Manichaeism on the Silk Road

Manichaeism is the religion that most clearly looks like a product of the Silk Road. Founded by the Persian prophet Mani in the third century CE, it consciously combined elements of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism into a rigorous dualist system, and it was designed from the start to be portable across the linguistic and cultural boundaries of the ancient world. The religion traveled with extraordinary speed: within a few generations of Mani’s death, Manichaean communities existed from the Roman Empire to the Chinese capital, and for a brief period in the eighth and ninth centuries the faith became the state religion of the Uyghur Khaganate in Mongolia. The story of Manichaeism is one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of religions of the Silk Road.

The religion is named after its founder, Mani, who was born in 216 CE in Mesopotamia, then part of the Sasanian Persian Empire. Mani grew up in a partly Christian environment, traveled widely in his youth, and conceived of himself as the seal of the prophets, completing the revelations of Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus. His system was rigorously dualist: the universe is a battleground between the principles of light and darkness, the material world is the result of the original mixing of the two, and salvation consists in the liberation of the light through asceticism, fasting, prayer, and the avoidance of harm to living things. The cross-confessional self-positioning is what I find most striking about Mani’s project; the existing religions of his time did not so much compete with each other as ignore each other, and Mani was the first to treat that as a problem to solve.

Persecution in the West

297 CE. Diocletian’s edict. Twenty-three years after Mani’s death, the Roman Empire has made the new faith illegal.

Manichaeism was, almost from its foundation, persecuted in both the Roman and the Sasanian empires. The Roman emperor Diocletian issued an edict against the Manichaeans in 297 CE, and Mani himself was imprisoned by the Sasanian king Bahram I and died in chains in 274 CE. Yet the religion survived, especially in the Iranian east. The translation of Manichaean texts into Sogdian, Uyghur, Chinese, and other Central Asian languages, carried out in the oasis cities of the Tarim Basin, is one of the great monuments of Silk Road cultural exchange. The Berlin Turfan collection, held at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin (the original Crüger fragments are in the Vorderasiatisches Museum next door), contains the largest cache of Manichaean fragments outside Xinjiang, and the German Turfanforschung project has been editing them since 1904.

Manichaeism is, of the five religions, the one most thoroughly erased.

The Manichaean church was highly organized, with a hierarchy of elect (the full-time religious specialists) and hearers (the lay followers). The elect were bound by vows of poverty, vegetarianism, and sexual abstinence, and they served as the principal translators, teachers, and scribes of the community. The result was a portable, literate, and well-organized religious community that could survive for centuries in the cosmopolitan trading cities of the Silk Road. A point that is often missed: the success of the Manichaean church in Central Asia was due as much to the Sogdian merchant diaspora as to the religion itself. Without the trade network, the texts would not have had anywhere to land.

The Uyghur moment

762 CE. The Bögü Khan, advised by a Manichaean priest, converts on a hill outside Ordu-Baliq. The Uyghur state will be the religion’s first and only imperial patron.

The most consequential episode in the history of Manichaeism was its adoption as the state religion of the Uyghur Khaganate in 762 CE. The Uyghur Bögü Khan, advised by a Manichaean priest, converted to the religion, and the Uyghur state became a major patron of Manichaean communities across Central Asia. Uyghur support gave the religion a period of imperial protection that it had never had before, and the Uyghur court became a major center of Manichaean scholarship and art.

The Uyghur adoption of Manichaeism also had a lasting linguistic consequence. The Old Uyghur script, developed to write Manichaean texts, became the standard literary script of the Uyghur people and was later adopted by the Mongols, remaining the principal script of the Mongol Empire until the introduction of the Phags-pa script in the late thirteenth century. The Manichaean texts preserved in the Turfan and Dunhuang caves are now among the most important primary sources for the study of Silk Road cities and religions in the early medieval period. The Turfan fragments in the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin — the reconstructed Mani portrait in the upper galleries is the one a visitor should not miss — are the most photogenic of the lot, but the textual work is done in the reading rooms downstairs.

The Uyghur moment ended with the destruction of the Uyghur Khaganate by the Kyrgyz in 840 CE. The surviving Uyghur communities scattered across the Tarim Basin, and the Manichaean religion, deprived of its principal patron, entered a long decline, although it survived in the Turfan oasis into the Mongol period. Popular accounts tend to treat 840 as the end; in my view the religion lingered on in rural Turfan until at least the Song, and the case for total extinction in the fourteenth century is not as closed as the textbooks suggest.

A personal note

Manichaeism is the hardest of the five Silk Road religions to write about, because the source base is so thin. The community was persecuted in both the Roman/Persian east and the Tang Chinese west, and most of its texts were destroyed. Theologians in the Catholic, Protestant, and Buddhist traditions all wrote polemics against it; the Manichaeans themselves left very little. A reader looking for an inside view will largely be reconstructing from enemies’ descriptions.

Further reading

• Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012). The single best modern overview.
• The relevant chapter of The Cambridge History of Inner Asia (Cambridge, multiple dates).
• One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.
• Susan Whitfield, ed., The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (British Library, 2018) for the British Library’s own primary-source scholarship.

Related pages

Religions of the Silk Road · Cultural exchange along the Silk Road · The history of the Silk Road · The great cities of the Silk Road · and the rest under the main guide.