Chapter Three　The Market of Disorder: Why Buddhism Prevailed in an Age of Division¶

Essay Six, Chapter Two left a sentence: the scriptures of true permanence were translated precisely during China's great age of disorder and became the most widely circulated scriptures there; the mechanism would come in Essay Nine. We have arrived. From the Yongjia upheaval to Sui reunification, China endured nearly three hundred years of division: revolving regimes, recurrent epidemics, roads choked with refugees. In its first two hundred years under the Han, Buddhism had been merely a companion to occult arts, with the Buddha worshiped alongside Huang-Lao, never amounting to a major force. Its expansion erupted after disorder began. This chapter's question is: what exactly did disorder provide that allowed a foreign religion that had previously remained a guest to become an institution spread across the empire within decades?

First analyze the demand. The first layer was an explanation of suffering. The mandate-of-Heaven theory was a doctrine of ordered times: it explained order, not Luoyang's bleached bones. Karma and rebirth offered portable justice. Reward for good and retribution for evil did not depend on a dynasty being present, making them well suited to an age when dynasties were absent. The second layer was services for the dead. In centuries of epidemic and warfare, death was the largest category of daily business. Confucian funeral rites governed procedure, not destination; Daoism was itself still taking shape. Buddhism brought into China precisely the part it had failed to occupy in India: deliverance rites, vegetarian assemblies, Yulanpen. In China, death services had almost no competitor. This perfectly retests Essay Three, Chapter Two's law: easy to sow on vacant ground, hard to spread where temples abound. Buddhism perished in India because the positions were already filled and flourished in China because a position was vacant. The same Buddhism's fate depended on whether a position was still open. The third layer was promises for the next life. Disorder made narratives of the Dharma's end credible, and the Dharma's end made the easy path reasonable. Tanluan's and Daochuo's Pure Land arguments bear the marks of warfare throughout. Volume Two, Essay Six has recorded their people and times; Huisi's vow text wrote awareness of the Dharma's end into a chronology.¹ The fourth layer was refuge. Monasteries were exempt from service and taxation. In the waves of renunciation during disorder, faith and survival could never be cleanly separated; the saṅgha itself became an institution for sheltering refugees.

Disorder drove the supply side too, with the same structure as Aśoka's case. Regimes ruled by non-Chinese peoples found no footing in Confucian mandate-of-Heaven theory. The Chinese-outsider distinction confined legitimacy discourse to Chinese ancestry; a Jie emperor could find no place for himself in classical learning. At Shi Hu's court, debate over whether Chinese people should honor the Buddha produced a famous answer: I was born in the borderlands; ‘the Buddha is a god of the Rong,’ and should indeed be worshiped alongside the others.² Put that sentence back into Essay Three, Chapter Two. Aśoka valued the Buddhist Dharma's disregard of birth and its ability to spread along relay roads; Shi Hu valued the same property. The Buddha did not ask whether one was Chinese or an outsider. Legitimacy discourse indifferent to ancestry was always the most pressing need of nonorthodox regimes. Fotucheng entered the Shi family's Zhao as state preceptor; Dao'an received Fu Jian's respectful invitation; two dynasties fought by force to acquire Kumārajīva. State preceptors and translation bureaus were two ends of the same supply. The Southern Dynasties took a different route with the same structure: aristocratic lineages wanted Buddhism recast through xuanxue, as in Chapter One of this essay; emperors wanted the crown of the imperial bodhisattva. Emperor Wu of Liang brought this to its culmination (more in Essay Ten).

The Northern Wei left another institutional invention, bringing the saṅgha's relief work directly under state administration. Tanyao, head of the Buddhist clergy, proposed saṅgha households (僧祇户) and Buddha households (佛图户): famine victims and state slaves were assigned to the monastic administration, delivering grain annually to the clergy's office to supply relief. Relief was handed to the saṅgha, and the saṅgha entered the fiscal system. This was Buddhism's first ‘place in the imperial order’ in China, and the beginning of every later entanglement. Monastic economy henceforth competed with the state's registered households for people and land. The remote causes of the Huichang suppression (Essay Eleven) begin here.³

The speed of growth can be stated in numbers. The Western Jin's two capitals had little more than a hundred monasteries; by the end of the Northern Wei, Luoyang had more than a thousand inside and outside its walls, the country more than thirty thousand, and monks and nuns numbered two million. Yang Xuanzhi devoted a whole book to Luoyang's monasteries. Two sentences in its preface best explain the growth curve: ‘Princes and noble ministers cast aside elephants and horses as though slipping off shoes; ordinary gentlemen and wealthy households gave up their fortunes as though leaving footprints behind.’⁴ What does two million mean? About one fifteenth of the Northern Wei's registered population had put on monastic robes. The steepest growth coincided precisely with the fiercest killing. Both suppressions of Buddhism, by Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei and Emperor Wu of Northern Zhou, came when regimes were consolidating and resuming projects of Confucian orthodoxy. Buddhism flourished in collapse and was curbed in reconstruction; the curve followed order's tightening and loosening.

Extend the figures to the end of the imperial system, and the curve becomes clearer.

The counting bases are heterogeneous. Northern and Southern Dynasties figures are retrospective counts from apologetic literature; Tang and Song figures come from ordination certificates and the Bureau of Sacrifices' official registers; counts are lost at either end of the Ming-Qing span. Their orders of magnitude and shape suffice.⁵ And the shape speaks clearly. In a hundred Northern Wei years, monks and nuns rose from seventy-seven thousand to two million, a twenty-sixfold increase; the High Tang's official register recorded only a hundred and twenty-six thousand. All peaks fall in centuries of division, all troughs in flourishing ages of strong central power. Huichang's single return of two hundred and sixty thousand to lay life was precisely a count taken as order was rebuilt. Ordered times meant quotas for Buddhism, not ruin. The Tang invention of ordination certificates essentially converted uncontrolled monastic numbers from disorder into state-authorized places. Renunciation changed from refuge into something requiring state permission. This curve extends to the end of the imperial system, matching this chapter's conclusion.

English key: “The Market in an Age of Disorder.” Demand in an age of disorder: an explanation of suffering (portable justice); services for the dead (no incumbent competitor); products for the next life (the age of Dharma decline and the Pure Land); and refuge (exemption from labor service and taxes). Buddhist supply: “The Buddha is a barbarian deity” (legitimacy); state preceptors and translation workshops; and Saṅgha households (relief delegated to the monastic organization). All four demand arrows and all three supply arrows converge at the center. The quoted description of the Buddha is Shi Hu’s statement as reported in Chapter 3, not the author’s ethnic classification.

The vertical axis reads “Population size (schematic),” referring here to monks and nuns. From left to right the periods are Western Jin, late Northern Wei, Kaiyuan, Huichang, Tianxi, Zhiyuan, and Kangxi. At the Kaiyuan trough: “Ordination certificates: leaving home becomes a licensed activity.” The inset reads: “Peaks in the centuries of division; troughs in flourishing times under strong central rule.” These are the author’s schematic comparisons. The chapter’s table combines retrospective apologetic counts, official registers, numbers returned to lay life, temple counts, and periods without adequate counts. Neither equal spacing, curve height, nor the connection between points provides a series measured on one consistent basis.

The final line means: “Buddhism died in India where the niches were occupied; it survived in China where a niche was vacant.” The chapter’s claim that disorder creates the demand and that the speed of adaptation is proportional to suffering is explicitly its conjecture; the schematic does not supply a measured correlation. The frozen Chinese image is retained because the existing English image omits the schematic axis label, drops the refuge arrow, and changes the later curve: its line rises toward Kangxi, while the Chinese line turns downward after the later undulations.

As the rules require, let this be explicitly marked: what follows is this volume's conjecture. Buddhism did not manufacture demand; disorder did. The speed of Buddhism's transformation in China was proportional to the degree of social suffering. The statement is given in its strong form because the Chinese evidence is unusually orderly: all four layers of demand were brought by disorder, both sides of supply strengthened by disorder, the growth curve in step with the warfare curve, and suppressive events in step with the rebuilding of order. The cautious weak form—disorder amplifies existing demand rather than creating it from nothing—remains available as a retreat, with a precedent in Essay Six, Chapter Two. But in the Chinese case, the strong form holds.

To close and introduce the next essay: three hundred years of disorder made Buddhism, but what people wanted must be read accurately. Comfort, efficacy, deliverance rites, the next life, plus a crown of legitimacy; no one needed Madhyamaka's precision. Essay Six said that the tradition of true permanence, a tributary at home, became the mainstream elsewhere. The mechanism is now clear: the needs of those who received Buddhism abroad determined its shape, and China's recipients lived in disorder. True permanence and Pure Land were the most sought after; doctrinal learning came second. These needs determined Chinese Buddhism's basic character. Then disorder ended. A reunified empire looked back and found within its borders a religious community of two million and thirty thousand tax-exempt monasteries. What would it do? It would count, regulate, and demand that the community give itself a place in the imperial order. The community would answer with an unprecedented doctrinal reconstruction. The next essay concerns the Chinese reconstruction.

A closing addendum: the theoretical cross-section. When Buddhism entered China, doctrine ran into danger before institutions did: non-self collided with the hun and po souls. In Chinese common sense, the dead had souls and sacrifices had recipients. If rebirth had no subject, who received retribution? The first generation of Chinese Buddhist learning answered with the doctrine that spirit does not perish. Huiyuan said the body ends but the spirit does not: fuel is exhausted and fire passes on. Fan Zhen challenged him with the doctrine that spirit perishes: bodily form is the substance and spirit its function, as in the analogy of blade and sharpness. Both sides were intelligent; neither stood on Indian doctrine's original ground. To make rebirth intelligible in China, Buddhism first set non-self aside. At the same time, concept matching interpreted emptiness through Laozi and Zhuangzi, the six houses and seven schools each holding to their own terms. Only with the arrival of Kumārajīva and Sengzhao, and the appearance of ‘The Emptiness of the Unreal,’ was emptiness recast through xuanxue corrected.⁶ The addendum's conclusion: translation's first lesson concerns not vocabulary but which doctrines may yield to fit China. Chinese doctrinal learning never fully recovered the non-self it conceded, even over the following thousand years.

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