25 - Religion and Violence in East Asia

Summary

Across East Asia, the period after the Mongol retreat was one of rebuilding and reordering. As they solidified political power, new regimes in China, Korea and Japan aggressively established authority over the religious realm, demanding compliance with moral and ritual norms, managing certain types of religious pluralism and violently crushing deviant devotion and organised religious resistance. Violence pervaded religion itself. Theological exploration of ideas such as cosmic destruction and rebirth, divine retribution, enforcer deities and the morality of killing for a greater good created stylised roles for both victims and perpetrators of violence. These themes manifested differently across the region. After Japanese militarists destroyed Buddhist mountain strongholds, lay armies defending the dharma fought with the ferocity of the faithful. Persecuted Christian converts willingly met martyrdom in the Catholic idiom. In China, the undercurrent of millenarian ideas that circulated through banned texts and teachings proved impossible to contain. These ideas could quickly militarise in response to stress, feeding a devastating cycle of rebellion and repression that continued through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Across the region, temples and monasteries fought for resources, and religious affiliations often provided a spark for local tensions to erupt into organised violence.