Silk and Memes

 

Xinru Liu’s Silk and Religion

 

For someone interested in the topic, Xinru Liu’s Silk and Religion[i] provides not only solid scholarly work, but (equally important) a lot of interesting anecdotes and tidbits of trivia  -- e.g., Bishop Liutprand’s arrest by the Byzantines for trying to smuggle out holy tapestries, or the Venetian abduction of St. Mark’s remains from Alexandria.

 

Her basic story is about the Eurasian silk trade between about 600 AD and about 1200 AD. She shows how silk came to be one of the chief markers of wealth, holiness and high status from one end of Eurasia to another, often even functioning as a form of currency rather than as a trade item.

 

She gives special attention to the connections between silk, elaborate funeral ceremonies, and relic-worship both in the Buddhist world of China, Central Asia and India, and also in Christian Byzantium and Western Europe. (In the Muslim world tombs were also worshipped, but Liu does not mention silk as part of this Muslim practice).

 

Several points occurred to me as I read this book. One is that terms like “Christianity” are pretty nominal. While it might just barely be possible, by studying elite statements of doctrine, to construct an intelligible story of what Christianity has been for the last two thousand years, once you look at popular practices, whatever coherence you found that way will disappear. Relic-worship and related practices are not part of the scriptures of Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, and insofar as they relate to these three doctrines, they seem more to be contrary to them than otherwise. And in fact these practices, which were heavily intertwined with magic and superstition, were often condemned by the orthodox when they first appeared.[iii]

 

Second, during much of the story it is sometimes hard to distinguish between religion, politics, trade, wartime looting, and even banditry. A traveller seeking silk, sutras, or relics might be a pilgrim, an ambassador, a soldier, or a merchant, and he might obtain them (often in exchange for something of value) from a monastery, a prince, a merchant, or a thief. While relics and sutras got some of their merit from the purity of their origins, they also were regarded as having magical powers of purification -- and while superstition inhibited some bandits and burglars, it didn't affect all of them, so there was a considerable black market in holy objects.[iv]

  

In all three cultural zones, religion performed state functions, and the state claimed religious sanction and subsidized organized religion. The church and the state were competing and interdependent forms of elite order which usually cooperated in trying as best they could to control or accommodate the actual popular practices. During the periods of political disunity, religion seems to have made international trade (specifically the silk trade) possible even in the absence of political order, and the silk trade continued even during the European Dark Ages and during the three centuries of Chinese disunity which followed the fall of the Han. When unifiers like Charlemagne came along, they allied themselves with the established religious leaders, supporting and protecting them in return for legitimation. And religious orthodoxy, when there was any, seems usually to have been the  result of state enforcement and appeared only after political unity has been achieved.[v]

 

Finally, long-distance trade seems especially susceptible to analysis as the diffusion of memes.[vi]  China, India, the Islamic world, Byzantium, and Catholic Europe -- especially China and Europe --  were, on the whole, isolated from one another, with only little windows of trade. (Before Marco Polo’s age there is no record of person-to-person communication between Chinese and Europeans). Thus, the specifics transmitted can be more easily disentangled during the early period than in the later case of massive influence. 

 

These meme transmissions are not limited to mere physical artifacts. From Liu’s presentation it seems that not only silk, but also the use of silk as winding sheets or grave goods in elite funerals spread west from China to the other cultural areas, and it seems possible that aspects of the cult of relics also spread west from the Buddhist or the Chinese world. In the other direction, purple silk, which had long been a preeminent luxury product in Rome (and the stereotype symbol for luxurious excess)[vii], and which had eventually come to be reserved for royalty and the highest clergy, was promoted during the internationalist Buddhist T’ang dynasty in China from its former rather lowly position in court ceremonial to the second most exalted place in the heierarchy.

 

There’s a lot more in this book, as well as in Liu’s other book about the ancient relations between India and China, so if you’re at all interested in the topic, I highly recommend them both.

 

 

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NOTES


 

[i] Liu Xinru, Silk and Religion, Oxford, 1996. Her other book is  Ancient India and Ancient China, Oxford, 1988. Another excellent, somewhat similar book about a later period is Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony (Oxford, 1989.)

 

[no ii]
 

[iii] Matthew 23:27 seems particularly inhospitable to relic worship: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.”

 

Liu gives examples of churchmen adapting themselves to pre-Christian practice, as do Richard Fletcher (The Barbarian Conversion, California, 1997) James C. Russell (The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, Oxford, 1994).  

 

Steven Sangren (History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community, Stanford, 1987) and Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (Death and the Regeneration of Life, Cambridge, 1982) describe many different cultures'  popular beliefs about the magical  powers residing in human relics. Some of these beliefs come from entirely outside the zone of civilized religion, and it’s reasonable to conclude that these were widespread archaic beliefs which the founders (Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammed) and their elite followers were not fully able to overcome.

 

Bloch and Parry hypothesize that elaborate funerals and worship of relics and graves correlate with agriculture and with landownership as the standard of wealth. Chinese studies have similiarly concluded that the more elaborate forms of ancestor worship are practiced mostly by wealthy families which benefit economically if the land inherited from the ancestors is collectively owned. (For Confucians, the kinds of theologically-suspect funerary practices Liu discusses are orthodox, since Confucius intended to revive and reform traditional practices, rather than to found a new religion as the others did.)
 

[iv] What Karl Polanyi (Trade and Market in the Early Empires, Gateway, 1957) says about the different forms of pre-modern trade is relevant here.
 

[v] The roles of Constantine, Charlemagne, Kanishka, Asoka, and others in the establishment of orthodoxy are well known, and the Christianization of Scandinavia was a royal project with diplomatic overtones (as was that of Lithuania). I think that Tibetan religion, in its astonishing diversity, also follows the model I have suggested. During much of history the Tibetan government has been weak, and it has been suggested that Tibet was, in fact, a stateless society. The supposed primacy of the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama (and the doctrines they follow) is a function of their relationship to China, and is significant to the extent that China is in control. (The first Dalai Lama was established by Chinggis Qan, and “Dalai” in fact is a Mongol word). Other religious sects do not necessarily acknowledge the religious primacy of these two men and their monasteries, and there are many individuals creditted with religious powers whose relationship to any of the sects is uncertain.. (Jeffrey Samuel, Civilized Shamans, Smithsonian, 1993; "Tibet as a Stateless Society and Some Islamic Parallels", Journal of Asian Studies, XLI No. 2, February 1982, pp. 215-229).

[vi] “Meme” in educated pop English just means “some phrase which disseminates very quickly, even among people who don’t understand it”. This usage is subtly pejorative, meaning something like “cliché”, and is mostly used for what might be called neo-clichés. However, “memes” are not just ideas, but can be any item which is culturally rather than genetically transmitted: agricultural practices, weapons,  tools, materials, forms of government, scientific theories, new crops, ways of cooking, and so on.

Originally it was hoped that memes would have that analytic power that atoms and genes have in their respective areas of study, and when this turned out not to be true it was sometimes  concluded that the "meme" meme really isn’t worth much. However, I disagree. One value of memetics is that it allows the separate discussion of natural and cultural causation. While the form of the concept is taken from genetics, what it actually does is to separate cultural history from biological evolution, and the idea that memetics is a form of genetic reductionism is the opposite of the truth.

The big value of memetics, in my opinion, is that it provides an escape from cultural holism, and allows you to treat quantums of culture as units. A memic description of the cultural transmissions between China and Catholic Europe before Marco Polo would consist of a manageably small number of elements. When discussing the Buddhist influence on China, for example, the number of units would be much larger, and when discussing the Sinification of Japan the meme-count would be enormous. Even in the case of Japan, however, it would be possible to look for Chinese memes which did not come across, and compare them to those which did, and similarly to look at old-Japanese non-Chinese memes which survived, and compare them to the ones which perished. This strikes me as a potentially productive way of looking at intercultural exchange.

 

[vii] For example, Statius:

 

“….et altis ipsa toris Serum Tyrioque umbrata recumbit tegmine….”

 

“On a raised bed, the work of the Seres [Chinese], she rested under the purple of Tyre.”  "Seres" means "people of silk".

 

(George Coedes, Testimonia of Greek and Latin Writers on the Lands and Peoples of the Far East, Ares reprint, 1979, p. 20).

 

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All original material copyright John J. Emerson 

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