Two Arrivals at the End of the Dynasty

The Han period is where two of the largest developments in Chinese religious history begin, and both begin quietly. Buddhism entered along the routes through Central Asia, carried by traders and by monks from Parthian, Sogdian and Indian backgrounds, and the earliest translations into Chinese were made in the second century of the Common Era.

Erik Zurcher's study of the process shows how slow and how partial it was: the first Chinese Buddhists were a small foreign and court connected group, the vocabulary had to be built out of existing Daoist terms that fitted badly, and several centuries passed before Buddhism became a mass Chinese religion. At the other end of the same period the Celestial Masters movement appeared in the west of the empire, organising communities under a hierarchy of officials, collecting a contribution of rice, and treating illness as a consequence of fault to be dealt with by confession and petition to a bureaucracy of spirits. That is the first organised Daoist church, with a priesthood, a territory and a liturgy, and it descends in a traceable line to Daoist practice today. Both movements grew as the Han state failed, and both outlasted it by a very long way. Neither was planned by anyone at court, which is a useful corrective to a period usually described through its official synthesis.