Organizer: Julia Murray, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Chair: Paul J. Smith, Haverford College
The Impact of Traditional Chinese Thinking on Chengguan’s Philosophy
Imre Hamar, Eotvos Lorand University
This paper is a study of the presence of Daoism in the discourse of the Huayan Buddhist thinker Chengguan (738–839), and of the significance of that presence for our understanding of certain changes which Chinese Buddhism underwent from the early to the late Tang.
Chengguan’s use of terminology drawn particularly from the Laozi and the Zhuangzi will be analyzed in the context of his anti-Daoist polemic (e.g., his critique of notions like "spontaneity" [ziran] and "life-force" [qi]). Contrasts will then be drawn between Chengguan’s apologetic appropriations of Taoism—which he characterizes as borrowings of the "words" but not meanings" of Daoism—and the relative absence of reference to any Chinese traditions in the writings, of earlier Huayan thinkers like Fazang (643–712). Finally, the argument will be advanced that this difference between the later and the earlier Huayan thinker is, in significant measure, a function of changes wrought in Chinese culture by the An Lushan rebellion (755–56).
In particular, the case will be made that the rebellion’s shift of power from the central imperial court to the domains of regional military governors deprived Buddhism of its accustomed cultural autonomy, leaving it more vulnerable than previously to factors in its immediate cultural environment. It could no longer continue as an imperially supported intellectual "world unto itself," content with its self-contained and "foreign" systems of metaphysics and epistemology. Now it had to justify itself in relation to the Chinese heritage. Chengguan’s references to Daoism, it will be shown, were his way of doing just that.
Sinicization Out of China: The Case of the Western Liao (Qara Khitai), 1132–1211
Michal Biran, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Western Liao, established by those Khitans who immigrated to the grasslands of Central Asia after the Jurchen conquest, is considered by the Liao shi to be a Chinese dynasty, and contemporary Muslim authors often denote its rulers as "The Chinese."
Indeed, despite the paucity of the sources about this dynasty, literary and archaeological evidence reveals that throughout its reign the Western Liao retained Chinese reign titles and official titles, Chinese dress, architecture and ceramic designs and used the Chinese language on coins. In the manner of Northern Chinese tradition, however, those symbols of "Chineseness" were by no means exclusive: the Western Liao emperor, for example, also bore the Inner Asian title Gürkhan and at least Khitan and Persian were used together with Chinese in writing.
This paper analyses the different meanings of China in pre-Mongol Central Asia. It argues that the Chinese features retained by the Western Liao were not mere superficial traces of two-hundred years’ rule in China nor were they an expression of Khitan admiration for Chinese culture. Rather, they met a practical need. Those Chinese features were an important part of Western Liao legitimation, not only towards its few Han-Chinese subjects but also vis-a-vis the other components of this multi-ethnic empire: Khitans, Mongols and even Central-Asian Muslims among whom the title Tamghaj Khan (The Khan of China) was a synonym for The Great Khan. The Northern Chinese tradition gave the Qara Khitai a higher cultural level and a more cohesive identity, what other nomadic dynasties in this region usually found in Islam.
The Traveler as Host: Chinese Cultural Imperialism in The Three-Treasure Eunuch’s Travels to the Western Ocean
Dongfeng Xu, University of Chicago
It is not likely that a reader will find a better literary illustration or elaboration of Chinese cultural imperialism than the romance narrative, Sanbao taijian xiyangji tongsu yanyi (1597) by Luo Maodeng. A literary reconstruction of some historical maritime expeditions undertaken by Zheng He or the Three-Treasure in a period of twenty-eight years (1405–33), Xiyangji displays a romance structure that provides an interesting case for a study of some cultural ideologies that the Chinese employ to deal with other cultures. My reading of Xiyangji, which Fredric Jameson would call "a socially symbolic act," will begin with an examination of how the narrative is related with the cultural ideology of China in general and the political movements of the age of Zheng in particular. Following Zheng’s journey launched to recover an Imperial Seal, a symbol of not only China’s national unity but also its self-proclaimed dynastic hegemony, the paper hopes to expose a rather simple solution that the work attempts to provide to the opposition between China and other cultures by presenting the others as evil, alien and subordinate. But my reading, rather than confirming a perfect nation-building frame in Xiyangji, purports to argue that the totalization supposedly achieved by Zheng and his fleet is deeply troubled. It is troubled or disturbed because, through a close examination, the conquest and transformation, even signs of textual production such as direct address, chapter titles and endings, designed originally to indicate the complete submission of China’s enemies, reveal that the other cultures nevertheless retain their discursive existence along with their irreducible differences or otherness.
A Fly Crushed Between Stallions: Uyghur History on the Margins of Empire
Nathan Light, University of Toledo
Outside of Inner Asia, narratives of Uyghur history exist on the margins of dominant historical discourses, but this marginality can illuminate the ideologies that shape dominant histories. In this paper, I analyze how Western and Chinese historians shape their discourses about Uyghur history to fit ideologies about their own civilizations. I compare their writings with those of native Uyghur historians and poets from the same period, and interpret the divergences in terms of Edward Said’s "orientalism" and Johannes Fabian’s "allochrony." In the last thirty years outsider understandings have strongly influenced Uyghur historical writing. I discuss the reasons that Uyghur scholars have responded to Western and Chinese ideas in their writing, while Uyghur ideas have been ignored by outsiders.
Although the Uyghurs’ position on the fringes of the Russian, Chinese, and Islamic worlds has not isolated them from historical events, it has excluded them from the discursive constructions of history that dominate the modern world’s self-consciousness. I discuss some reasons that Western sinologists have neglected native Turkic and Persian documents of Uyghur history and relied on Chinese sources instead. I discuss how this contributes to racial, orientalist, and sino-centric popularizations of Inner Asian history such as those found in the Arthur Sackler Gallery’s 1995 show "Traders and Raiders on China’s Northern Frontier" and the recent National Geographic documentary The Mysterious Mummies of China.
In the Name of God: Taiping Hostility to the Imperial Title
Tom Reilly, Pepperdine University
The religion of the Taiping rebels has long fascinated scholars of the rebellion, and yet the process by which the Taiping god came to be named Shang-ti and the consequences of this identification for the course of the rebellion have largely gone unexamined.
The Taiping rebels were initially introduced to the name of their deity through the pamphlet compiled by Liang A-fa, and more formally through the translation of the Bible prepared by the missionaries, Walter Medhurst and Charles Gutzlaff. The decision as to how to name the Christian God had become the focus of a hotly contested debate between those missionaries who advocated naming God after the classical "Sovereign on High," Shang-ti, and those who advocated the generic term for god, shen. Debating the merits and pitfalls of both terms, the missionaries not only foreshadowed the political direction the God-Worshipper’s Society would take, but also raised important issues concerning the religious associations of the Chinese emperor’s title.
Hung Hsiu-ch’uan in his understanding of the name of Shang-ti incorporated many of the implications that the missionaries warned against, and went beyond these to construct a religious basis for rebellion. Hung reasoned that the imperial title, Huang-ti, was a blasphemous usurpation of the title of Shang-ti, an interpretation which provided the basis for the Taiping call to abolish the imperial title and raze the imperial office.
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