2718931

Harvard-Yenching Institute
Emperor as Bodhisattva in The Governance of The Ch'ing Empire

Author(s): David M. Farquhar
Source: Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Jun., 1978), pp. 5-34
Published by: Harvard-Yenching Institute
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2718931 .
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Emperor As Bodhisattva
in the Governance of the Ch'ing Empire
DANTID M. FARQUHAR
University of California, Los Angeles
T HAT Chinese emperors had complex, many-sided political
images has been hinted at by several historians, but until the
appearance of Harold L. Kahn's fascinating study of the Emperor
Ch'ien-lung (1711-99, r. 1736-95),1 few had realized how self-
consciously they were fostered and manipulated. The most intensely
projected and most familiar of these images is Ch'ien-lung the
Confucian moralist-monarch, but we are also introduced to Ch'ien-
lung the warrior, encouraging tough military virtues in his fellow
Manchus, and Ch'ien-lung the hunter, promoting the hardy ideals
of the steppe among Mongolian princes. Some of the most unfamiliar
images are those revealed in a series of paintings of Ch'ien-lung from
the imperial collection, showing him in Taoist and Buddhist guises.2
It is one of these images-that of the emperor as a bodhisattva-that
I wish to explore in this essay; in particular, I want to discuss how the
image was used and managed in different parts of the Ch'ing empire,
specifically in China proper and in Mongolia.
As my point of departure, I am selecting one of the paintings
included in Professor Kahn's book (reproduced on page 7 of this
1
Monarchy in the Emperor's Eyes: Image and Reality in the Ch'ien-lung Reign (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1971).
2
Most of these were taken from the album Ch'ing-tai ti-hou hsiang
Ef
:f,
4 vols.
(Peiping: Ku-kung po-wu-yiuan, 1934-35).
5
6 DAVID M. FARQUHAR
article).' Mr. Kahn labels it "Ch'ien-lung as the Buddha," which is
a correct translation of the Chinese caption in the album from which
it came, but suggests something like "Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic
Muse" rather than its true nature: the holy icon of a saint, the con-
templation of which can help the suffering along the road to enlight-
enment. Executed in the style of the Tibetan temple banner, we see
Ch'ien-lung (it is clearly his portrait) in the raiment of a hieromonk-
reincarnation with the characteristic cap and monastic robes; his
left hand holds the Wheel of the Law (S. dharmacakra)4 and his right
hand is in the gesture of argument (S. vitarka-mudrd) ; he is surrounded
by many Buddhist saints, gods, and goddesses-Marpa, Mi-la-ras-
pa, Nagarjuna, the Citipati, and others can be identified. An in-
scription in Tibetan under the central figure makes it clear that we
are viewing not simply a portrait, but the representation
of a deity,
"The Sagacious Mainjusri, the guardian of men, great and sublime
being, King of the Law, Thunderbolt ... [?], having a good destiny,
and satisfying all desires."'
Mani'jusri (T. 'Jam-dpal; M.
Manjusviri, Jogelen
egesig-tu; Ch.
Wen-shu [-shih-li] 3Z [AqDIf])
is one of the most important
bodhi-
sattvas in Buddhism, the personification of the Buddha's intellect,
and, along with two other bodhisattvas, Avalokitesvara
and
Samantabhadra (Vajrapani
in some systems), forms a trinity,
the
Protectors of the Three Classes of Beings;6 the form "Sagacious
Ma-njusri" (S.
* Tiksna-Man-jusri,
T. 'Jam-dpal rnon-po, M. Qurca
Manjusiri,
Ch. Min-chieh Wen-shu
1
3Ag) is simply one
of
3
Kahn, p. 185: it comes from Ch'ing-tai
ti-hou
hsiang, ii,
P1.
3.
4
I use these abbreviations:
S.: Sanskrit,
T.: Tibetan,
M.:
Mongolian,
Ch.: Chinese,
and, respectively,
the Whitney, Bacot, Poppe-Mostaert (but replacing y
with
g),
and
Wade-Giles conventions. For Manchu I use the von Mbllendorf
convention.
5
The text is not entirely legible: 'jam-dpal
rnon-po
mi'i
rje-bor: rol-pa'i bdag-chen
chos-kyi
rgyal: rdo-rj'e
... brtan cin': bzed-don-un [?] grub skal-pa
bzaii:
6 On Manjusri
see Etienne Lamotte, "Ma-njusr;," TP,
48.1-3
(1960),
1-96;
and
Marie-The'r6se
de Mallman, A9tude iconographique
sur
Mafijusri (Paris:
Ecole
fran?aise
d'Extreme-Orient,
1964). On Avalokitesvara (T. Spyan
ras
gzigs;
M.
Qomsim,
Nidfiber
iijegci; Ch.
Kuan-[shih-Iyin M[1I-WjR),
Samantabhadra (T.
Kun-tu
bzani-po;
M.
Samandhabadari, Qamug-a sayin;
Ch. P'u-hsien
, and Vajrapaii (T.
Phyag-rdor;
M. Wcir-bani; Ch. Shou-chih chin-kang
++fiJ) as members,
with
Mainjuiri,
of a
trinity, see Klaus Sagaster, Subud erike,
ein Rosenkranz aus
Perlen,
Die
Biographie
des 1.
Pekinger ICani-skya Khutukhtu, gag dbani blo bzaii c'os Idan (Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz,
1967), p. 264, n. 1043. For the terminology
of deities I
generally
follow Walter Eugene
Clark, Two Lamaistic Pantheons, 2 vols. (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press,
1937).
I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
IL
INX5
43.
i S
r ,
I
'''S1'"tZ';:~~~~~~~~~Mr
7
I~~Ak
wL
b;~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~4
A,r
.. . .... --- --- -
,.
'
;
'
.'>s72e'?~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~......
+ s W 'Su ' +e '~~~~~~~4
''$!_$E,
~~~~~~~~~~~Wm
*''v**st>'~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~7,
8 DAVID M. FARQUHAR
numerous manifestations of the deity.7 This painting is not the only
known Tibetan-style icon depicting or purporting to depict Ch'ien-
lung as the bodhisattva Ma-njusri; there is one in the Hedin collec-
tion in Stockholm,8 and there was another in the former Feng-t'ien
(Mukden) Museum.9
For students of late imperial Chinese history at least, the presen-
tation of an emperor as a bodhisattva is certainly unusual, even when
we remember the special efforts made by the Manchu rulers to favor
the Mongols by patronizing Tibetan Buddhism. But, in fact,
Mongols and Tibetans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
would not have been at all surprised to see Ch'ien-lung presented
as a reincarnation of Manjusri. A history of Buddhism in Mongolia,
the Hor chos 'byun (1819), composed in Tibetan by 'Jigs-med rig-pa'i
rdo-rje (attributed to 'Jigs-med nam-mkha'), customarily refers to
the Manchu emperors as "the Manijughosa Emperors" (T. 'Jam-
dbyans goh-ma; Manjughosa is another form of Maijugri).'0 The
Subud erike, a biography of the reincarnation Tag-dbaii blo-bzani
6hos-1dan (1642-1714, better known as the First LUai-skya
[Janggiya] Qutugtu), written in 1729 by &ag-dbaii chos-idan,
constantly refers to the Manchu emperors in the same or similar
fashion: the Emperor Shun-chih (r. 1644-61) is called "the sublime
Mafnjusri Shun-chih (degedu manjus'ri eye-ber
jasagci)
and Emperor
K'ang-hsi (r. 1662-1722) "Ma-njusrl, the sublime K'ang-hsi"
(man-jusri degedu engke amugulang) or simply the "the
Manj'jusri
7
See Clark, ii, 264, No. 157, where he is depicted in a four-armed form.
8
Reproduced in Ferdinand D. Lessing, Yung-ho-kung, An Iconography of the Lamaist
Cathedral in Peking, The Sino-Swedish Expedition Publ. 18 (Stockholm, 1942), i, P1. 17,
a more primitive representation. Mr. Lessing's caption reads:
"
. . . Lamaist Painting
said to represent the Emperor Ch'ien-Lung as Grand Lama." That it is in fact Ch'ien-
lung-Ma-njuiri as a grand lama is proved by the iconographic details: at the lama's
right shoulder there is the lotus with the sword (S. kha.dga), while the left shoulder bears
the lotus and the book-the symbols appropriate to Maiijuri. See Antoinette K. Gordon,
The Iconography of Tibetan Lamaism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), pp. 14, 16,
68-70.
9 Reproduced in Hemmi Baiei
lQM
and Nakano Hanshir6 I
*jzPiFS,
Mammo
no ramakyo bijutsu
AM6
J*R
(Tokyo: H6z6kan, 1943), PI. ii-16, text volume, pp.
80-81.
10 See Hor-chos-byung, Geschichte des Buddhismus in der Mongolei, ed. and tr. Georg Huth,
(Strassburg, 1912), Tibetan text, p. 168 and passim., cited by Lessing, Yung-ho-kung,
p. 170, n. 10.
EMPEROR AS BODHISATTVA 9
master" (man-juu,ri
ejen)."
The still earlier
"autobiography"
of the
Fifth Dalai Lama, completed in
1680, customarily
uses the term
"Manijughopa
Emperor" for Ch'ing rulers.'2
Lest it be thought that these passages mean
simply
that the
Manchu Emperors possessed some of the characteristics attributed
to Main'jusri, or took him as their model, I would like to quote
a more
extended passage which is unequivocal; it is from a sketch of the
history of Buddhism and of the Buddhist canon, which is included
in an appendix (1721) to Volume 108 of the printed edition of the
Mongolian Buddhist canon (the
Ganjur
of 1718-20),
an official
project of the Emperor K'ang-hsi which contains one of his own
prefaces:
The holy Emperor T'ai-tsung of the Manchus (r. 1626-43), after having become
the ruler of the great tribes and states of the autonomous Mongolian princes
(gadagadu Monggol) and having gathered them together as his subjects, became
ruler of the government of China. After that, the holy Emperor Shih-tsu, who
[ruled under the name of] the holy Shun-chih, assumed the golden throne,
and consoled and gave protection to all of his peoples. After he invited the Fifth
Dalai Lama to Peking. . . for the benefit of those who desired salvation and for
all creatures, the religion of Buddha came to be spread even more than before.
The emperor, his ministers, and all his subject peoples made a vast number of
offerings and oblations, and showed the most profound respect [to the Religion].
Then Manijusrl, the savior of all living forms, [with the] intellect of all the Bud-
dhas, was transformed into human form, and ascended the Fearless Lion Throne
of gold; and this [was] none other than the sublime Emperor K'ang-hsi-Manijusr-,
who assisted and brought joy to the entire vast world, and who, because he was
the veritable Ma-njusrl in his material essence ...
13
The idea expressed here-that the secular ruler is an incarnation
of a buddha or bodhisattva-appeared quite early in China proper.
The monk Fa-kuo
MA
in 419 was the first to formulate the idea
clearly, when he stated that Emperor T'ai-tsu of the Northern Wei
dynasty, his sovereign, was in fact the Tathagata (Ch. ju-lai
Aa,
11
See Sagaster, fols. 19r, 35r, and 95v of the text
reproduction, and pp. 181, 194 and
n. 492, and p. 252, n. 961 of the translation. Mr. Sagaster's translations do not always
literally reflect the word Mafnju?ri which he sometimes translates (correctly) as "Kaiser."
12
Cited by Zahiruddin Amad, Sino-Tibetan Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Rome:
Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1970), p. 192 and elsewhere.
13 From fol. 20a of the Index to the Ganjur, as transcribed by L. Ligeti, Catalogue du
Kanjur mongol imprime (Budapest: Societe Korosi Csoma, 1942), i, 334. The interrupted
sentence runs on for another twenty-five lines in the same vein.
10 DAVID M. FARQUHAR
that is, a buddha) and in performing obeisance to him, a monk was
not showing respect to an emperor (for that was prohibited by the
scriptures) but was honoring a buddha. It has been asserted that this
thesis was devised to circumvent Fa-kuo's own dilemma: as an
official he was required to perform the bow to his sovereign, but as
a monk he was forbidden to bow to a secular ruler. Later, in 567,
that strange figure Wei Yuan-sung gi5, proposed that the ruler
of the Northern Chou dynasty was the living Tathagata, and as such
should form the centerpiece of a new laicized Buddhist utopia."4
Many Buddhist monks, particularly in the south of China, seem to
have been uncomfortable with these novelties; the orthodox posi-
tion was, after all, the separateness of the monastic community from
the secular world and its ruler, and Chinese monks had spent an
enormous amount of time and effort in getting the principle ac-
cepted."5 It is true that one ruler in the South, Emperor Wu of the
Liang dynasty (r. 502-49) was sometimes called the "Bodhisattva
Son of Heaven" (p'u-sa t'ien-tzu
AAr1X)f-)
or even "Emperor Bo-
dhisattva" (huang-ti
p'u-sa Afr)
by his courtiers, but no one seems to
have understood these expressions as indications of imperial bo-
dhisattvahood: they were compliments which suggested his piety
and Buddhist knowledge, and that he had taken the layman's bo-
dhisattva vows. And he certainly did not act as though he thought
he was a bodhisattva: although interested in controlling the com-
munity of the clergy in the same way that he controlled the secular
world, he was willing neither to silence the monk
Chih-tsang
Va
who opposed him nor discipline monks who refused to show him the
customary respect due rulers.'6
The political unifier of North and South, Emperor Wen of the
Sui dynasty (r. 581-604),
also took the
layman's
bodhisattva vows
and was called "Bodhisattva Son of
Heaven,"
but he seems never to
have called himself (nor allowed himself to be
called)
a
Tathagata
14
See Takao Giken , Chu-goku bukkyo shiron
dplR
(Kyoto: Heirakuji
Shoten, 1952), pp. 41-46; Kenneth Ch'en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 146, 189-90.
15
Takao, p. 44; Arthur F. Wright, "The Formation of Sui Ideology, 581-604," in
J. -K. Fairbank, ed., Chinese Thought and Institutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1957), p. 99; Michibata Ryoshi
j , Chlugoku bukkyoshi (Kyoto: Hozokan, 1948),
pp. 74-75.
163
Michibata, pp. 74-75; Ch'en, pp. 124-28.
or bodhisattva in a serious sense. He preferred the more traditional
personas for Buddhist sovereigns: the Great Patron (S. mahddandpati)
or the King Who Turns the Wheel of the Law (S. cakravartin, Ch.
fa-lun wang
&iME,
chuan-lun sheng-wang **I).17 And there, so
far as I have been able to learn, the matter rested; later Chinese
emperors, down to the Mongolian Yuan dynasty, do not seem to
have experimented (nor did Chinese monks) with the notion that
secular rulers might be buddhas or bodhisattvas.
Chinese Buddhists would of course agree that bodhisattvas had
often been reborn in the world of humans, but they have rarely gone
in for locating and identifying them among well-known contem-
poraries; that has been a Tibetan specialty, and Tibet's living bod-
hisattvas (T. sprul-sku), of whom the Dalai Lama is only the most
famous, are familiar to many. Such divine rebirths have usually been
monks or, if infants, became monks, but lay persons, including
kings, have occasionally been identified as specific reincarnations-
usually posthumously. The custom was already well established by
the time the great polymath Bu-ston (1290-1364) wrote his history
of Buddhism, the Chos-'byun. In that work he notes that Tibet's
first Buddhist king, Sroii-bcan sgam-po (d. 649), "is regarded as the
incarnation of Avalokita [i.e., Avalokitesvara] .. . ." while his
descendant, King Khri-sroii lde-bcan (r. 755-97), "was held to have
been an incarnation of Mafijusrl"; one of his successors, Ral-pa-6an
gcani-ma (r. 817-36) was considered a reincarnation of Vajrapani,
the third bodhisattva of the trinity.'8 Such ideas must surely have
become known in China through the Tibetan monks at the court of
the Mongolian emperors from the time of Qubilai (Shih-tsu, r. 1260-
94). Proof of their acceptance there is found in the remarkable
Buddhist monument at Chii-yung-kuan
)K&N
built by the last
Yuan emperor, Togon-temur (Uqagatu, Shun-ti, r. 1333-67), as
an offering to the Buddha, to the Buddhist doctrine, and to
Togon-
17
Wright, "The Formation," pp. 93-100; Takao, p. 45.
18
History of Buddhism (Chos-hbyung) by Bu-ston, tr. E. Obermiller (Heidelberg: Otto
Harrassowitz, 1931-32), ii, 185, 196. The Chinese princess Wen-ch'eng
Zb,
the consort
of Sroni-bcan sgam-po, who encouraged her husband to spread Buddhism in Tibet, is
regarded by Tibetans as a reincarnation of the female bodhisattva Green Tara (S.
Syama-Tara, T. SgroL-Ljofi). See Sat6 Hisashi _ Kodai Chibettoshi kenkyu (Kyoto:
Toyoshi kenkyuikai, 1958), i, 288.
temiir's ancestor, Qubilai. The relevant portion of the great Mon-
golian inscription there reads:19
That blessed bodhisattva the Emperor Secen (that is, Qubilai), possessed of vast
wisdom, about whom the prophecy was made that there would be someone
named "the Wise one from the vicinity of Mount Wu-t'ai" (i.e., Man-jurirl) who
would become a great emperor, who would adorn his country with great and high
pagodas, and who would reach the age of eighty years-[this emperor] brought
peace to the creatures of this vast nation, propagated the religion and doctrine of
the possessor of vast merit (i.e., the Buddha), erected great pagodas up to the edge
of the sea, and brought vast merits continually to all creatures. Commemorating
in gold the marvelous deeds which have been brought about by those bodhisat-
tvas destined by Heaven (i.e., the earlier Yuan emperors), [I], the Emperor-
Bodhisattva, the Son of Heaven and Master of Men, have caused this extensive and
vast pagoda to be founded.20
That the first part of this passage refers to Qubilai cannot be
doubted, since Se&en is the usual name for Qubilai in Yuian dynasty
public documents written in Mongolian, and Qubilai lived more
than the eighty years (1214-94) of the prophecy. I have been unable
to identify the source of the prophecy, but I think the phrase "the
Wise one from the vicinity of Mount Wu-t'ai" can only refer to the
bodhisattva Ma-nju?ri. Wisdom and its congeries are the stuff of that
bodhisattva's nature, and Mount Wu-t'ai in Shansi has, since at
least the fourth century, been a Buddhist pilgrimage center and the
focus for the Ma-ijuiri cult in China.21 The association of Mount
19
The best study of the monument and its inscriptions is Murata Jiro
14Eflp,
ed.,
Kyoyokan
gf
d,
2 vols., (Kyoto: Kyoto Daigaku Kogakubu, 1957). The Mongolian
text, which is the least damaged and the most accessible (there are companion inscrip-
tions in Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur and Tangut), presents a number of difficulties; the
best translation is, in my opinion, the one done by Nishida Tatsuo
fft*
in Murata,
Vol. I. I have used the text established by Louis Ligeti, Monuments en Icriture 'phags-pa.
Pi&ces de chancellerie en transcription chinoise, Monumenta Linguae Mongolicae Collecta, III
(Budapest: Akad6miai Kiad6, 1972), pp. 83-98, and consulted Poppe's translation in
Nicholas Poppe and John R. Krueger, The Mongolian Monuments in bP'ags-pa Script
(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1957), pp. 60-66. The original is in verse, which I
have not attempted to suggest in my translation.
20 These are verses 3-5 from lines 2-5 of the west wall of the gate (Murata, i, 262-65;
Ligeti, Monuments en Icriture 'phags-pa,
p. 95; Poppe and Krueger, pp. 64-65.
21
As Nishida has pointed out in Murata i, 238, the word Utai in the phrase Utai-yin
horein mergen
neretiiyoke
qdn can only refer to Mt. Wu-t'ai, "the Five Terraces," an inter-
pretation guaranteed by the companion Tibetan inscription which reads rce Ina'i 'dabs su
mkhas pa ses bya'i rgyal po 'byun sini, "there will appear a king called 'The Wise' beside the
Five Peaks." (The Chinese parallel passage is defaced.) The word mergen should be
Wu-t'ai (which is located in an area called Ch'ing-liang-shan
MMU,
"cool mountains") with Ma-njusrn comes from several Buddhist
canonical texts, the earliest of which to reach China in translation
was the Avata?psaka, where it is stated that to the northeast (of India)
at a place named "Ch'ing-liang-shan, a bodhisattva called
Mafijusr1 resides, with an entourage of ten thousand bodhisattvas,
and he preaches the Law there."22 This translation was made in the
fifth century; the translation in 710 of another, seemingly much more
explicit text, the Man-jufridharmaratnagarbhadhdra,d, helped even more
to promote the Mafnjusri cult at Mount Wu-t'ai: there the Buddha
states that at his Nirvana, the "Youthful Ma-njusrl" (Wen-shu shih-li
t'ung-tzu ; iIJi = S. Ma-njugrl-Kumarabhiita) would travel
to the mountains called the Five Peaks (wu-ting
_HTA),
located in the
country Mahaclna (ta-chen-na *t&M),
in the northeast of the con-
tinent.23 It is hardly surprising that the Chinese should have iden-
tified "Mahaclna," a country which was part of Indian mythical
geography, with China-indeed, the Indians themselves came to
make such an identification-and regarded Mafnjusri as the special
protector of China.2"
If my identifications of the referents in the Chti-yung-kuan in-
scription are correct, it seems to be an explicit enough statement of
a Mafnjusri-Yuan emperor union. Nor is it the only evidence we
have. A number of works from the fourteenth century have come
down through the Mongolian literary tradition and provide addi-
tional examples of a bodhisattva-emperor identity. One is the
understood here as "the wise one, the skillful or able one," not "good marksman" as
Nishida (Murata, i, 262-63) has done; mergen was already a stock epithet of Manfju?ri in
the fourteenth century, as a contemporary fragment from Turfan, a Maiijukri litany,
proves: "he [Mainjusri] is greatly intelligent by virtue of his great wisdom; he is greatly
resourceful by virtue of his great skill" (yeke
bilig-iyeryeke
oyutu/yeke
mergen-iyeryeke arga-tu).
See Louis Ligeti, Monuments pr6classiques 1: XIIIe et XIVe siMles, Monumenta Linguae
Mongolicae Collecta, II (Budapest: Akademiai Kiad6, 1972), p. 142. On the early
history of Mt. Wu-t'ai, see Lamotte, p. 54 ff, and Ono Katsutoshi
;jNWW
and Hibino
Takeo
9R t
-, Godaizan E,iIr (Tokyo: Zayuih6 Kank6kai, 1942).
22
After Lamotte, pp. 74-75, citing Taisho daizakyJ, No. 278, xxIx, 590a. Lamotte,
p. 77, thinks that the translation "Ch'ing-liang-shan" is a Chinese interpolation because
the Tibetan version uses
spa?i-ri,
"grassy mountain." (The Sanskrit original is lost.)
23 Taisho daizokyo, No. 1185A, xx, 791c. This has been translated in Lamotte, p. 85.
The text seems to have no analogue in the Tibetan canon.
24
Lamotte, pp. 84 if., and Ono and Hibino, pp. 4 if.
colophon to the translation of a Buddhist text, the Dolugan ebiugen
neretiu odun-u sudur; it refers to Emperor Togon-temiir as a "reincarna-
tion of the teacher Buddha, the savior .. ., the Bodhisattva Lord,
the [Emperor] Uqagatu."25
The colophon to a Paiicaraksa translation made between 1308
and 1311, and revised in the reign of Togon-temiir, alludes more
vaguely to the Emperor Qubilai's bodhisattvahood: "Then the
Holy One, because he was born as a reincarnation in the third
generation [since Cinggis Qan, the founder of the dynastic line],
his name was Qubilai, and he was raised to the highest peak; later,
he became renowned as the emperor Se6en."26 Finally, the Cagvan
tedke, a historical compilation of the late sixteenth century (before
1586), which is thought to contain much material from Yuan times,
very explicitly refers to "Qubilai, the reincarnation of the holy
Manjusri .27
Chinese sources of Yuan date asserting the bodhisattvahood of
Yuan emperors are more scarce: the damaged Chinese text at Chu-
yung-kuan calls Qubilai jen-wang fzZE, a common epithet of the
Buddha in Chinese works.28 Another, a Chinese translation of a brief
vade mecum of the Buddhist religion, written in Tibetan by Qubilai's
Buddhist teacher29 for the Crown Prince Jinggim (Ch. Chen-chin
R*,
d.
1285),
refers to the latter as "the bodhisattva
Jinggim,
the
25
Ligeti, Catalogue, i, 303, No. 1123:
tonilgian
iileddiig6i burqan
bags'l-yin
qubilgan: Togan
temiir-un
qag'an
... : arigvun uqag-atu bodhi-satuwa ejen....
26
Pentti Aalto, ed., Qutuy-tu Pancarakzd kemekii tabun sakiyan neretii yeke kolgen sudur
(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1961), p. 128: qutug'tu te iin-u gvutagar iiye-diir inu.
qubilgan
biiged toirogsen-ii tula nere inu. qubilai kemen qotala-yin oroi degere ergiigdejii. qoyina Se6en
qagan
kemen
aldarsi"Vig'ui.
The passage alludes to the presumed common root of Qubilai and
qubilgan,
"transformation, reincarnation." On the numbering of generations among Yuan
rulers, see Francis Woodman Cleaves, "The Bodistw-a cari-a awatar-un tayilbur of 1312
by Cosgi odsir," HJAS, 17 (1954), 121.
27 Man-ju!r qutugtu-yin qubilgan Qubilai neretiu (fol. 6r), cited in Walther Heissig, Die
Familien- und Kirchensgeschichtsschreibung der Mongolen, I: 16.-18. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz, 1959), p. 21, where the work is discussed.
28
Murata,
I, 312.
29
He was the monk Blo-gros rgyal-mchan (1239-80, generally known as the National
Teacher 'Phags-pa, Ch. pa-ssu-pa kuo-shih A,^EiJ). His work was translated into
Chinese under the title Chang-so-chih-lun
#Rffi
by 'Phags-pa's disciple Sarpa (Ch.
Sha-lo-pa
Jj'#E,
1259-1314) and is included in the Taisho daiz5kyd, No. 1645, from
which I have translated this passage, xxxii, 236c. On the work, see Heissig, Die Familien,
p. 27.
heir-apparent." If the Yuan emperors were reincarnations of a
bodhisattva, they were most likely bodhisattvas from birth, so this
text does not really enlarge the usage. It remains a possibility that
'Phags-pa was simply paying a compliment of the sort we en-
countered in the Liang dynasty, for in his list of the holy kings of
India, Tibet, and other Buddhist countries, he identifies no sovereign
as a bodhisattva.30
As for Mount Wu-t'ai, we have abundant evidence of the Yuan
emperors' continuing interest in it from the earliest years of Qubilai's
reign. They contributed to the building of a number of convents at
the shrine and some emperors and empresses made pilgrimages
there.3' Tibetan and other monks practicing Tibetan forms of
Buddhism became established there in Yuan times and never
disappeared, even during the succeeding Ming dynasty (1368-1644),
when Tibetan monks continued to make pilgrimages to Mount
Wu-t'ai.32
As a whole, this evidence can be taken neither as casual imperial
puffery of the sort so common in China and other countries, nor as
a revival of the old Northern Wei formula of emperor-as-Tathagata.
Instead, it represents a blending of the Tibetan theory of bo-
dhisattva metempsychosis in identifiable mortals, in particular rulers
who spread the Law, and the Chinese Buddhist tradition of Mount
Wu-t'ai as the locus for Mafnjugrl, the Chinese bodhisattva par
excellence. The Chii-yung-kuan inscription adds a third element to
the blend: the ancient Chinese views about the nature of kingship
taken up by Confucians; the bodhisattva-emperor is carefully desig-
nated there as "destined by Heaven" (M. denri'e'e
jaydtan
-
Ch.
t'ien-ming 4 and "lord of men" (M. ku'uin
ejen
=
Ch. jen-chu Ait,
jen-mu
jk).
So far as I have been able to determine, the rulers of the succeeding
Ming dynasty avoided, at least in public, expressions of their own
bodhisattvahood, although several of the Ming emperors, notably
30
Taisho daiz5kyo, No. 1645, xxxii, 230-231c.
31 Chen-ch'eng
M,&
Ch'ing-liang-shan chih (1877 blockprint ed.) 4.5b-6a; Ono and
Hibino, pp. 77-91; Yuian-shih (Po-na ed.), 28.4b-5a, 116.5a, 136.16a, 174.5a, 30.2a,
22.16a.
32 Yuan-shih, 35.12a; Henry Serruys, "Early Lamaisim in Mongolia," OE, 10.2 (1963),
191.
Ch'eng-hua (r. 1465-87) and Cheng-te (r. 1506-21), must surely
have been familiar with the doctrine since they were interested in
Tibetan Buddhism and cultivated the friendship of Tibetan monks.33
Strong evidence that the doctrine was at least privately held is sup-
plied by an intriguing passage in a well-regarded Tibetan history,
the Mkhas-pa'i dga'-ston by Dpa'-bo gcug-la 'phreii-ba 'jin-pa (1503-
65): it is recorded there that the Ming Emperor Yung-lo (r. 1403-
24) had invited in 1403 the Kar-ma-pa monk and reincarnation
De-bzin gsegs-pa (1384-1415) to Peking to perform ceremonies in
honor of the emperor's late parents, the Emperor Hung-wu (r. 1368-
98) and the Empress Ma
X, and to designate them respectively as
reincarnations of Ma-njusri and the goddess rara,34 The incident
also shows the belief that bodhisattvahood inhered in (or should
inhere in) the legitimate occupant of the Chinese imperial throne,
and was not a monopoly of the Yuan imperial family.
What had the Mongols done with the bodhisattva-emperor idea
after 1368, when China was lost to them? For the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, very little can be said, except to note that they
preserved some texts from Yuan times which embodied the idea and
from which I have already quoted. The great revival of religious
activity among the Mongols
in the later sixteenth century,
a
part of
the revival of Tibetan Buddhism in general, brought monastery-
building, the presence of monk-reincarnations in their
midst,
ex-
posure to the new Tibetan scholasticism,
and
great literary activity.
A notable example of the latter was the
completion
of a
project
long desired by Mongolian monks-the translation of the Tibetan
33
In writing to the Tibetan clergy the Ming emperors simply called themselves
"emperor" (huang-ti) in Chinese and "king" (rgyal-po) in Tibetan: see an original patent
of 1448 reproduced in Li Kuang-t'ao
4E
, Ming-Ch'ing tang-an ts'un-chen hsiian-chi
ch'u-chi 1 (Taipei: Chung-yang yen-chiu-yuan. Li-shih yii-yen yen-
chiu so, 1959), P1. 4.1 and 4.2. On the Buddhist activities of Ch'eng-hua and Cheng-te,
see L. C. Goodrich and Chao-ying Fang, Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York: Colum-
bia Univ. Press, 1976), I, 298 ff., 309; II, 1152-53.
34
The passage is cited in Japanese translation by Sato Hisashi, "Gemmatsu-Minsho
no Chibetto josei," in Tamura Jitsuz6
Wff,W
ed., Mindai Mammo5shi kenkyui: Mindai
Mammo shiryo kenkyui hen (Kyoto: Ky6to Daigaku Bungakubu, 1963), p. 542. The text
of the Mkhas-pa'i dga'-ston has been edited by Lokesh Chandra,
Mkhas-pa4i-dga4-ston,
Satapitaka Vol. 9, parts 1, 2 (New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture,
1959, 1961); the passage occurs in Vol. 9 Part 2, p. 523. On De-bzin gsegs-pa, see Sat6,
pp. 538 ff., and Dictionary of Ming biography i, 481-83. For a critical appreciation of the
Mkhas-pa'i dga'-.;ton, see H. E. Richardson, "The Karma-pa Sect. A Historical Note,
Part I," JRAS, 1958, Parts 3-4, pp. 139-64.
Buddhist canon, the Bka'-'gyur, into Mongolian. The main sponsor
of this enormous undertaking (it consists of 1,161 works in 108 large
volumes), begun in earnest a generation earlier, was the Emperor
Ligdan (r. 1604-34), the last Borjigin emnperor of the Mongols. His
sponsorship brought effusions of praise from the monk-translators in
their colophons, which furnish abundant materials for studying the
epithets given to the last native Mongolian emperor under conditions
of high Buddhist excitement.35 Here are the most frequently used
ones: Cinggis, T'ang T'ai-tsung, most holy of the thousand
Cakravartins of the sublime Law; emperor whose wisdom is as
great as Ma-njusri's; possessing extraordinary power and abundant
merit; brilliant, wise Cinggis with great intelligence; great sovereign
ruler of men; heroic Emperor Secen (i.e., Qubilai) of the Great
Yuan dynasty; god of gods; victor over all the cardinal directions.3"
Ligdan is nowhere called a bodhisattva reincarnation and the epi-
thets formed from the names of past Chinese and Mongolian
emperors do not imply their reincarnation in Ligdan. Nor is the
epithet "god" (tngri) very significant: with the spread of Buddhism,
the gods were forced to take a distinctly inferior role, if indeed they
were not suppressed altogether. I have found only one text which
asserts that Ligdan is a reincarnation, and there he is stated to be
simply "the reincarnation of a powerful sublime god."37 The
unidentified god might be Qormusda, a pre-Buddhist god of Iranian
origin who was "converted" to Buddhism and identified with the
Indian god Indra, the ruler over a number of petty gods,38 since in
another colophon, Ligdan is called "most sovereign master of men,
35On the translation of the Buddhist canon into MongoliXn, see Walther Heissig,
Beitrdge zur tbersetzungsgeschichte des mongolischen buddhistischen Kanons, Abhandlungen der
Akadnmie der Wissenschaften in G6ttingen, Phil.-Hist. Klasse, 3. Folge, Nr. 50
(Gottingen, 1962) and the literature cited there; and W. Heissig, "Zur Organisation der
Kandjur tbersetzung unter Ligdan-Khan (1628-1629)," Zentralasiatische Studien, 7
(1973),
477-502.
36
Degedii nom-un
minggan
cakirawad-un
qutug-tu
Cinggis Tang tayisung; Manju.ri metiu
uqagan bilig yeke-tui; asuru
auga
kiciui-tii ulemji sayin buyan-tu; masi uqagatu tayiming se6en
Cinggis; tai erketii kamun-ii ejen; bagatur
tayi yuwan Secen
qagan;
tngri-yin tngri; qotala
jiig-iid
ilagug&i.
I have pieced these together from Raghu Vira, Mongol-Sanskrit Dictionary (New
Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture, 1958), pp. 17-25, where they have
been conveniently collected.
37
Kiieii-tu degedii tngri-yin qubilgan inu. Ligeti, Catalogue, i, 5, No. 11.
38 See Clark ii, 306, No. 328: S. gatakratu (i.e., Indra), T. Brgya-byin, M. Qormusda,
Ch. Ti-shih
#;6
;
Rene deNebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons of Tibet (The Hague:
Mouton, 1956), pp. 99-100.
Qormusda of the whole world."39 Another source of the early seven-
teenth century, the Sira
tug'uji
by an unknown compiler, adds the
titles "turner of the golden wheel [of the Law] and king of the
Law-familiar epithets for Buddhist kings, but no indication of
bodhisattvahood.40
In a few cases, earlier rulers are mentioned in the seventeenth-
century colophons: one states that "Qormusda, the emperor of the
gods, was reborn in the fortunate holy Cinggis Khan."'4' And the wife
of the Mongolian ruler
Bosogtu
(1565-1624), the lady Noyancu-
jonggen, who had helped her husband sponsor translations of the
Buddhist canon, is referred to as a reincarnation of the bodhisattva
Green Tara.42 All told, the monk-translators were very restrained in
giving bodhisattvahood to rulers living or dead.
Much the same conservatism is shown by the Mongolian chron-
iclers of the seventeenth century, although all were writing under
strong Buddhist influence. In two of these, only once is a secular ruler
called a Buddhist reincarnation: in the poem, the Lament of
Togon-
temur, in which the last Yuan emperor bemoans the loss of his
capitals and his empire as the armies of the Ming rebels drive him
into Mongolia, Qubilai is referred to as a "reincarnation of all
Buddhas," while Togon-temur himself is called "reincarnation of
all bodhisattvas."43 In a third chronicle of the seventeenth century,
I have found no occurrences, and in a fourth only an insignificant
one.44 The most renowned of the early chroniclers, Sagang-secen,
39
Tai erketui kiimiin-ii ejen delekei-dekin-ii Qormusda. Ligeti, Catalogue, i, 39, No. 118.
40
Altan kiurdun-i orc'ig'ulugci nom-un
qagian,
cited in Heissig, Familien, p. 93.
41 Ligeti, Catalogue, i, 166, No. 746: Tngri-ner-un
qagan
Qormusda anu: sutu bogda Cinggis
qagan bolun qubilju toirtiged.
42 Walther Heissig, "Toyin guosi-guisi alias Coytu guisi: Versuch einer Identifizie-
rung," Zentralasiatische Studien 9 (1975), 364-65.
43
Qamui
burqan-u qubilgan Sec'en
qag'an
... Qamug bodisdw-nar-un qubilgan Uqagatu
qagan.
The poem is found in the anonymous Altan tob(i, ed. and tr. Charles R. Bawden, The
Mongol Chronicle Altan Tobfi (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955), pp. 65-67; the
Altan tob6i of 1655 by Blo-bzaii bstan-'jin edited by Francis W. Cleaves, Altan tob6i; A
Brief History of the Mongols, Scripta Mongolica, I (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1952), pp. 122-24, and in other chronicles. On the poem, which exists in a number of
versions, not all of which contain the lines just cited, and which may in fact date from
the fourteenth century, see Hidehiro Okada, "An Analysis of the Lament of Toyon
Temur," Zentralasiatische Studien 1
(1967), 55-78.
44
N. P. Sastina, ed. and tr., Sara tudzi, mongol'skaja letopis' XVII veka (Moscow-
Leningrad: Lzdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1957); the Asaragi'i neretii-yin teuike (1677)
who wrote his Erdeni-yin tobci in 1662 after the Manchu ruler had
become the emperor of the Mongols in the South, only twice at-
tributes bodhisattvahood to lay persons: once, following the Tibetan
chronicles, he calls the early Tibetan king Khri-sroii lde-bcan a
reincarnation of Man-jusr1-Kumdrabhfita;45 in another he refers to
the bodhisattvahood of the above-mentioned wife of
Bosogtu."
I have made an effort to explore some Mongolian literary ma-
terials for examples of secular rulers as bodhisattvas, but have been
unable to find any. The didactic poem about Cinggis Qan, "Bogda
Cinggis magtan surga'san sastira," for example, was composed
under strong Buddhist influence. It contains much Buddhist imagery,
and many Buddhist attributes are applied (quite unhistorically) to
Cinggis, but nowhere is he called a bodhisattva or anything like it.4"
These materials all suggest that, down to the early seventeenth
century, when the Mongols attributed bodhisattvahood to their
secular rulers, it was to those long-deceased dynastic founders and to
a few others with great accomplishments in the spreading of the Law.
This would change greatly after the Mongols joined the Ch'ing
empire.
Contact between the Manchu emperors and the Dalai Lamas
of Tibet had begun in 1637, when T'ai-tsung (Hong-taiji, Abahai)
invited the Fifth Dalai Lama to his capital at Mukden; formal
recognition of the Manchu emperor as a bodhisattva was signaled
in a letter sent by the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama to
Emperor T'ai-tsung in 1640, which was addressed to the "Ma-njusrn-
Great Emperor."48 This
was followed in 1653 by a more solemn
declaration when the Dalai Lama, on a trip to Peking by invitation
of Emperor Shun-chih, T'ai-tsung's successor, presented the em-
by Byamba (Samba), ed. Perenglei, Monumenta Historica, ii. 4 (Ulan Bator: Erdem
sinzilgeenii khevlekh uildver, 1960), p. 8, mentions the youngest son of an ancient Indian
king who had such a bizarre appearance that people believed his parents were incarna-
tions of a god and a devil (tngri cidkiur-un qubilgan).
45 Jalagu mancus'ri-yin qubilgan ... kri stong Idebcan. I. J. Schmidt, ed. and tr., Geschichte
der Ostmongolen (St. Petersburg, 1829), p. 46.
46
Ibid., p. 264, where she is called Tayi'al-jonggin. On all of these chronicles, see
Heissig, Familien, pp. 50-111.
47
. Damdinsuiruing, ed., Monggol uran
jokiyal-un degeji jagun bilig oruaibai, Corpus
Scriptorum Mongolorum, XIV, (Ulan Bator, 1959), pp. 47-50.
48 Gunther Schulemann, Die Geschichte der
Dalai-Lamas, rev. ed. (Leipzig: Otto
Harrassowitz, 1958), p. 243; Ahmad, pp. 154-62.
peror with a gold plate which said "God of the Sky, Mafijughoaa-
Emperor and Great Being."4"
Apart from the Yuan traditions I have already discussed, the
origins of this act seem to be rooted in some millenarian prophecies
and speculations which had been made in the sixteenth century in
Tibet. Those of the Third Dalai Lama, Bsod-nams rgya-mcho
(1542-88), particularly spoke of an imminent secular ruler and
Ma-njusri incarnation who, together with the Dalai Lama, would
unite Chinese, Tibetans, and Mongols in a great conversion to
Dge-lugs-pa Buddhism. The Fifth Dalai Lama apparently saw the
prophecy being fulfilled by the new Manchu emperors, who showed
the proper respect to the Yellow Faith, and brought first the Mongols
of Inner Mongolia under their sway (1635) and then made a suc-
cessful invasion of China proper in 1644; he may also have been
influenced by the Manchus' recently adopted self-name, Manju,
which suggested the name of the bodhisattva Ma-njusri.60
Although both Chinese and Tibetan forms of Buddhism were
familiar to the first two Manchu rulers, T'ai-tsu (Nurhaci, 1559-
1626) and T'ai-tsung,61 no evidence available shows that Buddhism
of any kind was a very important religion among the early Man-
chus. From the beginning, the activities of these emperors on behalf
of Tibetan Buddhism and the lamas were designed to impress the
Mongols favorably, and to make submission to Manchu imperial
authority more acceptable to the Mongolian princes.62 There is,
in fact, substantial evidence that these founding emperors disliked
lamas and their influence on the Mongols. In 1622, T'ai-tsu wrote
to a Mongolian prince with whom he was irritated: "You Mongols
are incessantly telling your rosaries and reciting the name of the
49 T. gnam-gyi lha
!Jam-dbyafis
goni-ma bdag-po ehen-po, reconstructed from Tsepon W. D.
Shakabpa, Tibet, A Political History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), p. 116 (the
translation there is inadequate); Ahmad, pp. 166 ff.
50 Ahmad, pp. 39, 167, 345; Shakabpa, p. 114; Ono and Hibino, pp. 112-13.
51
See Man-wen lao-tang, ed. Kanda Nobuo et al., Mambun roto 5Z;tt
(Tokyo: Toyo
Bunko, 1955), i, 58, where T'ai-tsu in 1615 describes quite accurately the life and aims
of Chinese Buddhist monks (Manchu hawaian); see also iv, 31 and v, 859.
52
Walther Heissig, "A Mongolian Source to the Suppression
of Shamanism," Anthropos
48 (1953), 499-500; Ahmad, pp. 154 ff; Luciano Petech, China and Tibet in the early
XVIIIth century, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972), p. 14.
Buddha, but when Heaven sees your continual duplicity and deceit,
He will not help you!"63 T'ai-tsung was more explicit in 1636 in
speaking to his ministers:
The lamas tell lies; they merely pretend to make offerings to the Buddha and to
keep their vows, but are secretly dissolute and lewd; they scheme after property
and rebelliously commit crimes. Furthermore, they forcibly extort wealth and
livestock from people, falsely stating that this will help them avoid punishment
in hell. Their talk is particularly extravagant. The lamas are merely worldly
people who fabricate retributions and deceive people who know no better. As for
those who go before the Judge of Hell, who will remember [the lamas'] favors
and thereby excuse [the sinners] from retribution? The lamas of today should be
called "incorrigibles," not "lamas." But the Mongols have a deep belief in the
lamas; they squander their goods on them and confess their sins and transgres-
sions to them, desiring to save their souls from hell and be reborn in paradise.
Thus there are such practices as the suspension of turning- wheels and the tying
of cloth banners."4 All this is very stupid and false, and hereafter it should be
prohibited.66
T'ai-tsung had earlier expressed alarm at the cultural effects of the
Buddhist revival among his Mongolian subjects: "The Mongolian
princes are abandoning the Mongolian language; their names are
all in imitation of the lamas'; in the end this will bring the fortunes
of the state into decline !"566 Similarly stern statements can be found
in the utterances of later Ch'ing emperors; K'ang-hsi in particular
made a number of them.57
Such an attitude is understandable in the light of the early
Manchu emperors' efforts to develop a useful military force out of
their Mongolian subjects: monks do not perform military service.
53 Cited by Li Yu-shu
*",
"La-ma-chiao tsai Wai-Meng-ti fa-chan ho ti-wei,"
in his Wai-Meng cheng-chiao chih-tu k'ao
Afi7R,jJV
(Taipei: Chung-yang yen-chiu
yuan, 1962), p. 338.
54
This is an allusion to the prayer wheels and prayer flags (M. kei mori) used by
Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhists. I am grateful to my teacher Prof. Lien-sheng Yang
for elucidating this phrase.
5 T'ai-tsung wen-huang-ti shih-lu ; (Taiwan reprint ed.), 28.5ab; the
statement has been picked up in T'ai-tsung's collection of imperial instructions, T'ai-tsung
wen-huang-ti sheng-hsiin g1JI, 6.4a, in Ta Ch'ing shih-ch'ao
p+#
sheng-hsuin (Taiwan
reprint), i, 93, and has been cited by Tayama Shigeru EIij , Shinjidai ni okeru Moko no
shakai seido (Tokyo: Bunky6 Shoen, 1954), p. 155.
66 T'ai-tsung wen-huang-ti shih-lu, 18.12b-13a, cited by Tayama, p. 181.
5
They have been collected by Li Yu-shu, p. 343.
Legislation was issued forbidding able-bodied Mongols from becom-
ing postulants or monks without permission; they were even pro-
hibited from taking the vows of a lay disciple on their own initiative.58
These remarks and decisions relate mainly to the Tibetan Bud-
dhism of the Mongols, but much the same opinions informed the
early Manchu rulers' view of Chinese Buddhists. As early as 1631,
T'ai-tsung had stated that he intended to control the establishment
of new monasteries and to use the state power to enforce the monastic
rules, the vinaya, upon the Buddhist clergy;59 in 1642 he showed his
awareness of Buddhism (or, more exactly, evil Buddhist monks) as
a breeder of subversive social and political activities.60 Thus the
outlines of one Buddhist policy, followed by subsequent Ch'ing
emperors in China and now familiar to us from many modern
descriptions, were already established before the Manchus reached
Peking in 1644. The policy can broadly be called anticlericalism,
an anticlericalism caused by the monks' nonconformity to customary
social norms, their refusal to marry or do useful work, their tendency,
in China, to attract persons of low social class, malcontents, and
crooks, and their proven capacity for generating political sedition.'
But this is just one Buddhist policy of the Manchus, one that
evolved from their military concerns and from their newly adopted
Chinese-Neo-Confucian outlook. It is extremely easy to develop a
very different religious image for the Ch'ing emperors, one of perfect
Buddhist monarchs, grand patrons of the True Law, and bodhi-
sattvas. At the same time T'ai-tsung was condemning the lamas,
he was making generous gifts to them, building temples for them to
reside in, and even performing the bow to one of them, the Mergen
58
Meng-ku lu-li
ttfiJ,
Chung-kuo fang-chih ts'ung-shu Vol. 38 (Taipei: Ch'eng-
wen ch'u-pan-she, 1968), 2.46-48. Postulants were called M. bandi, Ch. pan-ti
fAM;
a male lay-disciple was called M. ubasi, T. dge-bsnen, Ch. wu-pa-shih %Eft. On the
Meng-ku Ilu-li, see the elaborate studies which Shimada Masao
A- M
EJ has been engaged
in since 1969 in the journal Horitsu ronso.
59
T'ai-tsung wen-huang-ti sheng-hsiun, 6.3b (Ta-Ch'ing shih-ch'ao sheng-hsiin i, 92); a
contemporary draft of this order has survived; see Chang Kuo-t'ao, Ming-Ch'ing tang-an,
p. 90, No. 44.
60
T'ai-tsung ... sheng-hsiin, 6.4a (i, 93).
61
See for example Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and
the Growth of Chinese Anti-foreignism, 1860-70 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963),
pp. 4-20, and C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ.
of California Press, 1961), pp. 187 ff.
Lama. During his war with Ligdan, he was careful to instruct his
troops not to harm monks, their monasteries, or monastery prop-
erty.62 T'ai-tsung may have been cynically projecting a
faqade
to
gain the favor of the Mongols, but to make such an assertion about
his succesors would be risky. Consider the following: Shun-chih
was friendly with Ch'an monks, some of whom resided in the palace;
Yung-cheng (r. 1723-35) was profoundly interested in Ch'an
Buddhism, established a Buddhist publishing house, and himself
prepared an anthology of what he regarded as the quintessential
Buddhist writings in Chinese, Yu-hsuan yu-lu W in nineteen
chuan (1732); both K'ang-hsi and Ch'ien-lung wrote prefaces for
Buddhist books, and dedicatory inscriptions and eulogies for temples
and monasteries. Ch'ien-lung gave his mother on her seventieth
birthday more than nine thousand statues of Buddhist deities, and
studied Tibetan Buddhism and Sanskrit with the eminent Peking
reincarnation, the Lcai-skya qutugtu Rol-pa'i rdo-rje (1717-86).
The imperial sponsnorship of Buddhist books was on a grand
scale, and many of them were published in the imperial printing
establishment. They included one edition of the Chinese Buddhist
canon (1738) ;64 two editions of the Tibetan canon (1692 and 1700) ;65
the Mongolian canon of 1718-20 already referred to; the complete
translation into Mongolian of the Tibetan supplementary canon,
the Bstan-'gyur, and its publication in 226 volumes (1741-49);"
and an anthology of all dhdrani and mantra in Sanskrit from the
Tibetan canon, carefully transcribed in Tibetan, Mongolian,
Chinese, and Manchu scripts (1773, 80 volumes)-surely one of the
most complex typographical undertakings ever attempted in China
62
Heissig, "A Mongolian Source," pp. 499-500; Ono and Hibino, p. 108; Mambun
roto v, 515-16, 756-57, 772.
63
Kenneth Ch'en, pp. 449-51; Clark, I, xii-xiii; Arthur Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese
of the Ch'ing Period (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Govt. Printing Office, 1943-44), ii, 918;
Robert B. Oxnam, Ruling from horseback, Manchu Politics in the Oboi Regency (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 54; Lokesh Chandra, ed., Sanskrit Textsfrom the Imperial
Palace at Peking in the Manchurian, Mongolian and Tibetan Scripts, Satapitaka Series Vol. 71
(New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture, 1966), i, vii-x.
64
Ch'en p. 451.
65
A. von Stael-Holstein, On a Peking Edition of the Tibetan Kanjur Which Seems to be
Unknown in the West (Peking, 1934).
66
Translation had in fact begun in the early seventeenth century. Heissig, Beitrdge
zur Ubersetzungsgeschichte, p. 43.
up to that time.67 A fine new version of a Buddhist guidebook to
Mount Wu-t'ai and its temples, the Ch'ing-liang-shan hsin-chih,
edited by Lao-tsang tan-pa
UffIES
(Blo-bzaii bstan-pa, a Chinese
monk despite his Tibetan name), in ten chuan, was published by the
palace publishing house in 1701, while a greatly expanded edition
in twenty-two chilan, compiled by an imperial order of 1785, was
published by the palace in 1811 68 Ch'ien-lung ordered prepared a
Manchu language Buddhist canon (the Manju hergen-i ubal4yambuha
amba g'anjur bithe, 1790) for the benefit of his fellow Manchus (and
perhaps to convince the Mongolian clergy of his sincerity about
spreading the Law), a work that took nearly twenty years, involved
more than five hundred translators, and for which a special agency
of government was created.69
All of the Manchu emperors down to Ch'ien-lung sponsored
the construction of Buddhist monasteries and temples; some of these,
like the complexes at Jehol and Dolon Nor, astounding in their size
and magnificence, were especially for the benefit of the Mongols,
but many hundreds of Chinese Buddhist temples were built or re-
paired throughout the Ch'ing empire with official funds and sup-
port.70 Ch'ien-lung was capable of composing a Chinese Buddhist
eulogy for the Panchen Lama in honor of the latter's visit to the
capital in 1780, which was copied on stone with Tibetan, Mongolian,
and Manchu translations for all to see.7" Both K'ang-hsi and Ch'ien-
lung made numerous pilgrimages to Mount Wu-t'ai and its temples,
the former five times and the latter six times; dowager empresses
also frequently went there. The succeeding emperor, Chia-ch'ing
(r. 1796-1820) visited once.72
67
This is the Yiu-chih Man-Han-Meng-ku Hsi-fan ho-pi ta-tsang ch'uan-chou
N&J
fit
; which has been
photographically reproduced
in Lokesh
Chandra, ed.,
Sanskrit Texts.
68
See note 31 above and the excellent bibliography by Ono and Hibino, pp. 345-48.
69
Walther Fuchs, "Zum mandjurischen Kandjur," AM, 6 (1930), 388-402; and
Hans-Rainer Kampfe, "Einige tibetische und mongolische Nachrichten zur Entste-
hungsgeschichte des mandjurischen Kanjur,"
Zentralasiatische Studien 9 (1975),
537-46.
70 See for example Wolfram Eberhard, "Temple-building
Activities in Medieval and
Modern China," MS, 23 (1964), 264-318.
71 Wolfgang Bauer, "Zwei mehrsprachige Gedichtsinschriften Kaiser Ch'ien-lungs,"
Studia Sino-Altaica, Festschrift fur Erich Haenisch, ed. Herbert Franke (Wiesbaden:
Franz
Steiner Verlag, 1961), pp. 25-30.
72 See Ono and Hibino pp. 114-17; Kahn, p. 88 mentions five visits to Mt. Wu-t'ai
by Ch'ien-lung.
I have assembled this somewhat random group of facts (many
more could be adduced) first, to show that the Ch'ing emperors,
aside from their serious interest in creating Buddhist personas for
themselves, sometimes had a personal interest in the religion as
well; and second, to provide a setting for discussing the use to which
these emperors put their bodhisattvahood.
To be a recognized reincarnation of Ma-njusri would be an
enormous help to an emperor trying to control affairs in Mongolia
and Tibet. He would instantly be a cult object among all classes of
a population which universally accorded great reverence to living
bodhisattvas-a substantial boost to his political potency. It would
be especially valuable in dealing with the growing number of
ecclesiastical reincarnations in Mongolia: deities are always trouble-
some to control, even for emperors, but an emperor-bodhisattva is,
at the very least, able to meet the most exalted. monk-reincarnations
as a religious equal. It should be remembered that the monk-
reincarnations (M. qubilgan) came in large measure from the nobility,
and many of them (at least forty-four in Khalkha Outer Mongolia
alone in the late nineteenth century) had acquired lay serfs (M.
qara sabinar) and were thus true ecclesiastical princes. Note the
following recommendation made to Ch'ien-lung in 1737: "The
Erdeni Bandida Qutugtu and the Jaya Bandida Qutugtu, both of
Khalkha, have numerous subjects who have official commissions, go
out on military service, and in other ways behave just like the ordi-
nary subjects of a secular prince. These [reincarnations] should be
granted seals and patents for the management of their subjects."73
Unfortunately for them, the Manchu emperors were never able
to exploit publicly this new advantage; to my knowledge, in no
imperial document of Ch'ing times does an emperor assert his
bodhisattvahood-with a single exception, which I will discuss
below. Why not? There was first of all the matter of the style and
form of imperial nomenclature, about which there was great con-
73 Ta Ch'ing hui-tien shih-li
Fft*A
1j
(1818 ed.), 737.1 la; also in Ch'ing-tai
pien-
cheng t'ung-k'ao
?,t&
,
4th ed. (Taipei: Pien-chiang cheng-chiao chih-tu yen-
chiu-hui, 1959), p. 197. On the ecclesiastical reincarnations, see Robert James Miller,
Monasteries and Culture Change in Inner Mongolia (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1959),
pp. 63-67, 70 ff., and especially A. M. Pozdneev, Ocerki byta
buddijskich
monastyrej i bud-
dijskago duchovenstva v Mongolii v svjazi s
otnolenyjam
o sego
poslednjago
k narodu (St. Petersburg,
1887), Chap. 4. (I was able to use an unpublished English translation of this work which
was on deposit at the University of Washington.)
servatism, not only among the Chinese but also among the Mongols
and Manchus. Elaborate Buddhist epithets in the preambles of
decrees would have been unsettling to everyone. In addition there
was the anti-Buddhist bias so widespread among members of the
Chinese ruling class since the seventeenth century; it was for the
benefit of this group that the emperors' own anticlerical statements
were made. Some of these men felt that any Buddhist practices or
concerns were heterodox and they were not slow in telling the
emperor as much: Ch'ien-lung wrote in 1792, "When I started to
learn the [Tibetan] scriptures, I was criticized by some Chinese for
being biased towards the Yellow Church (i.e., Dge-lugs-pa Tibetan
Buddhism)."7 But there was another group within the Chinese
ruling class, the lay Buddhists, heirs of a tradition associated with
the Ming dynasty monk Chu-hung
41t*
(1532-1612).7 These men
would have been as miserable as the doctrinaire Confucians had a
Ch'ing emperor proclaimed himself a bodhisattva. As I have tried
to suggest earlier, Chinese Buddhists had many centuries before
decided that was heterodox; they were probably not much offended
by the emperors' hostility to the monks, since the lay Buddhists were
often anticlerical themselves. One might think that the best Buddhist
policy in China would be no policy, but such a stance was impossible
because Buddhist beliefs and institutions were still meaningful and
important to the great mass of Chinese people. The need to straddle
these contradictions explains,
I
think, much of the Ch'ing emperors'
religious behavior: on the one hand they felt obliged to write dedica-
tions for Buddhist monasteries, while on the other they felt obliged
to adopt a discrete, detached, secular tone in preparing them.76
74
This is from a polyglot inscription at the Yung-ho-kung monastery in Peking, cited
by Lessing, Yung-ho-kung, p. 61; the words "by some Chinese" are from the Manchu
version; they are missing in the others.
75
Ch'en, pp. 447-49; Leon Hurvitz, "Chu-hung's One Mind of Pure Land and
Ch'an Buddhism," in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Self and Society in Ming Thought (New
York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 451-81; and especially Kristin Yu Greenblatt,
"Chu-hung and Lay Buddhism in the Late Ming," in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., The
Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 93-140.
Although there is little discussion of Chinese Buddhism in Hummel's Eminent Chinese-not
a single Chinese monk receives a main entry-lay Buddhists can often be identified there
by soubriquets (hao) which end in the words chii-shih
)g?.
76 For a few accessible examples, see K'ang-hsi's Chinese preface to the Tibetan Bka'-
'gyur, written in 1684, in the Japanese photo-reprint edition, Chibetto daizokyo (Tokyo
As if this were not complicated enough, the integration of the
Mongols into a unified Ch'ing empire enormously aggravated the
Ch'ing emperors' hope for a single Buddhist policy. In Mongolia,
unlike China, the monks tended to come from the nobility and had
surprising influence on the secular princes. The ruling class there
was informed by the Tibetan theory of the dual principle of the
state (T. lugs-giiis, M. qoyaryosu), in whicn government was seen as
a joint enterprise of secular nobility and clergy." With Buddhism
lying athwart such a tangle of ethnic, class, and political interests,
it was virtually impossible for the emperor to communicate a single
empire-wide Buddhist policy. He had to learn to speak out of both
sides of his mouth.
The differing languages of the peoples concerned helped some-
what to segregate differing policies; an imperial decree in honor of a
Tibeto-Buddhist monastery would, in its Chinese and Manchu
versions, be quite neutral and circumstantial, while the Tibetan and
Mongolian versions would be filled with Buddhist imagery.'8
Temple dedications, although public, were neither very important
nor widely disseminated documents. However, documents of great
importance and wide distribution presented subtle problems of
wording and translation. Such an example is the Sheng-yiu kuang-
hsiun
W!RM11l,
the "Sacred Edicts," which contained what the
Emperor Yung-cheng in 1724 considered to be the universal and
indispensable doctrines of state, society, and morals, to be taught to
and obeyed by all subjects in the empire. Its famous "Lecture on
Heterodox Doctrines" (vii), in its Chinese version, says:'9
From ancient times, three religions have continued in propagation, that is, the
school of Confucianism and besides this, those of Taoism and Buddhism. The
and Kyoto: Chibetto Daiz6kyo Kenkyuikai, 1958), CLI, 51-52; A. von Stael-Holstein,
"The Emperor Ch'ien-lung and the Larger Suiramgamasuitra," HJAS, 1 (1936), 142 ff;
Erich Haenisch, Die viersprachige Griindungsinschrift des Tempels An-yuan-miao in Jehol v.
Jahre 1765, Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Abhandlungen der
geistes- und
sozialwissenschaftlichen KI., Jahrgang 1950, Nr. 15.
77 On this theory, see David M. Farquhar, "The Origins of the Manchus' Mongolian
policy," in John K. Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1968), pp. 202-3, 335, n. 42, 43; and Shakabpa, p. 71.
78
This was first pointed out by Lessing, Yung-ho-kung, pp. 12-13.
79
After C. K. Yang, pp. 194-95; see also A. Theophile Piry, Le Saint JEdit (Shanghai:
Inspectorate General des Douanes, 1879), pp. 122-25.
philosopher Chu Hsi says that Buddhism does not bother with the material uni-
verse but considers only the subject of the mind, and that Taoism merely aims
at the preservation of the spiritual essence of man. This fair statement from Chu
Hsi clarifies the fundamental objects of Buddhism and Taoism. But a class of
loafers, with neither livelihood nor abode, has since come forth to usurp the
name of these religions and corrupt the practical use of the same....
The Mongolian version, widely used as an elementary textbook
in Mongolia since the mid-eighteenth century, would also be fairly
rendered by the above translation, except for the words "clarifies
the fundamental objects of Buddhism and Taoism," which could
only be construed as "clarifies the fundamental objects of the Chinese
Buddhist monks and the priests of the indigenous (pre-Buddhist)
religion."80 Thus, already before the diatribe against the evils of the
clergy had begun, it would be clear to the Mongol reader that the
emperor was not talking about him or his Buddhism, but about the
Chinese.
The Mani'jusrl image obviously could not be managed by such
linguistic cunning, and it was too valuable a property to abandon.
The emperor had to rely on those outside the official system to spread
the idea among the Mongols, and this meant the lamas and the lay
nobles, the chief beneficiaries of the Pax Manjurica. It was an enor-
mous stroke of good fortune that the original bestower of the title
had been the Fifth Dalai Lama, a prolific writer and one of the
most widely respected occupants of that chair; his reputation
must
have persuaded many monkish and lay chroniclers to advance the
Ma-njusri-Ch'ing emperor idea. I cited three such texts at the
beginning of this essay, but many others can be found in the chron-
icles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.8'
80
Egun-dur qoosang bombo-yin ug dokiya-yi olJu mede3ii bolumui. I have used a trilingual
edition [San-ho _ *-] Sheng-yiu kuang-hsiin/[Gurban jiiil-iin uige qadamal] Bogda-yin
surgal-i
sengkeregil-iin badaragulugsan bicigl[Ilan
hacin-i gisun kamcibuha] enduringge tacihiyan
be
neileme badarambuha bithe (block-print of 1874), ts'e 2, pp. 94ab. The term bombo would
probably have been understood by Mongols in southern Mongolia as "Taoist priest,"
but it usually referred to the followers of the pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet. See F. D.
Lessing, Mongolian-English dictionary (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California
Press, 1960), p. 120.
81 Some examples: The biography of the Second Lafi-skya Qutugtu, Rol-pa'i
rdo-
rje,
Khyab bdag rdo r3e sems dpa'i no bo dpal Idan bla ma ... (1792-94), fol. 587: "The great
Ma -njughosa-Emperor" (gon ma
'jams
pa'i dbyans ehen po), cited by Hans-Rainer Kampfe,
p. 541; the Qalqa Monggol-un oron-dur burqan-u sasin eke olugsan uc6ir (1862), fol. 48 r: "May
Another way to foster the emperor-bodhisattva association was the
cultivation of Mount Wu-t'ai as a place of pilgrimage for Mongols
as well as for Chinese. Many convents there were assigned to
Tibeto-Buddhist monks, and the strong Tibetan and Mongolian
flavor which the site has had in modern times dates from the seven-
teenth century. The success of the promotion was quite extraor-
dinary; there are many records of the great efforts and expense
to which Mongols went in order to make the pilgrimage or to have
their remains buried there.83
It may be, as has been asserted, that the emperors were interested
in orienting the Mongols towards China and away from Tibet by
this and other imperially supported Tibetan-style monastic establish-
ments built on and near Chinese soil, but I suspect that the wish
to spread the Mafijusri-emperor belief was the main reason for the
new imperial concern with Mount Wu-t'ai.
the golden sway of the Holy Lord, the Mainjusri Emperor, be peaceful for innumerable
years." (Manjusiri bogda ejin
qagan-uyeke
altan toro-yi tiug tiumen on-du amugulang aqun), ed.
and tr. Charles Bawden, The Jebtsundamba Khutukhtus of Urga (Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz, 1961), p. 90;
Ra'sipungsug's
Bolor erike (1775), fol. 504a: "With the feet
of [His Majesty], the unwavering Mafnjusri and holy master, [having] an enduring
resting place, the government of the Great Ch'ing dynasty becomes perfectly firm. . ."
(dengsel iigei manjuwri bogda ejen-ui olmei ini oroKil tegiincilen yeke cing ulus-un toir inu maitida
batudeu .. .), ed. F. W. Cleaves, Bolor Erike: Mongolian Chronicle (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1959), iII, 293; Galdan's Erdeni-yin erike (1840): "The Dalai and Panchen
Lamas ... in a memorial proferred [the title]
'Manj'us?ri
Great Emperor.' " (Dalai blama
Banein blama ... ailadqaqu bicig-tuir Mang3usiri yeke quwangdi kemen erguigsen inu), ed. .
Nasunbaljur, Erdeni-yin erike kemekii teiike bolai, Monumenta Historica, III.1 (Ulan Bator:
Sinzlekh ukhaan, Deed Bolovsrolyn Khureelengiin Erdem Sinriilgeenii Khevlel, 1960),
p. 53a; Isibaldan's Erdeni-yin erike (1835) refers to the Ch'ing emperor as
"Manj'us?ri
Holy Master" (Man3usiri
bogda ejen), ed. Walther Heissig, Erdeni-yin erike, mongolische
Chronik (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1961), fol. 30r. It would undoubtedly be easy
to find more examples. In two chronicles I examined, Jimbadorji's Bolor toli (1834-37),
ed. Walther Heissig, Bolur toli, "Spiegel aus Bergkristall" von
Jimbadorji,
Monumenta
Linguarum Asiae Maioris, N. S. Vol. III (Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard, 1962),
and Dharma's Altan Kiirdiun
minggan
kegesfitui bicig (1739), ed. Walther Heissig, Altan
Kurdun Mingyan Gegesutu Bicig, eine mongolische Chronik, Monumenta Linguarum Asiae
Maioris, N.S. Vol. I (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1958), I found no passage which
calls the Manchu emperors bodhisattvas, although both praise them for spreading the
Buddhist religion. The Bolor toli, fol. 13v., does, however, call Cinggis Qan a reincarna-
tion of Vajrapaii (Tai3uu finggis
qagan
wajarbani-yin qubiljan), the only work known to
me that does.
82
Ono and Hibino, p. 106.
88
Miller, pp. 82-84.
One device for spreading the belief was guidebooks to Mount
Wu-t'ai written for the Mongols. These include some of the earliest
blockprint books made in China for the Mongols. The first was the
Uta-yin tabun agulan-u orosil siisugten-u 6ikin cimeg written by Blo-
bzaii bstan-'jin and published in 1667, which clearly speaks of the
Ch'ing emperor as the "reincarnation of Mainjusr1, sublime lord,
who makes the world prosper."84 This work, which was widely
distributed (prints could still be purchased in the early twentieth
century)85 was almost certainly published with the support and
encouragement of the imperial court: it was written at the behest
of a monk, Nag-dban blo-bzan, whom Emperor Shun-chih had
placed in charge of Mount Wu-t'ai in 1660; and its blocks were cut
at a government-financed monastery at Mount Wu-t'ai, the P'u-
sa-ting
AT0,
and later carried to Peking.86 Another edition of this
work under a different title seems to have been published in 1721.87
A third guidebook, the Serigiin tunggalag agulan-u Manjus.iri laks'an-tu
siime-yin gayiqams.ig': jibqulangtu gegen duri-yin cadig.. . of 1813, also
makes it a point to refer to the Manchu emperor as the "Ma-njusr1
holy master."88 These works, it is true, do not develop elaborate
theories about the bodhisattvahood of emperors, but they did not
need to: in books which were almost exclusively concerned with the
84
Manjus'iri-yin
qubilgian
delekei-yin
mandugulug''i
degedui ejen (fol. 73a) quoted by Walther
Heissig, Die pekinger lamaistischen Blockdrucke in mongolischer Sprache (Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz, 1954), p. 13, n. 2.
85 By 1923 the blocks seem to have been dispersed; a Peking book or curio dealer (?),
Pa-lun-t'e E , was selling odd folios from it to foreign visitors, as a dated folio 32a
in my possession shows.
86 Heissig, Blockdrucke, p. 12, n. 4; p. 13. The remarks of Charles Bawden, The Modern
History of Mongolia (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 84:
"
. . . it is quite clear from a study
of the colophons of lamaist books printed in Peking ... that this printing programme
... was in no way planned by or encouraged by the Emperors," should be scrutinized
with care. On P'u-sa-ting, see Miller, p. 82; Ono and Hibino, pp. 192 ff.
87
Tabun iu7egiirtii
agula-yin
cadig; see Heissig, Blockdrucke, p. 53.
88
Manju?ria bog'da ejen (fol. 27b). I have used a print in the collection of the University
of Chicago. On this work, see Heissig, Blockdrucke, pp. 163-64. A fourth guide to Mt.
Wu-t'ai in Mongolian is a translation of the Ch'ing-liang-shan hsin-chih, the Cing liyang
!an
agulan-u sineji-bi6ig,
which I have not been able to examine; chances are that it does not
refer to the Manchu emperors as Mafijiri since the work seems to be a simple revision of
Chen-ch'eng's Ch'ing-liang-shan chih (see note 31 above and note 8.9 below). The imperial
preface by K'ang-hsi (1701) is reproduced in Jaddungba, Naimadugar Jibjundamba-yin
Mongg'ol bicimel nom-un
c'uglagiulga,
Studia Mongolica, I.6 (Ulan Bator, 1959), pp. 11-12
(in this copy, the work is entitled U-tai serigiin tunggalag
agula-yinjokiyanggui),
and it uses
only the terms
qagan
or quwangdi, "emperor"; see Heissig, Blocdrucke, pp. 19-20.
cult of Mainjusri at Mount Wu-t'ai, it was sufficient simply to call
the emperor "Mainjusrl" for a firm connection to be made.89
There is negative evidence that the ManjusrI-emperor idea had
the tacit approval of the court: the works which asserted it were
never suppressed-indeed they sometimes carried imperial prefaces.
It is well known that the Ch'ing emperors were the most thin-skinned
of all rulers to occupy the imperial throne of China, and were quick
to retaliate against any real or imagined lese majeste.90
Judging from the numerous statements in books already referred
to, the acceptance of the emperor as a bodhisattva seems to have
been widespread among the Mongols. But semi-private expressions
of the idea are even more convincing evidence. For example, in a
letter to the League Chief of Tiisiyetii Qan aimak and other princes
and offices there, the eighth Jibjundamba Qutugtu (1870-1924)
refers several times to the Ch'ing emperor as the "Ma-njusri holy
master."9' There is not much doubt that the emperor was, as he
himself claimed in the patents which he issued to the important
clerics of Mongolia, "the great master of the secular and religious
orders,
who dominates the
universe,192
and that his bodhisattvahood
helped clinch this authority.
I must now deal with two documents which appear to contravene
89
I should mention that I have examined as many of the Chinese Mt. Wu-t'ai guides
as were available to me for statements identifying emperors with Manjuisri and have
found none. These include Hui-hsiang's
V*
Ku
-
Ch'ing-liang chuan, 2 chiian (7th cen-
tury); Yen-i's E-, Kuang X Ch'ing-liang-chuan, 3 chiian (1060); Chang Shang-ying's
Afi
Hsii a Ch'ing-liang chuan, 2 chiian (1 2th century) (these three works are included in
the Taisho daizokyo, Nos. 2098, 2099, 2100, LI, 1092-1127); and Chen-ch'eng's Ch'ing-
liang-shan chih, 10 chuan (1596, in the block-prient ed. of 1887). All of these books recount
stories of the appearances of Ma-njuAri on Mt. Wu-t'ai (see especially Ch'ing-liang-shan
chih, ch. 6), but his manifestations are usually in simple, humble people who appear
for awhile and then, wraith-like, disappear.
90
L. Carrington Goodrich, The Literary Inquisition of Ch'ien-lung, 2nd ed., (New York,
1966). Mongolian books were subject to the same censorship as were Chinese books;
see Heissig, Beitrdge zur Ubersetzungsgeschichte, pp. 43-53.
91
Mangfuziri
bogda ejen, from the manuscript "Jibjungdamba qutugtu-yin Tiisiyetiu
Qan
ayimag-un cigulgan
daruga giyiin wang
tusalagci
biikiin-dur ilegegsen bicig,"
fols. 2b, 3a (MS Mong. 52 in the Oriental Department, Royal Library, Copenhagen).
See Walther Heissig and Charles Bawden, Catalogue of Mongol Books, Manuscripts and
Xylographs (Copenhagen: The Royal Library, 1971), pp. 61-62.
92 Bi delekei dekin-i yiriingkeilegsen toro s'agin-u yeke ejen. See Erich Haenisch, "Ein
mandschu-mongolisches Diplom fur einen lamaistischen Wiirdentrager," MS, 13 (1948),
317-18. My translation differs somewhat from Haenisch's, which is based on the Manchu
text.
my statement that the Ch'ing emperors refrained from alluding to
their own bodhisattvahood. One is an inscription of 1744 erected
at the Yung-ho-kung
*n'g
monastery in Peking by Emperor
Ch'ien-lung in honor of his father, Yung-cheng. It says in part:
"Our August Father has from the beginning devoted himself to the
highest doctrines. He has realized Nirvana-samadhi and reached
the highest enlightenment (anuttara-samyak-sambodhi) and so ex-
tended blessings to all sentient beings and conferred benefits upon
aeons [innumerable as] dust. As King Sakyamuni, powerful and
benevolent, he has manifested himself in his real shape; all beings
take their refuge in (owe their lives to) Him."93 It would be hard to
find a more fulsome example of Buddhist hyperbole (or filial piety)
than this, but I would suggest that it has no direct connection with
the doctrine of emperor-as-Man-jusr1; instead, Ch'ien-lung is
suggesting that his father became a buddha through his own spiritual
efforts-something both more and less than being a bodhisattva
by imperial prerogative.
The other document is a private one, a painting in the imperial
collection, entitled "Emperor Kao-tsung (i.e., Ch'ien-lung) of the
Ch'ing dynasty as a reincarnation of Ma-njusr1 'ir. "9
Done in the Chinese style, it shows Ma-njusri (wearing the face of
Ch'ien-lung) engaging in a celebrated discussion with Vimalakirti,
in which the latter earns the plaudits of the bodhisattva by his
response of utter silence to the question of how one enters the
doctrine of nonduality.9" Ch'ien-lung has added a poem (dated
1753), which paraphrases
this passage of the sutra and describes
the scene as if it were an ordinary Buddhist painting.96
The picture's
title, using Ch'ien-lung's temple name, was of course added after his
death, and we have no way of knowing whether it had a similar one
at the time he saw it; but its allusion must surely have been clear to
him. While interesting because it illustrates that the emperor-
Manj'jusri
doctrine was not entirely ignored among
Chinese circles
93Translation by F. D. Lessing, Yung-ho-kung, p. 10.
"
Ch'ing-tai ti-hou hsiang, u, P1. 8.
95
Vimalakirti-nirdeda in Taisho daizokyo No. 475, xxv, 551c. See Ch'en, Buddhism in China,
p. 384.
96 I am grateful to my colleague Professor Lao Kan for kindly transcribing and eluci-
dating this poem for me.
at court, the painting also shows that the emperor was always dis-
creet, even within the intimacy of his own study.
In this survey I have tried to trace the history of the idea of the
ruler as a bodhisattva from its origins in Tibet to the Mongols of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and then to the Manchu rulers
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In making this journey
the idea underwent considerable change. The early Tibetans at-
tributed bodhisattvahood only rarely and posthumously to those of
their rulers with outstanding accomplishments in promoting the
religion; the particular bodhisattva incarnated in them varied. The
Yuan emperors, however, were bodhisattvas in their own times and
it appears that all of them from Qubilai to Togon-temiir were so
regarded,97 although only three, Qubilai, the crown prince Jinggim
who never lived to accede to the throne, and Togon-temiir, are
designated bodhisattvas in surviving texts, and of those only Qubilai
is called a specific one-Manijusri.
The Manchu rulers, beginning with T'ai-tsung, were all regarded
by the lamas as bodhisattvas, but paralleling the development of
ecclesiastical reincarnations in Tibet and Mongolia, where the
occupants of a particular monastic throne were always the same
bodhisattva, the Manchu emperors were all reincarnations of
Ma-njusri. They managed their divinity in a very different way from
the Yuan emperors of the fourteenth century: whereas the latter
did not hesitate to proclaim their bodhisattvahood, the former
never formally referred to it. This was because the Manchu rulers
had early decided that their most important economic and political
interests lay in China, and that their most visible religio-political
image was to be Chinese and Confucian. To call themselves bodhi-
sattvas would have put them squarely in opposition to the prejudices
of most of the ruling class of China, the educated landlords.
But the Ch'ing emperors were also the rulers of the Mongols,
who were an important part of the imperial defense network, and
whose ruling class, the hereditary Borjigin princes, their consort
clans, and a newly developed elite of Buddhist clergy, had very
97
So I interpret the plural formation in the critical passage of the Chu-yung-kuan
inscription (West wall, line 5, Ligeti, Monuments en e'criture 'phags-pa, p. 95): ddeiri'ece
jaydtan
bodisiwid-nar-unyabu'ulu [qsa]n, "[the marvelous deeds] which have been brought
about by those bodhisattvas destined by Heaven...."
different notions about the proper image for their emperors: they
expected them to be grand patrons of their religious establishments.
The hope of molding such a ruler must have been in the mind of the
Fifth Dalai Lama when he first designated the newly established
Ch'ing emperor a reincarnation of Ma-njusr1, and in the minds of
the Mongolian lay and clerical nobility when they spread that idea
in their writings. The Manchu rulers ignored their bodhisattva
status, but in fact surreptitiously promoted it, for it increased
their political influence in Mongolia and Tibet-a result perhaps not
foreseen by the Fifth Dalai Lama.
To be at once anti-BCuddhist (or, at least, anticlerical) and the
great patron of monasteries must have been a great trial to rulers in
a country where public images were so important and were so closely
scrutinized. The two personas were nevertheless consistently and
successfully cultivated for nearly two hundred years, without much
regard for the personal feelings towards Buddhism held by the
various emperors, which seem to have varied considerably. This
suggests that the political component of these images was the most
important: they were efforts to accommodate, to the greatest
extent possible, the interests of the ruling classes of China and
Mongolia, and thereby maintain Manchu paramountcy over both.

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Harvard-Yenching Institute

Emperor as Bodhisattva in The Governance of The Ch'ing Empire

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