Hé Qiáoyuǎn
Min Shu
1620 CE
trans. T. A. Bisson
1929
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NOTE |
The following is a biography of Mani written by the seventeenth century Chinese scholar Hé Qiáoyuǎn (also Romanized as Ho Ch’iao-yüan) (1558–1632) in his Min Shu, a history of his home province of Fuijan, published in 1620. The account is especially interesting for being a rare example of a historical Chinese account of Mani and testifies to the survival of Manichaean ideas and the memory of Manichaeism in imperial China at a relatively late date. It also testifies to the conflation of Manichaeism with Daoism, with Mani identified as an avatar of Laozi. T. A. Bisson translated the text from a French edition of Chinese Manichaean texts for a discussion of Chinese Manichean records in The Chinese Recorder. Below, I have provided his translation, prefaced by his analysis of the text. Note that the transliterations Bisson used follow older Romanization conventions.
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A CHINESE BIOGRAPHY OF MANI
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According to this record of Ho Ch'iao-yüan, Mani was born in 208 and died in 266. Mani's dates are usually accepted as 216 and 274 or 276/77. Although Ho Ch'iao-yüan's dates are, therefore, not wholly accurate, when we reflect that before him no Chinese record breathes a word of the time at which Mani lived, a variance of a few years for dates, in any case none too certain, will not prevent our admiration of the relative faithfulness of the tradition which was yet being transmitted in Fukien in the first half of the seventeenth century. The chronology of Islam, a faith much more recent and much more alive, has undergone far worse alterations in China. Ho Ch'iao-yüan possessed information no one would have believed existent in his time. |
The Hua-piao Mountain of the county of Chin-kiang prefecture of Ch’ian-chou is joined to the [mountains of the] Supernatural Source (Ling-yüan); its two peaks stand up like hua-piao. On the ridge slope back of the mountain is a rustic chapel dating from Mongol times. There sacrifices are offered to the Buddha Mani. The Buddha Mani has for name ‘Brilliant Buddha Mo-mo-ni’; he is a man from the land of Syria; and is also a Buddha, having the name ‘Envoy of the Great Light, Complete in Knowledge.’ It is said that more than five hundred years after Lao-tzu had entered the shifting sands of the West, in the wu-tzu year of the chien-an period of emperor Hsien of the Han (208 A.D.), he was transformed into a nai-yün (暈). The queen of the king Pao-ti ate and liked it, upon which she became pregnant. The time having come, the child came forth through her breast. The nai-yün is a pomegranate of the imperial gardens. This story is similar to that of the grasping of the pear-tree and the coming forth from the left side. His (Lao-tzu’s avatar; Mani’s) religion is called ‘luminous’; for clothes he considered white best; in the morning, he worshipped the sun, in the evening the moon. He had a complete conception of the nature of ‘dharma’, and pushed to the limit the effort to clarify it. He said: ‘That which approaches your nature is mine; that which approaches my nature, is yours.’ In fine, he united in one [the doctrines of] Sakya and Lao-tzu. He propagated [his religion] in the countries of the Arabs, the Near East, Tokharestan, and Persia. In the year ping-ssu of the t’ai-shih period of emperor Wu of the Chin (A.D. 266) he died in Persia. He entrusted his doctrine to a chief mu-che. The mu-che in the reign of Kao-Tsung of T’ang (650-683) propagated his religion in the Middle Kingdom. Then, in the time of Wu Tse-t’ien (684-704) an eminent disciple of the mu-che, the fu-to-tan Mi-wu-mo-ssu came in turn to the court. The Buddhist monks were jealous of him and calumniated him, and there were mutual struggles and difficulties; but Tse-t’ien was pleased with his words and kept the envoy to explain his Scriptures to her. In the period k’ai-yüan (713-741) they made a Ta-yün-kuang-ming-ssu (Temple of the Light of the Great Clouds) in which they worshipped him (Mani?). He himself (the fu-to-tan?) used to say that in his country there had been in the beginning two sages, called Previous Thought (先意) and Jesus (夷數); as we in the Middle Kingdom speak of P’an Ku. The word mo (末) means large. Of their sacred books there are seven works. They have [also] the Hua Hu Ching, where is told the story of Lao-tzu entering the shifting sands of the West to be born in Syria. In the period hui-chang (841-846) the monks were suppressed in great numbers, and the religion of the light was included in the suppression. There was the master of the Law, Hu-Lu, who came to Fu-t’ang (south of Foochow). He passed on his teaching to some companions of the Three Mountains (Foochow), and came to the commandery of Ch’üan in his travels; he died [there] and was buried at the foot of a mountain to the north of the commandery. In the period chih-tao (995-997) a literati of Huaian, Li T’ing-yü, found an image of the Buddha (Mani) in a soothsayer’s shop at the capital; it was sold to him for 50,000 pieces of money, and thus false images were circulated in Fukien. In the reign of Chen-Tsung (998-1022) a Fukien literati, Lin Shih-ch’ang, presented his classics (Manichaean) for safe-keeping to the Foochow official college. When T’ai-tsu, of the imperial dynasty, pacified the empire he gave the three religions to the people as a guide. Again he was dissatisfied that [the Manichaeans] in the name of their religion usurped the dynastic title. He drove out their disciples and destroyed their temples. The president of the Board of Finance, Yu Hsin, and the president of the Board of Rites, Yang Lung, memorialized the throne to stop [this proscription]; and because of this the matter was set aside and dropped. At present those among the people who follow its (Manichaean) practices use formulas of incantation called ‘the master’s prescription’; [but] they are not much in evidence. Behind the chapel are the Peak of Ten Thousand Stones, the Jade Spring, the Cloud-Ladder of a Hundred Steps, as well as accounts graven on the rocks [by visitors].
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Source: T. A. Bisson, “Chinese Records of Manichaeism,” The Chinese Recorder 60, no. 7 (July 1929): 425-426.
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