Christianisme,” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 40 (1975): 3–20.

Robert O. Crummey

participation in the church’s rites. In Orthodoxy, liturgy, belief, and practice are ultimately inseparable. Thus, in spite of minor differences in theology, major divergences in church organization and discipline, and a long history of animosity, Orthodoxy has far more in common with Roman Catholicism – and to some degree Anglicanism – than with any branch of Protestantism.6 Moreover, in seventeenth-century Russia, religious struggles took place in a large, long-established, comparatively centralized monarchy which, in spite of many obvious differences, bore much closer resemblance to England, France, or Spain than to the small city-states and principalities of Central Europe.7 The title of this chapter contains two terms that require further explanation. “Ecclesiastical elites” refers to two groups of people. First are the patriarch, bishops, and parish priests of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Second, during and after the church schism of the mid-seventeenth century, the conservative opposition to the Nikonian reforms, later known as the Old Belief, began to bring forth its own leaders and create its own unofficial organizational structures. Over the latter half of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, its leaders formed a second “ecclesiastical elite” – to be sure, canonically self-appointed, internally divided, and often fugitive from the power of official church and state.8 “Popular religion” refers to the beliefs and practices of ordinary

7 8

Some historians have suggested parallels between Old Belief and Protestantism for two reasons (for example, James Billington, The Icon and the Axe. An Interpretative Study of Russian Culture [New York, 1966], 193). First, the priestless Old Believers rejected the priesthood and created self-generating communities led by laypeople. In spite of these superficially “Protestant” arrangements, the priestless regard themselves as the faithful remnant of Eastern Orthodoxy and regret the loss of the full sacramental ministry of the church. Time and again, individuals among them have, for this reason, rejoined the priestly Old Belief or uniate affiliates of the “synodal” Orthodox church when they can overcome their canonical scruples. In the last two decades, all of the major Old Believer communities in North America have relived this recurring story. Second, the Old Believers’ ascetic way of life and success in business seems to parallel Calvinism. As I have argued elsewhere, the “Weber” thesis seems inappropriate to Old Belief for theological reasons (Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist. The Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694–1855 [Madison, 1970], Chapter 7, esp. pp. 135–7). I accept Manfred Hildermeier’s counterargument that Weber’s more general concept of “this-worldly asceticism” fits the Old Believers and, for that matter, many other religious or cultural minorities. His essay on this subject is in press. See also his “Alter Glaube und neue Welt: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Raskol im 18. und 19. ¨ ¨ Geschichte Osteuropas [hereafter JfGO] 38 (1990): 372–98, Jahrhundert,” Jahrbucher fur 504–25 and “Alter Glaube und Mobilit¨at. Bemerkungen zur Verbreitung und sozialen Struktur des Raskol im fruhindustriallen ¨ Russland (1760–1860),” JfGO 39 (1991): 321–38. Much of the recent literature on the Reformation concentrates on the latter. See, for example, the essays in Hsia, German People. Robert O. Crummey, “The Origins of the Old Believers’ Cultural Systems: The Works of Avraamii,” Forschungen zur osteurop¨aischen Geschichte [hereafter FzOG] 50 (1995): 121–38.

Belief and Practice in Russia

parishioners or those of comparatively uneducated or marginal individuals and groups in defiance of established authority.9 The following discussion will focus on six important points of contact between ecclesiastical leaders and ordinary parishioners. These are: the reform movement of the so-called Zealots of Piety and the popular beliefs and practices they attempted to change; the Nikonian liturgical reforms and their initial enforcement; the popular movements of religious renewal or protest uncovered by governmental and ecclesiastical investigators in the middle decades of the seventeenth century; the campaign of the royal government and the hierarchy to root out opposition to Nikon’s reforms; the explosion of violent resistance to changes in church and state, particularly self-immolation; and the initial efforts of the leaders of the conservative movement of resistance, the Old Believers, to channel and discipline the beliefs and practices of their followers. ∗∗∗∗∗ Ecclesiastical reform became a burning issue in seventeenth-century Russia on the accession of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (1645–76).10 A small, informal group of would-be reformers, known to later generations as the Zealots of Piety, gathered around the young monarch who was already establishing a reputation for sincere piety and intense interest in ecclesiastical matters.11 Among its prominent members were the tsar himself; his friend, F.M. Rtishchev; his confessor, Stefan Vonifat’ev; the prominent parish priest, Ivan Neronov; his younger protegee, the priest Avvakum; and the rising star of the ecclesiastical firmament, Metropolitan Nikon of Novgorod. As they looked at life in the parish,

The literature on popular religion in Europe is enormous. General overviews include Natalie Zemon Davis, “From ‘Popular Religion’ to Religious Cultures,” in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. Steven Ozment (St. Louis, 1982), 321–42; R.W. Scribner, “Interpreting Religion in Early Modern Europe,” European Studies Review 13 (1983): 89–105; Richard van Dulman, “Volksfrommigkeit ¨ und konfessionelles Christentum im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Volksreligiosit¨at in der modernen Sozialgeschichte, ed. Wolfgang Schieder (Gottingen, ¨ 1986), 14–30 and the works cited in footnote 4. For a recent discussion of the literature on popular religion as applied to Russia, see Robert O. Crummey, “Old Belief as Popular Religion: New Approaches,” Slavic Review 52 (1993): 700–12. For a narrative of the events discussed in this paper, see the two best general works on ecclesiastical reform and the church schism, Pierre Pascal, Avvakum et les d´ebuts du raskol (Paris, 1936; repr., Paris and The Hague, 1963) and Serge Zenkovsky, Russkoe staroobriadchestvo (Munich, 1970). ¨ die Fr¨ommigkeit” On the Zealots of Piety, see Wolfgang Heller, Die Moskauer “Eiferer fur zwischen Staat und Kirche (1642–52) (Wiesbaden, 1988). Since the Zealots were an informal group of friends and acquaintances, any interpretation of their aims and activities depends, in part, on assumptions about who can be considered a member.

Robert O. Crummey

the Zealots, some of them experienced parish priests, saw two fundamental problems: confusion and disorder in worship and the survivals of pre-Christian rites that still captivated and entertained many villagers. In attacking these problems, the Zealots implicitly confronted an even deeper problem. In comparison with much of Western Europe, the parish was loosely organized and, in practice, only tenuously connected to the higher ecclesiastical authorities. As individual reformers were already discovering, a parish priest, usually a descendant of priests, could minister to his people most easily by abiding by village tradition and not pressing them too hard to fulfill their ritual and moral obligations as Orthodox Christians.12 In a crisis, he might well find that his bishop was far away indeed. Paradoxically, as we shall see, the government and ecclesiastical hierarchy acted as though they could exercise effective control over parish life and the behavior of ordinary believers. The Zealots’ aspirations closely resembled those of ecclesiastical reformers in Western and Central Europe, especially Roman Catholics. They envisioned a vibrant Christian community in which, under the supervision of the hierarchy, priests celebrated the Eucharist and other offices with dignity and order and maintained high moral standards among their flocks. Popular devotional life was to be purified by removing extraneous elements and dubious forms of devotion.13 A revival of preaching was one step toward their lofty goals. In Russia, achieving liturgical uniformity and good order was a daunting challenge. Full Orthodox worship requires a variety of service books; over centuries of hand copying, significant inconsistencies had crept into these texts. From about 1500, the more enlightened Russian hierarchs had realized the importance of establishing standard, authoritative texts. In the early seventeenth century, the problem remained unsolved and, with the aid

Parishioners’ enthusiasm was undoubtedly dampened by the custom of paying priests for their services, including confession and administering the Eucharist. See S. Smirnov, “Drevnerusskii dukhovnik,” in Chteniia v Imperatorskom Obshchestve Istorii i Drevnostei Rossiiskikh pri Moskovskom Universitete [hereafter ChOIDR] 249 (1914, book ii): 1– 283, here p. 73. See also A. Amfiteatrov, Russkii pop XVII veka (Belgrade, 1930), esp. pp. 109–14. To distract the authorities from their real activities and goals, peasant radicals in Pudozh in 1693 made a formal complaint that they had been deprived of the sacraments because their village priests charged very high fees for their services. Whatever the truth of the charges, the people who made them evidently believed that they were plausible enough to be taken seriously (Akty istoricheskie, sobrannye i izdannye Arkheograficheskoiu komissieiu, 5 vols. [St. Petersburg, 1841–3] [hereafter AI], 5: 383–5 [no. 223]). Duffy, Stripping the Altars, Chapter 16, characterizes the Counter-Reformation in much these terms. See also Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? ¨ ReformationProlegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv fur sgeschichte 68 (1977): 226–52, and A.G. Dickens, The Counter Reformation (New York, 1969).

Belief and Practice in Russia

of that dangerous foreign innovation, the printing press, the leaders of the Russian church began once again to address the problem. The Zealots fully supported the effort. Initially, however, the Zealots gave special attention to two issues, neither of which was new. Ivan Neronov and his fellow parish priests in Nizhnii-Novgorod sent a petition to Patriarch Ioasaf in 1636, asking for his support in restoring order and dignity to services of worship. The petitioners recited a litany of apparently long-standing abuses – mnogoglasie (the practice of chanting up to “five or six” different parts of the service simultaneously); other liturgical short-cuts (for example, omitting the hours before the Divine Liturgy); and singing vespers in the morning. They also complained at length about rowdy behavior during services. Priests’ children played noisily in the altar area while, in the congregation, men and women came and went, talked loudly, and acted the fool. False monks, fake fools-in-Christ, and other panhandlers harassed worshipers. In a particularly ingenious scam, beggars, giving false names and addresses, asked the faithful for money to redeem them from bond-slavery.14 From the patriarch’s point of view, many of these complaints were clearly justified and the remedies obvious. In 1646, Ioasaf issued a general decree that all priests, deacons, and “all Orthodox Christians fast, live in purity with all discipline (vozderzhanie)15 and distance themselves from drunkenness, injustice and all kinds of sin.” The clergy should see to it that their parishioners “should stand in God’s church with fear and trembling and love, silently without any whispering,” and focus their minds on God and pray “over their sins with tears, humble sighs and contrite hearts without malice or anger.” A tall order indeed! The patriarch ordered parish clergy to put a stop to precisely the forms of irreverent behavior about which the Nizhnii-Novgorodians had complained.16 Attacking mnogoglasie was more controversial. Liturgical short-cuts had crept into Russian Orthodoxy for good reason.17 In Orthodoxy, there is no such thing as a missa brevis. Over the centuries, monastic services had become the norm in parishes. The Divine Liturgy and the other services put severe demands on the patience and stamina of even the 14

15 16

N.V. Rozhdestvenskii, “K istorii bor’by s tserkovnymi bezporiadkami, otgoloskami iazychestva i porokami v russkom bytu XVII v.,” ChOIDR 201 (1902, book ii): 1–31, here pp. 19–23. I have used the Library of Congress system of transliteration from Cyrillic. Akty, sobrannye v bibliotekakh i arkhivakh Rossiiskoi imperii Arkheograficheskoiu ekspeditsieiu Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1836–58) [hereafter AAE] 4: 481–2 (no. 321). For an extensive list of examples, see AAE 4: 487–9 (no. 327).

Robert O. Crummey

most devout laypeople. Thus the willingness of many priests and parishioners to do almost anything to shorten services is, if not admirable, at least quite understandable. When the first attempts to end these traditional practices encountered vigorous opposition, Patriarch Ioasaf retreated and, in 1649, an ecclesiastical council supported a return to the status quo.18 The reformers, however, would not give up their demand for an orderly liturgy with no overlapping or short-cuts (edinoglasie). The second of the reformers’ agendas – the survival of pre-Christian rites and impious entertainments – had troubled the leaders of the church for centuries. The Nizhnii-Novgorod petition of 1636 took up and expanded on the complaints of the church fathers in the Stoglav council of 1551 and, once Tsar Aleksei ascended the throne, royal decrees echoed the cry.19 The list of sinful behavior is lengthy and remarkably – indeed suspiciously – consistent throughout the documents. In midwinter and late spring, instead of coming to church, ordinary people went out to drink, gamble, tell fortunes, and enjoy the performances of the traditional folk entertainers (skomorokhi) with their irreverent and obscene patter and songs, their musical instruments, their trained bears, and their dancing dogs. Women and girls swung on swings. For their health, villagers bathed in the nearest river or lake at the new moon or the sound of thunder or washed themselves with silver coins. They also allowed folk healers into their houses to practice their arts. The documents describe the observance of the annual rituals of Rusalii and Koliada.20 Between the feasts of the Ascension and John the Baptist, villagers in the Nizhnii-Novgorod area gathered four times in different villages: women and girls brought food offerings and danced around a birch tree. Beginning on Christmas Eve, revelers celebrated Koliada, the winter solstice, with drinking, musical instruments, pagan songs, and all kinds of fortune telling. Masked mummers entertained them, including several young men representing a mare (kobylka). Even in Lent, the devilish entertainments went on. The skomorokhi went the rounds of houses and streets and swings appeared in the central square. Entertainers even parodied the Resurrection.21

18 19 20

S.A. Belokurov, “Deianie Moskovskago tserkovnogo sobora 1649 goda,” ChOIDR 171 (1894, book iv), 1–52. D.E. Kozhanchikov, ed., Stoglav (St. Petersburg, 1863), 135–41. On these festivals, see V. Ia. Propp, Russkie agrarnye prazdniki (St. Petersburg, 1995), esp. 45–7, 70–5, 122–4, 136–43; Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (Armonk, NY, and London, 1989), 9–10; and Russell Zguta, Russian Minstrels. A History of the Skomorokhi (Philadelphia, 1978), 9–12. Rozhdestvenskii, “K istorii bor’by,” AI, 4: 124–26 (no. 35); N. Kharuzin, “K voprosu o bor’be Moskovskago pravitel’stva s narodnymi iazycheskimi obriadami i sueveriiami v

Belief and Practice in Russia

As we would expect, these graphic descriptions come exclusively from prominent Orthodox priests and the government. How literally can we take the details of these accounts? In general, the picture they present harmonizes with earlier written sources and later ethnographic observation. Moreover, it seems improbable that conscientious parish priests would not know roughly what their parishioners were up to, no matter how much they disapproved of their conduct. At the same time, a pinch of skepticism seems justified. For one thing, the government’s decrees describe “pagan” practices in remarkably consistent, stereotypical phrases. In addition, the documents assume that folk practices were essentially the same all across Russia, from Nizhnii-Novgorod to Dmitrov, near Moscow, Belgorod in the south, and Verkhotur’e in western Siberia. What did these rituals and entertainments mean to the participants? On this we can only speculate. They were certainly carnivalesque with a vengeance.22 They allowed the participants to shed their inhibitions (on occasion, their clothes), drink, sing and dance, and, in the process, mock the respectable world and its powers. But what did participants think they were doing? Were they practicing a pre-Christian nature religion or just having a riotous good time?23 While any answer must be hypothetical, the most likely explanation lies somewhere in between. In the lives of seventeenth-century peasants, these survivals of ancient systems of belief were part of a complex syncretism of Christian and pre-Christian elements, of faith and magic expressed in annual cycles of rituals governed by two complementary calendars. The ecclesiastical reformers’ view of these popular practices was unequivocal. They were determined to abolish them for reasons that would make good sense to confessional leaders elsewhere in Europe.24 In origin, they were clearly pagan and the skoromokhi who led the revels had once functioned as priests or shamans; they distracted parishioners from their Christian duties during some of the great festivals of the

polovine XVII v.,” Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie, no. 1 (1879): 143–51; and Pascal, Avvakum, 161–4. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978), 213–15, rightly includes these Russian practices in this category. Relying primarily on ethnographic materials of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Propp, Agrarnye prazdniki, Chapter 7, also classified many of the practices that shocked the Zealots as “games and amusem*nts.” Historians of popular religion in England on the eve of the Reformation have a clear answer to this question. In Ronald Hutton’s words, “there is absolutely no evidence that the people who kept these customs were anything but Christian or had any notion that by carrying on these activities they were commemorating other deities.” Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (Oxford, 1994), 72. For the dynamics of the parallel process in England, see Hutton, Rise and Fall.

Robert O. Crummey

church year; the disorderly and licentious behavior they encouraged undercut Christian morality and decency; and they had bad practical consequences, not least deaths and injuries in the ritual brawls and the usual consequences of illicit sexual encounters. In Russia, as elsewhere, Lent appeared to defeat Carnival. At the prodding of the reformers, Tsar Aleksei, already known for his personal antipathy toward folk entertainment, issued a series of decrees, beginning in December 1648, ordering local governors to ban skomorokhi and suppress the rituals associated with them. The tsar ordered governors to proclaim his decree in every village and hamlet in their jurisdiction and authorized them to flog or, for repeated offenses, exile those who persisted in the old ways.25 Issuing decrees was much easier than changing deep-rooted patterns of behavior. Scattered evidence suggests that the skomorokhi, driven underground or into the remote countryside, continued to practice their ancient trade into the eighteenth century.26 Many of the agrarian rites and folk entertainments survived long enough for modern ethnographers to record them. And, in subtler ways, ordinary Russians continued – indeed continue – to incorporate ancient folkways such as charms, incantations, and folk healing into a Christian or post-Christian way of life. Not surprisingly, the implementation of the Zealots’ program of reform aroused violent opposition among the laity. The prominent Zealot Avvakum’s hagiographic autobiography, written roughly twenty years after the events, describes his clashes with a prominent aristocrat, V.P. Sheremetev, local notables, and ordinary parishioners while he was parish priest of Lopatit*y. To be sure, Avvakum’s methods of enforcing order and decency were hardly subtle. He describes his encounter with folk entertainers: . . . and again the devil raised up a storm against me. There came to my village dancing bears with tambourines and domras, and I, sinner that I am, being zealous in Christ I drove them out; one against many I smashed their masks and tambourines in a field and took away two great bears. One of them I clubbed, and he came to life again; the other I set loose in the fields.27

25 26 27

Kharuzin, “K voprosu”; P.I. Ivanov, Opisanie gosudarstvennogo arkhiva starykh del (Moscow, 1850), 296–99 (unavailable to me); AI, 4: 124–6. Zguta, Minstrels, 63–5. N.K. Gudzii, ed., Zhitie Protopopa Avvakuma im samim napisannoe i drugie ego sochineniia (Moscow, 1960), 62; Archpriest Avvakum, The Life Written by Himself, trans. Kenneth N. Bystrom (Michigan Slavic Translations, no. 4) (Ann Arbor, MI, 1979), 46. The translation is Bystrom’s.

Belief and Practice in Russia

In return, Avvakum survived berating, beatings, a severely bitten hand (by a parishioner), and an assassination attempt in which the weapon misfired.28 Twice, in 1648 and 1652, in fear for his life, he fled his parish for the safety of Moscow. The second time, he received a major promotion to become dean of the cathedral in Iurevets on the Volga. The assignment lasted only eight weeks until: The devil instructed the priests and peasants and their women; they came to the patriarchal chancellery where I was busy with church business, and in a crowd they dragged me out of the chancellery (there were maybe fifteen hundred of them). And in the middle of the street they beat me with clubs and stomped me, and the women had at me with stove hooks. Because of my sins, they almost beat me to death and they cast me down near the corner of a house. The Commandant rushed up with his artillerymen, and seizing me they raced away on their horses to my poor yard. But people came up to the yard and the town was in tumult.29

Unfortunately, in only a few instances does Avvakum’s “Life” give the specific reasons for these clashes. In Sheremetev’s case, he refused to bless the boyar’s son because, contrary to time-honored custom, the young man was clean-shaven. One of the clashes with local officials occurred when he intervened to rescue a young woman toward whom the grandee had dishonorable intentions. Similarly, he explained the riot in Iurevets on the fact that he had rebuked the priests and their women for “fornication” (bludnia). It is, of course, entirely possible that the disorders had causes other than Avvakum’s rigor. Between 1648 and 1652, many urban centers in Russia exploded in uprisings against rising taxes and a depersonalized and more intrusive bureaucratic administration.30 Other reformist priests suffered through similar tribulations. As foot soldiers in a campaign to reform parish worship and morals from above, they took the brunt of parishioners’ anger at the demand that they abruptly and radically change their traditional way of life. One after another, they found parish ministry untenable, trapped as they were between the aspirations of the reformers in Moscow and the recalcitrance of their flocks. The reform campaign took a sharp turn when Nikon succeeded Ioasaf as patriarch in 1652. As metropolitan of Novgorod, Nikon had proved to be an energetic reformer, a capable and courageous 28 29 30

Zhitie, 61–4; Bystrom, Life, 45–50. Zhitie, 63–4; Bystrom, Life, 48–50. I have slightly altered Bystrom’s translation. For a survey of the vast literature on this subject, see Robert O. Crummey, “Russia and the ‘General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’,” Journal of Early Modern History 2 (1998): 156–80. Valerie A. Kivelson, “The Devil Stole His Mind,” American Historical Review 98 (1993): 733–56, is an imaginative analysis of the symbolic significance of the Moscow uprising of 1648.

Robert O. Crummey

administrator, and an ardent advocate of the church’s leadership in society. In the stormy seven years of his active tenure as patriarch, however, the reforming coalition and ultimately the Russian Orthodox Church as a whole were fatally divided. What took place must be examined in its international context. Religious reform from above – “confessionalization” if you like – began in Russia roughly a century later than in Catholic and Protestant Europe.31 And, although cautious, Russian political and ecclesiastical leaders were, by the mid-seventeenth century, becoming aware of some of the implications of developments elsewhere. Some of the Zealots – the tsar, Rtishchev, and Nikon, among others – responded enthusiastically to international currents in ecclesiastical learning and culture, especially when transmitted through other Orthodox churches with which they desired closer contact. The messages they received were often ambivalent. From the Orthodox in Ukraine, battleground against revitalized and aggressive Catholicism, the Muscovite church received a body of apocalyptic literature summarizing biblical and later Eastern Christian teachings on the End Time. These works achieved considerable influence not only among the defenders of Orthodoxy in Ukraine, but also in Muscovy.32 At the same time, Ukraine provided Russia with new styles of Orthodox scholarship, education, and art, all taken from Counter-Reformation Catholicism and recruited for the defense of the Eastern church. The more analytical, rationalistic approaches of the Ukrainian scholars who began to enter Russian service made all but the most sophisticated and tolerant Muscovites uneasy.33 Frank Sysyn’s essay in this volume makes clear why these learned clergymen, whose erudition suited the needs of their homeland so well, had such a divisive impact on the Muscovite church and Russian cultural life. Nikon’s elevation to the patriarchal throne brought another source of inspiration to the fore. The tsar, the new patriarch, and some of their collaborators turned toward ecumenical Eastern Orthodoxy as represented by the Greek church in order to revitalize Russian Orthodoxy. For his part, Nikon also hoped that closer ties with the rest of the Orthodox world would help him recapture for the church the legal autonomy 31 32 33

Indeed, this was precisely the time when, according to Schilling, the process of confessionalization ended in the German lands (“Konfessionalisierung,” 28–30). H.P. Niess, Kirche in Russland zwischen Tradition und Glaube? Eine Untersuchung der Kirillova kniga und der Kniga o vere aus der 1 h¨alfte des 17 Jahrhunderts (Gottingen, ¨ 1977). K.V. Kharlampovich, Malorossiiskoe vliianie na velikorusskuiu tserkovnuiu zhizn’ (Kazan’, 1914); Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia. The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford and New York, 1992), Chapters 6 and 7.

Belief and Practice in Russia

and moral hegemony that, in his view, it had lost in a series of defeats and compromises culminating in the Law Code of 1649. Although the Russian church had never lost touch with its Greek sister and had, in recent decades, received a steady stream of needy Greek prelates, to say nothing of charlatans, the admiration of tsar and patriarch for the practices of Greek Orthodoxy and their increasing dependence on Greek e´ migr´e advisers shocked their contemporaries. After all, it was the Greeks’ apostasy at the Council of Florence that had thrust Orthodox Russia into the center of world history. Here, too, ironies abound. For the center of Greek Orthodox scholarship and publishing was Roman Catholic Venice. Moreover, in his defense of the dignity of the church and its personification, Patriarch Nikon began to adopt the arguments and language of the popes of the High Middle Ages.34 The link between these developments and life in the parish lay in the continued republication of service books. For, as all of the reformers had long understood, consistent and dignified worship was impossible without consistent liturgical texts. Nikon quickly gave this campaign a new twist. His Greek advisers had convinced him that, in cases where the two Orthodox traditions diverged, the Greek church had preserved the authentic practices of the early church while Russians, in their ignorance, had introduced local eccentricities into the liturgy. Accordingly, the new Psalter of 1653 omitted the customary instructions on the sign of the cross. Nikon soon issued new ones instructing the faithful to cross themselves with three fingers extended in the Greek manner rather than two as Russian tradition decreed.35 Thereafter, new editions and changes in liturgical practice followed one another in rapid succession.36 The Nikonian editions of liturgical texts deliberately attacked customary Russian practice. In addition to the sign of the cross, the more 34

Valerie Tumins and George Vernadsky, eds., Patriarch Nikon on Church and State. Nikon’s “Refutation” (Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam, 1982). English translation in William Palmer, The Patriarch and The Tsar, 6 vols. (London, 1871–6), vol. 1. The classic study of Nikon’s reforms is still N.F. Kapterev, Patriarkh Nikon i Tsar’ Aleksei Mikhailovich, 2 vols. (Sergiev Posad, 1909–12). The current state of the literature on many topics discussed in this paper reflects the fact that, during the Soviet period, scholars were, in effect, forbidden to publish serious work on explicitly religious subjects. Russian colleagues relate that, even in the late 1980s, censors required them to remove theological language from their studies of popular ideology or religious practices as a precondition for publication. For a systematic analysis of the changes in the liturgy, see Paul Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual and Reform. The Liturgical Reforms of Nikon in the 17th Century (Crestwood, NY, 1991). On the theological implications of the liturgical reform, see Karl Christian Felmy, Die Deutung des G¨ottlichen Liturgie im Rahmen der russischen Theologie (Berlin and New York, 1984), 80–111; and Bushkovitch, Religion and Society, 61.

Robert O. Crummey

dramatic changes included the four-pointed instead of eight-pointed cross on the sacred wafer and on church buildings; the triple rather than double Alleluia after the Psalms and the Cherubic hymn; the number of prostrations and bows in Lent; a new transliteration of “Jesus” into Slavonic (“Iisus” instead of “Isus”); and small but significant alterations in the wording of the Nicene Creed.37 For ordinary parishioners, these changes would probably have seemed less jarring than the enforcement of edinoglasie or the suppression of agrarian festivals and carnivalesque entertainment. They were significant enough, however, involving as they did some of the most frequently repeated words, gestures, and visible symbols in the liturgy. Nikon did not help matters by insisting, against the advice of the patriarch of Constantinople and his royal protector, that only reformed usage was acceptable. In 1656, Nikon repeatedly branded the two-finger sign of the cross and other traditional Russian practices as heretical.38 The reforms and the patriarch’s intransigence in enforcing them split the reform coalition in two. In a series of increasingly agitated letters written in late 1653 and early 1654 to the tsar and to Vonifat’ev, Ivan Neronov severely criticized Nikon’s abandonment of Russia’s heritage and the arrogance with which he was treating his former friends. The three-finger sign of the cross and the altered number of deep bows (poklony) in services were specific examples of these destructive policies.39 In one letter to Vonifat’ev, he told of hearing a voice from an icon urging him to resist Nikon’s reforms.40 In his later autobiography, Avvakum told the same story and claimed that both he and Neronov had immediately realized that Nikon had destroyed Russian Orthodoxy, the last bastion of true Christian faith.41 The two priests quickly fell afoul of the ecclesiastical superiors. The authorities imprisoned Neronov in a remote northern monastery; Avvakum was exiled to Siberia. According to tradition, the one bishop who in 1654 openly questioned the reforms, Paul of Kolomna, lost his see and perhaps his life for his stand.42 Prominent clergymen were not the only vocal opponents of the reforms. In 1657, the ecclesiastical and governmental authorities arrested the Rostov weaver, Sila Bogdanov, and two companions for 37 38 39 40 41 42

These were the changes on which later Old Believers concentrated their sharpest criticisms (Crummey, “Origins,” 132). Kapterev Patriarkh Nikon 1: 192–8; Meyendorff, Russia, 61–2. N. Subbotin, ed., Materialy dlia istorii raskola za pervoe vremia ego sushchestvovaniia, 9 vols. (Moscow, 1874–90) [hereafter Materialy] 1: 51–78. Materialy, 1: 99–100. Zhitie, 65; Bystrom, Life, 52. Materialy, 1: 100–2; Pascal, Avvakum, 248.

Belief and Practice in Russia

publicly condemning the new service books. Under intense interrogation, Bogdanov flaunted his convictions and, for his pains, was imprisoned in the same monastery to which Neronov had earlier been sent.43 Thus, even though the first protests against the Nikonian reforms were isolated and easily suppressed, they began the process of division within Russia’s ecclesiastical elite. From these small beginnings, there emerged two competing elites with two competing visions of reform from above, one consistent with contemporary international standards in the Orthodox world and beyond, however poorly understood, the other faithful to local Russian tradition. The first version of reform triumphed. Supported by the Tsar Aleksei’s government, the Orthodox hierarchy under Nikon’s authoritarian leadership rigorously enforced the new canons and, even after the patriarch withdrew from office in 1659 and was deposed for dereliction of duty in 1666, the process of confessionalization continued unabated. Using the records of the patriarchal Printing Office, Georg Michels has shown that the new books sold well in Moscow and that, over time, their use spread downward from the ecclesiastical hierarchy throughout the church.44 What does the hierarchy’s apparent success in enforcing the new canons suggest? That most Russians, clergy and laypeople alike, had little interest in the minutiae of liturgical change, as Michels argues? The willingness of a priest to accept the new service books does not, of course, tell us whether his parishioners followed their instructions in practice or continued to cross themselves in the old way. Or, as Duffy argues in the case of England, did the coercive power of the royal administration and the church overpower potential opposition before it had a chance to form? The speed and vigor with which the authorities pursued individuals as diverse as Neronov and Bogdanov surely set an intimidating example for their contemporaries. One example illustrates the interpretative dilemma. In his study of the first Old Believers in Ukraine, Michels points out that the priest Koz’ma, traditionally viewed as the first missionary of the old faith in Starodub, had perforce used the reformed liturgy in his parish in Moscow before leaving the capital. Therefore, the author argues, Koz’ma must have left Moscow for reasons unconnected with the Nikonian reforms and come out in opposition to 43

Rumiantseva, Dokumenty, 29–58; “Sudnye protsessy XVII–XVIII vv. po delam tserkvi,” ed. E.V. Barsov, ChOIDR, 122 (1882, book iii): 1–42, here 3–13. Bogdanov illustrates the difficulties of drawing neat divisions between “elite” and “popular” religious culture. On one hand, he consistently told his interrogators that he was illiterate; on the other, he carried around a notebook hidden in his hat. Michels, War, Chapter 1.

Robert O. Crummey

them in Ukraine only because, given local political conditions, it was expedient for him to do so.45 But may his move to a more congenial setting not have allowed him to give public expression to deep-seated doubts and convictions that, if openly revealed in Moscow, would have brought extremely unpleasant consequences? Either explanation is, in the end, a matter of speculation. Faced with such pressure, opposition to the Nikonian reforms coalesced very slowly. From within the ecclesiastical elite, individual opponents of Nikon’s reforms wrote treatises attacking both the general philosophy and specific details of the changes in the liturgy. Spiridon Potemkin, the learned archimandrite of the Pokrovskii monastery, composed the first tract of this type, probably in 1658. Between 1665 and the late 1670s, his successors produced a “canon” of anti-Nikonian polemical and devotional texts – Nikita Dobrynin “Pustosviat’s” lengthy petition; the “scrolls” of the priest Lazar’; Deacon Fedor’s “Response of the Faithful” and letters; Avraamii’s “Secure Shield of Faith” and petition; and the autobiographies of Avvakum and his cellmate, Epifanii.46 To this list, Michels rightly adds Bishop Alexander of Viatka who, although he did not write a major anti-Nikonian tract, collected a library of raw materials for such a task.47 This remarkable body of literature, whose authors wrote at great risk or from prison, met several pressing needs. It responded to the official publications defending the reforms, the Skrizhal’ (1656)48 and the Zhezl pravlenie (1668) of Simeon Polotskii, the most prominent representative of Ukrainian scholarship at the tsar’s court. In a broader sense, these writings expressed the growing frustration of Nikon’s opponents within the clergy: These men may well have hoped that the obvious truth of their position would convince the tsar and the hierarchy to abolish the new liturgical usages or, at the very least, allow the continued practice of the old. In this, they were profoundly disappointed. The ecclesiastical council of 1667 destroyed all hope of restoring Russian ecclesiastical tradition. Led by visiting Greek prelates, the fathers of the church required the exclusive use of the Nikonian practices, declared heretical such traditional Russian practices as the two-finger 45 46

47 48

Michels, “Old Believers in Ukraine,” 292–3. Crummey, “Origins,” esp. 125–6; N. Iu. Bubnov, Staroobriadcheskaia kniga v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XVII vv. (St. Petersburg, 1995), an indispensable guide to Old Believer polemical literature. Michels, War, Chapter 2. This work of the Greek hieromonk, John Nathaniel, had been published in Venice in 1574. Members of Nikon’s inner circle translated and edited it to support their patron’s program (Meyendorff, Russia, 61).

Belief and Practice in Russia

sign of the cross and the double Alleluia, and anathematized all those who refused to give up their opposition to the new order.49 The categorical nature of the council’s protocols destroyed any hope of future reconciliation. The anathemas were to remain in force until the 1970s. The council’s intransigence put the defenders of tradition in an impossible position. Their ranks divided. Through threats and appeals to preserve the unity of the Body of Christ, the leaders of the church convinced some prominent opponents – Neronov, Bishop Alexander and Nikita Dobrynin – to recant.50 Avvakum, Fedor, Lazar’, and Epifanii chose the path of resistance and martyrdom. Thus, in the late 1660s and early 1670s, a conservative intelligentsia emerged within the ecclesiastical elite and constructed the intellectual and polemical foundations of Old Belief. Prominent parish priests for the most part, they wrote their most ambitious works for men like themselves who knew the Bible and the Orthodox liturgical and devotional texts that circulated in Muscovy before the mid-seventeenth century. Over the following decades, later sympathizers copied many of these works – some of them remarkably abstruse – and circulated them among their followers.51 The core messages of the canon of Old Believer sacred texts were clear and dramatic. First, the Nikonian reforms were wrong for clear canonical and historical reasons. Second, they violated the Orthodox traditions of Russia. As conservative polemicists repeatedly pointed out, if only the Nikonian usages were correct and all others heretical, all earlier Russian saints, princes, and laypeople must literally be damned. Third, the Nikonian reforms marked the beginning of the End Time. This conclusion came naturally to those who accepted the symbolic statements of earlier Muscovite ecclesiastical writings that the Russian church was the last – and last possible – refuge of true Christian faith and took seriously the apocalyptic prophesies imported from Ukraine. It is not difficult to imagine the appeal of these general messages to ordinary laypeople, men and women who could not possibly have read the great petitions of Nikita Dobrynin or Avraamii. How these 49 50 51

Deianiia Moskovskikh soborov 1666 i 1667 godov (Moscow, 1893), 2: 3v–8, 30v–33v; Materialy, 2: 210–18, 264–79. Dobrynin later broke once again with the reformed church and, in 1682, was the most prominent Old Believer leader in Moscow. Some of the important early Old Believer writings were copied much more frequently than others. The works of men who made their peace with the official church in 1667 survive in comparatively few copies. Far more copies of the works of the intransigents of 1667 have survived.

Robert O. Crummey

convictions spread downward from the elite to significant numbers of ordinary people is a complex and open question. ∗∗∗∗∗ Some clues can be found in the official investigations of the so-called Kapiton movement of reform and protest in the middle decades of the century.52 Most of what we know about Elder Kapiton himself comes from later official Orthodox and Old Believer sources. Probably a selfappointed prophet of humble origins, Kapiton led a succession of small informal monastic communities in various corners of Northern and Central Russia between the 1620s and about 1660. Insofar as it can be reconstructed, his teaching had several central features. He advocated an asceticism far more extreme than the most rigorous teachings of Eastern Orthodoxy. One manifestation was continuous, severe fasting even in the church’s feasting seasons. He and his followers also rejected the authority of the Orthodox clergy on grounds of moral corruption. Although the sources are less clear on this point, his moral and ascetic rigor seems to have sprung from the conviction that the Apocalypse was at hand. Much more precise evidence about some of Kapiton’s followers in Viazniki survives in records of their interrogation in 1665. These itinerant or self-proclaimed monks and ordinary laypeople lived in informal monastic settlements. By their own admission, they fasted rigorously throughout the year. One of their accusers, Bishop Ilarion of Riazan’, charged them with going even farther and preaching ritual suicide through starvation in anticipation of the Apocalypse.53 When investigators arrested the monks Vavila and Leonid and some of their followers, others burned themselves to death rather than surrender.54 Under torture, the leading suspects remained defiant. They admitted that they would, on principle, have nothing to do with official Orthodoxy and its clergy. Several, moreover, specifically referred to the Nikonian reforms – a “schism of the books (knizhnoi raskol)” – as one of the reasons 52

The following discussion summarizes Robert O. Crummey, “Religious Radicalism in Seventeenth-Century Russia: Reexamining the Kapiton Movement,” FzOG 46 (1992): 171–86 and relies heavily on Rumiantseva, Antit*erkovnoe dvizhenie and Antit*erkovnoe dvizhenie. Dokumenty. Illarion also accused them of forcing unwilling followers to starve themselves to death in “graves” or pits. Ia. I. Barsukov, Pamiatniki pervykh let russkago staroobriadchestva. Letopis’ zaniatii Arkheograficheskoi Komissii 24 (1912): 1–424, here pp. 330–1. Rumiantseva, Antit*erkovnoe dvizhenie. Dokumenty, 57–9.

Belief and Practice in Russia

why they rejected the church’s authority.55 In 1666, the investigation uncovered more of Kapiton’s followers in the Vologda and NizhniiNovgorod areas. One of those arrested, Stepanida L’vova, defiantly described her austere way of life and her angry rejection of the clergy. “She said that she has hands of her own that can make the sign of the cross without a priest. And she does not go to church because now they celebrate by the new service books.”56 Thus, at this early date, the disciples of Kapiton displayed several of the defining characteristics of later Old Belief: the creation of selfgenerating monastic communities, radical opposition to the authority of the royal administration and the clergy, a belief in the imminence of the Apocalypse, and, in extremis, the practice of group suicide. The available evidence suggests that, in the 1660s, such groups were small, scattered, and eccentric. Moreover, the radicals’ statements under interrogation suggest that Nikon’s reforms were not the primary reason for their hostility to church and state. The world of the radicals in Viazniki and Vologda could not have been farther removed from the patriarch’s court or the Moscow mansion in which Boiarynia Morozova, leading patroness of the anti-Nikonians, hid Avraamii and a number of women devoted to the old ways. The radicals surely were a “popular” religious movement, however we define that elusive term. Nevertheless, the two groups shared a deep antipathy to the reformed church and an increasing willingness to defy its leaders and their royal protector whatever the cost. Miracle cults were a far more widespread form of popular devotion in mid-seventeenth century Russia than the “Kapitonovshchina.” Devotion to wonder-working icons and saints – well-known, obscure, or, in some cases, imaginary – appears to have proliferated among the clergy and all classes of the laity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to the increasing consternation of the hierarchy.57 Suppressing even the most dubious of popular cults raised the specter of serious opposition to church and state. Allowing miracle cults to flourish without the scrutiny and sanction of the hierarchy also presented dangers, however, not least the very real possibility that the Old Believers would use them to support their attack on the Nikonian reforms.58

55 56 57 58

Rumiantseva, Antit*erkovnoe dvizhenie. Dokumenty, 94, 98–9, 111. Rumiantseva, Antit*erkovnoe dvizhenie. Dokumenty, 189. Bushkovitch, Religion and Society, 89–127. For example, Old Believer polemicists often used the Life of St. Evfrosin of Pskov to defend the two-finger sign of the cross.

Robert O. Crummey

Thus, in spite of the risks, beginning with Patriarch Nikon himself, the ecclesiastical hierarchy strove with the government’s backing to regulate the cults and, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, suppressed public manifestations of a number of the more dubious or threatening of them.59 In the best-known example, Patriarch Ioakim convened church councils in 1677 and 1679 to reexamine the case of Anna of Kashin, a fourteenth-century princess whose popular cult had led, by about 1650, to officially sanctioned local veneration and preparations for her formal canonization. After a review of the evidence, including a detailed analysis of the historical inaccuracies in Anna’s “life” and the miracles attributed to her remains, the councils concluded that, while a lady of undoubted piety, Anna did not merit recognition as a saint.60 Eve Levin’s essay in this collection analyzes popular miracle cults and their regulation in the eighteenth century. ∗∗∗∗∗ From the very beginning of the Nikonian reforms and the opposition to them, the royal government and the Orthodox hierarchy worked together to suppress any overt manifestations of religious dissent or “schism” (raskol). The urgency of this task largely distracted them from the struggle against pagan rites and entertainments. Two of the cases we have described illustrate this collaborative campaign. Metropolitan Iona of Rostov first brought Sila Bogdanov and his disciples to Patriarch Nikon’s attention. After the metropolitan had questioned the suspects, Tsar Aleksei ordered the boyar, Prince A.N. Trubetskoi, and the powerful chancery official, Almaz Ivanov, to take over the investigation. These two prominent statesmen carried the investigation to its conclusion. Meanwhile, the metropolitan interrogated the two priests who were the suspects’ confessors and sent them on to Moscow for further questioning. Moreover, the tsar’s government asked the metropolitan to report in greater detail on the “subversive words” (neistovye slova)61 that Bogdanov had uttered in his presence. The accused, it turned out, had said that “he did not fear the tsar or his courts 59

Michels, “Place,” 25–9, draws attention to a complex dispute in 1659 and 1660, one element of which appears to have been an attempt by the autocratic Bishop Stefan to suppress a local Marian devotion. Significantly, Nikita Dobrynin was his most vociferous opponent. Bushkovitch, Religion and Society, 92–4; E.E. Golubinskii, “Istoriia kanonizatsii sviatykh v Russkoi tserkvi,” ChOIDR 204 (1903, book iv), here pp. 159–69; “Moskovskii sobor o zhitii blagoverynia kniagini Anny Kashinskoi,” ChOIDR 79 (1871, book iv): 45–62. Literally, “crazy words.”

Belief and Practice in Russia

and that the reign of the Antichrist had begun.” He called Nikon the “precursor of the Antichrist.”62 Similarly, in 1665, the parish priest Vasilii Fedorov and, some months later, Bishop Ilarion of Riazan’ informed the ecclesiastical authorities and the tsar, respectively, of the existence of the Viazniki radicals. In response, the government dispatched a detachment of musketeers (strel’tsy) to round them up and an investigative commission, led by the boyar, Prince I.S. Prozorovskii, to conduct the interrogations. At the end of the process, some of the lesser defendants who escaped execution were imprisoned in several monasteries, where, predictably, they proved difficult to control.63 Thus from the time of the Nikonian reforms, the royal government and Orthodox hierarchy collaborated in suppressing opposition, which, as they understood, was directed indiscriminately against both.64 The decrees of the council of 1667 made effective collaboration an even more urgent necessity. Responsibility for enforcing the Nikonian rites and suppressing dissent and schism (raskol)65 fell to the clergy. Parish priests bore the primary responsibility for enforcing the reformed canons. As a check on the loyalty of their flocks, they were to make sure that their parishioners fulfilled their minimal obligations as Orthodox Christians – annual confession and communion – and to report those who failed to do so. They were also to inform higher authorities of any individuals who openly held to the old rites or engaged in other forms of suspicious conduct.66 Clearly, then, this design for the imposition of the new order was part of the larger process of giving the Orthodox hierarchy more effective control over the beliefs and practices of ordinary parishioners. As Michels carefully demonstrates, the leaders of the church gradually succeeded in disseminating the new liturgical order downward through the provincial dioceses and large monasteries to the parish level. The process of dissemination was not complete in the remotest corners of the realm until the 1680s or 1690s. Moreover, as this process went on, some of the reform’s most vociferous opponents were the itinerant monks and nuns whose entire way of life made them opponents of tighter discipline in the church.67 62 63 64 65

66 67

Rumiantseva, Dokumenty, 29–58. The quotes are on p. 54. Rumiantseva, Antit*erkovnoe dvizhenie. Dokumenty, 50–137. Schilling describes

Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West (Studies in Comparative Early Modern History) - PDF Free Download (2024)

References