7.3: Reunification through Pluralism- Sui and Tang

To unite the empire, Sui set about knitting together the deeply divided northern and southern regions. The Sui imperial couple married their children into southern aristocratic families, and encouraged other northern aristocrats to adopt Chinese-language surnames and marry across regional and linguistic lines. But that was only the first step. Both Sui and Tang – which replaced Sui with another coup d’etat in 618 – solidified military conquest by incorporating as many existing cultural elements as possible into a new, pluralist empire.

The founding Sui imperial couple were both devout Buddhists. They personally copied sutras, and they kept strict order in the palace, filling it with prayer and incense. Since so many of their new subjects, north and south, shared their faith, they used it as one strand to weave their new, expanding realm together. In 589, when he defeated the last legitimate dynasty in the South, Sui Wendi also took boddhisattva vows with Zhiyi (538-597), the founder of a school of Buddhism called Tiantai. Tiantai itself drew together northern piety and meditation with southern sutra study and meditation, presenting a sutra popular in the North as the Buddha’s first sermon and one popular in the South as his last.⁵ Consciously imitating King Ashoka, Sui Wendi paid to build temples and support monks and nuns across the country. He ordered Buddhist clergy to chant Buddhist prayers for the nation three months out of the year. Monks also served at the sacred mountains.

The Sui capital alone housed 120 Buddhist temples. The largest supervised the national network, set standards of education and behavior for the clergy, and translated Buddhist texts. In 601, when the Sui founder turned 60, he ordered stupas built in every prefecture, and send monks and nuns to bring Buddhist relics to each and celebrate the opening of the stupas. He closed government offices for a week’s holiday.

Tang rulers were not initially as enthusiastic about Buddhism. The great travelling monk Xuanzang had to sneak out of Tang territory to begin his seventeen-year journey to India in search of sutras. But when he returned, Tang Taizong welcomed him back, sponsoring the translation of the 1,300 scrolls he had acquired. After that, support for Buddhism faltered only for about a year, when the government, alarmed at the wealth of monasteries, suppressed Buddhism in 845-46, melting down bells and statues to mint copper coins. Most Tang rulers lavished resources on temples and monasteries, and in return, monks served the state. They chanted sutras summoning spirit armies to protect the state, drew subjects into one cohesive body by holding vegetarian feasts for tens of thousands of people, held funerals to settle the spirits of soldiers killed in Tang’s massive military campaigns, and watched on Mount Wutai for auspicious signs of the presence of the bodhisattva Manjusri, which signaled good luck for the dynasty.⁶

Sui and Tang also patronized northern- and southern-style learning to pull the empire together. The Sui regime hired classicist northerners to claim the Mandate of Heaven. The propaganda, modeled on Cao-Wei proclamations, said that the Sui founder had faithfully served the Northern Zhou’s last child emperor until the emperor abdicated in his favor, giving him nine ritual gifts identical to Cao Cao’s, and pointing to cosmic signs that the dynasty ought to change.7 The Confucian propagandists designed rituals such as informing Heaven of the change, issuing a general amnesty, and having the emperor plow a furrow in a special field. The Sui issued a detailed code of proper rituals for relations between the emperor and his ministers, relations with foreigners, seasonal sacrifices, and marriage and funeral ceremonies for emperor and high officials.

As well as public relations for the imperial family as a whole, there were individual efforts. Tang Taizong associated himself with culture heroes sage-king Yu, King Wen of Zhou, his brother the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius. He patronized shrines to these figures and wrote poems expressing his feelings about them as exemplars. We’ll meet another great self-promoter at the end of this chapter.

In the period of division, aristocratic families north and south had practiced Confucian family rituals and intensified attention to the patriline, building on Latter Han ideas and practices that had launched the big clans into the status of a new aristocracy. Here’s an example of intensified patrilinealism: In Han times, even royal lines that produced no sons simply died out (that was what ended most of the early Han feudal kingdoms), not to speak of other families. But the Western Jin emperor carefully adopted sons as ritual heirs for his brothers who died childless. The Liu-Song dynasty of the South (420 to 479) also built the first state temple honoring Confucius, and Tuoba Empress Dowager Feng had followed suit, as well as having the Classic of Filial Piety translated into Xianbei.

Sui and Tang reinforced this shared elite patrilinealism to meld the empire together. Sui and Tang set up schools in the capital for elite sons that combined northern classicism with the southern poetic heritage. And to signal the court’s central cultural role, Sui Wendi collected, edited, and copied texts, offering a roll of silk for each scroll of text people brought in. He also proscribed “subversive” books, and tried to establish a simple and straightforward literary style. Tang emperors even decreed that every household own and study the Classic of Filial Piety – an order surely not followed, and perhaps modelled on the promulgation of Buddhist scriptures.

Daoism, too, aided unification. It bridged the gap between commoners and high-ranking families better than Confucianism. On the one hand, southern aristocrats had adopted Daoism as legitimating a life of leisure and poetry, as exemplified by Tao Qian and the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. The southern Liang dynasty had supported a school of Daoism centered on Mt. Mao near Nanjing, and two of the Northern regimes had adopted Daoism as the state religion. On the other hand, lower-ranking people adhered to the organized Daoism church that grew out of the late Han sects.

So the Sui regime employed Daoists to make calendars, and drew on their interpretations of omens and portents. Sui Wendi repaired Laozi’s shrine and praised himself in an inscription there. He collected over 8,000 scrolls of Daoist texts. Tang sponsored Daoism even more enthusiastically: a mission to Koguryŏ promoted Daoism as an international religion, visiting Turkish envoys toured a Daoist temple, and the Dao de jing was translated into Sanskrit, the language of Indian Buddhist scriptures. The Tang royal family claimed descent from Laozi (part of Taizong’s suppression of discussion of their Turkic roots), and Empress Wu and her husband Gaozong both engaged with Daoism. Their grandson, Emperor Xuanzong, (r.713-756), invited Daoist as well as Buddhist clergy to court, wrote a commentary on the Dao De Jing, and instituted an examination on Daoist scripture, with a school to teach it.

The state also permitted the many foreigners living in Tang – perhaps one-third of the population of the capital alone – to practice their own faiths, including Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Christianity. A Syrian branch of Christianity (Nestorians) even performed masses in the Tang palace. Finally, the Sui and Tang states normally tolerated the numerous local cults to deities that people relied on for help with the weather, sickness, and the like. Tang official Di Renjie, an advisor to Empress Wu, suppressed a large number of local cults, and Buddhist and Daoist clergy did try to stamp out or absorb these cults, converting blood sacrifice to vegetarian sacrifice, and enrolling local spirits as members of the Daoist pantheon, officials in hell, or fierce protectors of temples. But generally, the many faiths and deity cults coexisted.⁸

The faiths, languages, and peoples unified under one state were a collage: not uniform. As one historian writes, “the Tang empire was not a single homogenous community but rather a hodge-podge of communities and networks that stretched horizontally and vertically.”⁹