淸中期雲南張保太の大乘教

Abstract

The Ta-ch'eng sect which spread from Yunnan 雲南 to Szechwan 四川, Kweichow 貴州, the Yangtze 揚子 valley provinces, Chih-li 直隷, and to the capital of Peking北京 in the mid-Ch'ing period, was founded by Chang Pao-t'ai, a kung-sheng 貢生 from Ta-li 大理 prefecture of Yunnan. Like other founders of sects in the late Ming 明 and early Ch'ing periods, he held lower gentry status which one can identify with the "popular literati" 大衆的讀書人 as categorized by Tadao Sakai 酒井忠夫. The contents of his teachings are difficultto know, but the records of his attaining enlightenment and founding a sect at Mount Chi-tsu 鶏足山 give us a clue. Situated to the northeast of Ta-li, this mountain had become famous all over China as a sacred place of the Maitreya Buddha who would descend there and hold the Three Dragon Flower Meeting 龍華三會. Chang's enlightenment may have been based on Zen practices, but when he preached to a congregation of commoners, he seems to have included the Maitreya cult in his soteriological system. When the sect was suppressed in 1746, it had been divided into three sub-sects. One of them had a clearly anti-Ch'ing political color, but the others were presumably non-political. It seems the politically colored sub-sects had begun to cooperate with the kuo-fei bandits 嘓匪 and with mine-workers in Szechwan, a group of discontented, anti-regime fighters. Soon after their foundation, popular sects in China fell in to organizational and doctrinal disunity, a feature which corresponds to the characteristics of Chinese society observed by Mark Elvin as "the most fluid society in the world, " haunted by constant competition rather than harmony.