| World Mythology Dictionary: East Asia |
Siberia, Mongolia, China, Japan, South-East Asia
Beyond the Great Wall of China a nomadic way of life has always prevailed. Across the endless wastes have roamed the herds belonging to the people of the north–the Mongols, the Turks, the Tartars, the Tungus, the Huns. A world apart, the steppe was until the beginning of the nineteenth century a constant source of anxiety for Asia and Europe, whose civilizations have always rested upon intensive agriculture and urban settlement. From the steppe mounted raiders had descended with such fury that the nomad terror was legendary. Most notorious was Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227), who laid down the rule that any resistance to Mongol arms should be punished by total extermination. ‘The greatest joy’, he once said, ‘is to conquer one's enemies, to pursue them, to seize their belongings, to see their families in tears, to ride their horses, and to possess their daughters and wives.’ Although the Mongol onslaught of the thirteenth century failed to establish a world imperium, the devastation wrought in the numerous campaigns was immense, China bearing the brunt of the attack.
Yet the Mongol conquest of China (1279–1365) did result in the introduction of Buddhism to Mongolia and Siberia because the Tibetan form was adopted as the official religion of the nomad empire. The ‘yellow faith’ began to replace the old ‘black faith’, the original animist-shamanist religion of the north. Many old folk-customs were tolerated by giving them new meanings and the early myths were preserved by the art of the story-teller, but the authority of the shamans declined. No longer was the only custodian of the soul the shaman, the ‘medicine man’. Previously these spirit-possessed men were used to seek out and recover the lost or abducted souls of the sick. In trance and frenzy the shaman raised himself to the world of the spirits, where he gained control over certain incorporeal beings, especially those of disease and death, in order to exorcize them from people. The Buriat tribesmen living on the shores of Lake Baikal, for example, declare that Morgon-Kara, their first shaman, was able to bring back to earth even the souls of the dead. So perturbed was the lord of ‘the land of beyond’ that he complained to the high lord of heaven, who decided to put the shaman to a test. He got possession of the soul of one man and placed it in a bottle, stopping the opening with his thumb. When the man fell ill and his relatives asked Morgon-Kara to help, the shaman rode on his magical drum and searched every corner of the universe, till at last he observed where the missing soul was held. Then the wily shaman changed himself into a wasp, and flew to the deity's forehead, which he stung hard enough for the thumb to jerk away from the mouth of the bottle. The king of heaven, however, was not prepared to allow Morgon-Kara a complete triumph. The shaman's flight with the recovered soul almost became a headlong fall as the angered god split his drum in two. Afterwards, Buriat tradition explains, magical drums were only fitted with a single head of skin in token of the diminished power of the shaman.
Within the Great Wall the sorcery of the North Asian peoples found a place in Taoism, the Chinese religion of individual salvation. Taoism had two origins. First there were the philosophers of the Warring States period (481–221 BC) who withdrew from the courts of feudal princes and spent their lives in the forests or on mountains meditating upon Nature. Lao-tzu, ‘the Old Philosopher’, had simply quit civilization: the absence of a tomb for this ‘hidden wise man’ is a notable omission in an age that placed immense store by the rites of ancestor worship. ‘Confucius walks within society’, wrote Chuang-tzu (350–275 BC), the most distinguished follower of Lao-tzu, ‘whilst I walk outside it.’ Taoists felt wisdom ‘in their bones’, and rejected the elaboration of social duties so favoured by Confucianism. Instead of emphasizing the family and the clan, they sought after a feminine and receptive knowledge that could only arise as the fruit of a passive and yielding attitude in the observation of natural phenomena. This philosophical outlook was important for the early development of science in China, since Taoist observation and experiments in alchemy represent the dim beginnings of scientific method. What these adepts tried to discover was the elixir of life, the chemical means of immortality. There was a persistent belief in such a possibility, as the following incident of the ninth century shows. The chance excavation of a long-buried stone box filled with silk disturbed a greyhaired man of dignified mien who arose, adjusted his clothing, and then disappeared.
The other root of Taoism was the magic of the wu–female and male thaumaturges. Their sympathetic magic eased the lot of the hard-pressed peasants by placating malignant spirits and invoking those more kindly disposed. Details of a ceremony of exposure survive; it suggests that the drops of sweat shed by the sorcerer, dancing within a circle under the blazing sun, were expected to induce drops of rain. The psychic powers of the wu also enabled contact to be made with departed spirits, though their abilities in this direction were unappreciated by the nobility. The wu magicians, with the whole tradition of peasant belief, remained beyond the pale, utterly divorced from respectable worship. Not for nothing did Taoism, in opposition to Confucian orthodoxy, draw upon the primitive strength of the wu, whose shamanism was continually reinforced by fresh waves of invaders from the north.
In AD 165, there was an increase in the prestige of Taoism at the court, the Chinese emperor offering sacrifices to Lao-tzu for the first time, but this ceremony did not really endanger the Confucian supremacy. Only Mahayana Buddhism made a sustained challenge to become the national religion, though competition with this foreign faith transformed Taoism into an organized church. At every level in Chinese society the teachings of Buddha have had a profound effect. Until the modern period, only India, the Holy Land for East Asia, has influenced China. Yet that singular Chinese capacity to absorb alien peoples, whether Tartar, Mongol, or Manchu conquerors, was active in the development of Buddhism, too. At last the imported faith was modified to suit Chinese society, rather than China modified by the new religion. The Buddhist church adjusted to the Confucian state.
According to legend, when Confucius was born in 551 BC, a ch'i-lin (unicorn) appeared and spat out a piece of jade on which it was written that the philosopher would be ‘an uncrowned emperor’. The prophecy of the unicorn proved correct. Although Confucius remained an obscure and neglected teacher throughout his life, the impact of his thought upon the subsequent history of China has been immense. He was a moral philosopher, his this-worldly doctrine being a feudal ethic, which expected the prince to rule with benevolence and sincerity. The ruler was the Son of Heaven, whose harmonious relation with the spiritual realm ensured the welfare of the people. The unworthiness of a monarch would be reflected in the attitude of heaven, Shang Ti, just as ‘the earth shook’ and ‘rivers were dried up’ during the bad years of a tyrant, an unfilial son. The primitive rites of ancestor worship, thus elevated into a moral code by Confucian philosophy, were the ceremonial meeting of two worlds, the spiritual and the temporal. They underpinned authority–throne, clan, and family.
The attitude of Confucius to religion was entirely practical. ‘I stand in awe of the spirits,’ he told his students, ‘but keep them at a distance.’ He did not disbelieve, he simply had too much to consider in the temporal world. He was rather sceptical of man's powers of comprehension; the celestial realm could not be readily plumbed by divination or star-gazing. This reluctance of Confucius to pronounce on religion introduced a sense of balance in the spiritual world as well as on the earthly plane. It came to the aid of traditionalists opposed to the fervour generated by Buddhism. When Emperor T'ang Hui-ch'ang decided that the religious establishment had grown too large in AD 845, his course of action was straightforward enough. All monks and nuns in China, numbering 260,500, were laicized; thereafter, strong control was exercised over the affairs of religious orders, extending to the recruitment of personnel and ownership of property. While such scepticism meant that Chinese history has been unblemished by religious wars, it has taken its toll of imaginative speculation. Mythology tended to remain the preserve of Taoism and Buddhism, especially after the latter had succumbed to the Chinese political tradition of a strong central authority and accepted its role as a popular, not state, religion. The Chinese mind added to Buddhist cosmology, initiating several advanced schools of thought, but to Japan was left the final development of the faith in East Asia. In the twelfth century Chu Hs'i, the pre-eminent Neo-Confucian scholar, boldly said: ‘There is no man in heaven judging sin.’
The Constantine of Japan, Prince Shotoku (572–621), compared the three ethical systems of his country to the root, the stem and branches, and the fruit and flowers of a tree. Shinto was the tap-root embedded in the rich soil of folk tradition. Confucianism served as the sturdy stem and branches of the social order and learning; Buddhism engendered the blossoming of religious sentiment, the mature fruit of spiritual development. The three ways were seen as mutually co-operative, a view that lasted till the political upheavals of the fourteenth century, when religious strife raged side by side with feudal wars.
Shinto, ‘the way of the gods’, the indigenous belief of the Japanese people as distinguished from Butsudo, ‘the way of the Buddha’, always remained the focus of national aspirations for the reason that reverence for the ruling family is inseparably linked with the worship of Amaterasu, the sun goddess. As the ancestress of the Royal House, she is the chief divinity of the numerous folk pantheon, yet herself only the highest manifestation of the unseen spirit of the universe, Kunitokotachi. Though Shinto was supported by the government, having shrines throughout the country, it never achieved the organization of a national church. Rather, it is a means of showing respect to local spirits, ancestral powers, the throne, and the family. This moral emphasis received strength from Confucian ethics, which after the third century penetrated Japan through the agency of the Koreans. Chinese names were even adopted for the various relationships and the virtues necessary in the conduct of social life. The first direct official contact, however, occurred in 607 when Prince Shotoku sent an envoy to China. Soon monks and students followed in the wake of the ambassadors with the result that Chinese culture had a tremendous influence on Japan.
Most potent of the imports were the new schools of Buddhism then arising, such as the Ch'an Tsung, or ‘inner-light school’, which reached its culmination in Japan as Zen. In mythology the new faith introduced a great deal of the Indian imagination, its vastness of scale and its myriad forms, along with the subtle additions of the Chinese mind. Not only did the elaborate iconography of the ‘Greater Vehicle’ stimulate the evolution of Japanese myth, but more the arrival of Buddhist literature had a remarkable effect on Japanese folklore. Open to outside influences, just as it was open to immigration from the peoples inhabiting the continent to the west and the islands to the south, ‘the land that faces the sun’ has had few inhibitions about taking over the development of foreign ideas. Japan is the Sicily of East Asia.
Indo-China, the antiquated name for the countries nearest to the southern border of China, did have in its coinage an insight into the historical experience of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Here it was that the two hoary traditions of India and China met, though only in Vietnam were the political and religious ideas of Confucianism firmly rooted. Beyond the area of direct control the Chinese did not succeed in exporting their culture; they were content with the acceptance of a vague suzerainty by more distant kings. Representative of overseas policy would be the treatment of the Sultan of Malacca, near whose city the famous Chinese admiral Cheng Ho established a temporary naval base in 1406. The Chinese were welcomed at Malacca, a state which had only recently gained its independence, the ruler travelling to Peking three times to offer homage. That he began his reign as a Buddhist and then converted to Islam caused the tolerant Son of Heaven no anxiety at all.
Cambodia and Laos, along with Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, and the western part of Indonesia, Sumatra, Java, and Bali, were originally under Hindu influence, although never conquered by any Indian power. There is no exact record of how this came about, but it is likely that at first traders from South India came for spices, their ships taking advantage of the monsoon winds. They were followed by brahmins who converted the ruling tribal chiefs to the worship of the Hindu pantheon, and also set up kingdoms modelled on the ancient Indian system of kingship. According to a Cambodian legend, an Indian brahmin named Kaundinya landed with a merchant vessel in the first century, married a local princess, and so became the ruler of the coastal country. The princess-bride is said to have been a nagini, snake girl, many of whom feature among the ancestresses of South Indian dynasties. The influence of these immigrants was strong and continued for several centuries, later strengthened by the arrival of Buddhist monks, who left India when resurgent Hinduism threatened to extinguish their faith. Brought by the monk-missionaries was the older of the two Buddhist traditions, the Hinayana or ‘Lesser Vehicle’, which was dedicated to the ideal of individual salvation and represented the way to this end as monastic self-discipline. The Sailendra kings of Srivijaya welcomed the new religion, an inscription of 778 registering the construction of a shrine in their territories on Java. The most magnificent Sailendra monument immediately followed, likewise in the central part of this island; namely, the vast stupa of Borobudur. Its erection at the beginning of the ninth century is evidence of the wealth belonging to Srivijaya, the dominant state in South-east Asia, while the stupa's iconography reveals the eclipse of the ‘Lesser Vehicle’, overtaken as it was at this time by the more vigorous ‘Greater Vehicle’, or Mahayana tradition, which proposed the ideal of salvation for all and developed disciplines of popular devotion and universal secular service. Today Hinayana survives chiefly in Burma and Thailand.
The decline of Hindu-Buddhist states in the Indonesian archipelago resulted from volcanic eruption, famine, internecine war, and the steady progress of a gradual Moslem infiltration. For Islam had been establishing itself among the islands since gaining its first foothold on the north-western coast of Sumatra at the end of the thirteenth century. Soon Malacca became Moslem, and thereafter most of the immigrants from India also professed the faith. The conversion of the local peoples was largely a peaceful event; but it was none the less decisive. With the exception of the tiny island of Bali, which stubbornly clung to its Hindu culture, the mythology and arts of this overseas India withered and disappeared under the iconoclasm of Islam. On the East Asian continent alone did Hinduism or Buddhism persist as national religions, even though conflict with the Thais forced the Cambodians to abandon their immense temple complex of Ankor Wat in 1450 and to withdraw to the lower reaches of the Mekong River.
The remainder of South-east Asia is that area which received neither Chinese nor Indian civilization, and which derives its present culture principally from the more recent arrival of Islam and Christianity. This includes the Philippines, annexed by the Spaniards in 1521, a considerable portion of the extensive island of Borneo, and the eastern part of Indonesia, the Celebes, and Amboina. Indigenous belief was a primitive animism, and where it still exists, as in the notable oral traditions of the Borneo tribesmen, we find a mythology full of ghosts and spirits connected with natural phenomena. Of the mythological world this is the far shore, located just outside the currents of the major traditions: Indian and Chinese ideas never reached it, and West Asian thought came through the intermediary of either Christian Europe or Arab Islam. As the Dayak people of Sarawak call the jungled interior, this portion of South-east Asia is ulu, the end of the world.
