Manichaeism in Central Asia and China

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Manichaeism began in third-century Mesopotamia, but it lived longest and travelled 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 religion takes its name from the prophet Mani, born around 216 CE in Babylonia, then under Sasanian Persian rule, and raised in a Jewish-Christian baptist community. He reported revelations from a heavenly Twin, presented himself as the last in a line of messengers that included Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus, and wrote his own scriptures — in Syriac and Middle Persian — precisely so that his message would not be corrupted in transmission as he believed those of his predecessors had been. He was also a painter, and illustrated books were part of the canon. He died in prison around 276, an event his followers remembered as a passion and called the crucifixion.

Its teaching held that the cosmos is the battlefield of two eternal and opposed principles, a kingdom of Light and a kingdom of Darkness, and that salvation 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. The church divided into the Elect, who held to strict celibacy, vegetarianism, and poverty so as not to harm the light bound in living things, and the Hearers, ordinary believers who supported them and hoped for a better rebirth.

It was the eastward diffusion that gave the religion its longest reach. Manichaeism spread west into the Roman Empire — the young Augustine was a Hearer for nine years before his conversion and later wrote against it — but its enduring home lay along the Silk Road. The Uyghur ruler Bögü Khan adopted it as the court religion in the eighth century, and Manichaean communities persisted in the oasis cities of the Tarim Basin and in southeastern China for centuries after. For most of that history the faith was known chiefly through the polemics of its enemies, Christian and Muslim; only with the manuscript finds at Turfan in Central Asia and at Medinet Madi in Egypt, in the early twentieth century, could Manichaean texts be read in the believers’ own words. The picture they 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 travelled 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