Walter POHL – Andre GINGRICH (Eds.)
medieval worlds • no. 6 • 2017
Religious Exemption in Pre-Modern Eurasia, C. 300-1300 CE
Antonello Palumbo
S. 118 - 155
doi:
10.1553/medievalworlds_no6_2017s118
Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Abstract:
Starting from the end of the fourth century, the Buddhist monastic community in China entered a protracted confrontation with a variety of political regimes, Sinitic and barbarian, significantly affecting their own processes of state formation and the reconstitution of a unified empire after a long period of division. Although elites and rulers often lavished patronage upon the clergy, and used Buddhism to buttress their authority, the overall response of these regimes, especially in the north, was unforgiving. Four persecutions from 446 to 955 and increasingly tight regulation effectively undermined monastic prerogatives, ultimately thwarting the emergence of a Buddhist ›church‹ in China. The last major episode of suppression intriguingly took place only a few years before the founding of the Song dynasty (960-1279) and China’s subsequent transition towards what many historians have seen as her first modern period. Buddhism did live on in the new era, but as a social body it was terminally hamstrung by the state’s inflexible grip. Comparing this trajectory to the fortunes of Christianity in the late antique Mediterranean and then in early medieval Europe raises several counterfactual questions. One of the most important perhaps concerns the long-term effect that religious exemption, or the lack thereof, respectively had on imperial state formation on the two sides, in what Walter Scheidel has called the ›First Great Divergence‹ between China and Western Eurasia. Whether the rise of the Christian church with its privileges may have decisively stood in the way of an imperial resurgence in the West is an already old question; but whether, conversely, the Chinese state’s successful confrontation with Buddhism was key to its extraordinary endurance as an imperial entity is a still largely unexplored avenue of inquiry, which this paper intends to probe.
China; Buddhism; Late Antiquity; Great Divergence; taxation; religious exemption; population registration; imperial formation
Published Online:
2017/12/01 11:44:00
Object Identifier:
0xc1aa5572 0x00372f23
Rights:All rights reserved.For questions regarding copyright and copies please contact us by email.
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Table of Contents
Religious Exemption in Pre-Modern Eurasia, c. 300 – 1300 CE: Introduction
Charles West
Treasures in Heaven: Defining the Eurasian Old Regime?
R. I. Moore
Envisioning a No-Man’s Land: Hermitage as a Site of Exemption in Ancient and Early Medieval
Indian Literature
Kanad Sinha
Evolving Relationship between the Buddhist Monastic Order and the Imperial States of Medieval
China
Mario Poceski
The Normative Character of Monastic Exemption in the Early Medieval Latin West
Kriston R. Rennie
Clerical Exemption in Canon Law from Gratian to the Decretals
Anne J. Duggan
Nothing to Declare: Status, Power and Religious Aspiration in the Policies of Taxation in Ancient
India
Ulrich Pagel
Exemption Not Granted: The Confrontation between Buddhism and the Chinese State in Late
Antiquity and the ‘First Great Divergence’ Between China and Western Eurasia
Antonello Palumbo
The Political Significance of Gifts of Power in the Khmer and Mercian Kingdoms 793-926
Dominic Goodall and Andrew Wareham
Conversion, Exemption, and Manipulation: Social Benefits and Conversion to Islam in Late Antiquity
and the Middle Ages
Uriel Simonsohn
Religious Exemption, Justice, and Territories around the Year 1000: The Forgeries of Worms
Thomas Kohl
The Exemption that Proves the Rule: Autonomy and Authority between Alcuin, Theodulf and
Charlemagne (802)
Rutger Kramer
From Symbiosis to Separate Spheres? England, 1163
Judith A. Green
Religious Exemption and Global History before 1300 – Closing Comments
Julia McClure
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