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Stranger-Kingship and Cosmocracy; or,Sahlins in Southwest ChinaLiang Yongjia Liang Yongjia is a senior r esearch f ellow, Asia

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To cite this article: Liang Yongjia Liang Yongj ia is a senior research f ellow, Asia Research Instit ut e,Nat ional Universit y of Singapore (2011): St ranger-Kingship and Cosmocracy; or, Sahlins in SouthwestChina, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 12:3, 236-254

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Stranger-Kingship and Cosmocracy;or, Sahlins in Southwest ChinaLiang Yongjia

Major works of the ninth to seventeenth centuries have described the kingship of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms (652 1254) of Southwest China. I argue that these narratives may be understood in terms of the modes of identifying and assimilating the cosmological alterity proposed by Marshall Sahlins: stranger-kingship, which depicted the king as a stranger; and cosmocracy, which depicted him as a universal ruler *a cosmocrator. While a stranger-king was to some extent an extra-social, guest associated with the wild and untamed, and also partly an affine of the autochthonous people, a cosmocrator was a supra-social, moral host, and envisaged more as a consanguine of the subject people. These two pre-modern ideas of sovereignty are constituent parts of Sahlinss elementary forms of the politics of life, so that one cannot

be reduced to the other.

Keywords: Stranger-Kingship; Cosmocracy; Sahlins; Southwest China

Introduction

Kingship has been widely reported and theorised in Africa (Frazer 1994, Kopytoff 1987), in the Indo-European world (Helms 1998, Kantorowicz 1985), and especially in Asia (Reid & Castles 1975, Tambiah 1976, Gesick 1983, Fernandez-Aresto 2000,Caldwell & Henley 2008) and the Pacific (Sahlins 1985, Valeri 1985). Contributing to

a recent discussion, Sahlins (2008a, 2008b) conducted a global survey of ethno-graphies and drew the modest conclusion that the elementary forms of kinship,politics and religion are all one (Sahlins 2008a, p. 197) concerned with theacquisition and assimilation of the potency of alterity (Sahlins 2008a, p. 192).According to Sahlins, alterity has been mistaken as the supernatural, but, he quotesViveiros de Castro, since death exists, it is necessary for society to be linked withsomething that is outside itself * and that it be linked socially to this exterior (1992,

Liang Yongjia is a senior research fellow, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Correspondence to: Liang Yongjia, 469A Tower Block, #

08-03, Bukit Timah Road, 259770, Singapore. Email:[email protected]

ISSN 1444-2213 (print)/ISSN 1740-9314 (online)/11/030236-19# 2011 The Australian National University DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2010.544325

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology Vol. 12, No. 3, June 2011, pp. 236 254

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pp. 190 1). In this light, Sahlins dubs stranger-kingship a manifestation of thispolitics of alterity:

the social incorporation and distribution of external life powers is the elementary

form of the political life, and . . .

marital alliance is its experiential archetype . . .

thestranger-king polity is a developed expression of these principles, stranger-kingsbeing to the native peoples as affinal relatives are to consanguines. (Sahlins 2008a,p. 184)

Sahlinss generalisation follows the line of thought that kingship is essentially aboutalliance (Hocart 1927, pp. 99 112), violence (de Heuch 1982, Dume zil 1988),precedence (Fox 1994), and separation (Quigley 2005, p. 4), all having somethingto do with the extra-social power he called stranger. However, in addition tostranger-kingship, Sahlins discusses another type of kingship called cosmocracy,hinting that it may be distinctively different from stranger-kingship. In cosmocracy,the cosmocrators synthesise the ontological and theological dualisms that mark stranger-king polities to produce a distinctive system of totalised and centralised rule(Sahlins 2008a, p. 190). He believes that cosmocracy denies the particular authority or ritual privilege claimed by subject people on the basis of their indigeneity, and thatby appealing to cosmology it lends local chiefs the same kind of alterity that thestranger-kingship exemplifies, as shown in the cases of the hinterland people of thegalactic polities in Southeast Asia and the peripheral peoples of the Chinese empire.Instead of installing a stranger inside, cosmocracy is the polity of apical states thatradiate with power concentrated at the centre. Cosmocrators, because of theirconflicting claims to universal domination, are often at war with each other andplagued by instability.

Although Sahlins may imply that both stranger-kingship and cosmocracy rest onalterity, the distinctive nature of cosmocracy in Sahlinss work has not beenadequately pursued. Nor does he directly suggest that cosmocracy is a manifestationof the elementary forms of politics of life. Hence, I aim to fill this gap by analysingthe ninth- to seventeenth-century historical sources on the kingship of the Nanzhaoand Dali kingdoms (652 1254) in Southwest China. I propose a structural differencebetween the stranger-kingship and cosmocracy models for analytical purposes, a kind

of difference that Sahlins discerns at the empirical level, but ignores when it comes tohis overarching theory. I argue that stranger-kingship and cosmocracy are twodistinct pre-modern ideas of sovereignty which are both needed to support Sahlinssthesis on the elementary forms of the politics of life, so that one cannot be reducedto the other and they should not be confused in the way Sahlins does. They are twoalternative ways of identifying, acquiring and assimilating alterities in narrations of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms, that is, the stranger-king is an amoral, extra-socialguest and more like an affine to the autochthonous people, while the cosmocrator is amoral, supra-social host and more similar to a consanguine of the subject people.

My main concern is neither the actual occurrence of events nor the textualgenealogy of different sources. Rather, my interest is to examine the recurrent themes

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 237

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about kingship in the historical sources, aggregated and reverberated in varioussources. These sources include the works of literature that have exerted tremendousinfluence on regional history. The recurrence of kingship themes is importantbecause the narrations of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms have been central to thetextual production and reproduction of regional history. Of course, these themes donot exist in a vacuum but are related to the social context. However, what mattersmore here is the fact that these alternative ways of assimilating alterity have beenpersistent over a span of nine centuries, despite even the most radical social changesafter the Ming conquest in 1381 (cf. Yang 2009).

The authors of the textual sources used here include the Nanzhao and Dalichroniclers, their counterparts from imperial China, and the historians from thedynasties when Nanzhao and Dali had been conquered and incorporated intoimperial China. Different modes of historical production can be expected in different

styles of approach, but interestingly, as far as kingship is concerned, the authorialdifference is unimportant, as all wrote in terms of stranger-kingship or cosmocracy.In other words, as far as Nanzhao and Dali kingship is concerned, there seem to beonly two modes of historiography.

The Nanzhao (652 899) and Dali kingdoms (937 1254) were two ancient politiescentred in the present-day Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture in Southwest ChinasYunnan province. The kingdoms were consecutive in both territory and sharedideology (Hou 2006, pp. 118 39). Some historians have argued that the Nanzhaokingdom was consolidated as a result of the imperial Chinas (Tang Dynasty [618 907]) strategic containment of the Tibetan Tubo (Backus 1981, Ma 1991). Thekingship and culture in these places have been argued to be close to Chinese models,despite the fact that the kingdoms made tremendous and steady efforts to bepolitically independent, and that imperial Chinas Song Dynasty (960 1279) ceasedclaiming any authority over the Dali kingdom. Yang (2009) proposed that theconsolidation of Yunnan should be understood in a complex, global perspective by taking the power of distant connections beyond China into consideration. Suchopinions regard power * military or economic * as decisive. However, it can beargued that power in a purely social sense alone cannot account for polities thatlasted for centuries, since perhaps it is only lately in human history that power

became a purely social fact, as established by real-instrumental means of coercion *the way it seems to contemporary Social Science (Sahlins 2008a, p. 184). It is moreimportant to consider the power exterior to society more generally, as a type of superhuman power (Riesebrodt 2009) essential to sustain the social world; the kindof power at once of kinship, politics and religion * the power of alterity.

The Stranger-King: Extra-Social, Guest and Part-Affine

Many sources have suggested that the founder kings of the Nanzhao and Dalikingdoms were strangers * fratricidal barbarians and guests of the subjected people.As such, they were seen as essentially beyond the community and beyond the

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relationships of men, with their power typically founded on an act of barbarism *murder, incest, or both (Sahlins 1985, p. 79). The stranger-king usually forms amarital alliance with an autochthonous female, often of royal birth. He is also said tobe the descendant of the union of an indigenous woman with a dragon from thesupernatural world. Therefore, he is like a cross-cousin born by the paternal aunt of the autochthonous people, and thus a kind of affine. These stranger-kings can befound in many contemporary folktales, the textual origins of which can usually bedated back as far as the Ming Dynasty (1368 1644) * the first Chinese dynasticregime that incorporated Dali and Yunnan as a whole (Yang 2009). One of the mostpopular tales of the Nanzhao king, Huoshao Songming Lou (Burning the PineBrightness Pagoda), told of how Piluoge, King of Nanzhao, committed fratricidewhen he was about to annex the five kingdoms in the vicinity. The tale was regardedas referring to a true event in a sixteenth-century chronicle, Nanzhao Yeshi (Unofficial

History of Nanzhao) * one of the most well-known texts on regional history:

Figure 1 Offerings to the Pillar (Li 1982).


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. . . Piluoge appointed his qinzu (patrilineal kinsmen) to head the other fivechiefdoms. Before long, they began to disobey him. Piluoge bribed JiannanGovernor Wang Yu [of the imperial China], requesting to be allowed to annex thefive chiefdoms. His request was approved by the Chinese imperial court. Piluogethus sent envoys to the five chiefs, saying: you shall come on June 24 and pay homage to our common ancestor. The one who refuses to come will be deemedguilty. He then decreed to have a big Pine Brightness Pagoda built, with an ancestorshrine installed. The five chiefs arrived on time, including [the chief of Dengdan]who worn an iron bracelet from his consort Lady Ningbei, who failed to dissuade

him from going. On the 25th, the five chiefs [and Piluoge] ascended the pagodaand performed sacrificial rites. Afterwards, they enjoyed the sacrificial raw food andwines till night, drunk. Piluoge came downstairs alone, set fire [to the pagoda] by burning the paper money, and had his guards surround the pagoda. All five chiefswere burned to death. Piluoge sent messengers to tell the consorts of the chiefs thatthe burning of the paper money had caused the fatal accident, and asked them tocome and collect the remains. When the consorts arrived, nobody could identify their husbands remains, except for Lady Ningbei who found hers beside the ironbracelet. To the present day, the event has been commemorated by the Yunnaneseas the Torch Festival. Now that the five chiefs had been eradicated, Piluoge alsocaptured their consorts. Learning about Lady Ningbeis beauty, he sent troops to

take her. Lady Ningbei said, Never can I be married to a second husband!, andcommitted suicide. (Ni et al. 1990, pp. 50 1)

Figure 2 Sakyamunis Assembly of the Buddhas (Li 1982).

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Piluoge was nothing short of violent, lustful and barbaric. He burnt his con-sanguines alive, together with the ancestral shrine, at a kin-binding occasion, thusmaking him guilty of patricide, fratricide and blasphemy. He captured his kinspeoples

consorts as a war trophy, thus making him guilty of incest and promiscuity. He evenattempted to rape his sister-in-law, leaving her no choice but to commit suicide. Allthese deeds were appalling violations of kinship morality. By negating the moralnorms of kinship, he seized the kind of power that was not seen as inherent inhumanity, the kind of power that reveals and defines itself as the rupture of thepeoples own moral order, precisely as the greatest of crimes against kinship: fratricide,parricide . . . (Sahlins 1985, p. 79). The imperial Chinese court approved of this brutalact, and legitimised it by conferring on Piluoge the title of a Duke (and then a Prince)with a Chinese surname (Fang 2001, pp. 119 36). China continued to take the newly

founded polity as a chiefdom, by continuing to use the title of Nanzhao, and the eventthereby became one of the strategic sources of the rise of local chiefs and the advent of stranger-kings (Sahlins 2008a, p. 191). Here we see how violations of customary kinship norms typical of stranger-king stories are seen as fundamental to the foundingof states.

Other sources have suggested that instead of Piluoge, Luosheng, that is, Piluogesgrandfather, should be credited with founding the Nanzhao kingdom, not by conquestbut by appropriating a pre-existing, autochthonous polity, the White kingdom. Heunited Nanzhao with the White kingdom after being bestowed with divine miraclesand marrying a princess. A ninth-century painting scroll, Nanzhao Tuzhuan (PictorialHistory of Nanzhao), provides details on how Luosheng replaced the autochthonous

Figure 3 Images of Avalokistsvara (Li 1982).


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ruler, Zhang Lejinqiu * king of the White kingdom. During a sacrificial rite to Heavenofficiated by Zhang and attended by Luosheng and other chiefs, the master birdflew from the iron pillar and alighted on Prince Xingzong [i.e. Luosheng]s shoulder(Li 1982, p. 140). Luosheng realised that the bird was originally his family guardian,and King Zhang was certainly very surprised. In Baigu Tongji (Ancient History of theBai),1 by this event King Zhang was convinced of the supremacy of the Nanzhao king,who was, Xinuluo, father of Luosheng, so he gave up his throne, and married hisdaughter to him (You 1989, p. 23). The Hu Wei (1775, p. 9) version of The Unofficial History of Nanzhao tells this story in detail:

When the community were making offerings to the pillar, the bird carved out of gold, which had formerly been at the pillars summit, suddenly able to fly, alightedon Nu-los shoulder. All were forbidden to move. At the end of eight days, it wentaway. The crowd, astonished at the prodigy, said that Heaven was enjoining

something. Chin-chiu consequently married him (Nu-lo) to his (Chin-chius)daughter, and the whole realm obeyed him (Nu-lo). 2

Xinuluos marriage to the princess has been narrated in numerous legends andcommemorated through a number of pilgrimages, including Gwer Sa La * one of themost elaborate festivals in Dali (Fitzgerald 1941, Liang 2006). Like a medievalromance, the event was about a royal alliance: Princess Jingu * Zhang Lejinqiusadolescent daughter * met Xinuluo when she was running away from home afterbeing scolded. She had sex with Xinuluo that very night she ran away and eloped withhim the next day. This shameless and hateful behaviour enraged King Zhang

Lejinqiu so much that all the envoys and gifts Xinuluo sent him were rejected.Another reason for the kings anger was that he lost his son * the legitimate successor,who was sent to look for the princess. Meanwhile, Xinuluo did not stop sending gifts,especially after he was elected the chief of his people and founded the MengsheChiefdom (later Nanzhao). After a lengthy process of sending and rejection betweenthe extraordinary son-in-law and the indigenous ruler, the king allowed the princessto return and visit the palace in Dali. Xinuluo followed his wife because he was afraidthat she would not come back, but he hid himself before arriving at the kings palace.Finally, King Zhang recognized the marriage and gave his kingdom to Xinuluo.

In these two sources, Xinuluo (or his son Luosheng) married the princess.Regardless of whether Luosheng was given the hand of the princess or Xinuluo wasinvolved in illicit sex with her, the future king ends up in both versions with the statusof the royal son-in-law. Though he replaced the White kingdom with his Nanzhaokingdom, he was known as Fuma , the princesss husband. He was thus clearly anaffine to the autochthonous people.

In the legend of Xinuluo and Princess Jingu, Xinuluo is described as a guest fromoutside. He came to the land of the White kingdom to hunt. He sent gifts and paidvisits. Being ugly and not having been invited, he hid himself from his father-in-law.He was treated like a guest, but an undesired one. He thought like a guest. His gueststatus was reinforced by being the affine, who, by eloping with the indigenous

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princess, caused the loss of the princesss brother * the autochthonous consanguine.The future king is thus a guest-affine.

The Nanzhao royaltys guest status is also indicated in the Ancient History of the Bai , where Xinuluo recognises the status of the indigenous ruler by giving KingZhang Lejinqiu the title of Guolao , or the kingdoms father-in-law (You 1989, p. 25).A thirteenth stone stele, which honours a Mr Zhang as the descendant of the guojiu ,or the kingdoms maternal uncle, reveals that both the Nanzhao and Dali kingdomsalike accorded the indigenous line of Zhang the honour of being the preceding royalhouse (Yunnan Bianxiezu 1988, p. 112). Whatever privileges the Zhang may havereceived, they were outweighed by the new kings identification as a guest and affineto the people he ruled. The Nanzhao royal house was believed to have come from thesouth, and Nanzhao literally means the king of the south. Many Chinese officialhistories (zhengshi ) identify the Nanzhao kings as the Black Barbarians ( Wuman ),

identified by modern historians as the Yi (Backus 1981). In popular tradition, theroyal houses natal place was put forth as a backward, barren and mountainousarea, in contrast with the civilised land of rice paddies (Fitzgerald 1941, pp. 23 44),and was believed to be an area of qianghan (aggressive and barbaric) people. TheNanzhao king was a guest and an affine, but a very strange-looking one. In the story of his union with Princess Jingu, Xinuluo was an extremely ugly hunter dressed inanimal skins. His ugly face caused several significant episodes. For example, afterhaving illicit sex, the pretty princess passed out in fright the next morning with aclearer sight of her future husbands extraordinarily ugly face. Also, on the way tothe White kings palace, Jingus girlfriends gradually stopped singing the happy songsbecause they thought Xinuluo was too ugly to match the pretty princess. Finally,Xinuluo himself realised his ugliness and felt so ashamed that he left his wife and hidin the mountains to wait for her while she visited the kings palace. In other words,his ugliness threatened his alliance, guest-hood and political career.

The ugly-face theme suggests the kings strangeness, and the difficulty andambiguity of installing the outside inside, which is typically found in many stranger-king institutions (see, for example, Fox 2008). After all, the union wasalready too strange to fit in with any available cultural scheme, so it had to take placein a rebellious and risky manner, that is, illicit sex and elopement.

In the founding legend of the Jiulong, to which historical grouping many lineagesascribed their ancestry, the Nanzhao kings were also said to be affinally related to thepeople they ruled over because of their origin in an alliance between anautochthonous female and a foreign male. The Jiulong legend has been held by numerous sources to be the origin of the Nanzhao kingship (Hou 2002, pp. 177 *200, Lian 2007, pp. 83 5) as early as the late Nanzhao period (ninth century), but itbecame especially popular in the Ming dynasty. Basically, it tells how in the Ailaomountains, a girl named Shayi became strangely pregnant after witnessing an floatinglog moved upstream. She gave birth to nine (or ten) boys. The log then transformeditself into its authentic form * a dragon * and came to meet the boys that Shayi borehim. All the sons ran away in fear except for the youngest one, who mounted the


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dragons back. This boy was Xinuluo * the founder king of Nanzhao. A ninth-century description reported that the Nanzhao kings claimed to the Chinese emperor thattheir origin was from Shayi (Fan 1961, p. 68), and, as such, they not only claimed tobe legitimate rulers at Chinas periphery, but also recognised their origin from theunion of a dragon of the other world with an indigenous woman. For the renownedfamily and big surnames ( mingjia daxing ) of the Nanzhao kingdom, claiming to bethe descendants of one of the jiulong brothers was an indication of their Hinduorigins (see, Hou 2002, p. 198), and thus, their eligibility to the kingdoms office(Lian 2007, p. 40). In other words, the legend was created to affirm the king wasdescended from an outsider who married an insider, thus again an affine to theunderlying people.

When the founder kings of Nanzhao (Xinuluo, Luosheng or Piluoge) were depictedas strangers, their conduct was characterised by fratricide, incest and adultery. They

were strange because of their unbelievable ugliness. In other words, they were againsthumanity and in every way anti-social in their origins. Territorially, they came fromanother place, and had to remove the autochthonous rulers through miracles, giftofferings or conquest. In other words, they were guests, sometimes unexpected. Theways to incorporate the dominated people were either through marrying theindigenous women or claiming to be the descendants of a marital alliance betweenan extraordinary outsider and an autochthonous woman. The kingship was thusnarrated in terms of the king being the alterity of the autochthonous people, but thekingship belonged to an order of amorality, or extra-social morality, and the king wasa guest-affine. He was, thus, a stranger-king, ambiguously filled with the auto-chthonous peoples affections and violence, because it is as if nothing foreign weremerely human to them. Endowed with transcendent powers of life and death, theforeign becomes an ambiguous object of desire and danger (Sahlins 2008b, p. 10).In this sense of identifying and assimilating alterity, affines remain indispensable asOther . . . for [their] political-ideological and cosmological legitimation and thus[their] political viability (Helms 1998, p. 52).

The Cosmocrator: Enfeoffing Mountains and Rivers and Entitling the King

Most of the historical literature of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms indicatesexplicitly that the kings engaged in persistent efforts to install the ideology of the kingas the ruler of the universe. These efforts included enfeoffing mountains and rivers,modelled after practices in the Chinese empire, as well as a much more persistent andsuccessful installation of the Cakravartin kingship, or Buddhist sovereignty describedby Tambiah (1976) for Southeast Asia. Contrary to the kin-killing incestuousstranger-king, these enfeoffing kings or Cakravartin kings were represented asmorally superior and universal. These kings also represented a form of cosmologicalcentring of power instead of the power derived from an outsider from anotherterritory. Although still from outside, they were supported by supernatural authority.As shown below, this centring of power in their persons suggests that they were the

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hosts of the law (dharma ) of the social world. These kings claimed to be in directcontact with a superior source of power, and ancestors of their people. In general, thekings were no longer portrayed as strangers, but as supra-social hosts and ancestors.They were Sahlins cosmocrators.

The Nanzhao kings engaged in the well-established practice of feng wuyue sidu ,or enfeoffing five mountains and four rivers. This involved declaring the fivecosmological poles of traditional Chinese cosmology, east, west, south, north and themiddle, to be marked by five mountains and four rivers, and claiming the kingsprivileged power over this. By such enfeoffment, the king placed himself and thecapital of his kingdom at the very centre of the world. Enfeoffing the mountains andrivers was always accompanied by solemn narrations of cosmos-recognition eventssuch as the founding of a new era, often the kingdom itself. In The Unofficial History of Nanzhao , King Xinuluo is said to bring order to the kingdom, and enfeoff

the mountains and rivers, installing Shenming Tianzi (the emperor god) as thekingdoms patron, and confer the titles of mountain gods on seventeen deceasedsages (Ni et al. 1990, pp. 34 5). In the Ancient History of the Bai , the enfeoffedmountains and rivers were listed, following the kings sending petitions to sky andearth, mountains and rivers and the state shrine (You 1989, p. 25). King Yimouxun(r. 779 808) was the first one who actually enfeoffed the mountains and rivers * apractice adopted from the Chinese imperial court (Zhao 2008). Other Nanzhao kingssaid to have enfeoffed the mountains and rivers also intended to recreate or reorientthe cosmos, especially King Longshun (r. 877 97), who, immediately after ascendingto the throne, changed the kingdoms name . . . offered sacrifice to the Emperor-Godof Jinma and Biji, and installed a complete system of temples and shrines.He also changed the capital, and offered sacrifice to mountains, rivers and the stateshrine . . . (Zhang 1998, pp. 660 1).

Enfeoffing mountains and rivers was an important way for the Chinese emperor toclaim sole authority as Tianzi , or Son of Heaven (Granet 1932). By strategically adopting this practice, the Nanzhao king declared himself superior to the immediatesocial world, and in communication with supernatural sources of authority. Hebrought about and maintained the correct cosmological order at the centre.According to a ninth-century report (Fan 1961), the Nanzhao king had his royal

animals captured from the wild; he faced the south in court; he wore the exclusive redand ate with distinctive golden utensils; and he was cremated, but his ears wereburied in golden urns. All these practices placed him at the centre of the world.

Most of the late Nanzhao rulers, and all of the Dali rulers, shared three titles *Huangdi , Biaoxin and Mohe Luocuo . Huangdi (emperor) was adopted from Chinese,meaning the Son of Heaven who rules All Under Heaven ( tianxia ). Biaoxin (Pyu-shin)is said to have been adopted from the neighbouring Pyu of Myanmar whom KingShilong conquered (Pelliot 1933, p. 28), and means the monarch (Fang 2001, p. 624).Mohe Luocuo is the Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit Mahara ja, meaning greatking, the title for many kings in India and Southeast Asia (Feng 1930, p. 1). As part of the Sanskritisation process in Yunnan (see Pelliot 1933), the title of Mahara ja revealed


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the king as claiming to be a Cakravartin. Initially applied to King Longshun, the title of Mahara ja was later used by all the Dali rulers, even after the kingdom was conqueredby Kublai Khan and the royal house was degraded to the status of governors of Dali(zongguan ) under the Mongolian Yuan empire. Indeed, the imperial Chinese Tangcourt and the Tibetan Tubo kingdom had entitled the Nanzhao kings Yunnan Wang (King of Yunnan) and Ridong Wang (King of the East Sun), but the Nanzhao kingssoon abandoned these titles, most probably because they did not designate universalkingship, and were subject to the overarching Chinese and Tibetan claims of universalkingship (emperor or tsenpo ). On the other hand, the titles, Huangdi, Pyu-shin andMahara ja, all indicate that the Nanzhao and Dali kings preferred and appropriatedthe titles of universal kings from neighbouring polities, and used these titles to declarethemselves as universal rulers.

The enfeoffing of the mountains and rivers, together with the kingss titles,

demonstrate that the Nanzhao and Dali kings were not seen as guests of the peoplefrom the outside, but as cosmologically endorsed rulers, hosting the world order andsuperior to the people over whom they reigned. Their sovereignty was established by the king coming to represent a supra-social alterity to the world he ruled.

The Cosmocrator: Cakravartin Kingship

Claims to universal rulership were manifested, particularly, in the form of BuddhistCakravartin kingship. 3 Paralleling the expansion of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms,Buddhism became widely spread as a form of moral and religious life over Asia, to theextent of forming a Buddhist civilisation, or more accurately a civilising Buddhism(Mauss 2006, p. 70). Representing one of the developed forms of Buddhist politicalphilosophy, Cakravartin kingship was widely spread in South, Middle, East andSoutheast Asia during the period of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms. A Cakravartinking declared himself (or herself, in the case of Wu Zetian [see, Ku 2003, pp. 223 324and pp. 377 424]) either as the Devara ja, that is, the ruler patronised by Buddha/Boddhissatva, or as Buddhara ja, that is, the ruler being the Buddha/Boddhisattvahimself. In Mahayana Buddhism, Cakravartin kingship was often promoted by variousesoteric traditions, especially the Vajraya na school favoured by the monarchs in North

India, China and Southeast Asia (Ku 2003, pp. 10 1).Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms were located almost at the centre of the Buddhist

polities, as Mauss (2006, pp. 70 1) and Ku (2003) noted, and the presence andpersistence of the Cakravartin kingship in the late Nanzhao kingdom and during theentire span of the Dali kingdoms was firmly established (Hou 2006, pp. 2 * 67, Ku2003). One strong proof of this is a 17-metre, 800-figure handscroll completedbetween 1173 and 1176 (Li 1982, p. 32); this is known as The Chang Sheng-wen Handscroll of Buddhist Images . The offering-maker ( gongyangren ), or the one whohad the handscroll drawn, was a Dali King known as Emperor and Pyu-shin Lizhen.He recognised his predecessor, King Longshun of Nanzhao, as the first Mahara jaand the offering-maker of the image of Avalokites vara Ekadasamukha (Li 1986).

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In addition, this Dali king also appears in the S akyamunis Assembly of the Buddhas,depicted in the Huayan Jing (Buddha vata .msaka-maha vaipulya-su tra) (Hou 2006,p. 105), with the Seven Treasures ( saptaratna ) characterising a Cakravartin king (Li1982). According to Ku (2003), the different Avalokites vara images in the handscrollindicate the presence of the Cakravartin kingship, and this was particularly reflectedin the images of Avalokitesvara Potala and Amoghapa sa, whose authentic formof body (the dharmaka ya and sa .mbhogaka ya) was Acaya Avalokitesvara (Hou 2006,pp. 2 67) * the most popular deity in Dali until today.

As a Cakravartin, a Nanzhao or a Dali king was no longer then an anti-social,barbaric guest like a stranger-king. Instead, he ruled the world because he was fromanother kind of alterity, a morally superior world. Instead of being an ugly andfratricidal stranger, the king was superior and an example to his subjects in terms of morality. He followed King As okas example of ruling by Ten Virtues, and civilised

the Four Continents of the World. He decreed that people should follow the virtues,and freed them from the Ten Evils. He followed the Ten Virtues fully, and he wascalled Dharmara ja (king of law) (Taisho Tripitaka 9, p. 272). The Manual of Standard Prayer * written during the Dali kingdom * tells of how the Cakravartinking was able to save the people from flood, famine, fire and war (Hou 2006, pp.30 1). As such, the king endowed his subjects with Buddhist morality, and inspiredthem with Buddhist philosophy and teachings. The prevalence of Buddhism in thelate Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms is well known. According to a fourteenth-century report, the people in this area upheld Buddhism. Every family, rich or poor, neverfailed to install a Buddhist shrine in his house. Everybody, old or young, never failedto carry in hand a string of chanting beads. The days of observing vegetarianism,prohibiting meat and drink, amount to more than half a year. Countless temples havebeen built along the mountains (Guo 1986, pp. 22 3).

As a Cakravartin, the king was the centre of the mundane world in both a temporaland spatial sense. Temporally, ruling the world constituted a stage on his deferred journey towards Nirvana. The importance and general acceptance of these ideas isconfirmed by the well-known fact that nearly half of the Dali kings abdicated andbecame monks. In other words, the king was institutionally a renouncer-ruler , whocould eventually return to the transcendental world from which he originated. The

renouncer-ruler-renouncer itinerary shows that this form of kingship depended uponthe king being a mediator between the mundane and extramundane world, while thesupernatural power of the latter was brought about and concentrated by the kingthroughout the mundane world. His role of mediator in this sense shows thetemporal part of his transcendental life. The figure of renouncer-king, as a version of the Cakravartin king, was not unique to Dali. It has been demonstrated in the early political philosophy of ancient India (Gokhale 1966) and Thailand (Tambiah 1976,p. 43) * two polities where the flow of materials and ideas to the Nanzhao Dalikingdom has been suggested (Li 2000, Yang 2006).

Spatially, in The Chang Sheng-wen Handscroll of Buddhist Images , the king wasplaced among the pantheons of Buddha and various incarnations of Avalokites vara,


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structurally contrasted with the mundane world. Luo Yong (in Fang 2001, pp.615 21) observed that the handscroll was divided symmetrically between ChineseZen Buddhism and the Dali indigenous Buddhism, indicating a felt division betweenguest (Chinese Buddhism) and host (Dali Buddhism). In the illustrated history of Nanzhao, King Longshun declared himself the Cakravartin king with the morality of the earth who requested to unite the four directions into one family (Li 1982, p.137). The actual institutional structure of the Dali kingdom, as observed by Lian(2007, pp. 111 40), also demonstrates this predominant guest-host division by contrasting the royal Duan family with the ministerial Gao family. The emperor livedin the capital, spending most of his time at ceremonies and rituals of esotericBuddhism, officiated by the royal ritual specialists of the Dong family. One of theesoteric rituals was the ultra-elaborate consecration ( abhi .secana ) of the emperor, inwhich the king was offered tribute. The ministerial Gao family, on the other hand,

was stationed in the forts surrounding the capital. It inherited the rights and titlesthat controlled the office of mundane affairs, named the Eight Offices, and wieldedthe real power of administration, including revenue, civil work, defence anddiplomacy. Contrary to the king and his ministerial families who claimed to be of Indian origin, the Gao family were descendants of Chinese who practiced ChineseZen. The centre-periphery positioning, the division of power between mundane andextramundane affairs, and the respective historical signification, all suggest that theemperor occupied the moral centre of world, and hosted the cosmological orderwithin which the ministers administrated the mundane affairs under his divine jurisdiction.

The Nanzhao and Dali kings were associated with Lord Avalokites vara. In a longsuccession of textual traditions, Avalokites vara was believed to have come from India,in different incarnations, to aid the establishment of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms.In these incarnations, Avalokites vara was said to appear in the form of an Indianmonk, who left many marks on Nanzhao landscape in a series of events where he wasmistreated by laymen. After centuries of textual reproduction, Avalokites vara was saidto have incarnated 18 times, each of which was related to the divine bestowal of kingship. These events during different incarnations included promising Xinuluo thekingdom, converting various unbelievers to Buddhism, removing a demon ( Ra ks asa ),

and saving and assisting Duan Siping to establish the Dali Kingdom (Ji 1998[1706]).The patronage of Avalokites vara also implies a host-guest relation. In these

incarnations, the kings were portrayed as natives who treated Avalokites vara withcourtesy and hospitality. Some episodes recount that Xinuluos mother and wife wereso generous that twice, while on their way to bring lunch to Xinuluo, they gaveall their food to a mendicant monk. The monk turned out to be Avalokites vara, andhe promised Xinuluo that the latter would become the king of Nanzhao. In otherepisodes, ignorant villagers beat, burned and chopped the Avalokites vara-turnedmonk, but they were never able to harm him. The Illustrated History of Nanzhao(Li 1982, p. 50) claimed, in 825 AD, that an Indian monk came to the capital of Nanzhao and said, the sage (a rya) of our Lotus Sect, Acaya Avalokitesvara, had

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arrived at your Kingdom of Dafeng People from India, after travelling through all thechiefdoms begging. Where is he now? We can see that the patron-client relationbetween Avalokitesvara and the Nanzhao king was narrated in terms of the host-guestrelation.

As Cakravartins, the Nanzhao and Dali royalty were believed to be direct heirs of Asoka, the paradigmatic historic king of the Buddhist kingship (Ku 2003, Tambiah1976, p. 96). Hou (2002, pp. 165 200) and Lian (2007, pp. 59 67) have analysed thecomplex textual relations between the Dali (and Yunnan) stories about As oka.A sixteenth-century document, Yunnan Tongzhi (General History of Yunnan), toldthat in the beginning, there was a kingdom of As oka in the Western Sea. Asoka . . .married a girl from the sky and begot three sons . . . The second son was sent to thefief between Mountain Cang and Lake Er [meaning Dali] (Hou 2002, p. 170). In The General History of the Bai and The Making of the White Kingdom, it was the third son

that King Asoka sent to Dali. The Ni Lue version of Nanzhao Yeshi provided a family tree of Biaojudi, son of Asoka:

Biaojudi, the third son of As oka who was the king of Magadha at the West Heaven,married Cimengkui and begot nine sons, named the Jiulong family: the eldest wasAfuluo, ancestor of the sixteen states (India); the second was Mengjujian, ancestorof Tubo (Tibet); the third was Mengjunuo, ancestor of the Han (China); the fourthwas Mengjuchou, ancestor of the Eastern Barbarians; the fifth was Menjudu, whobegot thirteen sons, five worthies and seven sages, ancestor(s) of the Meng (laterNanzhao); the sixth was Mengjutuo, living in the Lion Kingdom (Ceylon); theseventh was Mengjulin, ancestor of Jiaozhi (North Vietnam); the eighth was

Mengjusong, the ancestor of Zheng Lejinqiu of the White Cliff (the WhiteKingdom); the ninth was Mengjulin, the ancestor of the Baiyi (the Tai people). (Niet al. 1990, pp. 17 8)

According to Hou (2002, p. 184 94), this is one of the variations of the above-mentioned legend of Jiulong, and Cimengkui * here was Shayi, the girl who saw alog moving upstream. Cimengkui is then an indigenous woman who marries the sonof Asoka, who was sent by his father to travel to Dali for spreading Buddhism. Whatis curious in this legend, as in many others about kingship, is that a transformationtakes place in terms of kinship. It can be noted that while the third son of As oka was

an affine to the people he ruled, his sons were not. Instead, they were the ancestors of various kingdoms, including Nanzhao, because the affinal/consanguineal relation of Biaojudi and Cimengkui transformed into consanguineal in the second generation,when their sons were all called ancestor (zu ). Losing affinal identity at the secondgeneration is also the case in the contemporary Dali kinship, which is reflected in thefuneral rites (Liang 2005). In other words, a Cakravartin king who claimed ancestry to Asoka would share the same origin as his subjects; he would be his subjectsconsanguine. The king and his subjects are supposed to share a consanguinealrelationship since they all descend consanguineally from the ultimate source of authority, King As oka. Here alterity are depicted in terms of consanguineal relations,not in terms of affinity.


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In a way similar to the founding king of Nanzhao, Duan Siping * the founder of the Dali kingdom * was also regarded, by many sources, as the descendant of theindigenous people. While his mother conceived him miraculously, his father was nota legendary animal, but a dead spirit; the spirit was that of a Nanzhao minister, theWhite king or the Nanzhao prince. As claimed on a fifteenth-century stone stele,Duan Siping was conceived by a female born from a plum fruit. When she bathedin a river, a dragon-turned log touched her feet. She found the dragon was theapotheosised general, Yuanzu * son of King Geluofeng of Nanzhao (YunnanBianxiezu 1988, p. 71).

The bulk of the sources on cosmocracy demonstrate that the Nanzhao and Dalikings were not guilty of anti-social crimes of adultery, incest, fratricide, patricide orsimply being ugly. Instead, they were enlightened with the noble truth of the universe,destined to instruct the people with virtue. They were morally superior. Instead of

marrying into the kingdom, they were the ancestors of the subject people. They were atthe centre of the hierarchical world, accumulating power from all directions, andpatronised and supported by divinity. The people from all directions paid tribute andhomage to the kings centrality, and ministers assisted him as his guests. Theirrelations with their patron god were like that of a host-guest relationship.A cosmocrator again depended on his alterity, but unlike a stranger-king, thecosmocratic alterity was not territorial, but celestial. The cosmocrators also drew onsources of power from the outside, but this outside-ness was transcendental,instructive and moral. The role of a cosmocrator depended on his claim to the divinemandate, and it was this that was supposed to bring order to the social world, inaccordance with the order of the transcendental world. In this respect, a ratherdistinctive division between the transcendental and the mundane worlds was created.The transcendental world, be it the obscure heaven or the world of Nirvana, wasabstract and inaccessible to the common people. It was this inaccessibility that deemedthe ruler not a god, but an enlightened human being imbued with moral superiority orpatronised by beings from the transcendental worlds. Therefore, as a cosmocrator, aNanzhao or Dali king was a moral supra-social host, and more like a consanguine tothe people he ruled, than an affinally related and amoral stranger-king.

Conclusion

In significant historical sources about the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms, written indifferent times and with different perspectives, despite the heterogeneity, there is acommonality * they all narrate the kingdoms in terms of stranger-kingship and/orcosmocracy. As stranger-kings, the kings were anti-social guests and affines, while ascosmocrators, the kings were supra-social hosts and similar to consanguines.Nevertheless, both stranger-kingship and cosmocracy rest upon alterity, albeit of two kinds.

Neither stranger-kingship nor cosmocracy is about authority over a territory,which is a modern but narrow definition of sovereignty. They are philosophies about

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the relation between the king and his people, a relation premised on the identificationand the assimilation of an alterity. In this respect, these two pre-modern ideas of sovereignty contrast notions of morality, kinship and rights.

Stranger-kingship and cosmocracy are not mutually exclusive concepts. Instead,they often appear in the same literature and even in the same chapters. This fact isimportant because, at least to Sahlins, stranger-kingship and cosmocracy werespatially separated and mutually generated. One of his inferences was that cosmocraticpolities were often at war because of the exclusive claim of universal kingship on bothsides (Sahlins 2008a, p. 192). This, however, was not always true. In one of theincarnations, Avalokites vara ordained Xinuluo a limited sovereignty by promisinghim that the limit of a birds three-month journey and the height of a trees needle-shaped leaves would be subjected to you and your offsprings rule (You 1989, p. 177).In the genealogical constructions of the Nanzhao and Dali kings, neighbouring polities

and people were also interpreted as sharing the same ancestor * the grandson of KingAsoka showing a consanguineal relationship to other peoples. Clearly, the Nanzhaoand Dali version of cosmocracy did not refer to the king as the sole universal ruler.They were aware of the neighbouring polities. In addition to the division of stranger-kingship and cosmocracy, it seems, therefore, necessary to examine the subcategoriesof both.

The dichotomy of stranger-kingship and cosmocracy is nevertheless necessary because it helps to reflect the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane, the visible andthe invisible, the affine and the consanguine, descent and alliance, and the king andhis people, all of which are themes central to the inquiry into the elementary forms of religious life, kinship and politics. While Sahlins has provided the modestconclusion that they are all one, we may also notice, through the lens of Nanzhaoand Dali kingship, that all of them have something to do with the separation of, andthe exchange between, selfness and the alterity, which is, as Mauss (1990) hassuggested, the elementary form of the social itself.

Acknowledgements

The paper was presented in National University of Singapore and Yunnan University.

I am grateful to David Gibeault, Kathryn Robinson, Kenneth Dean, Lin Chaomin andAga Zuoshi for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

[1] This book was written around 1384 1416 and has had a tremendous inuence on regionalhistoriography (Hou 2002, p. 50).

[2] The text was translated by Helen Chapin (1944, p. 150), in which Nu-lo is Xinuluo, andChin-ch iu is Zhang Lejinqiu.

[3] A Cakravartin king generally refers to the king who rules the world according to the BuddhistDharma, following the example of the paradigmatic king Asoka. Cakravartin kingship is atotalising power with the wheel ( cakka ) of domination and morality. His this-worldly ruling is


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a deterred journey to Nirvana, as a world conqueror and renouncer, with seven treasurespresent. For a detailed explanation, see Tambiah (1976, pp. 38 53, p. 96, and pp. 60 5) andKu (2003, pp. 10 20).

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