The Buddhist Repertoire, Part 1

Chapter 10, “The Buddhist Repertoire, Part 1: The Era of Pluralist Patronage,” is the first half of the third study of various repertoires of political legitimation. This chapter focuses on the development of Buddhist institutions and historiography in the fifth century, a period of pluralist patronage under the banner of Sinitic universalism. The Buddhist repertoire in maritime diplomatic relations with South Seas regimes proved an important staging ground for the ruler’s performance as a cakravartin, or Buddhist universal ruler, as well as a conduit for Buddhist expertise. By the end of the fifth century, Jiankang elites had developed Buddhist legends and practices that asserted that the Jiankang regime’s legitimacy derived, not from the Han Empire, but from its direct inheritance of legitimacy from the cakravartin Asoka, who had ruled in northern India in the third century BCE. This set the stage for the striking developments of the sixth century.

Conclusion

Section 2 has demonstrated that the political culture of the Jiankang Empire was sharply different from that of the Central Plains, which was the core region of all other large medieval East Asian empires. Jiankang’s political culture can be seen as a distinctive expression of the proto-ethnic identity of the people who dominated the empire, mostly Churen and Wuren. Elite Zhongren migrants from the Central Plains dominated the court only during a part of the fourth century, and their influence waned from then straight through to the end of the sixth century. Instead, the locally rooted garrison culture of the military and the merchant class was the primary driver and innovator in both politics and the economy....

Vernacular Languages

Chapter 4, “Vernacular Languages,” offers the second of two case studies in the ethnicization of cultural features of the Wuren. Using the results of modern linguistic studies, the chapter shows that the vernacular spoken languages of the Jiankang Empire have a substantial, perhaps predominant, non-Sinitic basis, most importantly in the Austro-Asiatic family (along with Mon and Khmer, among others). These languages were recognized as decisively foreign by people of the Central Plains. Within the empire, the polyglot linguistic situation in the fifth and sixth centuries was addressed by the use of one of two common spoken tongues, either Jiankang Elite vernacular (the most Sinitic language within the empire) for the educated class, or, to a much lesser but still significant extent, Chu vernacular among the military.

The Discourse of Ethnicity

Chapter 2, “The Discourse of Ethnicity,” identifies environmental determinism as the primary discourse in early medieval East Asia within which cultural differences were discussed and evaluated. Those differences can be regarded as “ethnic” if they were understood to be both inherent/immutable and politically salient. The chapter explores the evolution of this discourse in the Central Plains region of the Yellow River, particularly as it was applied to the peoples south of the Huai River, especially the Wu people, or Wuren. The conclusion is that the discourse increasingly became more ethnicizing, and clearly identified the Wuren as a distinct, and inferior, ethnic group.

Conclusion

In the introduction to this section I observed that, even though all three repertoires were deployed simultaneously, it is possible describe the evolution of the Jiankang throne’s preferential deployment of them over the course of four hundred years. In concluding the section, I review that history and consider the reasons the throne chose to present itself in the ways that it did....

The Buddhist Repertoire, Part 2

Chapter 11, “The Buddhist Repertoire, Part 2: Jiankang as Theater State,” is the second half of the third study of various repertoires of political legitimation. This chapter argues that the Liang and Chen regimes in the sixth century built on the developments of the late fifth century and responded to the crisis of the Sinitic repertoire by making the Buddhist repertoire paramount instead. The chapter assesses the politics of bodhisattva ordination and the increasingly public rituals, such as Boundless Gatherings and relic worship, that turned Buddhist legend and ideology into well-established political performances. Jiankang in the sixth century can be understood as an example of a Buddhist “theater state,” a model scholars have used to understand political regimes in non-Sinitic parts of Southeast Asia. Especially when combined with elements of vernacular culture, the Buddhist repertoire proved a more successful fit for Jiankang’s political culture than the Sinitic repertoire had been.

The Sinitic Repertoire

Chapter 9, “The Sinitic Repertoire,” offers the second of three studies in various repertoires of political legitimation. Sinitic universalism, based on Sinitic classical philosophy and the model of the Han Empire, is well studied and understood. This chapter emphasizes the tensions within the Sinitic repertoire in the Jiankang regime: between military and suasive approaches to building a Sinitic universal empire; between frugal and ostentatious approaches; and between the traditional Central Plains–centered political geography and one that was transposed to the Yangzi delta, an effort that was undertaken in earnest beginning in the fifth century. Daoist approaches, both huahu (conversion of the barbarians) and millenarian, are also considered as a variant of Sinitic universalism. The concluding analysis argues that the adoption of Sinitic universalism posed numerous intractable difficulties for the imperial throne, especially following the rise of an assertive Central Plains–based regime in the late fifth century.

The Vernacular Repertoire

Chapter 8, “The Vernacular Repertoire,” offers the first of three studies in various repertoires of political legitimation. As the only locally focused repertoire, vernacular traditions most readily contributed to ethnogenesis, as a case study of Koguryo demonstrates. The Wu region had similar potential to be politically autonomous (fengjian) within the Sinitic world, a path that was advocated in the late third and early fourth centuries, notably by Lu Ji. The chapter profiles the legends and practices surrounding several Wu local figures: the effective founder of the Jiankang regime, Sun Quan; the imperial tutelary deity Jiang Ziwen; the ancient Sinitic legend of Wu Taibo; and the god Wu Zixu. The concluding analysis argues that local culture had both a Sinified version and a more wholly vernacular version; the latter was much more politically relevant to the Jiankang regime, part of an effort to gain support within garrison culture.

Managing Prosperity

Chapter 7, “Managing Prosperity: The Political Economy of a Commercial Empire,” looks at the policy choices of the Jiankang regime that contributed to commercial prosperity, including the design of the capital city, the fiscal system, the remittance system, and monetary and trade policies. It shows that these policy decisions were closely tied to the interests of key groups within the ruling class, particularly the imperial house and leading military figures, who frequently had considerable private commercial interests. It also explores the link between these policies and the patronage of Buddhism. The system is compared to that of the Roman Empire and South and Southeast Asian regimes. Widely criticized as “corruption” by historians trained in the Sinitic tradition (as well as by modern ones), the pro-commercial political economy would be better understood as a normalized part of the empire’s operations.

Making Hierarchy

Chapter 6, “Making Hierarchy: Garrison, Court, and the Structure of Jiankang Politics,” analyzes the contrasting political cultures of two functional/occupational groups: garrison and court. While garrison culture emphasized relatively fluid patron-client ties, personal honor, violence, and vengeance, court culture emphasized rigid status hierarchy, calm restraint, and skillful deployment of the Sinitic paideia. The imperial household played a key brokerage role between the two cultures, but the garrisons dominated the process of imperial succession, which did not follow the rules of primogeniture and was always contested. The chapter then uses the Churen group (jituan) of the early fifth century as a case study to demonstrate that the strong regional basis of patron-client cliques, though similar in many ways to the rise of military groups such as the Tabgatch Compatriots in the north, did not result in significant ethnogenesis. The chapter offers as an alternative the model, taken from studies of Southeast Asian regimes, of the “man of prowess.”