Manichaeism in Central Asia and China

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Manichaeism began in third-century Mesopotamia, but it lived longest and traveled farthest to the east. Carried along the trade roads of Central Asia, it became for a period the state religion of the Uyghur steppe empire and survived in Chinese communities into the later Middle Ages — its dualist core intact, its vocabulary remade in Buddhist terms with each frontier it crossed.

The prophet and the seal

The religion takes its name from the prophet Mani, born around 216 CE in Babylonia — the Sasanian district of Mardinu near Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the Persian capital, late-antique territory and not the older astral world of the Old Babylonian sky-watchers. His father Patek had attached the family to an Elchasaite Jewish-Christian baptist community of southern Mesopotamia, a sect of repeated ritual washings and a vegetarian table. From inside that world Mani reported, at the age of twelve and again at twenty-four, revelations from a heavenly companion he called the Twin — in Greek the syzygos, in Aramaic the tawma — who disclosed to him the architecture of the cosmos and commissioned him to carry it out. He presented himself as the last in a line of true messengers that ran through Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus: the seal of the prophets, sent to gather what his predecessors had begun. Where their teaching, on his account, had been entrusted to memory and so corrupted in transmission, Mani wrote his own scriptures down — in Syriac and in Middle Persian — and bound the writing to a second canon of his own painting, an illustrated picture-book so that the unlettered could see what the literate read. Royal favor under Shapur I gave way to suspicion under Bahram I, and Mani died in prison around 276, in chains, his body afterward beheaded and displayed. His church remembered the death as a passion and named it, in deliberate evangelical parallel, the crucifixion of Mani. His disciple Sisinnios succeeded him as head of the church.

The full apparatus of the founding — the seven-book canon, the three-times cosmology in its complete sequence, the Sasanian court drama — belongs to the mother account of Manichaeism, the Religion of Light. What concerns the eastward road is the shape of the religion that traveled it.

Two principles, captured light

Its teaching held that the cosmos is the battlefield of two eternal and opposed principles, a kingdom of Light and a kingdom of Darkness, neither derived from the other and neither prior in time. This is the architectural point that the later, looser sense of “Manichaean” — moral black and white — most distorts. Mani’s Darkness is not a fall, a privation, or a lapse; it is a primordial substance with its own internal order, and the dualism is therefore cosmological and substantial rather than ethical. Salvation, in turn, is the gradual release of particles of light now imprisoned in matter. The myth at the center is elaborate and grim: an assault by Darkness, answered when the Father of Greatness sends forth a series of emanations whose call summons trapped light back toward its source. History, on this account, is the slow work of sorting the two substances apart again, until a final conflagration completes the separation. The eye can read the apparatus of that work in the visible sky — the Milky Way is the Column of Glory up which liberated light ascends, the Sun and Moon are ferries carrying it home. This is dualism in its most fully developed late-antique form, drawing on the same Mesopotamian and Syrian matrices as the neighboring currents of gnosis without dissolving into them.

The church that carried this doctrine divided into two grades. The Elect held to strict celibacy, vegetarianism, and poverty, refusing even to harvest or cook, so as not to wound the light bound in living things; their disciplined bodies were the instrument through which captured light was freed, the daily ritual meal the apparatus of its release — the reconstruction set out in Jason BeDuhn’s study of the Manichaean body. The Hearers, ordinary believers, supported the Elect with food and alms and hoped, through that service, for a better rebirth that might one day carry them up into the rank of the Elect. The whole life of the religion was a discipline of asceticism bent toward a single cosmic end: the extraction of light from the world.

The road east

Manichaeism spread west into the Roman Empire within Mani’s own lifetime, and there it ran into the church and the state together: the young Augustine of Hippo was a Hearer for nine years in North Africa before his conversion and afterward wrote the most influential attack on the religion that the Latin world possessed. For roughly fifteen centuries that attack, and the heresiological literature around it, was nearly all the West knew of the faith — the rebutters standing in for the witnesses. But the religion’s deepest and most durable home lay the other way, along the Silk Road, where its missionary instinct found a thoroughfare already built.

The carriers were merchants. The Sogdians — the Iranian traders whose caravan-cities strung the route between Samarkand and the Chinese frontier — made themselves the great middlemen of Central Asian religion, and Manichaean texts in the Sogdian language are among the richest the road left behind; Bactrian-speaking communities carried it too. By the seventh and eighth centuries Manichaean monasteries stood in the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin, above all at the city the sources call Khocho or Qocho near Turfan, where a later generation produced the illuminated codices and wall-paintings that the modern recovery would depend on.

The decisive moment came on the steppe. In 762 or 763 the Uyghur ruler Bogu Khan, intervening in the Tang civil wars touched off by the An Lushan rebellion, met Manichaean clergy at Luoyang and took the religion back to his court. Under him and his successors Manichaeism became the state religion of the Uyghur Khaganate — the only Manichaean state in the history of the world. The conversion was carved into stone in the trilingual inscription at the Uyghur capital, Karabalghasun, in Old Turkic, Sogdian, and Chinese: a king’s public profession of the Religion of Light. When the Kyrgyz broke the steppe empire in 840, the Uyghurs who resettled the Tarim oases carried the faith with them, and it remained the dominant religion of the Qocho kingdom for roughly another century and a half before yielding, slowly, to Buddhism.

In China proper the faith arrived under the Tang and won a measure of formal recognition: an imperially commissioned compendium of Mani’s teaching, framing him as the Buddha of Light, was produced for the court in 731. The conscious strategy was translation — not of words only but of the whole religious surface. In the Roman west the Manichaeans had spoken Christian; along the eastern road they spoke Buddhist, rendering the Father of Greatness and the saving emanations into the vocabulary of buddhas and bodhisattvas, Mani himself into a buddha. The Church of the East, the East Syrian Christianity that traveled the same roads, was a fellow-traveler and sometime rival in the same oasis markets; the two missions competed for the same Sogdian congregations.

Persecution and afterlife

The protection of the Uyghur khans had bought the Chinese communities their standing, and the fall of those khans cost it. When the steppe empire collapsed, the emperor Wuzong’s great suppression of foreign religions in the 840s — the same campaign that fell on Buddhism and on the Christians of the Church of the East — stripped the Manichaeans of their patrons and their houses in the capitals. The religion did not die; it went south and underground. In the southeastern provinces, above all in Fujian, it survived as the Religion of Light, Mingjiao, and entered the long career of a suspected sect, repeatedly condemned in the persecution edicts of the Song dynasty as the work of vegetarian demon-worshippers — a charge that fastened on exactly the dietary discipline that defined the Elect. Woven into the dense fabric of Chinese popular religion, with Buddhist and Daoist surfaces drawn over its dualist frame, the faith persisted where the imperial eye reached least.

Its furthest endpoint is a small stone hall at the foot of Huabiao Hill in Jinjiang, Fujian — Cao’an, the Thatched Hermitage, rebuilt in stone in 1339 under Yuan toleration. Set into its rear wall is a seated granite figure with shoulder-length straight hair, a calm frontal face, and robes falling in even folds: Mani as the Buddha of Light, carved the same year, the only surviving sculpted image of Mani anywhere. A fifteenth-century inscription nearby preserves a formula naming the attributes of the Father of Greatness in Chinese — purity, light, power, wisdom — still legible centuries after the church that coined it had thinned into folk memory. A black-glazed bowl excavated at the site bears an inscription naming the society of the Religion of Light. How much living Manichaean doctrine survived behind these stones into late imperial China is genuinely uncertain — by the Ming the local cult wore Pure Land Buddhist and Daoist dress and may have lost the memory of what it once was — but the continuity of the place is not in doubt, and Cao’an was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021 as a component of the Quanzhou maritime emporium. The newly surfaced Xiapu manuscripts, ritual texts from the Fujianese countryside first reported in 2008, have reopened the question of how deep and how late the Manichaean substratum ran in the religion of that coast.

Reading the religion in its own voice

For most of its history the faith was known chiefly through the polemics of its enemies, Christian and Muslim, who described a heresy they meant to refute. That changed only in the twentieth century, and it changed largely on the eastern road. Between 1902 and 1914 four German expeditions to Chinese Turkestan, led by Albert Grünwedel and Albert von Le Coq, recovered tens of thousands of manuscript fragments from the Turfan oasis — a Manichaean component in Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Old Uyghur, Bactrian, and Chinese, written in Mani’s own elegant script and several adapted ones. Hymns, prayers, confession-formulae, sermons: the believers’ own words, in the languages of the road they had traveled. The find at Medinet Madi in Egypt in 1929 added the Coptic codices of the western tradition; the Cologne Mani Codex, surfacing in 1969, gave back Mani’s own disciples on his youth. Taken together with the Chinese material that Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot drew from the sealed library cave at Dunhuang — including the imperial compendium of 731 and a long doctrinal scroll — the recoveries let the religion be read, for the first time since late antiquity, in its own voice rather than through its rebutters.

A still-unfolding chapter is visual. Since 2006 a small corpus of medieval Chinese silk paintings long held in Japanese collections as Buddhist works has been identified as Manichaean — a cosmology painting, a depiction of the Buddha Jesus, scenes of Mani’s teaching — restoring something of the illustrated canon that Mani had made part of his scripture from the beginning.

The eastern scholarship and its texts

The historical reconstruction of the eastern Manichaean world rests on a body of modern critical scholarship, almost all of it still in copyright and best approached through its institutional homes. The standard historical surveys are Samuel N. C. Lieu’s Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China (Manchester University Press 1985; rev. ed. Mohr Siebeck 1992) and his Manichaeism in Central Asia and China (Brill, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 45, 1998), which gathers the Chinese texts in their original scripts with translations and a working catalog of the published Manichaean corpus. The fullest English source-anthology for the Iranian, Turkic, and Chinese material is Hans-Joachim Klimkeit’s Gnosis on the Silk Road: Gnostic Texts from Central Asia (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), which sets the Turfan hymnody and the Sogdian and Uyghur fragments in translation. Jason BeDuhn’s The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) reconstructed the ritual logic of the Elect’s meal that gives the whole eastern practice its rationale.

The primary documents themselves are increasingly open at the level of the image. The Berlin Turfan fragments are cataloged and digitized through the Digitales Turfan-Archiv of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the single most consequential open resource for the Iranian and Turkic material; the Chinese Dunhuang scrolls are served through the International Dunhuang Project. The recovered visual canon is treated in Zsuzsanna Gulácsi’s Mani’s Pictures (Brill, NHMS 90, 2015), which follows the didactic image-tradition from Sasanian Mesopotamia through Uyghur Central Asia to Ming-era China. The earliest stratum of this work is freely consultable: Édouard Chavannes and Paul Pelliot’s editio princeps of the Dunhuang doctrinal scroll, Un traité manichéen retrouvé en Chine in the Journal Asiatique of 1911–1913, was the first Chinese Manichaean scripture given to Western scholarship, and remains a foundational translation. The lone surviving cult site is documented in the UNESCO World Heritage inscription of Quanzhou, of which Cao’an is a component, and the granite Cao’an figure of Mani as the Buddha of Light is the only sculpted likeness of the prophet that exists.

The picture the recovered texts give is of a missionary faith that translated itself deliberately into each culture it entered — Christian in the Roman west, Buddhist in its vocabulary further east — while holding that dualist core unchanged. That adaptability is part of why it traveled so far, and part of why, once suppressed, it left so little of itself standing.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906; touches on Manichaeism among the Gnosis)

→ Related: Gnosis · Church Of The East East Syrian Christianity · Chinese Popular Religion · Manichaeism Religion Of Light · Dualism · Buddhism · Asceticism · Augustine Of Hippo · Mesopotamia · Babylonia · China · Song Dynasty