Sacred Sovereigns across the Silk Road: The Church of the East's Gift of Buddhist-Christian Icons to the Chinese Emperor in 781, and Its Relevance to Buddhist-Christian Studies

This article examines the Xi'an stele, set in place in 781 in China's capital of Chang'an (modern-day Xi'an), by the East Syrian Christian community resident in China officially since 635. The Xi'an stele indicates that an elite within the East Syrian Church presented "an image" (xiang 像) to the Chinese emperor in the church's first year of official residence in order to solidify relations between the church and the still recently established Tang Empire (617–907). The essay raises the question of what kind of image, precisely, this might have been, by exploring the possibility that this image was a Byzantine Christian icon with Esoteric (Tantric) Buddhist influences. The article makes three basic arguments in support of this assertion. One is that though the exact nature of the image cannot be determined, there is enough access available to the thinking that surrounded the gift a century and a half after it was given, to suggest that enough Buddhist (one argument) and Christian elements (the second argument) were present in this milieu making the suggestion plausible, that this was a Buddhist-Christian icon. A third argument is that an early form of inter-imperial and inter-monastic debate about the role of images in religious worship was taking place in and around this gift of images. This was not the formal debate one normally thinks of in which two sides write, or speak, back and forth to one another, presenting their views and reasoning on a particular issue, and examining (or attacking) the views of the opposing side. But the Christians of Tang dynasty China were imperial representatives, and their gift of images gave expression to dialogue and debate. This debate culture is recoverable through an examination of the flourishing of Esoteric Buddhism that occurred across the empires of the Silk Road starting in the sixth century, and that gave rise gradually to a new type of monastic and charismatic holy man, one present among both Buddhists and Christians.