NEGOTIATING BELONGING: THE CHURCH OF THE EAST’S CONTESTED IDENTITY IN TANG CHINA by Kenneth T. Morrow APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ J. Michael Farmer, Chair ___________________________________________ Rosemary Admiral ___________________________________________ Peter Park ___________________________________________ Monica Rankin ___________________________________________ Frederick Turner Copyright 2019 Kenneth T. Morrow All Rights Reserved To Ann M. Morrow and the late Elbert M. Morrow, my parents NEGOTIATING BELONGING: THE CHURCH OF THE EAST’S CONTESTED IDENTITY IN TANG CHINA by KENNETH T. MORROW, BBA, MA, JD DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HISTORY OF IDEAS THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS May 2019 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to the chairman and to the members of my committee, J. Michael Farmer, Rosemary Admiral, Monica Rankin, Peter Park, and Frederick Turner, and also to Cihan Yüksel Muslu, now at the University of Houston. My special thanks to J. Michael Farmer, who did his best to educate me in the dao of the sincere China scholar—I will daily examine whether I have mastered and carried out his instruction. He also opened doors for me to meet and to learn from other China scholars beyond UT Dallas. The scholars of the Tang Studies Society have been generous with their expertise and encouragement. Naming them all would be tedious reading, but I should at least mention Wendi Adamek, Stephen Bokenkamp, Jessey Choo, Anthony DeBlasi, Alexei Ditter, Paul Kroll, Amy McNair, and Anna Shields. The Society’s workshop reading Buddhist and Daoist texts and the New Frontiers in the Study of Medieval China workshop at Reed College on muzhiming both provided training that I hope bore fruit in this dissertation, and travel subventions from the organizers of each workshop helped to make my attendance possible. I must also mention the helpful feedback that I received generally at a University of Colorado at Boulder Asian studies graduate student conference, and particularly conversations with Paul Kroll and Michael Nylan which are now reflected in my discussion of Hua Xian and family. A travel grant from the University of Kansas East Asian Library and the assistance of Vickie Doll and Michiko Ito made possible the core research in Chinese language sources from which this dissertation launched. In Luoyang, Mao Yangguang kindly met with me and my entourage, and he provided background on the muzhiming of Hua Xian and the Lady née An, helped me to v obtain rubbings of the stones, and introduced us to Wang Linghong who graciously hosted us at the Longmen Museum where the muzhiming are kept. I am indebted to the McDermott Library’s interlibrary loan staff and to Alexander Rodriguez, research librarian extraordinaire, who doggedly pursued that wayward book for me. My thanks to Thomasina Hickmann, Madhavi Biswas, Sharron Conrad, Jennifer Kraemer, and Lance Lusk for their help and camaraderie in the writing process. Travel grants from UTD’s School of Arts & Humanities and from the Tang Studies Society enabled me to present my research at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting where I benefited from valuable questions and comments. The love and support of my wife, Cheeying, and our daughter, Michelle, have been essential. Not only my help and anchor at home, they were my charming entourage adding to the fun and excitement of field research. Completing this project has been a long road for us, and now . Woohoo! April 2019 vi NEGOTIATING BELONGING: THE CHURCH OF THE EAST’S CONTESTED IDENTITY IN TANG CHINA Kenneth T. Morrow, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2019 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: J. Michael Farmer The Church of the East entered along the Silk Roads from Persia through Central Asia to China during the prosperous and cosmopolitan Tang dynasty, and the church, naming itself Jingjiao, enjoyed an official status before the imperial court from 638 to 845 CE. This dissertation uses four important stone-inscribed commemorative texts from the Jingjiao community, along with the larger historical record, to explore the ways leaders and well-placed lay people of the church sought to negotiate for the church and for themselves a place of belonging in China even as various dynamic forces within Chinese society contested that identity. A crucial part of Jingjiao’s context is the method of the church-state relationship that the Church of the East had learned under Sassanian rule and continued under Muslim rule, for the model of political and social integration with religious distinctiveness marked Jingjiao’s attempts to negotiate its place of belonging in Tang China. Beginning with the Jingjiao bei’s account of Jingjiao in the High Tang, this study also draws upon other transmitted and excavated texts to explore how Jingjiao leaders sought to negotiate a place for the church within the Tang state and society during the empire’s most secure and vii broad-minded period. Though Jingjiao experienced difficulty during the time of Wuzetian’s Zhou dynasty and the tumult of the restoration of the Tang, the record of Jingjiao’s response and efforts to reclaim its lost position reveal yet more of its strategy to negotiate a legitimate identity in China. A rhetorical analysis of the bei’s visual rhetoric as well as of its text preface and verse traces Jingjiao’s argument that, as China recovers from the devastation of the An-Shi Rebellion and emperor Dezong begins to institute reforms to restore a political structure nearer to that of pre- Rebellion times, the Creator-God, the Three-in-One who reaches out to humankind through the Messiah, has blessed China when wise emperors honored Jingjiao, and He stands ready to bless emperor Dezong as he follows their precedent and honors God by securing the church’s place before the Court and, thus, in Chinese society. The study then draws primarily upon recently excavated commemorative stone inscriptions from three near-contemporaries from Luoyang’s Jingjiao community. Rhetorical analyses of the muzhiming of Han man (d. 827) and of his Sogdian wife (d. 821) draw upon historical context and studies of the muzhiming genre while comparing the oddly different texts in order to draw conclusions about the aspirations and social obstacles facing Christian, mixed Han-Sogdian families in 820s Luoyang. Next, the dissertation studies the innovative use of a Buddhist dharani pillar form to bear a Jingjiao devotional text and commemorative inscription at the grave of a Sogdian woman by her Han and Sogdian family upon her burial at Luoyang in 815. Then, the discussion weaves observations of the three commemorative stone inscriptions with the time’s intellectual and political currents that culminated in the Huichang Persecution of Buddhism and other foreign religions in China. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................v ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................. vii CONVENTIONS ........................................................................................................................... xi INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ xii Argument and Organization ........................................................................ Xiii Translated Texts .......................................................................................... Xvi A Historiography of Tang Dynasty Jingjiao ............................................ Xviii CHAPTER 1 THE CHURCH OF THE EAST .............................................................................1 The Origin of the Church of the East .............................................................1 The Distinction of the Church of the East and the Nestorian Controversy ...6 A Subject-Partner of the State ......................................................................15 Monasticism and Learning ...........................................................................21 Adjustment to Muslim Rule ..........................................................................28 CHAPTER 2 JINGJIAO IN THE HIGH TANG ........................................................................42 A Jing Wind Blows Eastward .......................................................................44 Finding the Right Name ...............................................................................52 Monasteries and Monks ...............................................................................57 Tying Together the Severed Knot ................................................................63 CHAPTER 3 THE RHETORIC OF THE JINGJIAO BEI ..........................................................80 Jingjing, the Author .....................................................................................80 The Bei’s Visual Rhetoric ............................................................................83 Jingjiao Transcends Culture, Blesses Society .............................................90 Stalwart Jingjiao ..........................................................................................95 The Blessing of Jingjiao Believers ..............................................................99