Barrett, T. H.

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Tang Taoism and the mention of Jesus and Maniin Tibetan Zen:a comment on recent work by Rong Xinjiang. . School of Oriental and African StudiesThe contributions of Rong Xinjiang to the study of Tang civilization, andparticularly of external inﬂuences upon it, have already rapidly mounted upto a considerable number, so the appearance of a volume collecting many ofhis essays together in one place is much to be welcomed.1 Though the focusin this collection is almost exclusively on matters of interest as much to studentsof Inner Asian languages as to sinologists, the latter will ignore these studiesat their peril, for they often throw a new light on questions of longstandingdebate even among those whose horizons are limited linguistically to theChinese world. For example, one essay reprinted here deals with the problemof how knowledge of Manichaeism and Christianity reached Tibet, buildingon the notion that the Chan (Zen) text known as the Lidai fabao ji may haveplayed some part in this by adding to existing knowledge of that West Chinesework and its inﬂuence in Tibet some further details culled from Dunhuangmanuscripts relating to the same textual tradition, earlier identiﬁed byR. Tanaka in Japan, and by Rong himself.2 To this is further added documenta-tion in some detail on the way in which an awareness of these two religionscould have reached West China.It is not my purpose here either to recite the full evidence for his arguments,or still less to contradict them, for they add up to a plausible account of anintriguing episode of cultural transmission. Rather, the following remarks areaddressed to one remaining piece of evidence that is not incorporated by Ronginto his overall picture, and that for reasons that will become clear is somewhatdiﬃcult to evaluate. It has been known for over ninety years that the namesof Jesus (as in Rong's sources, ‘the Messiah’) and of Mani are apparentlylinked in a Taoist source of the eleventh century, which as a whole wassuspected of reﬂecting information current during the eighth century.3 Theword ‘apparently’ is used advisedly in the case of Mani, since in the text inquestion though the term for ‘Messiah’ is written conventionally enough, thelatter name is written ‘Modi’.4 What I had not appreciated—anymore, itseems, than anyone else—is that this same terminology can be conﬁrmeddirectly for the Tang or Five Kingdoms period by a Dunhuang manuscript,1 For a full bibliography of Rong Xinjiang's work to circa 2000 see Nairiku Ajia gengo nokenkyu: 15 (2000), 179–80; the following remarks relate, however, to a new work not mentionedthere, Zhonggu Zhongguo yu wailai wenming (Beijing: Sanlian, 2001), which gathers togetherﬁfteen of his essays and eleven book reviews.2 ‘Lidai fabao ji zhong de Mo Manni he Mishehe’, in ibid., 343–68. The passage in questionin the Lidai fabao ji has been rendered into English on the basis of an earlier mention in Frenchby R. A. Stein on p. 161 of David Scott, ‘Buddhist responses to Manichaeism: Mahayanaaﬃrmation of the Middle Path?’, History of Religions 35/2, 1995, 148–62. I do not know whatpart, if any, the passage plays in the doctoral research of the 1998 Stanford dissertation by WendiAdamek, but a general description of the text and some initial ﬁndings on its Tibetan inﬂuencetranslated from the writings of Yanagida Seizan by Carl Bielefeldt may be found in LewisLancaster and Whalen Lai, Early Ch'an in China and Tibet (Berkeley: Berkeley Buddhist StudiesSeries, 1983), 13–49.3 E. Chavannes and P. Pelliot, Un traite´ maniche´en retrouve´ en Chine (Paris: Imprimerienationale, 1913), 291–2.4 Jia Shanxiang, Youlong zhuan 4.8a (Daozang edition, Schipper no. 774).Bulletin of SOAS, 66, 1 (2003), 56–58. © School of Oriental and African Studies. Printed in theUnited Kingdom.57        S. 6963, which provides a fuller text concerning the two heresies than that ofthe eleventh-century transmitted source, but retains for Manichaeism—if thatis what it is—the same variant transcription. The text proclaims itself to bethe second fascicle of the Laozi huahu jing, the polemical account of Laozi'ssupposed conversions of the barbarians that seems to have circulated in theTang in a ten-fascicle form.5 The Messiah, as in the later text ﬁftieth in a totalof ninety-six heretics discomﬁted by Laozi on his legendary travels beyondChina, is described as having ‘twelve hundred demons as his retinue. Theyenter into human bodies and if their hosts give way to the ﬁve desires, theycan cause misdeeds. They are able to control all sorts of perversity, and thosewho serve them long enough end up in this perverse sect’.6 This slightlyGadarene concept of demon possession is, however, not unique to the entryof Christianity but also extended to all the ninety-ﬁve (actually ninety-seven)other heresies, which are, one supposes, largely imaginary, even if inspired byearlier Buddhist lists.Could this passage have any relevance for the materials examined by RongXinjiang, providing for example their proximate source, rather than directcontact between the Zen lineage celebrated in the Lidai fabao ji and devoteesof the religions themselves? One possible reason for hesitating to aﬃrm thiswould be the lack of date to the manuscript, which may be later than the mid-to late eighth century focus to the materials he describes. It is true enoughthat another portion of the same text concerning the travels of Laozi, the ﬁrstfascicle, has been found at Dunhuang in a copy (S. 1857) which has beenassigned, on the basis of a name at the end of the text referring to its copyist(or owner) that is attested elsewhere in a dated manuscript, to early in theeighth century, and this portion, too, asserts the superiority of Taoists overManichaeans. But it uses an entirely accurate transcription for the term—though curiously enough, one that has been deliberately distorted by a secondhand—and mentions Christianity not at all, so the two manuscripts could beof diﬀerent dates and reﬂect diﬀerent recensions.7 Neither transcription, forthat matter, matches these in Rong's materials.What to make of all this is something of a puzzle, though it clearly hasbearings on the contacts between Taoism and Tang Christianity pointed outearlier in the Bulletin. If it is impossible to place all the materials mentioningJesus and Mani into a single chain of ﬁliation, might some other patternaccount for the manuscript variations, such as common dependence in the caseof Rong's materials and S. 6963 on a lost recension of the Laozi huahu jing,not necessarily that of the early eighth century, but earlier than the materialshe uses? Such a recension would then date to circa 740, about the timewhen I would suggest that Christianity and the hagiography of Laozi were5 There is a good general description of the history of scholarship on this troublesome text asreﬂected in the Dunhuang manuscripts in the collectively edited series volume Ko:za Tonko: , Volume4, Tonko: to Chu:goku Do:kyo: (Tokyo: Daito: shuppansha, 1983), 97–117, by Yamada Toshiaki.6 A photograph of the passage in question is most readily (if not entirely legally) available inHuang Yongwu (ed.), Dunhuang baozang 54 (Taibei: Xinwengfeng 1981–86), 177, at the end ofthe second frame.7 Lin Wushu, ‘Laozi huahu jing yu Moni jiao’, Shijie zongjiao 18, November 1984, 116–22,provides an overview of the ongoing relationship between the successive recensions of the textand Manichaeism as fas as can be deduced from other sources, but does not to my eye mentionS. 6963, though he does touch on another portion of fascicle one, P. 2007, which has the nameMani written accurately in the form originally given in S. 1857. For my remarks on S. 1857 andits date, I follow Oˆfuchi Ninji, Tonkoˆ Doˆkyoˆ: Mokuroku hen (Tokyo: Fukutake shoten, 1978),p. 322; for the passage in question, see Huang, Duhuang baozang 14, p. 176, where, however, thename at the end is illegible.58 . . brought into some kind of relationship in the oﬃcial Tang Taoist ideology.8The deliberate mutilation of the transcription for Manichaeism, however, mightindicate interference with an original recension at some later date. One possibil-ity is that during the ascendancy of Taoism and of dynastic rule in the earlyeighth century both Manichaeism and Christianity could comfortably bedescribed as heresies subordinated by Laozi, but that later dynastic dependence,after 756, on Manichaean Uighur troops made it impolitic for texts declaringthe subordination to Taoism of the religion of these turbulent though vitalallies (but not of Nestorianism) to survive without modiﬁcation.9This hypothesis can obviously only be of value if other possibilities can beshown to be less likely, and I am not sure that such is the case. But given theintrinsic interest of tracing the spreading awareness of both Christianity andManichaeism across Asia at this time, some further research into this matterwould seem to be merited.8 See my note ‘Buddhism, Taoism, and the eighth-century Chinese term for Christianity’, inBSOAS 65/3, pp. 555–60.9 The role of the Uighurs after 756 is summarized in Denis Twitchett, ed., Cambridge Historyof China, Volume Three, Part One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 480, 483,608–10.

Tang Taoism and the mention of Jesus and Mani in Tibetan Zen

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