RUINS OF AN OLD ASSYRIAN CHURCH ON LAO-TZU'S TURF

Courtesy of the New York Times (Feb 24); article by Leslie Camhi

The tranquil landscape surrounding a lonely stone pagoda some 50 miles from the city of Xian in northwestern China has inspired visionaries and rulers. According to legend, the founder of Taoism, Lao-tzu, wrote his classic work, the Tao Te Ching, during a single night's stay in the nearby hills before disappearing into the west. More than 1,000 years later, in the seventh century A.D., a Tang emperor erected a vast complex of Taoist temples on the site, calling them Lou Guan Tai. And there, more recently, Martin Palmer, a British Sinologist and theologian, claims to have discovered remains of the earliest Christian church in China, dating back to the seventh century.

"It's rather like the Hari Krishnas being allowed to build a temple on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral,'' Mr. Palmer said on the telephone from Manchester, England, where he heads the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, a nonprofit preservationist group. ''It immediately changes our picture of the church in China. Western scholars had said that it was a heretical church, that it had no impact on Chinese culture. And here we see that it was given an incredibly honored position."

Mr. Palmer has long been interested in this Church of the East, whose followers were concentrated in Persia and scattered across the ancient trading routes to China, from Baghdad to Samarkand. Little evidence of their existence survives. The Nestorian Stone, an eighth-century tablet in the Museum of Stone Inscriptions in Xian, tells the story of Christian missionaries arriving in the capital of Changan (now Xian) in A.D. 635 from present-day Afghanistan. And scrolls found in the caves of Dunhuang, on China's northwestern frontier, recount a version of the gospel in Chinese, melding Christian, Taoist and Buddhist imagery.
''The scrolls describe a church in which men and women were equal and slavery was forbidden,'' Mr. Palmer said. ''Its version of the Ten Commandments instructed Christians in vegetarianism and forbade the taking of any life. It taught the Taoist notion of original goodness, rather than original sin, and it said the answer to karma and the fear of perpetual reincarnation is Christ.''

While translating a collection of these documents for his book ''The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity,'' published last year by Ballantine Books, Mr. Palmer came across a faint map published by a Japanese scholar in the 1930's. It was probably the work of spies posing as archaeologists while charting China's rural defenses in preparation for Japan's 1937 invasion. (In 1933, Chinese scholars also toured the ruins, but their findings were inconclusive.) The map listed no place names, but it marked a pagoda near the Lou Guan Tai temple, calling it ''Da Qin,'' one of whose meanings is ''from the Roman Empire."

"Imagine a church in the middle of rural England, called the Tang Dynasty Chinese Temple,'' Mr. Palmer said. ''It's that much of an anomaly."

Mr. Palmer's suspicions regarding the building's Christian origin were heightened when, climbing a hill overlooking the pagoda, he realized that the entire site was laid out, not on the north-south axis traditional for Chinese temples, but rather facing east, as befits a proper Christian church. Local lore, in the person of a Buddhist nun said to be 115 years old, confirmed this interpretation. ''Of course!'' she exclaimed when told of his insight. ''This was the most famous Christian monastery in China."

The monastery -- only traces of which remain -- was probably destroyed in 845 during a period of persecution begun by the Confucianists against foreign religions, including Buddhism and Christianity. Around 1300 the pagoda was converted into a Buddhist temple and then was sealed in 1556, when damage from an earthquake caused it to lean perilously. The Chinese authorities, notified of the site's significance, immediately set about restoring it. When they reopened the building, they discovered a 10-foot-high mud, plaster and wood grotto on the second floor.

"It's a traditional Chinese scene of the five sacred mountains of Taoism," Mr. Palmer said. "And set right in the heart of it are the fragmentary remains of a nativity scene, with the Virgin Mary and Christ." On the third floor they found a six-foot-tall sculpture believed to represent Jonah lying outside Nineveh, and seventh-century graffiti carved into a brick by a homesick monk in Syriac, the liturgical language of the Church of the East (as Latin was for the Church of Rome).

The importance of these findings was underlined last March, when the Taliban destroyed the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan, two towering, 1,500-year-old statues carved into a cliff in Afghanistan that were priceless examples of Gandharan art, which combines Greek and Buddhist iconography. ''The only other known place in the world where Western and Eastern artistic traditions met in antiquity and created joint works of art is in that pagoda in China,'' Mr. Palmer said.

Both places drew from the flourishing culture of the Silk Road, a mercantile network that linked Changan (then the largest city in the world), across the Gansu corridor in northwestern China and the ancient kingdoms of Central Asia, to Antioch and Byzantium. Art and artifacts in the exhibition ''Monks and Merchants: Silk Road Treasures From Northwest China, Fourth to Seventh Century,'' organized in November by Annette Juliano and Judith Lerner at the Asia Society in New York, overlapped with the period of Da Qin's construction. ''There was a synergy between religion and trade on the Silk Road,'' said Colin Mackenzie, associate director of the Asia Society, ''that carried Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Nestorian Christianity along its routes. Our exhibition told the story of how we think Chinese civilization was virtually transformed by these foreign influences.''

The Da Qin monastery and pagoda have been added to the 2002 World Monuments Fund watch list of 100 most endangered sites, along with the Ohel Rachel Synagogue in Shanghai, an early-20th-century building that served the city's swelling population of Jewish refugees from Europe during the 1930's. Henry Ng, executive vice president of the World Monuments Fund, said, ''With all the discussions about religious tolerance in China, and Beijing's negotiations with the Vatican about opening up full diplomatic relations, it's very interesting to see these two foreign faiths coming to China at different points in its history, and finding a home there.''

The Chinese response has been positive so far. The Chinese director of the Da Qin project was the keynote speaker at a symposium on early Christianity in China, organized by the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing in October, and several Chinese scholars plan to visit the site.

Working with the Chinese authorities, Mr. Palmer hopes to conduct more excavations and further restore the pagoda, the monastery and surrounding sites. He also plans to create a Museum of the West in China. ''Just as, sadly, a lot of people in the West view China as a monolithic, totally foreign entity, so many Chinese feel the same way about the West,'' he said. ''The purpose of the museum would be to challenge these views, to say the West has been in China for 1,400 years. It helped shape China and China helped shape the West.''

Tim Barrett, a professor of East Asian History at the University of London, suggests that a growing need for alliances against the spectacular rise of Islam during the seventh century may have fostered Tang dynasty tolerance of Christianity. And since Lao-tzu was reportedly heading west when he disappeared, Professor Barrett said, ''Taoists were perfectly willing to see any culture imported from the West, including Christianity, as a reflection of his teachings.''

Such logic seems to find echoes today. Mr. Palmer has worked closely with the China-Taoist organization for many years. ''They're fascinated by my findings,'' he said. ''They wrote me that this confirms their suspicion that Jesus should be classified as a grand Taoist master.''

For more information visit: "The Da Qin Project: Early Christianity in China" at:
http://www.asiasociety.org/speeches/palmer.html

Courtesy Zinda Adaar 4, 6751  Volume VIII   Issue 5  March 4, 2002