The Church of the East Reaches China

The story of how the Church of the East, the church of the Persian empire (see the Church of the East Organises at Seleucia-Ctesiphon), came to China is told on a stone slab that its clergy set up in 781 (Xi’an Stele, date line and Syriac text). The slab calls their teaching Jingjiao, the “luminous religion” (Xi’an Stele, Chinese text, opening section).

According to the stele, a “most-virtuous” man named Aluoben, in older books Alopen or Olopun, came from the land it calls Da Qin, carrying sacred books. He reached Chang’an, the Tang capital, in 635. The emperor Taizong sent his minister Fang Xuanling out to the west to meet him and bring him in. The books were translated in the imperial library, and the emperor inquired into the teaching of Aluoben in his private rooms (Xi’an Stele, Chinese text, on the year 635).

In the seventh month of 638 the emperor issued an edict, which the stele quotes. It begins:

Right principles have no invariable name, holy men have no invariable station.

It says that Aluoben has brought books and images to the capital, that the teaching has been examined and found good for living things and for people, and that it is to be practised throughout the empire. A monastery was to be built in the Yining ward of the capital, with twenty-one monks (Xi’an Stele, Chinese text, edict of 638). A collection of Tang state documents completed in 961 preserves the same edict under the same date, in slightly different words. There Aluoben is a “Persian monk”, and a further edict of 745 orders the “Persian monasteries” renamed after Da Qin, because the teaching had come from there in the first place (Tang Huiyao 49, Da Qin monasteries).

The stele opens with a summary of the faith: one God, three in one, who made the world; a Messiah born of a virgin in Da Qin; twenty-seven sacred books; baptism with water; the sign of the cross; prayer facing east, seven times a day (Xi’an Stele, Chinese text, opening section). It goes on to say that under the next emperor monasteries were founded in every prefecture, that Buddhists spoke against the teaching in 699 and that it was mocked in the capital in 713, and that the emperor Xuanzong restored it to favour (Xi’an Stele, Chinese text, reigns of Gaozong to Xuanzong).

The stone is dated twice: in Chinese to the second year of Jianzhong, 781, and in Syriac to the year 1092 of the Greeks, in the time of the patriarch of the Church of the East. The priest who set it up was the son of a priest from Balkh (Xi’an Stele, date line and Syriac text). It shows a church that had come to China from Persia, not from Rome or Constantinople, and that lived there under imperial licence for a century and a half.