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Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

 
Venue: 
FAMES Room 8/9
Event date: 
Thursday, 13 February, 2025 - 14:00
Event organiser: 

China Research Seminar Series talk given by Yang Shen (Zhejiang University).

In the popular literature of late imperial China, Buddhist monks are frequently portrayed as sexual predators, charlatans and swindlers. Nuns, too, are depicted as gossips and procuresses who lead women of good families astray. Similarly, in official narratives of the period, monks often appear as black magicians and political rebels. While sporadic polemics against Buddhist clerics can be found in earlier texts, this sweepingly negative portrayal is a new phenomenon of the sixteenth century. 


It was once common among historians to see such stories as evidence of the decline of Chinese Buddhism from its heyday in the Tang. More recent scholarship has tended to discountenance the “decline thesis”. Yet, the question remains: why were there so many polemics against the clergy in this period – and not just in popular literature, where they might be put down as fantasy, but also in official history writing, where the intention was presumably more serious? Even if the content of these polemics is dismissed as fictional, the fact that they were produced at all is surely significant of a change of perception. Why was there such a change of perception? Did it have nothing at all to do with changes in reality? After all, perception and reality are interwoven.


My central claim is that late imperial Buddhist clerics, while continuing to serve as providers of daily ritual services, ceased to be regarded as sole authorities on Buddhist faith and learning. Religious authority became dispersed among other social groups and professions, including Confucian scholars, lay-Buddhist adherents, and even individually operating ritual specialists. The dharma, the Buddhist law, was no longer the exclusive possession of the sangha, the Buddhist clergy. What we are seeing, in other words, is a “popularisation” or “de-monopolisation” of religious authority. 

Junqing Wu is a lecturer of Chinese history at the University of Liverpool. Before joining Liverpool in 2019, Dr Wu was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research. Her research focuses primarily on social and religious history from the 10th century (the Song Dynasty) up to the late 16th century (the Ming Dynasty). She is particularly interested in changes in the perception of religion, as revealed in the transmission of historiography. Her revised thesis, which examines “religious heresy” as a discursive construct largely independent of social realities in the Ming and Qing, was published in 2017 by Brill as a monograph in their series “Religion in Chinese Society” under the title Mandarins and Heretics The Construction of “Heresy” in Chinese State Discourse. 

Contact
Dr Noga Ganany: ng462@cam.ac.uk