Millennialism has a long history in China. Though millennialist thinking spans the globe, rarely has it showed so much diversity or had such an influence as in Chinese history. Millennialist movements, large, popular, and sometimes capable of remaking the country’s balance of power, are a constant feature of the last two-thousand years of Chinese history. Indeed, two of the nation’s most well-known dynasties, the Tang and the Ming, began as millennialist movements and maintained aspects of their messianic ideology even after rising to power.
The future age of bliss is almost by definition a utopia, and so millennialism is inherently intertwined with utopian thought. Twentieth-century scholars liked to claim that China has no utopian tradition to speak of. Nothing could be further from the truth. Utopian thought provided the basis for traditional Chinese society. The major schools of Chinese philosophy, formed in the turbulent years before the rise of a unified empire, all took the proper construction of the social and political order as their main theme. While the Legalists had a more practical focus, advocating for a state that was stable and strong rather than unswervingly benevolent, the Confucians, Taoists, and Mohists all agreed that the purpose of the state was to create a completely harmonious society wherein all individuals were happy, prosperous, and concerned for one another’s welfare. When Confucianism replaced Legalism as the state ideology in the Han Dynasty, this utopian objective was cemented as the guiding principle of the national government, and so it remained until the end of the imperial system two-thousand years later.
Naturally, the ideal was more often honored in the breach than in the observance, and imperial dynasties generally showed little compunction to put these utopian ideals into practice. Rarely did they even try. Wang Mang, who in the time of Christ briefly interrupted the Han Dynasty by taking the throne for himself, provided a cautionary tale. After founding the Xin Dynasty, he tried in earnest to create a Confucian utopia built upon economic equality, public welfare, and the prohibition of slavery. For his efforts he was overthrown in a popular uprising and murdered by a mob. But even with obvious failures of execution such as this, the utopian ideal remained alive. Scholars and thinkers proclaimed that a completely just and prosperous social order had existed in the past, in the golden days before the Warring States tore the nation apart. All that was required for it to return was for a truly just Emperor to sit upon the throne once more.
In the Han period, this utopian ideal gained a name: Taiping. Meaning “Great Peace, taiping was a harmonious social order that would combine, in scholar Barbara Hendrishke’s words, “elements of social justice, general fairness, and of public welfare” (Hendrishke 85). The happiness brought about by taiping would be complete and universal. Hendrishke explains that, in the Taiping jing, the great eschatological classic of the Taoist canon, “[a] single individual, dissatisfied and resenting his fate, can … put the arrival of the Great Peace at risk” (67). (Incidentally, the Taiping jing is often attributed to Gan Ji, who is sometimes identified with the Yu Ji in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms who mystically engineers the death of the Wu kingdom’s founder, Sun Ce.) But taiping was, importantly, more than just a social ideal. The achievement of taiping would transform human life, the natural world, and even the cosmos itself. As Anna Seidel describes it, under taiping “there were no premature deaths, no bad harvests, the climate was so friendly that the rain did not break the clods of earth and the wind did not whistle in the branches” (163). In effect, society in Chinese thought functioned something like the Grail kingdom in Arthurian lore; when the ruler was bad, weak, or infirm, the land itself would become unsettled, blighted, and infertile. If the ruler was strong, good, and capable, the weather would be mild, the people happy, and the harvests abundant. As a result, the coming of taiping would quite literally reshape the world.
With the hope for a truly just social order, universal human happiness, and the physical transformation of the world, Chinese thinkers had already come upon most of the ingredients for millennialism. All they needed was a sense of expectation for the future fulfillment of taiping. And, since taiping could theoretically be brought into being at any time, such expectation was not hard to come by. In the Han Dynasty, Taoists in particular had gravitated to the taiping ideal. Not coincidentally, Taoists of the time also developed China’s first known strands of millennialist thought. Even before the Han’s collapse, Taoists were already looking for a deified Laozi or the future messiah Li Hong to appear and lead the world into the coming golden age of taiping.
These expectations exploded into the first truly popular millenarian movements during the period of time chronicled by the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The beginning of Chinese millennialism, at least as a major social force, is dated to 184 C.E., when the Yellow Turban Rebellion broke out under the leadership of Zhang Jiao, a Taoist mystic, prophet, and folk healer who claimed that Zhuangzi himself had charged him with overthrowing the Han Dynasty and ringing in the taiping of the Yellow Heaven. Indeed, the movement’s name, rendered as “The Way of Peace” or “The Way of Great Peace” in English, was Taiping dao. Clearly, Zhang Jiao’s devotion to the taiping ideal was strong. Still, the strength of his convictions, and that of hundreds of thousands of followers, was not enough to bring about taiping. It was enough, however, to achieve his other objective, albeit indirectly. Though the Han Dynasty survived the rebellion, it was left as a hollow shell that governed the country in name only. Real authority now resided with the warlords that the Han had been forced to empower in order to defeat the Yellow Turbans, thus beginning four hundred years age of political fragmentation.
Every reader of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms knows this. The Yellow Turban Rebellion is the starting point of the great novel. Not only is the story of Zhang Jue receiving his holy book from the spirit of Laozi is one of the first that new readers will encounter but the rebellion is the call to action that inspires the novel’s protagonist Liu Bei to leave his simple peasant life and sets him on the long, painful course toward founding the Shu-Han state in Sichuan. It leads him to meet and swear brotherhood with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei and to first cross paths with the novel’s antagonist, Cao Cao. Indeed, the events of the Yellow Turban Rebellion establish the major characters, plot, and themes of the novel going forward. All that happens afterward is the direct or indirect consequence of Zhang Jiao’s effort to put his millennialist vision into practice.
But despite their greater literary prominence, the Yellow Turbans are arguably of less historical importance than the other Taoist millennialist movement that appears in the novel. Formally known as the Way of the Celestial Master, the Five Pecks of Rice sect resembled the Yellow Turbans in many ways. They were also a popular Taoist sect that had millennialist ambitions centered on the coming taiping, ambitions that their founder and his family were expected to fulfill. Zhang Daoling is reputed to have founded the sect in 142 C.E. when he took on the title of Celestial Master. Around the time of the Yellow Turban Rebellion, his grandson and the third Celestial Master, Zhang Lu, was able to seize control of the Hanning region north of Sichuan and establish an independent state under the sect’s control. Unfortunately for Zhang Lu but fortunately for the movement, this would put him directly in the middle of the conflict between Liu Bei and Cao Cao that makes up the backbone of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. As a direct result of Zhang’s entanglement in the Liu-Cao feud, the history of Taoism would be forever changed.
Liu Zhang was the ruler of Sichuan in the early years of the third century. A not-very-ambitious man, he had contented himself with his single large province while other warlords consolidated their realms. Thus, by 211 C.E., he found himself surrounded by enemies. Cao Cao’s state of Wei and Sun Quan’s kingdom of Wu both hungrily eyed Sichuan from afar. But of more immediate concern was Zhang Lu. His state, centered in Hanzhong, controlled the route that connected Sichuan to the north, leaving Liu Zhang particularly vulnerable to attack from that direction. Liu Zhang’s solution was to ask Liu Bei to enter Sichuan with his army in order to defend the region from the northern threat. However, war soon broke out between the two Lius. In 214, Liu Bei won the war, established himself as ruler of Sichuan, and founded the Shu-Han state, the third (alongside Wu and Wei) of the eponymous Three Kingdoms.
Zhang Lu, having enjoyed a ringside seat to the drama of the land’s threefold division would soon find himself in the middle of it. His state was now directly in between two powers that were mortal enemies. Since Hanzhong was the gateway to Sichuan, controlling it could give either Shu-Han or Wei the decisive advantage in their war. Furthermore, the Hanning region was the birthplace of the Han Dynasty, and thus acquiring it would serve to bolster the imperial ambitions both states had for themselves. Besides, each knew that by taking Hanzhong, they would keep it out of the other’s hands, and that was a victory in itself. As such, as Liu Bei established himself in Sichuan, both he and Cao Cao turned their gaze toward Zhang Lu, the Five Pecks of Rice movement, and Hanzhong.
Cao Cao struck first. In 215, as an immediate reaction to Liu Bei’s successful conquest of Sichuan, Cao Cao invaded Hanning and marched on Hanzhong. Military resistance to the much stronger Wei force proved disastrous for the Five Pecks of Rice. Cao Cao demanded surrender. At this time, Liu Bei got involved, offering to take Zhang Lu under his protection if the Celestial Master would flee with his army to Sichuan. Zhang Lu found himself in an unenviable situation. According to the main historical chronicle of the time, the Sanguozhi (Records of the Three Kingdoms), “He was torn between immediate surrender to Cao, struggling on his own … or to go at least temporarily westward – to Liu Bei” (qtd. in Goodman 23). Initially, he chose Liu Bei. The Celestial Master accepted Liu’s offer and began moving south toward Sichuan. According to the Hou Hanshu (History of the Later Han) “Liu Bei appointed Huang Quan to lead all his generals to welcome Lu. Lu had already returned to Nanzheng in his northward surrender to Cao Cao” (qtd. in Goodman 23-24). Zhang Lu’s mind had changed. He headed northward once again and finally surrendered to Cao Cao in September of 215.
A document produced by Wei a few years later in support of the ascension of Cao Cao’s heir to the imperial throne acknowledges that Zhang Lu did not believe that the Cao family had inherited the Mandate of Heaven. Thus, the reason for his choosing Cao Cao must have been entirely pragmatic, based on Cao Cao’s greater power and control of the Han court. Still, choose Cao Cao he did, and for this he was rewarded with a title and post in the Wei administration. Liu Bei responded by launching his own invasion of Hanzhong a few years afterward. He would defeat Cao Cao in their final direct encounter and claim the Hanning region for himself. In imitation of the Han Dynasty’s founder, he took the title of King of Hanzhong and subsequently used this as the basis to declare himself Han Emperor in 221.
Zhang Lu died in 219. Wei lost Hanzhong to Shu-Han the same year. However, during the brief time the Hanning region was under his rule, Cao Cao expelled the Five Pecks of Rice sect from the region, sending Zhang Lu, his family, and most of his followers to Cao’s base of Ye near the imperial capital of Luoyang. His intention was to neutralize the movement and sap its power. But the opposite happened. Being sent into the Chinese heartland allowed the Celestial Master sect to spread throughout the populous cities of northern China. In addition, Cao Cao’s actions placed the Celestial Masters in both physical as well as social proximity to the imperial court at Luoyang. This soon led to a political partnership with the Wei regime. An early Celestial Master text, the Da daojia lingjie, reveals that Zhang Lu’s heirs offered to use their spiritual influence to legitimize Cao Pi’s overthrow of the Han Emperor Xian in 220 if the new Wei Dynasty would grant them authority over the Taoist faith. By lending religious support to Wei’s claim to the Mandate of Heaven, the Celestial Masters tightly intertwined themselves with the new ruling dynasty.
The consequences would be tremendous. The Celestial Master school was no longer restricted to a single limited area but became popular throughout the north of China. When the Jin Dynasty, which replaced Wei, was forced to flee the north a century later, the sect followed them southward and had soon penetrated every part of the country. The entanglement of the Celestial Masters with the imperial court continued and their relationship with successive dynasties only grew stronger. Like the Christian Church in the west, the movement shed most of its apocalyptic and revolutionary character in order to focus on institution building and bolstering the powers-that-be. In return, they were granted more and more influence over the religious life of the nation. When the Northern Wei Dynasty—a different dynasty than the by-then-defunct Wei of the Three Kingdoms—became the first to adopt Taoism as the state religion at the end of the fourth century, it was the Taoism of the Celestial Masters that they enshrined.
The rest is, as they say, history. The Celestial Masters turned Taoism into an organized religion, giving it a priesthood and a set of rituals. With the backing of the imperial court, Celestial Master Taoism—later known as Zhengyi—became the orthodox and mainstream form of the faith. Today, it remains one of the two main branches of the Taoist religion alongside the monastic Quanzhen school. As for the Celestial Masters themselves, the direct descendants of Zhang Daoling and Zhang Lu, they had by the Song Dynasty acquired so much power and prestige that Western scholars were once in the habit of referring to them as the “Taoist Papacy.” For the next thousand years, the Zhang Celestial Master was the highest Taoist official in the land with unparalleled access to the Emperor himself. He even enjoyed the exclusive privilege of selecting Taoist priests for the imperial court, a prerogative the Celestial Master would maintain right up to the end of the imperial system in the twentieth century.
This all happened because of Liu Bei and Cao Cao’s squabbling over Hanzhong in the 210s. Had that situation not played out exactly as it did, it is difficult to imagine Zhang Lu’s heirs rising to such dizzying heights or his sect becoming the normative and regular form of Taoism. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms portrays the conflict between Liu Bei and Cao Cao as an event of world-historical significance. Scholars, particularly western scholars, like to scoff at this, but in the case of Taoism, the portrayal is accurate. If not for Liu Bei and Cao Cao’s rivalry and the particular manner in which it unfolded, a major world religion would look completely different today. Who knows what path Taoism would have taken if not for those two warlords jockeying for position in western China in the third century C.E.
The Celestial Masters’ choice to actively support the imperial ambitions of Cao Cao’s family was fortuitous, since it began their long and prosperous relationship with the ruling dynasties of China. That relationship, in turn, earned them so much popular respect that they did not suffer at all by association in the later periods of Chinese history when Cao Cao’s name became a byword for tyranny, treachery, and usurpation. However, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms did not let them get away so easily. Zhang Lu appears as a major character in the chapters of the novel that focus on Liu Bei’s taking of Sichuan and founding of Shu-Han. His importance to this sequence of events is clearly acknowledged; indeed, the novel even inflates it. Zhang Lu is now the sole reason that Liu Zhang invites Liu Bei to Sichuan. As the text explains: “Liu Zhang and Zhang Lu were enemies, for the protector had killed Lu’s mother and younger brother … Informed by the governor that Zhang Lu meant to march on the Riverlands, the protector, a timid sort, became unnerved and confused” (Luo 1025). Liu Zhang says as much in his written invitation to Liu Bei when he complains that “Zhang Lu’s army on our northern front gives me no peace” (1041). As the chief instigator of events in Sichuan and a military threat in his own right, Zhang Lu emerges as a far more powerful and significant ruler than he had been in history.
This does not mean that the novel’s portrayal of him is positive. Far from it. The Zhang Lu of the Romance is vindictive, indecisive, and foolish. Like so many of the would-be warlords that populate its pages, he possesses great flaws that prove his undoing. It is no surprise that the novel portrays Zhang Lu so negatively, given that he functions as an antagonist to Liu Bei and ultimately joins Cao Cao. What is more surprising, however, is that the book’s ire is not limited to Zhang Lu himself. Zhang Lu’s more famous relation comes in for his share of criticism. The novel states quite baldly, “His grandfather, Zhang Ling, the Taoist of the Swan Call Hills in the Riverlands, led people astray with faked miracles that won him a great name” (1022-23). In short, according to the Romance, the first Celestial Master was no sage, but a mere charlatan unworthy of the “great name” history has bestowed upon him.
This is a stunning statement. It is not unprecedented, for the novel seems to be drawing on a similar passage found in the Hou Hanshu. But it is still a remarkable thing to include in a novel at this time. Zhang Daoling was still universally revered when the novel was being written, with Taoists throughout the land invoking his supernatural aid. The reigning Celestial Master of the day still proudly trumpeted his descent from Daoling and the Emperor still patronized his cult. Zhengyi Taoism based its claim to universal authority entirely upon Zhang Daoling’s having received that authority from Laozi in a mystical vision. And here was the novel’s author saying that Daoling had faked his visions and other miracles. If this was true, then the Celestial Masters had no basis for the power and prestige they currently enjoyed. The existence of the whole Taoist church, the organized, institutional side of the faith, would be completely invalidated. Eleven centuries of development would stand upon a lie.
It should be noted that the novel’s repetition of the Hou Hanshu‘s claim about Zhang Daoling is not simply a knee-jerk reaction to a band of dangerous sectarians. The long description of the Five Pecks of Rice that immediately follows the charge against Daoling is surprisingly positive, noting both the sect’s concern for the public welfare as well as the forgiveness they extend to wrongdoers. Nor is the novel necessarily opposed to claims of magic powers or millennial revelations—the Taoist sage Zuo Ci is positively portrayed as getting the better of Cao Cao through magic and even Zhang Jiao’s encounter with Zhuangzi is treated as genuine. Nor is it simply a matter of fidelity to the Hou Hanshu. The novelist freely departed from his sources when it suited him and could have easily done so here if he felt the attack on Zhang Daoling was too strong. But he did not, and thus the critique likely reflects his own sentiments. Perhaps what angered the novelist was that, unlike these other individuals, Daoling succeeded at turning Taoism into an organized religion. As we have seen, the author is quite fond of reclusive Taoist sages and seems to have nostalgia for the time when their way of life was the primary manifestation of Taoist faith. Naturally, that was a time which the ascendancy of the Celestial Masters brought to a close. Possibly, then, it was a corresponding sense of resentment that caused him to strike out at Zhang Daoling.
Regardless of his motivations and the nice things he otherwise had to say about the sect, to repeat the Hou Hanshu‘s attack on Zhang Daoling was to attack Zhengyi Taoism as a whole. It was like someone telling a member of the Catholic Church that St. Peter was a fraud. And this was the most popular novel in the country denouncing its most popular religious institution, an institution that enjoyed the full backing and support of the Emperor and his court. Without official action, generations of Chinese would read those damaging words. But the novelist, for his part, was playing with fire, as was his Qing Dynasty editor when he left the line in. It was a striking departure from their usual deference to imperial rule. The resulting situation had the potential to be explosive.
But then nothing happened. The novel continued to be embraced by Chinese society at large, including the imperial court. The Celestial Masters lost none of the prestige and reverence they were accustomed to from both the court and the populace. Indeed, no one seems to have taken much notice of the book’s denunciation of one of China’s most beloved religious figures. The passage on Zhang Daoling seems largely to have been overlooked. Still, it is there for all to read. Those who read it will be reminded of a time when the future of Taoism was still unsettled and impossible to predict, and will feel a little of that uncertainty themselves. In that sense, the novel’s judgment on Zhang Daoling is a fitting reminder of how Taoism’s fate itself was decided by the events chronicled in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
The Celestial Master episode, it must be said, reveals a great deal about how Cao Cao and Wei responded to millennialist thinking. But what about Liu Bei and Shu-Han? What was their response to the millennialist climate of their times?
The answer will be revealed in our next entry. Read on.
A Note on Sources
A number of sources have proven invaluable in the writing of this entry. First place in that list much go to the remarkable scholarship of Anna Seidel which has so thoroughly documented the origins and early development of Taoist millennialism. The lines quoted above are from Seidel’s insightful article, “Taoist Messianism,” (Numen, vol. 31, no. 2., 1984).
I have also quoted from Barbara Hendrischke, “The Daoist Utopia of Great Peace,” (Oriens Extremus vol. 35, no. 1/2, 1992).
Hubert Seiwert’s Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2003) is an indispensable resource for sketching the development of Chinese eschatological and millennialist thought. It offers an almost encyclopedic survey of the many millenarian movements, ideas, and individuals that have existed throughout China’s long history.
Because my copy of the Sanguozhi is abridged and does not include Zhang Lu’s biography, I have relied upon the accounting of historical events given by Howard L. Goodman in “Celestial-Master Taoism and the Founding of the Ts’ao Wei Dynasty: The Li Fu Document,” (Asia Major, Third Series, vol. 7, no. 1, 1994). The translations of the relevant passages in the Sanguozhi and Hou Hanshu quoted above are also Goodman’s. I have, however, taken the liberty of converting all proper names from the old Wade-Giles renderings into Pinyin for the sake of consistency.
In addition, two of Vincent Goossaert’s articles, “Bureaucratic Charisma: The Zhang Heavenly Master Institution and Court Taoists in Late-Qing China,” (Asia Major, Third Series, vol. 17, no. 2, 2004) and “The Heavenly Master, Canonization, and the Daoist Construction of Local Religion in Late Imperial Jiangnan,” (Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie, vol. 20, 2011),
And, once again, my edition of the novel is Three Kingdoms, attributed to Luo Guanzhong and translated by Moss Roberts (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2003).
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