The Evolution of the Buddhist Otherworld Empire in Early Medieval China

The perception of the afterlife as a mirror image of the living world is a widespread religious phenomenon among civilisations. As this mirror-image relation is conditioned by the natural and social surroundings of each cultural milieu, particular questions arise when a religion is translated from one cultural domain to another, as Buddhism was into China. One of the most striking aspects of popular Chinese Buddhism is the ubiquity of purgatorial and penitential liturgies that are performed as part of funerals, ancestral worship and religious festivals and involve communication with a bureaucratic pantheon for the sake of the well-being of the deceased and the living. This otherworld authority takes the form of a pre-modern Chinese bureaucratic empire ruled by the Indian Buddhist and local Chinese deities. This article attempts to unravel the evolution of the Buddhist use of this Chinese imperial metaphor in the period before the emergence of the more fully fledged imperial image presented in the Scripture of the Ten Kings during the medieval period. By examining early archaeological and mortuary texts, I will first show how the development of the “imperial metaphor” of otherworld authority began once Chinese feudal states were first unified as an empire during the Qin-Han period. The second section illustrates how the bureaucratic otherworlds that existed parallel in Indian and Chinese contexts were linked and amalgamated within Chinese Buddhism through the accommodation of certain religious concepts, such as abstinence days, transmigration and the afterlife fate of deceased kings and officials, which were formulated in Chinese Buddhist apocryphal scriptures and popular religious texts. Through this process of evolution, the profile of the Chinese Buddhist otherworld empire we are familiar with today was formed.