Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (19 page)

Hungli's view of the Buddhist clergy was colored by prudish NeoConfucian attitudes toward sex. Of course, the clergy's own internal
regulations required chastity, and the Ch'ing Code prescribed special
penalties for monks who lured married women into adultery. Yet
clerical fornication seems to have evoked from Hungli a particular
loathing and vindictiveness. In 1768 a monk near Nanking was
accused of having sexual relations with several married peasant
women. Governor-general G'aojin noted that the Nanking area
"easily harbors criminal monks (chien-seng)," because there were so
many clerical establishments that it was hard to keep track of them
all. Accordingly, G'aojin had his county officials keep alert for bad
clerical behavior. Authorities near Nanking discovered that the
present culprit, a "depraved monk," had been engaging in such
conduct for years and had even bribed a local headman not to report
it. He had also amassed considerable wealth by renting out plots of
his monastery's land to tenants. "For such a depraved monk to amass
wealth and flout the law at will [through sexual misconduct] is a great
injury to the morals of the community," wrote G'aojin. The ordinary
penalties in the Ch'ing Code seemed insufficient for this culprit, who
should, he recommended, he sent to Ili to serve as a slave in the
military colonies. Hungli replied that even such a penalty would be
"too light." "Such depraved and evil monks have long injured local
morals." The culprit should be "beaten to death immediately in order
to make manifest Our punishments. How can he deserve anything
more lenient?" G'aojin replied that he was indeed to blame for recommending too light a sentence. Not only would the criminal be
beaten to death, but it would be done in the presence of all the monks of Nanking, as a warning to them all. Two-thirds of the monastery's
property was to be confiscated.45

This bloody one-upsmanship between Hungli and his imperial inlaw suggests that monk-bashing was a source of moral satisfaction for
rulers who considered the clergy to be mostly hypocrites and corrupters of the community. Such expectations of clerical behavior made
it plausible to connect them with other harmful and immoral activities, such as sorcery. Aggravated by officials' alarm over what they
perceived to be an alarming growth of the clerical underclass,
described in Chapter 2, these imperial fears of the clergy were made
to order for a nationwide sorcerer-hunt. Along with beggars, the
clergy, particularly those in small temples or out on the road, were
among China's most vulnerable groups, with no protection forthcoming from kin or community. But why were the general public
such avid participants in the persecution of 1768?

Clergy, Beggars, and the Common Man

In view of the prominent place of Buddhist monks among sorcery
suspects in the 1768 scare, it is somewhat surprising that the two
major eighteenth-century collections of supernatural tales (by P'u
Sung-ling and Yuan Mei) picture the Buddhist clergy as relatively
benign. Sorcery aplenty is attributed to Taoists, such as the homicidal
Taoist beggar depicted at the beginning of this chapter. By contrast,
Buddhists are attacked mainly for hypocrisy or for immorality (particularly sexual license-a theme common in European anticlericalism). The phrase "sorcerous Taoists and licentious Buddhists" (yaotao yin-seng) sums up the difference.46 We shall have to look beneath
the level of elite story-writers to discover a plausible source for popular fears of monks.''

In a society fearful of strangers, several aspects of monks' lives
seem to have placed them in harm's way. One is the long, sometimes
permanent condition of being a novice: the period between taking
the tonsure ("leaving the family"-ch'u-chia) and receiving ordination.
Although being ordained required a long period of study under a
master (a senior monk) and generally had to he completed in one of
the elite "public monasteries," becoming a novice was relatively easy
and informal. The subject pronounced his intention of renouncing
lay life, had his head shaved by his tonsure-master (the "master" or
shih-fu who would now be responsible for his training), and began to observe the "ten prohibitions" (chastity, vegetarianism, and so on).
Having left his own family, he now acquired a monastic "family," in
which his master served as a surrogate parent and his fellow novices
as brothers. A very large proportion of monks were brought up in
the monastic life from adolescence. Their training generally took
place in small "hereditary" temples: those run by monastic "families"
and passed down from one generation to the next. Only years later,
if at all, was a monk ordained at one of the large "public" monasteries.

In the meantime the novice was part of a large intermediate
stratum of the unordained, a stratum easily entered and indeed easily
exited. Although classified by the state (and by society at large) as a
"monk" (seng), he was forbidden to reside in any of the large, elite
monasteries. Such "monks" probably constituted the majority of the
Buddhist clergy, and most soulstealing suspects (including two of the
Hsiao-shan monks; see Chapter i) were in fact of this group. The
government's suspicions centered on such men, and it would not be
surprising to find that popular fears ran along the same channels:
these were men in limbo, neither of the orthodox family system nor
of the certified clerical elite. This fact should lead us to question the
usefulness of the designation "monk," which was used in government
documents to describe virtually anyone with a robe and a shaved
head, whatever his state of religious commitment or education. Many
of these men, or perhaps even most of them, were not unambiguously
in any of the approved categories that gave bureaucrats the reassuring idea that they had society under control.

Rootlessness was another suspicious mark of the novice. Once tonsured, he was often cast into the life of the road. The search for
religious instruction, or a pilgrimage to pay respects to the grave of
an "ancestor" of his monastic family, were common reasons for travel.
Another, perhaps the most common, was begging: small temples
commonly lacked enough land endowment to support their inhabitants, and lacking adequate donations or fees from requiem masses,
begging was the only way out. Monastic begging was not universally
approved (some monasteries forbade it), and attitudes toward mendicant monks were sometimes not much different from those toward
beggars in general."Nevertheless, eighteenth-century documents
show that begging monks were everywhere to be seen.

Popular attitudes toward monks were probably conditioned by both
of these situations: the ambiguous status of the novices (of the sangha
but not really in it), and by the general ambivalence toward begging (an occupation of the rootless and shiftless, yet somehow sanctified
by the holy poverty of the clergy). Toward Taoist priests, popular
attitudes were probably more unreservedly fearful.

Taoist practitioners were conventionally associated with various
forms of magic (alchemy, exorcism, and the search for immortality).
This made them logical suspects when the "evil arts" were at issue.
Although their normal community functions were such benign practices as healing-exorcism, their demonic role in fiction suggests that
magical arts were considered to be turned readily to evil uses.49
Buddhist monks, whose main community function was assisting the
souls of the departed through the underworld, were not sorcerers in
quite the same sense, which may explain their relative benignity in
popular stories. Yet we may wonder whether, in the popular mind,
the various sorts of ritual specialists were as sharply distinguished
when they were strangers to the community. Wandering Buddhist
monks might have seemed unpredictable and inscrutable, for
example, when compared with monks based in a local temple whom
everyone saw at neighborhood funerals. And it takes little imagination to perceive the menace of a "wandering Taoist." Local ritual
specialists were comparatively "safe," in that their community roles
were known. Indeed the neighborhood exorcist probably seemed
about as threatening as the family doctor. But outsiders were another
matter. To them might reasonably attach more general suspicions
about people with special ritual powers.

Where commoners might fear ritual specialists for their magic,
gentry scorned them for their shiftlessness. A collection of lineage
homilies from Chekiang points out that every occupation has its
"principle of livelihood" (sheng-li), whether scholar, farmer, artisan,
or merchant. "But then there are those lazy, idle drifters who wander
about as Buddhist monks, Taoist priests, vagrants, or ruffians, who
are registered in no native place. These people are not living
according to any principle of livelihood. There is no `principle' for
living without a principle of livelihood, just stealing a living from
Heaven and Earth."50

The taint of death pollution. An authority on Cantonese society writes
that funerary priests (in this case, roughly speaking, Taoist) bear a
definite social stigma "because of the nature of their work," rather
like morticians in our own society. "Their neighbors ... are never
completely comfortable in their presence." The reason is the death
pollution that is thought to adhere to their bodies. Even though these priests "make every effort to avoid direct contact with the corpse or
with the coffin," they cannot wholly dissociate themselves from the
dangerously polluting aspect of their profession.5' Ritual specialists
in the community make their living particularly at funerals, a job that
puts them continually near the coffins of the newly dead. We have,
as yet, no confirmation that fear of death pollution, so evident in
South China, contributed to popular ambivalence toward the clergy
in the rest of the country, but we cannot rule it out.

The sorcerer as outsider. The mix of reverence and fear in which
commoners held ritual specialists is especially meaningful in the light
of the clerical underclass of late imperial times. Wanderers with
special spiritual powers were a unique sort of danger, and perhaps
(given Min 0-yuan's account) an increasingly visible one by the mideighteenth century. Studies of other cultures suggest that sorcery is
often imputed to outsiders: Alan Macfarlane notes, on the basis of
African and English data, that "men who wander about the country"
are natural targets of sorcery accusations.52 Sorcery, which (unlike
witchcraft) involves no innate powers but merely the manipulation
of magic techniques, is essentially impersonal: the evil done is more
like vandalism than vendetta. The absence of community ties therefore would make wandering mendicants (whether clerical or lay)
logical suspects. Though they would lack a personal motive, they
would also lack social inhibitions and community responsibilities. Add
to this the xenophobia of the peasant villager toward outsiders of
any sort, and sorcery is quite a reasonable fear.53

In Chinese popular religion, the pervasive fear of aliens is
expressed in the serious ritual business of propitiating "ghosts" (kuei).
These are conceived as unattached spirits who lack the family ties
that would otherwise provide the sacrifices that would ease their
distress and dispel their rancor. Dangerous social and political marginality in the yang or temporal world is closely associated with dangerous spiritual marginality (ghostliness) in the yin or shadow world.54

In the cases of 1768, foreignness was nearly always a detonator of
soulstealing panic. It was often noticed, at first contact, as linguistic
difference, by which strangers were instantly marked. Here the contrast with shamanism could not be sharper. In Cantonese communities, for example, shamans must be well-established members of the
community in order to perform their job, which is to hold at bay the
malevolent spirits of the discontented dead: a task that requires intimate knowledge of village social relationships.55 It appears that "good" or "safe" ritual specialists (community priests, shamans) must
be community members, whereas "bad" or "dangerous" ones (sorcerers) cannot be. If so, it is likely either that fear naturally attaches
to aliens, or that sorcery accusations within the community would be
so harmful to social relations that they cannot be permitted-or
perhaps even conceived of. Hence it is upon the stranger that suspicion must fall.56

The Social Terrorism of Beggars

In one respect, mendicant clergy were more vulnerable to sorcery
charges than were lay beggars. Those who make a profession of
communicating with the spirit world can readily be imagined to have
ways of making spirit forces serve their personal ends: the very stuff
of sorcery. Nevertheless, sorcery charges were also leveled at many
lay beggars during the soulstealing panic. Most often they were
merely doing the legwork for evil monks (going about clipping
queues for them). Fear of beggars, however, had nothing to do with
mastery of ritual "techniques." Quite the opposite: it was their ritual
invulnerability that made them dangerous.

Monks and beggars were the poorest and most defenseless groups
in Chinese society. They were supported by no influential kinsmen,
they had little or no economic reserves. Monks, as we have seen, had
such important functions in community ritual that they could not be
dispensed with. But how were beggars able to persist in their way of
life despite public scorn and loathing? The reason seems to be that,
however helpless in the respectable social world, they had the power
to make the public fear them. People had two reasons to fear beggars:
"contamination" and "ritual sabotage," which are in fact closely
related.

Contamination. Dread of contamination enabled a beggar to make
people pay to keep him at a distance. What all observers agree was
a carefully cultivated (and conventional) filthy and ragged appearance-the beggars' uniform, as it were-may have excited pity, but
also stirred revulsion; people shunned a beggar's touch. This practical
concern to avoid diseases (such as running sores, which beggars
ostentatiously displayed) was closely joined to a fear of spiritual pollution. The death of a beggar on one's premises could have "drastic
cosmological implications," because his ghost would then have to be
exorcised at some expense and with dubious effect.'' The job of pallbearers, conventionally allotted to beggars, also tainted them with
death pollution, which was good to stay away from. To be "touched"
for money by such people was preferable to being touched physically.