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Chapter 1 The Legacy of the Tuoba Xianbei: The Tang Dynasty An Old Open Secret In late autumn of the thirteenth year of Zhenguan (ad 639), under the reign of the second monarch of the Tang dynasty, Emperor Taizong, a major libel case broke out in the capital: a Taoist priest, Qin Shiying, accused Falin, a leading Buddhist monk in the metropolitan region, of “defaming the royal ancestry” by refuting the official claim that the imperial Li family descended from Laozi, the legendary founder of Taoism.1 The catalyst of the case was the Tang imperial house’s series of actions to promote the “native” Chinese religion allegedly created by their self-claimed sage/sacred forefather at the expense of the “foreign” Buddhism, raising the status of the former above that of the latter and resulting in strong reactions from the Buddhist establishment. It should be added that the incident occurred in an era during which family origins and clan membership were of critical importance, not just politically, but often more importantly for commanding cultural prestige. A few dozen old Hàn clans with their roots in northern China had for centuries dominated high society and consequently the officialdoms in both northern and southern China. They formed a quasi-aristocracy extremely difficult for outsiders to penetrate, whether ethnic Hàn or “Barbarian.” While politically trying to suppress the status of these families, the Tang imperial house was simultaneously compelled to play the same game by claiming its more recent pedigree from the prestigious Li clan of the Longxi region in northern China. Falin’s “defamation” of the royal ancestry thus threatened not only the religious halo transmitted from the founder of Taoism but also the self-asserted Sinitic Longxi ancestry. The latter was, naturally, part and parcel of the Tang house’s claim to legitimacy for ruling the vast Hàn populace. Legacy 5 Monk Falin was duly arrested and went through several months of court proceedings, defending himself against various incriminating accusations. Finally , on a day in the last month of the Chinese year (January 640 of the Julian calendar), during an inquisition session attended by Emperor Taizong himself, the brave monk plainly declared, “According to my knowledge, the Dashe [clan] of the Tuoba is known in Tang language as the Li. From this descended Your Majesty’s family, which did not come from the Longxi (Li) clan going back to Laozi.”2 This blasphemous statement was followed by further scandalous declarations about the self-claimed royal Longxi Li lineage, including the accusation that the clan was the offspring of a slave turned impostor. Quoting Buddhist sutras and metaphors, Falin equated the Tang imperial house’s forfeiture of its northern lineage from the “god-king” of the Tuoba of the Yin Mountains in Mongolia, and their adoption of the Taoist pedigree, to “replacing gold with chalcopyrite (copper iron sulfide),” “exchanging fine silk for burlap,” and even “abandoning a ‘jewel princess’ in order to liaise with a female slave.”3 The emperor was naturally outraged, yet befitting his posthumous fame as one of the most tolerant and just monarchs in Chinese history, with a prankish sense of humor, he granted Falin seven days to practice what the hapless monk had previously preached in a Buddhism treatise, namely that reciting the name of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Chinese name Guanyin) would produce a religious miracle, saving the pious caller of the sacred name from the executioner ’s ax. Evidently not quite ready for immediate martyrdom, Falin beat a humiliating retreat, which incidentally made the Buddhist source on which our story is based all the more believable: By claiming, on the day the miracle was due, that he had in the past seven days merely recited the emperor’s name instead of that of Avalokiteśvara, Falin secured an imperial pardon, or rather the commuting of the death penalty to exile in remote Sichuan. More intriguingly, faced with the opposition of imperial court judges who wanted to uphold the mandatory capital punishment, Emperor Taizong explained that Falin’s defamation of the royal ancestry “was not without foundation.” Emperor Taizong apparently recognized that the imperial clan’s genealogical connections to the Tuoba nobles and other “Barbarian” families were open contemporary knowledge. For one thing, his own grandmother née Dugu, his mother née Dou, and his principal consort (and mother of the heir apparent) née Zhangsun were all indisputably of core Tuoba and other Xianbei descent. What monk Falin tried to...

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