Antonello Palumbo: "The Buddhist Empire That Never Was: Once Again on Wu Zhao and her Politics of Religion"

Abstract:

The Zhou dynasty of Wu Zhao (690–705), the only woman-emperor in the history of China, is widely seen as a heyday of Buddhism. Buddhist worship and canonical translations were promoted on an unprecedented scale, as for several years the empress assumed the epithet and regalia of a cakravartin, a Buddhist universal ruler. Her very rise to emperorship was purportedly enabled by Buddhist propaganda, exploiting a prophecy about a woman monarch in a Mahāyāna scripture, the Dayun jing. While several scholars, from Rao Zongyi to N. Harry Rothschild, have drawn attention to Wu Zhao’s repeated acts of Taoist devotion, or to her adroit use of the Confucian repertoire, the notion of Buddhism as the state religion of the short-lived Zhou empire has proved remarkably resilient. This lecture will make a case for a radical revision of the narrative. It will argue, among other things, that Buddhism was largely irrelevant to Wu Zhao’s enthronement as emperor; that Buddhist propaganda was, in fact, only deployed after the foundation of the Zhou, and not for internal legitimation, but as an ideological game-changer in the struggle with the Tibetans for the conquest of Buddhist Central Asia; and that although Wu Zhao did lavish patronage to Buddhist works, from scriptural translation to temple building, she also undermined the authority of the Buddhist clerical establishment and decisively thwarted its ambitions to supremacy, with significant consequences for the later history of empire in China. 

Bio:

Antonello Palumbo is the current Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (Fall Semester 2024/25). He studied in China (Peking University), Italy (where he holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the former Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples) and Japan (Kyoto University). From 2005 to 2020 he was first Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the Religions of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He subsequently was a researcher in the ERC project ‘Open Philology: The Composition of Buddhist Scriptures’ at Leiden University, Institute for Area Studies (2021), Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in East Asian Studies at Yale University (2021/22), a Senior Fellow at the IKGF, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen (2022/23), and Substitute Professor of Buddhist Studies at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University (2023/24). His research has covered several aspects of the religious, social and political history of premodern China in its connections to the Old World system, and with a special focus on Buddhism. He is the author of An Early Chinese Commentary on the Ekottarika-āgama: The Fenbie gongde lun 分別功德論 and the History of the Translation of the Zengyi ahan jing 增一阿含經 (Taipei: Fagu Wenhua, 2013) and of many articles and essays.