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DOI: 10.13173/2365-5666
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DOI: 10.13173/9783447115100
Formations of Knowledge in Chinese Late Antiquity
Michael Puett
The concept of ‘late antiquity’ has been powerfully explored in recent scholarship
on the larger Mediterranean world. However, surprisingly few attempts have been
made to explore the formations of knowledge in China during this period from a
comparable framework. This paper will be an attempt to do so by discussing the
complexities of the ways knowledge was transformed in the first few centuries of
the Common Era in China, and to frame the discussion in a way that will hopefully open up larger comparative questions.
Given the nature of the materials that we have from China – in some ways
similar to those from the Mediterranean region, but in some ways quite different –
such an exercise will hopefully help to open up larger historical questions. Are the
models currently being debated for the exploration of late antiquity in the Mediterranean region helpful for thinking about this period in Chinese history, and,
conversely, do the transformations occurring in the eastern end of Eurasia open
up some possible approaches for thinking about formations of knowledge in the
Mediterranean region? How, moreover, do we think about comparative history?
If a notion of ‘late antiquity’ is helpful from a larger Eurasian perspective (and I
think it is), how should we understand these larger transformations in Eurasia,
and how can we helpfully think about transformations of knowledge from a comparative perspective?
1 The Concept of Late Antiquity
The notion of a “late antiquity” did not arise until the twentieth century. It was a
direct product of the modernity narratives that had begun coalescing in Europe in
the nineteenth century – and that have very much continued through the present.
According to these narratives, history should be divided into a periodization of
ancient, medieval, and modern. The break to modernity from the medieval period
is, of course, the most important moment in these narratives. The precise content
given to the medieval period varies according to the specific narrative in question,
but typical characterizations involve claims that the medieval period was dominated by ritual, superstitious beliefs, pregiven social hierarchies, etc. The modern
period, of course, was defined as a break from such a world of ritual and authority,
with humans becoming able to make their own history.
The ancient period – the period that came before the medieval – was usually
presented positively – it is what the medieval period destroyed and accordingly
what had to be recovered and developed for the full flourishing of modernity. In
DOI: 10.13173/9783447115100.123
124
Michael Puett
perhaps the most common formulation, the ancient period was the first flourishing
of human rationality – the emergence of philosophy, science, and democratic forms
of governance. From this perspective, late antiquity would then be a degeneration
of the world of antiquity – a degeneration that led directly to the medieval world.
Despite the fact that the concept arose in the midst of such teleological conceptions of history, it has recently been taken over by a number of historians explicitly concerned with rejecting such teleologies. Figures such a Peter Brown, Averil
Cameron, Glen Bowersock, and Arnaldo Momigliano have explicitly rethought
the notion of late antiquity outside of the paradigm of degeneration and decline.1
The result has been an intensive study of the social, economic, and religious patterns of the first several centuries of the Common Era, definitively taken out of the
modernity narratives of an earlier generation. Instead of placing these centuries
within a grand narrative of the eventual rise of modernity, the past several decades of scholarship have focused on the particular and the local to explicate the
complex transformations of this period.
Given this history of the concept of late antiquity, and given the recent work
that has been done to remove the concept from grand narratives of modernity, it
is worth asking if the concept is helpful to use from a larger comparative point of
view. In particular, it is worth asking if the concept is one that should be applied
to the study of Chinese history. Considering the fact that the concept of ‘late antiquity’ arose as a piece of larger modernity narratives, it would seem directly
akin to concepts like ‘early modernity’ – and I have explicitly questioned the use
of terms like ‘early modernity’ for precisely this reason.2 A concept like ‘early modernity’ implies an inherent teleology toward a modern world. Simply making it
global does nothing to change the underlying teleological claim. So why would it
be helpful to use the term ‘late antiquity’ in a panEurasian sense?
The first part of my answer is that, in China, ‘late antiquity’ is actually an indigenous term, used by figures at the time to describe the world in which they were
living. In the Taiping Jing, for example, in sections that probably date to the second
century, one finds the following:
In high antiquity, those who obtained the Way and were able to bring peace
to their rule did so only by nurturing themselves and holding fast to the
root. In middle antiquity, there was some loss; they made small mistakes
in nurturing themselves and lost the root. In late antiquity, plans were not
auspicious, and they regarded their body lightly, saying they could obtain
1
One of the most influential works in the rethinking was Peter Brown’s Society and the Holy in
Late Antiquity, Berkeley 1982. On the critique of the notion of decline and fall in particular, see
Glen W. Bowersock, “The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome”, in: Bulletin of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences 49.8 (1996), pp. 29–43. For a helpful collection of some of the key
ideas of the subsequent re-thinking, see Glen W. Bowersock et al., Interpreting Late Antiquity:
Essays on the Postclassical World, Cambridge Mass./London 2001.
2 Kathleen Davis and Michael Puett, “Periodization and ‘The Medieval Globe’: A Conversation”, in: The Medieval Globe 2.1 (2016), pp. 1–14.
Formations of Knowledge in Chinese Late Antiquity
125
another one. Thus, they greatly lost it [the root], and they brought chaos to
their rule. Although this was the case, it was not the fault of the men of later
antiquity. It arose from the dangers of inherited burden.3
The vision of history here is one of a gradual decline from a period of peace in
high antiquity. In middle antiquity, errors started being made. As these errors
continued to accumulate, the world fell into chaos. This is the situation of the era
when the text is being written – an era of inherited burden, in which the errors of
the past have accumulated to dangerous proportions. This is not, the text makes
clear, the fault of the people of the current period – it is simply the product of living at the tail end of such an accumulation of errors. This era is explicitly called
“late antiquity”.
The term is thus an indigenous one in China in the second century, and, ironically, it is used with very much the same sense of decline that the term initially had in twentieth century scholarship on the Mediterranean region – the same
sense, in other words, that a generation of scholars have tried to move beyond.
I will return soon to what the authors of the Taiping Jing recommended for their
own era and what they thought would come next. But here let me emphasize the
implications of such an indigenous usage for our own scholarly historiography. As
is clear from this example, claims of ‘late antiquity’ can be made outside of modernity claims. Or, to be more precise, outside of the kinds of teleological modernity
narratives that have been so dominant in 19th and 20th century EuroAmerican historiography – narratives that define modernity as a uniquely recent phenomenon.
On the contrary, modernity narratives are hardly unique to the Western world
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, in early China, such narratives
– as well as critiques of such narratives – were common. The emergence of the first
empire in China in 221 BC E occasioned what I would like to call a “modernity moment” – a moment when one gets much the same vision of history commonly associated with the “modern” in the Euro-American world of the past two centuries.
The selfproclaimed “First Emperor” explicitly announced himself to be breaking
from a traditional world and initiating a radically new era of unity, rectification,
and order.4 As he stated in one of his inscriptions:
3 Wang Ming 王明, Taiping jing hejiao 太平經合校 (Collated Edition of the Taiping jing), Beijing 1992,
37.61. Here and throughout my translations have been helped immeasurably by those of Barbara Hendrischke in her, The Scripture on Great Peace: The Taiping jing and the Beginnings of
Daoism, Berkeley 2007. My focus here and later will be on the dialogues between a Celestial
Master and the Perfected. Most scholars agree that the content of this section belong to a
later Eastern Han context. See the excellent summary by Barbara Hendrischke, “Early Daoist Movements”, in: The Daoism Handbook, ed. by Livia Kohn, Leiden 2000, pp. 134–164, here:
143–145.
4 Michael Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early
China, Stanford 2001; Davis and Puett, “Periodization and ‘The Medieval Globe’”, pp. 9–10.
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Michael Puett
It is the twentyeighth year. The First Emperor has created a new beginning.
He has put in order the laws, standards, and principles for the myriad
things …
All under Heaven is unified in heart and yielding in will.
Implements have a single measure, and graphs are written in the same
way …
He has rectified and given order to the different customs …
His accomplishments surpass those of the five thearchs …5
Although the empire that the First Emperor forged would fall soon thereafter,
many of the same claims continued in the ensuing Han Empire. Indeed, the Huain
anzi, an imperial text written in the second century BC E, makes claims concerning
an “end of history” directly comparable to those seen in Hegel, and more recently
Francis Fukuyama.6
Instead of accepting and taking at face value 19th and 20th century EuroAmerican claims modernity, historians should see such claims as being just that: claims,
and claims directly comparable to those seen elsewhere at particular moments in
world history. As a comparative hypothesis, I would like to argue that modernity
moments are particularly common with the rise or dramatic expansion of empires.
This certainly is true for 19th and early 20th century European thought, and certainly true for the kind of “End of History” arguments made in the United States after
the end of the Cold War in 1989.
Claims of ‘lateness’, on the contrary, tend to occur when there is a sense of an
end of an era. This is true, for example, with more recent claims that we are living
in a period of ‘late capitalism’ – the implication, of course, being that the age of
capitalism is reaching its end, and will soon be followed either by new era of peace
(for example, communism) or (more commonly now) something cataclysmic (such
as environmental collapse). And it is certainly true for the claims of late antiquity
we have already seen in second century China.
Indeed, claims of modernity and claims of lateness are frequently paired, often
quite literally, as in recent sociological arguments concerning ‘late modernity’,7
but more often paired temporally. This was certainly true with twentieth century
theories of ‘late antiquity’ in the ‘late’ Roman Empire beginning the decline that
would ultimately be overturned with the rise of modernity. But the two can also
be paired in the opposite chronology. As we have already seen, claims of ‘late
antiquity’ appear in China in the second century C E, while claims of modernity appear several centuries earlier. Selfproclaimed modernity moments, in other
5 Sima Qian 司馬遷, Shiji 史記, “Qin Shihuang benji” 秦始皇本紀, Beijing 1959, 6.245.
6 Michael Puett, “Sages, Creation, and the End of History in the Huainanzi”, in: The Huainanzi
and Textual Production in Early China, eds. Sarah A. Queen and Michael Puett, Leiden 2014,
pp. 269–290.
7 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Stan ford
1991.
Formations of Knowledge in Chinese Late Antiquity
127
words, can also precede selfproclaimed late antiquity moments. Both are based
upon a comparable vision of history – either a radical break from a selfproclaimed
traditional past or a period of decline leading inexorably to a new beginning. It is
much the same vision of history, with the difference largely lying on which side of
the break one perceives oneself to be standing.
Once we finally stop accepting the “modernity” claims of the past two centuries at face value, we can start exploring “modernity moments” in world history,
asking when and why they arise. And we can do the same for moments of perceived lateness. These can and should be comparative, analytic categories.
To return to the work of Brown et al. to rescue the understanding of the first
few centuries of the common era in the Mediterranean region from narratives of
decline. The effort is absolutely correct, just as it is correct not to take claims of
modernity in 19th and 20th century historiography as the correct way to understand those two centuries. But this should not lead us to ignore the claims made in
these periods. Certainly in China claims of lateness are pervasive in the first few
centuries of the common era – clearly in the apocalyptic movements that begin
emerging for the first time during this period, but, as we shall see, in other areas as
well. Such claims were often made in relation to – sometimes against, sometimes
returning to – the imperial claims of radically breaking from the past. Such claims
are not good descriptors of what was actually going on, but the cultural resonance
of such claims still needs to be explored.
What I would like to argue is that, just as the period of the emergence of empires in the last few centuries before the common era should be thought of in larger Eurasian terms, so should the period of the first few centuries of the common
period.8 Late antiquity, I would argue, was a panEurasian phenomenon.
2 The World of Late Antiquity in Eastern Eurasia
To make the argument, let us first return to China. And return in particular to
the Taiping Jing, the text mentioned above that labeled its own era to be one of ‘late
antiquity’. To quote again from the same text:
Those in late antiquity have again inherited and carry on the small errors
of middle antiquity, and they increasingly make them into ever greater errors … When it comes to summoning the dead, ghosts are not able to come
and eat constantly, and yet the sacrificial offerings were nonetheless greatly
increased, thereby exceeding the proper standards. Yin grows and overcomes yang. No one knows which ghostly and spiritual creatures repeatedly come to gather together and eat, indulging themselves and having their
way, acting like dangerous thieves and killing people without end. When
they kill a person, [the ghosts] see an increase in the service [i. e., an increase
in the sacrificial offerings] and see no punishments. Why should they not
8
Michael Puett, “Early China in Eurasian History”, in: A Companion to Chinese History, ed. by
Michael Szonyi, Malden, MA 2017, pp. 89–105.
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Michael Puett
continue [killing the living] with all their strength? As a result, pernicious
energies grow daily. It all turns back and attacks the giver of the sacrifices.9
The errors we saw mentioned above included failures in the practice of sacrifice.
By sacrificing too frequently, the ghosts have increased and begun attacking the
living. The result is that the entire balance of the living and the dead has been
destroyed:
Living humans are yang, ghosts and spirits are yin … Therefore, when yin
triumphs, the ghostly creatures join together to create horrors so profound
that no words can describe it. This is called the arising of the yin, and the
decline of the yang. It causes rule and order to be lost and endangers the
living.10
The underlying vision of history in the Taiping Jing is apocalyptic. The selfproclaimed period of late antiquity is one of dangerous decline, leading inevitably
toward a coming cataclysm.
At roughly the same time, another millenarian movement, the Celestial Masters, was similarly arguing that the accumulation of a series of disastrous practices
on the part of humanity had resulted in a gradual descent of the cosmos into a
coming apocalypse.11 For the Celestial Masters as well, one of the key reasons for
the decline has been the use of sacrifice. Only here the response is even stronger.
If the Taiping Jing called for a restriction of sacrifice such that a proper balance
between the living and dead could be restored, the Celestial Masters called for a
rejection of sacrifice altogether.12
The response of both the Taiping Jing and the Celestial Masters was similar as
well: a turn to a higher divine power.13 With the Celestial Masters, the call was
for humanity to follow the precepts revealed by the high deity Laozi, a beneficent
deity who had created the cosmos and who provided revelations for how humans
should properly live within it. Those who did so would become the seed people
for the next cosmos that would be generated after the coming apocalypse.14
The sacred scripture revealed by the deity Laozi was the text known as the
Laozi. According to a commentary written to the text and ascribed to the grandson
of the founder of the Celestial Masters, the Laozi was a clear, direct text written
such that its precepts could be easily understood and easily followed by human9 Taiping jing hejiao, 46.53.
10 Taiping jing hejiao, 46.50–51.
11 Terry F. Kleeman, Celestial Masters: History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities, Cambridge
Mass. 2016.
12 Michael Puett, “Forming Spirits for the Way: The Cosmology of the Xiang’er Commentary to
the Laozi”, in: Journal of Chinese Religions 32 (2004), pp. 1–27.
13 Michael Puett, “Ghosts, Gods, and the Coming Apocalypse: Empire and Religion in Early
China and Ancient Rome”, in: State Power in Ancient China and Rome, ed. by Walter Scheidel,
Oxford 2015, pp. 230–259.
14 Kleeman, Celestial Masters.
Formations of Knowledge in Chinese Late Antiquity
129
ity.15 If humans stopped sacrificing and started following these precepts, they
would survive the coming apocalypse and seed the new cosmos.
Similarly, the Taiping Jing called for the creation of a de facto scripture by putting together all of the previous revelations by the high deity Heaven.16 These revelations had been misunderstood by previous generations (hence leading to the
gradual decline), but if humans simply collated all extant writings and arranged
them by category, they would add up to a single, clear statement: “If one has these
follow one other by category and thereby supplement each other, then together
they will form one good sagely statement.”17
In both cases, the scripture based upon the revelations by a single beneficent
deity would overturn existing, false ritual practices. And in both cases the revelations are in written form, purportedly offering clear guidelines that would need
no interpretation and no explanation.
Some of these elements were not completely new. Antisacrificial movements
had begun in China as early as the fourth century BC E, and calls for humans
to follow the guidelines of a higher, benevolent deity who had created a moral
cosmos were asserted by the Mohists in the fourth century BC E as well.18 But the
drawing of these elements into apocalyptic visions of history with a focus on revealed teachings are part of a formation of knowledge that emerges only during
the first few centuries of the common era.
3 Eurasian Late Antiquity
Much of what we have seen in these examples from China have clear parallels in
the late antiquity of the western end of Eurasia as well. A rejection of sacrifices
and a turn to scriptures claimed to have been revealed by a high, purely beneficent divinity; the claim that such scriptures can be read directly, with minimal or
no interpretation; the claim that the accumulation of human errors are leading to
a coming apocalypse, which will be followed by a great era of peace – these are
all well known to scholars studying the first few centuries of the common era in
the Mediterranean region. Guy Stroumsa has in particular emphasized precisely
these points as characteristic of the emerging religions of late antiquity.19
15 Michael Puett, “Manifesting Sagely Knowledge: Commentarial Practice in Chinese Late Antiquity”, in: The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture, ed. by Paula M. Varsano,
Albany 2016, pp. 303–331.
16 Jens Østergård Petersen, “The Anti-Messianism of the Taiping jing”, in: Studies in Central and
East Asian Religions 3 (1990), pp. 1–41; Barbara Hendrischke, “The Daoist Utopia of Great
Peace”, in: Oriens Extremus 35 (1992), pp. 61–91; ead.,“The Concept of Inherited Evil in the Taip
ing Jing”, in: East Asian History 2 (1991), pp. 1–30.
17 Taiping jing hejiao, 132.352.
18 Michael Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, Cambridge Mass. 2002.
19 Guy Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations of Late Antiquity, Chicago 2009;
id.,The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity, Oxford 2015.
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Michael Puett
So how are we to explain such similarities occurring at roughly the same time
at either end of Eurasia, before any direct contact had emerged between the two
regions?
I suspect part of the answer lies in the paired visions of history discussed above
– or, rather, in the cultural and social worlds within which such visions emerged.
More specifically, the enormous empires that began forming across Eurasia at the
end of the first millennium BC E, culminating in the Roman and Han empires at
either end of Eurasia, helped to spawn the millenarian movements that later rose
against them – and that later too became embedded in them.
We have already noted the tremendous claims of a radical break that were associated with the rise of the empires. But the empires also then helped to generate new economies of knowledge that would ultimately lead to these millenarian movements.20 More specifically, the empires created an oikoumene that led to
the emergence of networks operating outside of and beyond local sacrificial sites.
These networks created new forms of knowledge circulation, particularly through
writing. In many ways, both the forms of these millenarian movements (superseding local sacrifices, turning to written scripture) and the framework of the vision
(calls for greater unity, rectification, and coherence) were products of the economies of knowledge created by the empires. This is also why they took the form not
of a claimed decline of the empire itself but rather of a much more general decline
of the entire cosmos. This is also why they called for a radicalization of these economies of knowledge: a call for a more complete rejection of local ritual practice, a
call for the following of a single, correct scripture seen as divinely revealed and
without the need for human interpretation, a call for a more complete form of
unity that would occur after the coming apocalypse. In other words, the millenarian claims are in many ways a radicalization of the formations of knowledge the
empires had spawned.
This also helps to explain the degree to which the empires could so easily absorb the millenarian movements. The Roman empire converted to Christianity,
and the Wei empire (the successor empire to the Han) largely converted to the
Celestial Masters in the third century C E. The empires and the millenarian movements were directly related, just as their respective visions of history were as well.
In short, I would like to argue that thinking in terms of economies of knowledge opens up a way of explaining the complex shifts occurring over these several
centuries at both ends of the Eurasia, and of explaining why such similar shifts
were occurring at roughly the same time.
Such a comparative framework also raises some interesting questions. It has
long been commonplace to compare the fall of the Roman empire with the fall of
the Han empire. But seeing both in terms of the longer processes of late antiquity
20 Schmidt, Nora, Nora K. Schmid, and Angelika Neuwirth (eds.), Denkraum Spätantike: Reflexio
nen von Antiken im Umfeld des Koran, Wiesbaden 2016.
Formations of Knowledge in Chinese Late Antiquity
131
opens up other possibilities.21 We should consider periodizing the Eastern Han,
Wei, and Western Jin (i. e., first through fourth centuries) as one period, directly
comparable to the Roman Empire over the same centuries. This allows us to see
the complex dynamics over this period, instead of falling into the danger of thinking only in terms of the rise and fall of dynasties (which in this case were really
successive military coups). And it allows us to trace the surprising parallels of the
ways that empires and millenarian movements were interwoven through related
economies of knowledge throughout this period.
4 Conclusion
Exploring economies of knowledge from a comparative perspective is helpful for
several reasons.
To begin with, it hopefully helps to force a rethinking of modernity narratives.
The modernity narratives that have been so dominant in nineteenth and twentieth
century EuroAmerican historiography have their direct parallels in other imperial periods. And they tend to be intimately related with notions of belatedness
that can set in during periods of selfperceived endings (for better or for worse) of
these imperial periods. Recent examples include self-proclaimed visions of “late
capitalism” and “late modernity.” Earlier examples include the “late antiquity” of
the Taiping Jing. Such periods can also be located by historians in the past, as in the
“late antiquity” of early twentieth century historiography. Either way, they partake of a similar framework: modernity narratives posit the current moment as a
heroic break from a confining, traditional past, while lateness narratives posit the
current moment as one of beckoning toward an even more radical break.
Exploring economies of knowledge from a comparative perspective, then, allows us to see when and why particular understandings of history emerge, instead of accepting such visions of history as being descriptively accurate. In terms
of current assumptions, it allows is to see that the emphasis on modernity narratives reflects, at a larger level, an imperial moment, while the recent emphasis on
lateness (whether to situate the current moment or to describe a moment in the
past) reflects a sense of a coming end.
In the case at hand, such a comparative approach to economies of knowledge
has allowed us to place late antiquity within a larger Eurasian context. Doing so
may, I hope, highlight some of the key aspects of the economies of knowledge that
make this period so distinctive. I have here only had room to mention a limited
number of these aspects, but hopefully even these few examples help to demonstrate the potential usefulness of a comparative approach. The fact that, at roughly
the same time, similar rejections of sacrifice, apocalyptic claims, turns toward the
authority of a beneficent creator deity, and turns toward a revealed scripture that
is purportedly understandable with minimal or no interpretation forces us to ask
further questions about the nature of these economies of knowledge and what is
21 Puett, “Early China in Eurasian History”, p. 103.
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Michael Puett
distinctive about them. Doing so, as I have noted, helps to highlight issues and
raise questions of periodization concerning our understanding of eastern Eurasia.
Hopefully bringing in the material from the eastern end of Eurasia will also help
to highlight the significance of these issues in the Mediterranean region as well.
Moreover, the particular differences of the ways these debates and dynamics
played out in the western and eastern ends of Eurasia also had tremendously important implications for the respective histories of the two areas, to give but one
example. Although the Celestial Masters did convert many of the northern elites
in the north China plain, the empire also continued its sacrifices as well. This set
up a very different dynamic than occurred in the Roman and Byzantine empires
following the conversion to Christianity. Here again, the significance of these differences can only be explored by placing these economies of knowledge into a
comparative perspective.
In short, seeing late antiquity as a Eurasian phenomenon will hopefully allow
us to explore the complex dynamics of knowledge formation during this period
in ways that may shed considerable light on the histories of both ends of Eurasia.
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London 2001.
Brown, Peter, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, Berkeley 1982.
Davis, Kathleen and Michael Puett, “Periodization and ‘The Medieval Globe’: A Conversation”, in: The Medieval Globe 2.1 (2016), pp. 1–14.
Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age,
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