A Taoist's Own History of Taoism: Records of the Zhengyi Storm (Part 1)

I. The Rise of Underground Resistance Societies in the Early Qing After the Manchus crossed the pass, the Great Ming fell, and the Qing was founded, a great many patriots dedicated to overthrowing the Qing and restoring the Ming turned to underground activities—things grew quite lively. The Qing government still had to govern the realm, and the largest groups among the people were scholars and peasants. The best way to control the scholars of the realm was naturally to give them a path to advancement, so the Qing had long since laid its plans: as early as the third year of Tiancong (1629), it reopened the civil examination system, vigorously revering Confucius, giving the scholars of the realm some way forward. The scholars saw that although the dynasty had changed, the Confucian and Mencian learning they had studied could still fetch a fine price, and so they set busily to their studies. As for the peasants, the government vigorously encouraged the reclamation of wasteland. Acquiring land was simple: whoever cleared it owned it. With such a bounty on offer, great numbers of peasants also set off to bring wasteland under the plow. Scholars were busy sitting for degrees; peasants were busy reclaiming waste ground. This strategy proved highly effective. Those who had once meant to overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming fell into dejection, saw through the ways of the world, and took refuge in religion. Yet the newly founded Qing had little governing experience. The Shunzhi Emperor was young, and under the regency of Dorgon, the Manchu nobles had not been at peace for two years before they began enclosing land. Vast tracts of Han Chinese land were seized, and later this extended even to their houses. History records: "Wherever the land-enclosing parties went, the owners were driven out on the spot; everything in the household became theirs. Ugly wives and children were taken off; those who wished to keep them dared not refuse. Even the tenant farmers who had lost their livelihood were taken in to farm for the enclosers." Not until the fourth year of Shunzhi did Dorgon issue regulations "permanently forbidding" land enclosure; in fact, sporadic enclosures continued until the eighth year of Shunzhi. The peasants had been busy reclaiming land; now whatever they cleared was seized, and there was nowhere to appeal for justice—so of course they were going to revolt. Added to that, the memory of the Yangzhou Ten Days and the Jiading Massacres was barely a few years old, and resistance was inevitable. As it happened, there remained a crowd of the discontented—patriots still preoccupied with overthrowing the Qing and restoring the Ming—who recalled, perhaps, that Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming, had started out by robbing under the banner of the Manichaean White Lotus religion. And so, under the names of various newly invented religions, they preached to the peasants who had lost their land. In short order a great many religious societies sprang up. One after another—this school, that gate—the White Lotus Society, the Yellow Heaven Teaching, the Wenxiang Teaching, the Xiantian Teaching, the Luo Teaching, and others all flourished. These underground religions had an advantage: they did not need to discourse much on doctrine. Most peasants were not highly educated, so complex theology was unnecessary. Produce a few miracles, exhort a bit, and that was enough. It is well known that multi-level marketing, as a technique, was originally mined from Christian missionary methods; add the Pure Land school's "skilful means" (upāya), just chanting the all-powerful weapon "Namo Amitābha Buddha," and you had a broad base of faith. Price the ticket to the Western Paradise as low as possible—no fear they would not dutifully believe. So when the Pure Land's skilful means fused with brainwashing theology, they became an instant hit, and cult leaders everywhere rushed to fuse multiple teachings into one. Interestingly, most of these underground religions had been founded in the late Ming period. Their original plan, presumably, was to grow, then overthrow the Ming and install themselves as masters. Once the Manchus crossed the pass, the realm instantly had new masters. That was no obstacle—on the contrary, it was a fine moment to proselytize everywhere and drag people into "overthrowing the Qing and restoring the Ming." In the eyes of the Qing rulers these were all heterodox teachings. After all, there was a clique of people day and night plotting how to topple the Qing government. Though they looked incapable of much, they were still a factor of instability and disunity. The underground societies in the folk sphere were a hotbed of activity, but the orthodox Taoism—the Zhengyi and the Quanzhen alike, with their millennia of transmission—had long grown accustomed to the shifting winds of the realm and the rise and fall of dynasties. They paid it no mind and simply closed their doors to cultivate on their own. The Qing government, however, thought otherwise. It could hardly leave things unmanaged. It was, after all, a foreign race; and though it sought to make Manchu and Han one family under heaven, that was easier said than done. There would always be the stubborn: whatever you said or did, they would find fault. So the Qing had to adopt measures of binding, in order thoroughly to consolidate its rule and achieve unification under heaven. As for Han religions, Buddhism was relatively easy to manage—all monks were tonsured and lived in monasteries. As the saying goes, the monk may run, but the temple cannot. Watch the temple closely and the monks have nowhere to flee. Moreover, Buddhism itself had the tradition "without depending on the sovereign, the Dharma cannot stand," and always got on relatively warm terms with rulers. Its doctrine of patient endurance also helped soften the bones of the masses, so Buddhism was not a matter requiring special worry. Furthermore, as early as before the conquest, under the Qing Taizong (Huangtaiji), the Office of Buddhist Affairs had already been established; there was contact and exchange with the lamas of Tibet, with frequent correspondence—Buddhism had its roots with the dynasty. What gave them a headache was Taoism, especially the Zhengyi tradition. Its organization was loose; to the Qing, the Zhengyi ritual-rank system was less a matter of organizational management than an honorary conferral body. The Celestial Master's residence at Mount Longhu always examined and certified the great masters recommended from various regions, then bestowed corresponding titles. Once the masters had received their registers, they returned home. Absent urgent business, they might never set foot on Mount Longhu again in their lives. Still, managing was better than not managing at all, so they planned to continue the methods of successive dynasties: confer ranks and honors, grant empty titles to the Zhengyi Celestial Master. At least there would be in Longhu Mountain a roster of regional masters, which would facilitate administration. Moreover, granting the Zhengyi Celestial Master a title was something he could hardly refuse; it would inevitably also draw dissatisfaction from the underground folk religions, which would help isolate the Zhengyi from them. Then have the Zhengyi publicly declare and promote loyalty to the sovereign and love of the country—they could influence the common people and at the same time divert the attention of the underground societies. That was precisely what the Shunzhi Emperor planned. II. Ghosts in the Late-Ming Palace and the Great Ritual of the Luotian Here we must go back a bit. Before the fall of the Ming, in the thirteenth year of Chongzhen (1640), the Chongzhen Emperor had invited Zhang Yingjing to the capital. By chance the crown prince was gravely ill, so Zhang performed a ritual for the prince's treatment. The result was, naturally, quite effective, and the emperor rewarded him handsomely. From August of the sixteenth year of Chongzhen (1643), perhaps under too much pressure, many people in the palace seemed to have gone mad. Officials, eunuchs, and palace women whispered among themselves of strange shadows drifting past. Rumors flew that the Forbidden City was haunted. But how could the Forbidden City easily become haunted? Setting aside the grand feng-shui configuration in place, there were within the Imperial City no lack of Taoist temples and halls—images of the Three Pure Ones, the Hall of the Thunder God, and so on—to suppress anything untoward. No real ghost would dare act up so. So what was going on? In fact, from the thirteenth year of Chongzhen, when "pestilence spread and eight or nine of every ten died," through the bubonic plague of the summer and autumn of the sixteenth year of Chongzhen (1643), and its transformation into pneumonic plague in the spring of the seventeenth year (1644)… By August of the sixteenth year of Chongzhen, the pneumonic plague that broke out in Tianjin near Beijing was even more severe. History records: "Heaven sent down disaster; plague raged. From August until now (the fifteenth day of the ninth month), transmission was at its height. Some died in a day or two; some were infected in the morning and dead by evening. Each day no fewer than hundreds perished; in some cases whole households died without a single survivor. Door by door, house by house, none was spared." According to Luo Yangxing, who supervised military affairs in Tianjin in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen: "Last year plague raged in the capital; the dead lay in heaps; nine houses out of ten were empty. In some cases entire households were wiped out with none left to collect the bodies." So at the time the death rate in the whole city of Beijing was perhaps forty percent or more—corpses strewn across the fields, nine houses out of ten empty, the entire capital desolate. It was impossible for the people in the palace not to fear. If the plague ever reached the court, the likely result would be being herded together and burned. Under such circumstances, all manner of rumors were entirely normal. The Chongzhen Emperor had always considered himself a hardworking sovereign—his hair had gone white from toil by thirty, which proved it. So he could not fathom why the realm had met with such frequent disaster. Was his virtue truly lacking? Was there a flaw in his governance? When there is disorder under heaven, the sovereign's virtue must be deficient—this doctrine of resonance, under the stern lectures of generations of Confucian elders, meant that whether rulers believed it or not did not matter: you could not afford not to believe it. There is a historical backdrop: in the late Ming, the realm happened to hit the Little Ice Age, suffering natural disasters for seventy-two years in a row. The court was busy with relief here one day and there the next. Moreover, real power in government had fallen into the hands of ministers; whatever the emperor wished to do, he was constrained at every turn. With more disasters naturally came more deaths; with more deaths, plague spread more easily. So epidemics typically followed great calamities. Perhaps recognizing that Taoist Celestial Masters were better at dealing with plague, in the twelfth month of that year Chongzhen resolutely summoned the 52nd Celestial Master Zhang Yingjing to an audience at court. In fact, by this time Li Zicheng had conquered nearly the whole country and was essentially prepared to invade the capital. The great trend of the realm was already clear. Zhang Yingjing could well have declined to go—but he went. In the second month of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, the emperor earnestly asked Zhang Yingjing to preside over the Great Ritual of the Luotian. For this grand ritual, three hundred Taoists and three hundred monks each were selected to take part; it lasted forty-nine days. Every three days during the rite, Chongzhen came to the altar to pray that any sin in the world might be laid upon him alone. After the Great Ritual of the Luotian ended, Chongzhen still cherished a sliver of hope and asked Zhang Yingjing about the situation. Zhang replied: "Heaven has already sent a sage lord from the north down into the world to cut down the demons." Later Chongzhen asked about the fate of the state. Zhang Yingjing, perhaps unable to bear telling the truth, could only answer: "The state shall endure long—ten thousand sons, ten thousand grandsons." The emperor was probably pleased to hear this, but he did not understand the conventions of asking about dynastic fate. As early as the Sui dynasty, Xiao Ji had set a precedent: when asked about the fate of the state, Xiao answered, "Divined years: two thousand; divined generations: two hundred." In fact "two thousand" (二千) can be split into "two strokes and ten" (二丿十); read together they form the two characters "thirty" (三十). As for "generations two hundred," the Book of Sui calls it "thirty-two cycles"; the History of the Northern Dynasties and the Comprehensive Guide call it "taking two cycles of generations"; the Mirror of History cites it as "taking two transmissions of generations"—because 世 (generation) can be split into 卅 (thirty), and "two hundred" (二百) can also be split into "thirty-two" (三十二). The "sage lord from the north" mentioned here was in fact the northern Manchus crossing the pass; and "ten thousand sons, ten thousand grandsons"—the character 万 (ten thousand) actually means that the era ended in the Wanli reign. Later the capital fell. On the eighteenth day of the third month of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, the emperor personally took sword to kill his consorts and daughters, striking his young daughter Princess Zhaoren to death and severely wounding his elder daughter Princess Changping by severing her arm. The virtuous Empress Zhou also hanged herself in the Palace of Earthly Tranquility. At dawn on the nineteenth day, Chongzhen, accompanied by the imperial brush eunuch Wang Cheng'en, left the Forbidden City, climbed Coal Hill in the imperial park, and hanged himself beneath an old pagoda tree. He was thirty-three years old. Some who do not fully understand the situation may feel this was too cruel. Although Li Zicheng is called a peasant uprising, in truth it was not a righteous act of rising against oppression; he observed no propriety or integrity to begin with. Within seven or eight days of entering the capital, he began burning, killing, and looting, and violating women. If the women of the imperial household fell into his hands, the consequences need not be described. In the fourth month of that same year—also known as the first year of Shunzhi—Dorgon led the Eight Banners army and combined forces with the Ming general Wu Sangui. They fought Li Zicheng inside and outside the Shanhai Pass; Li was defeated and withdrew from Beijing. As for Zhang Yingjing's answer above, some think it is a forced interpretation by later ages; only Zhang Yingjing himself could truly know. III. The Celestial Master's Talismans Refused Back to the main thread. Precisely because of the foregoing, in the third year of Shunzhi, when Dorgon served as regent, Zhang Yingjing had Jiangxi Governor Li Xiangfeng present to the Qing court forty talismans of the Perfected One of Zhengyi. Zhang had his reasons. Outsiders might not see the great tide of Taoism's decline in the Qing; the Celestial Master family, which had lived under Yuan rule, could not fail to see it. What policies a foreign race entering China would adopt toward Han religion was something that had to be made clear. By offering talismans, one could probe the rulers' attitude. Yet the reply Zhang received was: "The way of governance lies solely in revering Heaven and diligently serving the people. What need is there of this? Once the court employs them, the realm will certainly follow the example; put them away." This means: the way of governing the state lies in revering Heaven and diligently serving the people; there is no need to enshrine your talismans. If the court used these talismans, the whole realm would imitate them—so we shall store them away unused. Fine words, but reality always slaps back. Dorgon's so-called "revering Heaven and diligently serving the people" found little concrete expression. From the third year of Shunzhi to the eighth, the court was rocked by storms without end—hardly worth elaborating. As said at the outset, the enclosure of land by Manchu nobles cost countless commoners their land and homes. With nothing to do, they could only join the "overthrow Qing, restore Ming" activities, and popular societies and resistance grew ever fiercer. White Lotus, Wuwei, Wenxiang, and other teachings rose in frequent disturbances everywhere. A word too about Shunzhi: in childhood and youth he had received an almost entirely Manchu education. Dorgon, citing the emperor's youth, firmly refused him a Chinese education. Only after Dorgon's death in 1650 did Shunzhi have the chance to study Chinese learning. Yet the first figure Shunzhi encountered was Adam Schall von Bell (Tang Ruowang). Schall worked painstakingly to convert the emperor to Christianity and cultivated a basic set of faith concepts in him. It is well known that the Western theological "brainwashing" was quite impressive, but Chinese and Western cultures differ. At the very least, to insist that everything in the Manchu shamanism they believed was evil demons was absolutely unacceptable. Switch to Buddhism, and everything could be explained as Dharma protectors; Esoteric Buddhism, closer in spirit to shamanism, naturally won the favor of the Manchu royal house even more easily. Shunzhi was perhaps also nursing this confusion and shock. Later, hearing that Master Hai Shou of the Caodong school had practiced in a cave on Jingzhong Mountain in Zunhua, Hebei, for nine years, he went to meet him, began to understand Chan Buddhism, and developed a deep interest in it. Chan had always been a product of the confluence of Taoism and Buddhism, full of performance art and splendid anecdotes—many things genuinely could provoke deep thought. And so, Schall's painstaking efforts were picked off by Buddhism like fruit from the tree. In the eighth year of Shunzhi (1651), Suksaha, Zhandai, and Muchilun first impeached Regent Dorgon for treason. After Dorgon was executed with his entire household by Shunzhi's order, not only were his partisans purged, but he was further posthumously attainted: his titles were stripped, the posthumous honors of his mother and wife revoked, and his ancestral sacrifices discontinued. IV. Shunzhi Rewards the Celestial Master Seeing the disturbances grow too intense, the Qing government apparently felt it could not hold out, and changed its mind: it could not do without Taoism after all. Religious affairs needed to be managed. So it reversed course—whatever Zhang Yingjing had been refused was Dorgon's doing, and Dorgon had been executed for rebellion, so no one minded slapping his face in turn. That same year, Shunzhi suddenly summoned the 52nd Celestial Master Zhang Yingjing to an imperial audience, and directly edicted him as the "Great Perfected One Who Continues the Teachings of Zhengyi, Overseer of Taoist Affairs Under Heaven," granting him a first-rank seal. But in truth, although Zhang had opportunistically presented forty talismans when the Qing was first established, actually receiving the imperial appointment was not necessarily a joyful matter. The realm was still unstable; a great many popular societies and underground religions still held considerable influence. Accepting this investiture would inevitably draw curses from people the world over. We do not know how Zhang felt, but that same year, while returning to Mount Longhu, he passed away (feathered化) at the Qionghua Temple in Yangzhou. That year the 53rd Celestial Master Zhang Hongren, aged twenty-six, succeeded to the office. Some hold that this historical event actually affected Taoism's own landscape: as a result, many Zhengyi practitioners defected to the Quanzhen. According to the late Taoist scholar Monica Esposito's research, the regions where the Quanzhen rose were indeed those where the Zhengyi had once been active. She also found that many famous early Quanzhen patriarchs are explicitly recorded in sources as having studied Zhengyi rites before joining the Quanzhen. Although at this time the Quanzhen looked freer and more carefree, there were never so many free gifts—the Qing government naturally would not spare the Quanzhen either, but that is a story for later. This also well explains a phenomenon: the Quanzhen originally had no liturgy of fasting and rituals. Yet in fact the Quanzhen do have their own liturgical manuals, and it is quite clear that later Quanzhen liturgy largely evolved from Zhengyi forms. The most famous example, the Guangcheng Yizhi, was originally also the property of Zhengyi fire-house Taoists. Revising liturgical canons requires extremely rich knowledge of ritual; it is very hard for anyone but a professional ritualist to invent them from thin air. By the twelfth year of Shunzhi (1655), the 53rd Celestial Master Zhang Hongren came to court for an audience. Because there were rumors of demons harming the people in the outer dependencies, the court ordered their expulsion. Zhang dispatched ritual officers Gao Weitai and Yang Youfen beyond the frontier to perform the exorcism; the response was immediate. The various tribes all experienced the efficacy of the rites and came to believe the Taoist methods had not declined. Zhang Hongren was then once again successively enfeoffed as Great Perfected One, and granted exemption from all corvée labor for his household and the Great Temple of Highest Clarity on Mount Longhu. Zhang Hongren was on close terms with Shi Daoyuan of Suzhou. Shi, ordained in youth as a Taoist of the Chaozhen Temple, met an extraordinary man named Zhang Xinfu who transmitted to him the elixir formula. He received precepts under the Quanzhen master Changyue, later studied under the Perfected Master Xu Yanzhen of Mount Longhu, and cultivated the Thunder Rite of the Five Thunders, able to command a hundred spirits. He then resolved to rebuild Qionglong Mountain as a shrine to the Perfected Lords of the Three Mao. Through unremitting effort he finally established a great many temple compounds in Jiangnan. In 1699, Zhang Hongren also petitioned on his behalf the Shunzhi Emperor for the temple name "Shangzhen Guan" (Temple of the Highest Perfected), and bestowed on Shi Daoyuan of Qionglong Mountain the title "法师 Who Nurtures the Origin and Embraces the One, Proclaims the Teachings, and Transforms and Evolves." Today Shangzhen Guan on Qionglong Mountain stands on that site. It was continuously expanded; by the late Qing, its halls and pavilions are said to have comprised more than two thousand rooms managed in thirty-six sections, with over forty palaces, halls, and pavilions. V. The Kangxi Emperor Bestows the Qiankun Jade Sword In the eighteenth year of Kangxi (1679), the thirteen-year-old young Celestial Master Zhang Jizong entered the capital for an imperial audience. By chance there was a dispute over the position of Celestial Master, so Kangxi had the two parties set up altars and contend in a rain-making contest. Zhang Jizong prevailed, and the emperor bestowed the calligraphic plaque "Bicheng" as his sobriquet. Especially that year, Kangxi and Zhang Jizong together established a rule: every three years, the reigning Celestial Master would be responsible for selecting young, outstanding Taoists from Mount Longhu and dispatching them to the capital to serve as "Court-Attending Ritual Masters on Seasonal Duty." These masters were to be supported by the imperial house, concentrate on cultivation, and take full charge of all major court rituals—such as the continuous thirty-six-day "Golden Register Great Ritual" for the emperor's birthday each year, or the smaller "Rite of Pacifying the Dipper" on monthly days of the Northern Dipper's descent, or the solemn "Rite of Ascending to Heaven" when the emperor or empress passed away, and so forth. One note here: only emperors and empresses were qualified to hold the "Rite of Ascending to Heaven"; consorts were not permitted. In other words, only those qualified to enter the Son of Heaven's mausoleum were qualified to hold this rite—just as in former great households, the principal wife was always supreme, for only after death was she qualified to enter the husband's ancestral hall and receive the incense offerings of descendants, while concubines were not. The Son of Heaven's Imperial Ancestral Temple was even more special: even emperors of previous dynasties enjoyed sacrificial incense. This long tradition might perhaps be understood as the mutual regard of emperors for one another. So even under Qing rule, the Forbidden City still enshrined and sacrificed to the gods of the five directions and five emperors, and the Altar of Soil and Grain was built of five-colored earth—matters that naturally touch upon the mysteries of incense offering. From another angle, it may also be understood not as a question of science, but as a traditional cultural custom. Later still, in the thirty-third year of Kangxi (1691), Zhang Jizong by imperial order burned incense at the Five Sacred Peaks; at Bianjing and elsewhere he used iron talismans to subdue the waters. In the thirty-fifth year he was further bestowed the Qiankun jade sword; in the forty-second year he was edicted Grand Master for Glorious Happiness; in the forty-sixth he was granted a residence in the capital; in the fifty-second he was granted silver from the treasury to rebuild the halls of Mount Longhu. From this we can see that although the Qing imperial house primarily revered Buddhism, it could not in fact do without Taoism.