Li Deyu (787–850): (Civil) Religion, Politics, and Biography

China is often and quite willingly considered to be ‘avant la lettre secular’ (J. Casanova). But how did the relationship between religion and politics look like in historical actuality, for instance during the golden age of Buddhism under the Tang (or T’ang) Dynasty (618–907)? Was there something along the lines of a secular, Ruist (or Confucian) orthodoxy, orthopraxy, or ‘civil religion’ (H. Seiwert), which was opposed to the Religious in the shape of ‘Isms’ as Buddhism and Daoism (or Taoism), fangshi (‘recipe gentleman’, D. Harper), and popular or ‘diffuse’ religion (C.K. Yang), comprised of ancestor worship, divination, etc.? My thesis focuses on the period between the proscription of Buddhism (and other religions that were considered ‘foreign‘) under Emperor Wuzong (r. 840–846) and its subsequent restitution under Xuanzong (r. 846–859). My corpus comprises 48 ‘essays’ or ‘critiques’ (lun), written by chancellor Li Deyu (787–ca. 850) and preserved in his late work Qiong chou zhi (Records of Exhaustion and Grief). These critiques deal with fangshi, Totenfolge in Ancient China, the convert-cum-emperor Liang Wudi (r. 502–549), etc. Furthermore, Li addressed memorials to the emperor, in which he remonstrates against the appointment of Daoists to the court and private ordinations of Buddhist monks and nuns, ponders about the function and structure of the imperial ancestral temple – and occasionally congratulates his emperor on the destruction of monasteries. Moreover, he probably authored an edict dating from 845 that marked the climax and completion of Emperor Wuzong’s proscription. Intriguing from the perspective of comparative literature and cultural studies is Li’s usage of quotations from canonical, historiographical and other sources as Zuozhuan (Tradition of Zuo, – a canonical ‘commentary‘ on the Spring and Autumn Annals) and Hanshu (Book of Han – a canonical history of the Former or Western Han Dynasty, 202 BC – 9 AD), which he employs to build chains of arguments. Almost none of his works has been translated into a modern language yet. On the theoretical side I contend that there was no independent religious field in Imperial China at least since the Eastern Han Dynasty (9–220 AD). Instead, there existed multiple religious fields (of Buddhism, Daoism, fangshi, ect.), but only one ‘literary-political’ field (i.e., circumscribed by the written language), which evolved in a normative triangle between the emperor(s), the classical literature and the scholar-officials (and aspirants to this position). The indubitably existing Religious incessantly infiltrated the literary-political field during the course of history, but it was either integrated into the literary-political field or excluded from the scene. Violence between scholar officials, who were educated in the Ruist canon, on one side and Buddhist and Daoist clerics as well as fangshi on the other can better be explained as processes of social closure in the literary-political field rather than as ‘competition over the distribution of religious commodities (Heilsgüter)’ in the sense of P. Bourdieu.