When Emperor Wu Met Bodhidharma: A Reading of Mid-Tang Religious Policy
Date
2018
Authors
Strange, Mark
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Publisher
Academia Sinica
Abstract
From the early eighth century on, those concerned with the practice and theory of
statecraft paid recurring attention to emperor Wu of Liang 梁武帝 (r. 502–549).
They cast him as a “Buddhist” ruler and used him as an ideological cipher to debate
the imperial religious policy of their own times. Their discourse was dominated by
critiques of the Liang ruler, in particular his material and ritual support for the Buddhist church. To counter such critiques, defenders of Buddhism’s role in imperial
statecraft sought novel argumentative strategies. They attempted to divorce emperor Wu’s practice of Buddhism from what they defined as fundamental doctrine.
Through evaluations of emperor Wu’s religious merit, they now established moral
and metaphysical criteria for imperial legitimacy, bringing into question the limits of
spiritual and temporal authority. This paper uses the shift in mid-Tang accounts of
emperor Wu to shed light on contemporary struggles for political and social control
between the imperial state on the one hand, and the Buddhist church on the other.
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Asia Major
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Journal article
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Open Access via publisher website
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Restricted until
2037-12-31
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