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Scholars discover signs of life in a 'dead' religion

June 09, 2005

ManiThumb,jpg.jpgA scholar from The University of New England has been involved in a discovery that, for historians of religion, is as momentous as a well-documented sighting of a Tasmanian tiger would be for zoologists.

UNE’s Professor Majella Franzmann is one of a team of Australian scholars who have seen evidence that a once-powerful and widespread religion, thought to have died out around the world centuries ago, is still being practised in south-east China.

Manichaeism, a religion that spread from its native Persia to the Atlantic extremities of the Roman Empire in the west and to the coast of China in the east, rivalled Christianity itself in the early centuries of the Christian era. Although scholars know that it survived as a living religion in eastern China until at least the 16th century, no one in the scholarly world has ever suspected that it was still being practised there.

The Australian team, who have visited south-east China several times over the past few years to document Christian and Manichaean inscriptions dating from the period of Mongol rule, were shown, on their last visit in April this year, a household shrine with an image of Mani (the founder of Manichaeism) at its centre. They have documented the discovery in a paper to be published this week in the international journal "Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa" (Review of Religious History and Literature).

Professor Franzmann said the household shrine was in a village near Huabiao Hill in Fujian Province, which had been a centre of Manichaean devotion, especially during the religion’s ascendancy in the 14th century (Yuan Dynasty). She said the original Manichaean shrine, with a large statue of Mani, had been preserved on Huabiao Hill as part of a later Buddhist shrine and was now a UNESCO heritage site. “The small statue in the centre of the household shrine appears to provide a direct link with the devotion once practised in the larger hillside shrine,” she explained. “If so, it is witness to a living line of devotion that stretches back to the time when Manichaeism was openly and widely practised in the area.”

She described how a villager had invited the team into his home to see the small Mani statue (pictured here), which he said had been handed down through many generations of his wife’s family. She said its decoration was so different from that of the large statue at the heritage site that it was unlikely to be a product of recent “cultural” interest in that statue. “We concluded that the household image reaches back to a time well before UNESCO provided funding to preserve the shrine, and represents an earlier tradition of decoration,” she said.

“Much fieldwork remains to be done,” Professor Franzmann concluded. “We need to find out, for example, if the family has any other items that would provide further evidence of links to Manichaeism. What we do believe at this point is that the household shrine is a direct link from the family to the historic Manichaeism that we know was practised in the region.”


Media contact: Professor Majella Franzmann, School of Classics, History and Religion, UNE (02) 6773 3406 or Jim Scanlan, Public Relations, UNE (02) 6773 3049.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at June 9, 2005 10:56 AM