Why the West Rules--For Now (53 page)

In this simpler world, coinage, counting, and writing lost their uses. With no one mining copper to supply their mints, the kings of northern China first tried reducing the metal content of their
coins
(to the point, some claimed, that the coins were so light they could float) and then stopped issuing coins altogether. Account-keeping and census-taking shriveled up and libraries rotted. It was an uneven process, and drawn out across centuries, but in most of northern China and western Europe population fell, thistles and forests reclaimed fields, and life grew shorter and meaner.

PATIENCE AND PUSILLANIMITY

How could this have happened? To most Easterners and Westerners, the answer was obvious: the old ways and old gods had failed.

In China, as soon as the frontiers crumbled, critics had accused the Han of losing the mandate of heaven, millenarian healing cults had convulsed the land, and the most creative minds within the educated elite had begun questioning Confucian certainties. The “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove,” a group of third-century freethinkers, became icons of a new sensibility, reportedly passing their days in conversation, poetry, music, drinking, and drugs rather than studying the classics and serving the state. According to one story, the sage Ruan Ji, caught in a scandalous breach of etiquette (walking unchaperoned with his sister-in-law), just laughed: “
Surely you do not
mean to suggest that
li
”—custom,
the foundation of Confucianism—“applies to
me
?” He expanded on his theme:

Have you ever seen the lice that inhabit a pair of pants? They jump into the depths of the seams, hiding themselves in the cotton wadding, and believe they have a pleasant place to live. Walking, they do not risk going beyond the edge of the seam; moving, they are careful not to emerge from the pants leg; and they think they have kept to the rules of etiquette. But when the pants are ironed, the flames invade the hills … then the lice that inhabit the pants cannot escape.

What difference is there between the gentleman who lives within a narrow world and the lice that inhabit pants legs?

The moral seriousness of Han court poets now appeared ludicrous; far better, said the new generation, to withdraw into pastoral, writing lyrical descriptions of gardens and forests, or even to become a hermit. Aesthetes who were too busy to retreat to the distant mountains might just play at being hermits in the gardens of their own villas, or—like Wang Dao, chief minister at the court in Jiankang around 300—could hire people to be hermits on their behalf. Painters began celebrating wild mountains, and in the fourth century the great Gu Kaizhi raised landscape to the status of a major art form. The Seven Sages and other theorists elevated form over content, studying the techniques of painting and writing rather than their moral message.

This third-century revolt against tradition was largely negative, mocking and rejecting convention without offering positive alternatives, but toward the century’s end that changed. Eight hundred years earlier, while Confucianism and Daoism were just getting started in China, Buddhism had also been spreading across South Asia. The Old World Exchange brought Buddhism to Chinese attention, probably when Eastern and South Asian traders mingled in central Asia’s oases, and it is first mentioned in a Chinese text in 65
CE
. A few cosmopolitan intellectuals took it up, but it long remained just one among many exotic philosophies washing in from the steppes.

That changed in the late third century, thanks largely to the central Asian monk-translator Dharmaraksa. Traveling regularly between Chang’an and the great oasis of Dunhuang, he attracted Chinese intellectuals
with new translations of Buddhist texts, putting Indian concepts into language that made sense in China. Like most Axial sages, the Buddha had written nothing down, which left endless scope for debate over what his message was. The earliest forms of Buddhism had emphasized disciplined meditation and self-awareness, but the interpretation that Dharmaraksa promoted, known as Mahayana Buddhism, made salvation less onerous. Dharmaraksa presented the Buddha not as a spiritual seeker but as the incarnation of an eternal principle of enlightenment. The original Buddha, Dharmaraksa insisted, was just the first in a series of Buddhas on this and other worlds. These Buddhas were surrounded by a host of other heavenly figures, particularly Bodhisattvas, mortals who were well on the way to enlightenment but had postponed nirvana to help lesser mortals perfect themselves and escape the cycle of rebirth and suffering.

Mahayana Buddhism could get extreme. Most Buddhist sects believed that a Maitreya (“Future”) Buddha would one day lead the masses to liberation, but starting in 401 a stream of wilder-eyed Chinese devotees identified themselves as Buddhas and, teaming up with bandits, rebellious peasants, and/or disaffected officials, went on rampages intended to bring salvation to everyone right now. All ended bloodily.

Mahayana Buddhism’s most important contribution, though, was to simplify traditional Buddhism’s burdensome demands and open salvation to all. By the sixth century all that the popular “Heaven-Man Teaching” required was for devotees to walk laps around statues of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, worship relics (especially the many teeth, bones, and begging bowls said to have belonged to the Buddha), chant, act compassionately, be self-sacrificing, and follow the Five Precepts (thou shalt not kill, steal, commit adultery, drink, or lie). Its teachers conceded that this would not actually lead to nirvana, but it would deliver health, prosperity, and upwardly mobile rebirth. The “Pure Land School” went further, claiming that when believers died, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, working with the Amitabha Buddha, would interrupt the cycle of rebirth and guide them to a Western Paradise where they could pursue nirvana away from the cares of this world.

Indian seekers after nirvana regularly took to the road, begging as they went. Holy wanderers (as opposed to well-heeled hermit-poets) were alien to Chinese traditions, and did not catch on, but a second
Indian path toward enlightenment—monasticism—did. Around 365, Dao’an—a native Chinese Buddhist trained as a Confucian, rather than a central Asian immigrant—drew up a monastic code to fit Chinese society. Monks would wear the tonsure and both monks and nuns took vows of chastity and obedience, earning their keep through labor while pursuing salvation through prayer, meditation, and scholarship. Monasticism could get as extreme as millenarian Buddhism: many monks and nuns injured themselves, imitating—in a small way—the Bodhisattvas’ self-sacrifice, and a few even burned themselves alive, sometimes before audiences of thousands, to redeem others’ sins. Dao’an’s great contribution, though, was to shape monasticism into a religious institution that could partly fill the organizational void created in China by the breakdown of state institutions in the fourth century. Monasteries and convents built watermills, raised money, and even organized defense. As well as being centers of devotion they became oases of stability and even islands of wealth as rich co-religionists gave them land and tenants and dispossessed peasants fled to their protection. Thousands of monasteries popped up in the fifth century; “Today,” an official wrote in 509, “there is no place without a monastery.”

Buddhism’s conquest of China was remarkable. There could have been only a few hundred Buddhists in 65
CE
; by the sixth century most Chinese—perhaps 30 million people—were believers. Yet astonishing as this is, at the other end of Eurasia another new religion, Christianity, was growing even faster.

Classical traditions did not crumble as early in the West as in the East, perhaps because Rome’s frontiers held longer, and although Western healing cults did arise after the great epidemics of the 160s, they did not favor the kinds of violent revolution popular among Chinese versions. Yet the chaos of the third century did unsettle old ways in the West. Statues carved all over the empire bear silent witness to a new mood, abandoning the stately principles of classical art in favor of strangely proportioned forms with huge, upward-staring eyes, seemingly gazing on another, better place. New religions from the empire’s eastern margins—Isis from Egypt, the Undefeated Sun from Syria, Mithras (whose followers wallowed in bulls’ blood in underground chambers) perhaps ultimately from Iran, Christianity from Palestine—offered eternal life. People were asking for salvation from this troubled world, not rational explanation of it.

Some philosophers responded to the crisis of values by trying to show that the scholarship of past centuries was still relevant. In their day, scholars such as Porphyry and Plotinus (the latter perhaps the greatest Western thinker since Aristotle) who reinterpreted the Platonic tradition to fit modern times were among the biggest names in the West, but increasingly thinkers were looking for entirely new answers.

Christianity offered something for everyone in this troubled age. Like Mahayana Buddhism, it was a new twist on an old Axial Age idea, offering a version of Axial thought more in tune with the needs of the day. Christianity took over Judaism’s sacred books, announcing that its founder, Jesus, was the Messiah predicted there. We might call both Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity “second-wave” Axial religions, offering new kinds of salvation to more people than their first-wave predecessors and making the path toward salvation easier. Equally important, both new religions were ecumenical. Neither Jesus nor the Buddha belonged to a chosen people; they had come to save everyone.

Jesus, like the Buddha, wrote no sacred texts, and as early as the 50s
CE
the apostle Paul (who never met Jesus) was struggling to get Christians to agree on a few core points about what Christianity actually was. Most followers accepted that they should be baptized, pray to God, renounce other gods, eat together on Sundays, and perform good works, but beyond these basic premises, almost anything was possible. Some held that the God of the Hebrew Bible was merely the last (and lowest) in a series of prior gods. Others thought the world was evil and so God the Creator must be wicked too. Or maybe there were two gods, a malevolent Jewish one and Jesus’ wholly good (but unknowable) father. Or two Jesuses, a spiritual one who escaped crucifixion and a bodily one who died on the cross. Maybe Jesus was a woman, some suggested, and maybe women were equal to men. Maybe new revelations could overrule the old ones. Maybe Jesus’ Second Coming was imminent, in which case no Christian should have sex; maybe its imminence meant Christians should practice free love; or maybe only people who were martyred in horrible ways would go to heaven, in which case sex was irrelevant.

The Buddha was widely believed to have been pragmatic about transcendence, recommending that people use whichever of his ideas helped and ignore the rest. Multiple paths to nirvana were not a problem. For Christians, however, getting into heaven depended on knowing
who God and Jesus were and doing what they wanted, and so the chaos of interpretations forced believers into a frenzy of self-definition. In the late second century most came to agree that there should be bishops who would be treated as descendants of the original apostles with the authority to judge what Jesus meant. Preachers with wilder ideas were damned into oblivion, the New Testament crystallized, and the window on revelations closed. No one could tinker with the Good Book and no one could hear from the Holy Spirit unless the bishops said so; and no one had to renounce marital sex or be martyred, unless they wanted to.

Plenty of points of disputation remained, but by 200 Christianity was becoming a disciplined faith with (reasonably) clear rules about salvation. Like Mahayana Buddhism, it was distinctive enough to get attention, offering practical paths to salvation in troubled times, yet familiar enough to be comprehensible. Learned Greeks even suggested that second-wave Axial Christianity was not so different from first-wave Axial philosophy after all: Plato (the Athenian Moses, some called him) had reasoned his way to the truth and Christians had had truth revealed to them, but it was all the same truth.

When high-end state institutions started breaking down, bishops were well placed to step into the gap, mobilizing their followers to rebuild town walls, fix roads, and negotiate with Germanic raiders. In the countryside conspicuously holy men, renouncing the world as vigorously as any Buddhist, became local leaders. One ascetic achieved empire-wide fame by living in a tomb in the Egyptian desert, fasting, and battling Satan, all the while wearing a hair shirt. His greatest promoter insisted, “
He neither bathed
his body with water to free himself from filth, nor did he ever wash his feet.” Another holy man sat on a fifty-foot column in Syria for forty years, while other renouncers wore animal skins and ate only grass, living (briefly, presumably) as “fools for Christ.”

All this struck fastidious Roman gentlemen as bizarre, and even Christians worried about wild men who inspired fanatical followings and answered to no one but God. In 320 an Egyptian holy man named Pachomius found a solution, herding local hermits into the first Christian monastery, where they pursued salvation through labor and prayer under his rigid discipline. Pachomius and the Chinese Dao’an surely knew nothing of each other, but their monasteries were strikingly alike and had similar social consequences. In the fifth century Christian
monasteries and convents often moored local economies when larger structures broke down, became centers of learning as classical scholarship waned, and provided monkish militias to keep the peace.

Christianity spread even faster than Buddhism. When Jesus died, around 32
CE
, he had a few hundred followers; by 391, when Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity the only legal religion, more than 30 million Romans had converted, although “conversion” is necessarily a loose word. While some highly educated men and women were going through torments of doubt, working through the doctrinal implications with great logic and rigor before accepting the new faith, all around them crowds thousands strong could be won over by Christian or Buddhist wonder-workers in a single afternoon. Consequently, all statistics remain crude; we are doing chainsaw art again. We simply do not know, and probably never will, exactly when and where the pace of conversion accelerated and when and where it slackened, but since we know that both Christianity and Buddhism started with a few hundred followers and eventually had 30-million-plus,
Figure 6.9
shows what the
average
growth rates for each religion must have been across these centuries, smoothed out over the whole of China and the Roman Empire. On average, Chinese Buddhism was growing by 2.3 percent each year, meaning that it doubled its following every thirty years, but Christianity grew by 3.4 percent, doubling every twenty years.