Mānī on the Margins: a Brief History of Manichaeism in Southeastern China

Mānī (216–ca. 277 AD), the founder of Manichaeism, was brought up in a Jewish-Christian community at the end of the Arsacid dynasty. After several private revelations, he established his own religion, which he and his disciples propagated in the newly established Sasanian Iran. Spreading east along the Silk Road, Manichaeism arrived in China in 694, where it remained basically a religio licita until 843. After the Huichang persecution (843–845), Manichaeans found a relatively safe harbour in the southeastern regions, especially in present-day Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, where they survived for centuries, as reports from the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties attest. In this paper, after summarizing the main events before the Huichang persecution, I give an overview of what the historical sources recording various manifestations of southeastern Manichaeism tell us about the latest form of Manichaeism, which uniquely survived in this peripheral region at a time, when it had completely disappeared from other parts of the world. This overview differs from other similar endeavours in that it also incorporates some new developments that were inspired by the discovery of a new corpus of texts from Xiapu and Pingnan counties, where it was the figure of Lin Deng (1003‒1059), who played a pivotal role to preserve the Manichaean heritage of the Tang.