thodox traditions posit the arrival of the next buddha,
Maitreya, in the remote future, the notion of a mes-
siah who incarnates in a corrupt world to wash away
the existing order has been taken more immediately at
a popular level. In the fourteenth century, the White
Lotus society developed expectations of the imminent
arrival of Maitreya that required a cleansing of the evil
political regime. The White Lotus Rebellion, which oc-
curred in China from 1796 to 1805, was just such an
attempt. Many states have been suspicious of religious
secret societies, including those with Buddhist roots.
In some cases Buddhist institutions openly maintained
large standing armies; in Japan, powerful monasteries
accumulated land holdings so large that they effectively
became feudal domains, complete with taxation and
militias. When Japan was unified by force in the six-
teenth century, it was inevitable that warlords such as
Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582) came to face Buddhist
institutions in battle, especially the Jodo shinshu. Dur-
ing the Tokugawa period (1600–1868), local monas-
teries and temples came to function as organs of the
state, so that anti-Buddhism overlapped with nativism
and new versions of Shinto. The strong association of
Buddhism and the Tokugawa regime led to a persecu-
tion and widespread destruction of Buddhism in the
years after the Meiji restoration of 1868.
The relations of monk and ruler
Although the san ̇gha has had much to gain from good
relations with political rulers, in an ideal sense monks
are supposed to be uninterested in material wealth.
The legendary story of BODHIDHARMAmeeting Em-
peror Wu of the Liang (r. 502–550) has the great pa-
triarch of the CHAN SCHOOLbluntly dismissing the
salvific potency of all the emperor’s wealth: All the
donations to build temples and copy scriptures pro-
duced no merit at all. Furthermore, the ideal monk
was supposed to be unaffected by the threat of vio-
lence represented by the ruler. Lore has developed in
which the heroic monk casually brushes aside any
hint of fear. The monk SENGZHAO(374–414), for ex-
ample, faced with the threat of execution, recited a
verse to the ruler:
The four elements originally have no master;
The five skandhas are basically empty.
When my head meets the white blade,
It will merely be like beheading the spring
wind.Placed in a situation of conflict with the civil author-
ities, threatened with the possibility of physical pun-
ishment and death, Sengzhao used his words to convey
a simple message: The body is empty, so killing me
would be useless and cannot even frighten me; you ul-
timately cannot kill me, because there is no “me” to
kill. The basic trope then, is the use of the idea of S ́UNY-
ATA‚ (EMPTINESS) during a display of virtuous bravado
in the face of an overbearing ruler.This ability to speak truth to power was in part de-
rived from Buddhist anthropology and the cultivation
of nonattachment, but also from the position of the
monk as “outside” or “beyond” the world. Indeed, at
times the foreignness of Buddhism was embraced
and displayed: Monks—even native-born monks—
described themselves as fangwai zhi bin(guests from
outside the boundaries) who come from outside the
imperial domain. The analogy of exteriority is evident
also in the term chujia(left the household), although
this was also quite literally true—clerics were indeed
absent from the home. As Stephen Teiser remarks:
“The power of monks—their ability to enrich sub-
stantially the welfare of the family—depends upon
their social placement outside of the family” (p. 205).
The same could be said of their placement outside of
the political realm.There were moments when the ritual practices of
clerics were in direct physical contact with other, in-
compatible, systems of behavior. For example, in
China, Confucian imperial guest ritual conflicted with
the vinaya—as when a monk refused to bow to the
ruler. Yet at these moments of obvious physical pres-
ence, we find the otherness of the monk admitted, in-
deed emphasized. The claim of belonging to some
authority “outside the boundaries” was at the same
time the claim to a site within the realm, from which
to speak of the ruler as if from outside his realm.The strength of this assertion relied on the tradition
of legal privileges accorded to foreign visitors (for ex-
ample, visiting princes). Hereditary kinship with the
ruler of a foreign state brought a number of privileges,
such as partial noncompliance with imperial ritual,
and partial extraterritoriality. Buddhist discourses of-
ten analogized monks to high-ranking representatives
of a “ruler,” the Buddha. Monks are the Buddha’s
“sons,” his “crown princes,” and so should, by anal-
ogy, have diplomatic immunity or extraterritoriality.
Buddha is an emperor (of the dharma), and monks
(his heirs) are princes, and thus the authoritative
ambassadors of his words. In China, even as heavenPOLITICS ANDBUDDHISM