12

Wild Man from the Mountain

Genghis Khan was beginning to feel what the Mongols call nasand daragdax—the inevitable triumph of age over body. Although he had defeated the last holdout leader of the Khwarizm army, he had little cause to celebrate. His army had lost only one battle, but combined with the loss of his grandson, the year 1221 marked a turning point in his life. He was tired and very far from home. His eldest son, Jochi, had ignored his summons and stayed as far away as he could, and his other sons continued squabbling among themselves as though their father had already died and they had taken charge of the empire.

After seeing the world, tasting the best and the worst of civilization, experiencing humanity’s good and bad, rising to the pinnacle of power and sinking to the emotional depths of despair, he now embarked on a new personal spiritual journey that was to be his final campaign in life. He did not turn inward to engage in philosophical meditations or seek magic rituals to promote inner harmony and peace. Instead, his new quest took him out beyond himself into the world to seek out the most respected and renowned spiritual teachers and wisest minds of his time. He knew intimately his own spirituality and customs, but he set out to study other, more formally organized religions to find some soothing knowledge, some mystical secret that had eluded him. As with the most important quests in life, he did not know precisely what he was searching for, but he hoped that he would recognize it when he found it.

Mongols preferred fighting in the winter. The warriors and their horses tired less easily and responded to the cold with energetic enthusiasm. In the summer, the heat drained man and beast, and their bows lost their strength and sharpness. In the long summer days, the horses grazed to store up the energy needed for the winter campaign. The men enjoyed wrestling and drinking fermented horse milk in the day and singing during the night. The late summer evenings, after the heat of the day had passed, provided Genghis Khan an opportunity to sit and talk in a more leisurely fashion. Summer was the season for playing games and talking philosophy in the Mongol camps.

In the spring of 1222, a delegation of Taoist scholars arrived at his camp at the foot of the Hindu Kush near modern-day Kabul. A few weeks after the destruction of the city of Balkh, the Chinese sage he had summoned two years earlier and his disciples traveled past the city ruins. “Its inhabitants had recently rebelled against the Khan and been removed,” one of his disciples wrote cryptically. “But we could still hear dogs barking in its streets.”¹ The Taoists approached the Mongol camp just south of what the Mongols called the Snowy Mountains, when the almond and peach trees bloomed.

In the aftermath of the violence and suffering in Afghanistan, the blossoming landscape offered the promise of healing. “Thousands of cliffs vying in beauty purify a man’s thoughts,” wrote Yelu Chucai, who was still serving Genghis Khan so loyally. “Myriads of streams vying in swiftness strengthen my spirits.” The mountain scenery inspired creativity, and his thoughts melded with the setting. “Now I think of the mountains; now I look at the poems.”²

Taoism had arisen out of folk beliefs about spirits and forces of nature, but through the centuries, it had evolved into a full philosophy complete with accomplished monks, elaborate rituals, and competing sects with their rival grand masters. Taoism was the native religion of the common people in China while Confucianism was the prescribed way of life for the educated elite. Both were indigenous to China, in contrast to Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Manichaeism, which were foreign imports. Taoism lacked the philosophical sophistication and prestige of Confucianism or the mystical depth of Buddhism, but Mongols found its worship of nature and local spirits familiar, and many Taoist teachings aligned with their traditional belief.

Some of Genghis Khan’s first Chinese allies had been Taoists. As early as the 1190s, members of the old Khitai royal family had fled from northern China to join him, bringing with them an excellent knowledge of Chinese literary and spiritual culture, including a keen appreciation for Taoism. They proved loyal during the dangerous vicissitudes of his relationship with Ong Khan.³ From these early experiences with Taoists, Genghis Khan appreciated their loyalty and recognized their value in winning popular support among the common people in China.

To this end, in 1219 before embarking on his invasion of Central Asia, he summoned Taoist monks under the leadership of the most famous sage of his day, the elderly and venerable Qiu Chuji, whose followers honored him as the Wild Man from the Mountain.⁴ Shortly before the Mongol invasion of China, Qiu Chuji had assumed the leadership of the Quanzhen sect, sometimes translated as Complete Reality or as Complete Perfection, one of Taoism’s fiercely competitive factions. In an era of social violence and moral decay in China, he garnered notoriety as a backwoods poet and homespun philosopher who celebrated the nostalgic purity of rural life, far away from the political infighting of the royal court and the turmoil in the cities and villages. His devotees claimed that he knew the secret to everlasting life.

Genghis Khan recognized his need for good laws, and because the old sage “has much explored the laws” and is a holy man who lived according to “the rigorous rules of the ancient sages,” he summoned him to leave his home and come offer counsel. “In this letter I have briefly expressed my thoughts and hope that you will understand them,” he wrote to Qiu Chuji. “I hope also that having penetrated the principles of the great Tao that you will sympathize with all that is right and will not resist the wishes of the people.”⁵

Qiu Chuji was not a natural traveler. His first major complaint on the journey came early on, when he realized that his travel companions would include young Chinese women entertainers who had been recruited to lift troop morale on the front battle lines in Afghanistan and Iran. As a venerated philosopher, he feared the scandal, or possibly the temptation for his disciplines, of traveling in such company. He wrote to the Great Khan that he felt it was best “not to see things which arouse desire.” The Mongols indulged him with a separate escort in another caravan.⁶

As China’s most famous sage, Qiu Chuji had met with an earlier Jin emperor, and recently both the new Jin emperor of the north as well as the Sung emperor of the south had summoned him to their respective courts. He had refused both, but recognizing that the Mongols were the new power, and would be likely to replace both courts and possibly reunite all of China, he wisely accepted Genghis Khan’s invitation. He did not then know that it would be three years before he would return home from the mobile Mongol headquarters, which he referred to respectfully as “Dragon Court.” He was advanced in age and had little to gain personally from the long trip, but he wished to secure assurances from the Great Khan that his sect and disciples would be well treated.

The sage’s disciple kept a diary of the journey that reveals a man too old and settled in his mental habits to see much that was new. Whatever Qiu Chuji encountered merely reinforced conclusions he had reached years earlier or matched long-held prejudices and frequently voiced complaints about everything from the cost of wheat in the desert to the poor quality of the roads. Qiu Chuji had never before ventured from northern China, and at his age, he found little comfort in anything new or unfamiliar. He made the prosaic observations of a tired old man who commented on the weather and the landscape more out of boredom than from interest in the places, culture, people, or history around him. The mountains were high, the desert dusty, the sun hot, the rivers wet, the snow cold, and the marshes filled with evil spirits.

The sage succeeded in identifying something disagreeable in the most unlikely situations, as when he passed over a mountain and spotted a large lake that resembled a rainbow. “It was dreadful to look down to the lake in the depth,” he observed. He composed poems by day and passed them around to his students to enjoy in the evening. He reserved his greatest admiration for his own deeds, no matter how trifling. En route to Genghis Khan, he addressed one poem to three young geese that he had set free on a lake. “They tended you to no purpose,” he wrote addressing the goslings, “save to bring you to the kitchen; and only my kind interest saved you from becoming a meal. In a light skiff I took you out and set you among the huge waves, there to wait till autumn’s end when your wings are fully grown.”

The old sage’s only comforts seemed to be the fresh fruits, wine, and soft cotton fabrics provided along the way. One night after a dinner of good food and drink, he delighted in the entertainment of some local boys dancing with swords and performing balancing tricks on long poles. Beyond ample complaints and vain vignettes, we learn only that those he encountered received him with joyous awe, were deeply impressed by the old master’s piety and philosophy, and wept copious tears when he departed. He appears to have noticed nothing about their customs or religious life, but for some unexplained reason, he noted with great pleasure how amazed the foreigners were by the quality and ingenuity of his water pail.⁷

By the time Qiu Chuji finally reached the Mongol camp, Genghis Khan had suffered the death of his favorite grandson and witnessed quarreling among his heirs. Driven by a growing sense of despair over human nature and his own mortality, he hoped to find some ultimate truth or primary principle to guide him and his empire. Like the Uighur and Turkic leaders before him, he adhered tenaciously to the principle of Tore, the ideal of just power, a concept that was also central to Taoist teachings. Although the Mongols generally invoked the concept of just power in relation to the state and the khan, the Taoists showed greater concern for the individual spiritual quest. Early Taoist scholars translated the Mongol term Tore into Chinese as Tao li.⁸ Their quest for the Tao resembled Genghis Khan’s search for the correct moral principles of Tore.

It is hard to imagine the impression that the Mongol camp made on the Chinese visitors. They politely and politically refrained from recording any negative opinions. Some of the experience of entering a Mongol camp appears in the works of other writers. With a mixture of awe and contempt, Kirakos of Gandzak described life in the Mongol camp: “Whenever possible they ate and drank insatiably, but when it was not possible, they were temperate. They ate all sorts of animals both clean and unclean, and especially cherished horsemeat. This they would cut into pieces and cook or else roast it without salt; then they would cut it up into small pieces and sop it in salt water and eat it that way. Some eat on their knees, like camels, and some eat sitting.” Accustomed to marked status difference among members of most royal courts, the Armenian was surprised by the egalitarian way of the Mongols. “When eating, lords and servants share equally.” When drinking fermented mare’s milk, “one of them first takes a great bowl in his hand and, taking from it with a small cup, sprinkles the liquid to the sky, then to the east, west, north and south. Then the sprinkler himself drinks some of it and offers it to the nobles.”⁹

The records of Genghis Khan’s philosophical discussions with the Taoist sage survive in more detail than those of any other of his religious conversations, as bitterly opposing accounts written by two primary participants, both of whom were about thirty years old and well educated in Chinese history, philosophy, and culture. Qiu Chuji’s perspective was recorded by Li Zhichang, one of the eighteen disciples who accompanied the master on this long journey, whose fitting name translates as Perfect Constancy.¹⁰ As the old master’s scribe, Li Zhichang attended the meetings with Genghis Khan, listened carefully to the translation of his words into Chinese, and recorded the conversation.

Li Zhichang published his Account of Travels to the West (Xiyou ji, not to be confused with a more famous Chinese novel of a similar title about the Monkey King) seven years later, in 1228, soon after the deaths of both Genghis Khan and Master Qiu Chuji.¹¹ Almost immediately afterward, Yelu Chucai wrote a dramatically contrasting account of the scholar’s visit in Record of a Journey to the West (Xiyou lu). Yelu Chucai wrote a memoir of his service with the Mongols in Central Asia in an effort to correct what he claimed were the lies of the Taoist sage and his disciples.¹² For seven hundred years, Li Zhichang’s account was accepted as the sole record of the discussions between Genghis Khan and the sage, as Yelu Chucai’s report had disappeared from the libraries and archives of China and scholars began to suspect that it had never existed. Then in 1926, a meticulous scholar, Professor Kanda Kiichiro, discovered a copy in the imperial library in Japan.

Among the many religious scholars who had flocked to the Mongol court, some had been spies. One such group of Buddhist monks arrived from Japan under the pretext of seeking religious manuscripts from China for the edification of the thriving Buddhist community in Japan. Instead, they collected whatever information they could about the Mongol court. Because Yelu Chucai’s book fulfilled both criteria of their mission, touching on religion and politics, the spying monks brought a copy back with them to Japan, where it enjoyed a protective inattention while the vagaries of religious politics and neglect gradually destroyed the limited edition of the book in China. Suddenly, with the unexpected discovery of the manuscript, a new firsthand account of conversations with Genghis Khan, scholars could compare Taoist and Mongol perspectives.

Yelu Chucai was a cultivated scholar of aristocratic disposition and courtly manner who was proud of his ancestry as a descendant of the rulers of the deposed Liao dynasty in northern China. He had enjoyed a classical Chinese education in Confucian thought and harbored a nostalgic longing for a lost past. The way forward, he believed, was always to go back in time to some earlier state of social and spiritual harmony. This accounted, in part, for his having joined the Mongols soon after Genghis Khan’s conquest of the Jin capital, where he lived: he had hoped that they would restore the glory of his Khitai ancestors.

Yelu Chucai had enthusiastically supported Genghis Khan’s decision to summon the Taoist sage to the Mongol court, but he quickly regretted that decision. When he met the old man, admirable by reputation, he found him to be disgusting. “At the beginning of our conversations—at the time when we were exchanging verses—I openly approved of him to some extent,” he wrote. “Then, as our acquaintance deepened, I got to know him thoroughly. . . . I disapproved of him in my mind and laughed at him in private.” Yet he voiced no such criticism at the time. “Had I attacked him it would have created a dispute,” he explained in his defense.¹³ He considered Qiu Chuji not merely a religious deviant but a greedy, materialistic hypocrite posing as a sage. In short, he was a fake.

The Mongols showed polite deference to the Taoist delegation, but their reaction as reported by Yelu Chucai differed markedly from the Taoist account. Without contradicting the venerable sage directly, Genghis Khan gently teased him and lightheartedly joked in a way that the sage misunderstood or that his disciples chose not to mention.¹⁴ He had summoned the sage for the purpose of “preserving life”¹⁵ for his empire and seeking his wisdom regarding the key to an efficient and moral government. But the sage quickly confessed, “Affairs of warfare and statesmanship are not within my capability.”¹⁶

Genghis Khan was concerned with immortality, but as he made clear on many occasions, it was the immortality of his empire and the survival of his lineage that preoccupied him—not that of his mortal body. Another Mongolian chronicle connected the visit of the Chinese sage directly to the need to rule “many people having other customs.”¹⁷ He sought to learn “the manner in which one might hold the government and one might protect and support living beings.” He understood the rules guiding nomadic herding life and the way of the warrior, but he sought assistance in administering the agricultural and urban parts of his empire.

Instead of practical principles governing public affairs, Qiu Chuji and his sect specialized in spiritual quackery, mainly selling longevity through magic. The sage sought to prolong life through chemical transformations in the body, replacing forbidden foods with magic elixirs concocted by the monks and by developing secret techniques to preserve semen inside the body of men. (Women did not seem to be in need, or deserving, of immortality.) Unlike healers who crafted medicines and potions from plants and animals, the Taoist alchemists used hard substances that did not decay and concocted their elixirs from cinnabar (red mercury), jade, pearls, gold leaf, and other precious stones that seemed to last forever. If the soul of gold could make it endure eternally without tarnishing, the logic went, eating it might make humans live longer as well.

To promote their craft, Taoist healers and sages circulated stories of monks facilitating miraculous cures and living to incredible ages. Some, like Qiu Chuji, were said to be immortal. Qiu Chuji’s followers asserted that he was more than three hundred years old and still vigorously active. Rich men throughout China sought the services of his disciples to prolong their lives.

In contrast to the heavy formality and rituals surrounding most royal courts, entering Genghis Khan’s inner court was much like stepping into the tent of a Mongol herder. The monks did not have to kowtow or kneel in his presence; they simply “inclined the body and pressed the palms of the hands together on entering his tent.”¹⁸ The Chinese monks marveled that this meeting with the great world conqueror was more like a chat. Li Zhichang remarked that their Mongol hosts even offered bowls of fermented mare’s milk to relax them. When the sage complained that he did not eat meat or drink mare’s milk, the khan indulged him with melons, fruits, and vegetables as well as ample wine made from grapes.

The relaxed informality of the Mongol court allowed Genghis Khan to put his guests at ease while he made quick and decisive evaluations of their character. He judged them by their answers to the easiest and seemingly most innocent questions before listening to their prepared speeches and philosophical discourses on the topics they considered most pressing. Queries about their name, age, family, and origin were not humble politeness or small talk. How visitors answered these questions played into his evaluation. He used the deceptively simple tactic of preceding a question with sweet words of flattery so that while the mind of the guest savored the taste of the compliment, the tongue began to wag freely.

The interview began, according to Li Zhichang, with an expression of appreciation for the long journey the master had undertaken and for his willingness to visit. “I take this as a high compliment,” Genghis Khan told the sage. He then asked Qiu Chuji by what name he should call him, as he had various honorific titles. The sage seemed blissfully unaware of his host’s dislike of fancy titles. “People call you Tengri Mongke Ken,”¹⁹ the interpreter said, using the Mongolian equivalent of his Chinese title, literally meaning Heavenly Eternal Person but akin to Immortal Sage. The Taoist’s title seemed to bestow an air of divinity on the sage, as if he claimed authority to speak for God. Genghis Khan seemed skeptical of such supernatural claims. The only Mongol previously to have claimed such a title was Teb Tengeri, who had ended up abandoned by heaven.

“Did you choose this name yourself or did others give it to you?” asked Genghis Khan.

The sage responded as if this were no more than an extension of the compliments he had just received. “I, the hermit of the mountains, did not give myself this name,” he said in boastful humility. “Others gave it to me.”

The Mongol emperor, a man who had grown up in the thickets of Burkhan Khaldun and had lived among the Uriyankhai mountain men, did not ask the city sage why he was also known as the Wild Man from the Mountain, but later he sent an official to ask the monk again for his real name. “What were you called in former days?” Again, the Chinese sage avoided giving his real name and replied that people called him “the Immortal Sage or Eternal Master.”²⁰

Genghis Khan next addressed the absurd claims that the old man had been alive for centuries. Qiu Chuji was born around the year 1148 and became a monk in 1166 at age eighteen. He had reached his early seventies when he met Genghis Khan, who was fourteen years younger. When asked directly how old he was, the sage demurred, claiming that he did not know his age. Not long thereafter, however, the monk’s disciples celebrated his birthday with a party in a large orchard. “The nineteenth day of the first lunar month [mid-February 1223] was the Master’s birthday,” wrote his disciple Li Zhichang, “and all the officials burnt incense-candles and wished him long life.”²¹

Mongols often did not know their age and seemed not to care very much about it, but the Chinese used the twelve-animal zodiac cycle, and most people, certainly an educated scholar, knew their year of birth. For a monk concerned with telling fortunes, the sign corresponding to the year, day, and hour of birth held great importance. As Yelu Chucai wrote, “He falsely stated that he did not know it. How can an intelligent person not know his age?”²² By this point, Yelu Chucai had formed a decidedly negative opinion of the sage, but Genghis Khan, accustomed to dealing with all sorts of men, was more tolerant of the evasive answers. Yelu Chucai claimed that if the sage could not be trusted to answer the simplest questions honestly, how could his advice be taken seriously? Whereas Yelu Chucai was angry with the Taoist’s deception, Genghis Khan gently teased the monk and decided in jest to call him “the immortal.”

When asked practical questions, such as the cause of thunder and lightning, the sage answered with theological mutterings that thunder and lightning arose as nature’s punishment for improper behavior. He advised the Mongol emperor to practice Taoist rituals in order to appease the ancestral spirits, not knowing what a sensitive subject this was for a man who had not been allowed to worship his ancestors. Genghis Khan remained silent. Chatting on freely and seemingly delighted by how much he had impressed the Mongols with his wisdom, the sage then recommended that the Mongols bathe and wash their clothes, acts that they considered to pollute Mother Earth. He also recommended that they follow odd dietary restrictions to avoid earthquakes, being struck by lightning, and similar calamities.²³

Because the sage’s disciples claimed he had lived for more than three hundred years, Genghis Khan asked him to share the secret recipe of his life-prolonging medicine. He replied that the secret to eternal life did not come from an elixir but from following the correct path, which he then proposed to explain. As his entire reputation and the prosperity of his sect derived from selling elixirs that promised longevity, rival monks later mocked the sage for this answer. The old man advocated the denial of bodily pleasure and the need to overcome physical longing through mental and spiritual discipline. The venerable sage had three often-repeated pieces of advice for Genghis Khan: stop hunting, stop having sex, and stop taxing the Taoist clergy. In the end, the Great Khan would agree to only one of the three recommendations.

In addition to their personal chats, Genghis Khan arranged for the sage to preach sermons to his advisers and to his sons, whom he desperately sought to educate with moral knowledge in addition to their military skills. One can scarcely imagine their reactions, sitting cross-legged on the ground after a day of fighting as they listened to this wizened old monk preach the virtue of restraint. Qiu Chuji delivered his most important lecture on November 19, 1222, and ten years later his disciples published it.²⁴ The sermon offered windy explanations of the origin of the universe that contained aspects of traditional Taoism combined with the dualism of the Manichaeans. “Tao is the producer of Heaven the nurturer of Earth,” he began. “The sun and moon, the stars and planets, demons and spirits, man and things all grow out of Tao. Most men only know the greatness of Heaven; they do not understand the greatness of Tao. My sole object in living all my life separated from my family and in the monastic state has been to study this question.”

His lengthy sermon outlined the history of the Taoist faith, introduced its great teachers, and offered anecdotes from his own life. He shared the Taoist creation story: “When Tao produced Heaven and Earth, they in turn opened up and produced Man. When Man was first born he shone with a holy radiance of his own and his step was so light that it was as if he flew.” Life began in perfect spiritual harmony between body and soul, and between humans and nature. However, mankind made a fatal mistake, eating mystical mushrooms that disrupted the divine harmony and ended the original paradise on Earth. “The earth bore fungoids that were moist and sweet-tasting. Without waiting to roast or cook them, Man ate them all raw; at this time, nothing was cooked for eating. Man with his nose smelt their scent and with his mouth tasted their taste. Gradually his body grew heavy and his holy light grew dim. This was because his appetite was so keen.”

The moral of this story was that people “must do without pleasant sounds and sights, and get their pleasure only out of purity and quiet. They must reject luscious tastes and use foods that are fresh and light as their only delicacy.” His teaching reflected strong Manichaean tenets about the power of foods to destroy the spirit. “If the eye sees pleasant sights, if the mouth enjoys pleasant tastes or the natural state is perturbed by emotions, then the original Spirit is scattered and lost.” Some wondered how he could preach about overcoming needs and the importance of austerity when his first action on approaching the camp had been to complain about the food served to him.²⁵

He then turned to an even worse threat to the Original Spirit than food—sex. “The Taoist must, above all, abstain from lust,” he said. He warned that “a licentious life wastes the fine particles of the soul and leads to a considerable loss of the Original Spirit.” The Tao consists of two aspects: “The one, light and pure. This became the sky. The sky is male and belongs to the element fire. The other form is heavy and unclean. This becomes earth. The earth is female and belongs to the element water.” Mongols understood the distinction, but for them earth and water were both pure substances, like fire. They could be made impure only through human action. The union of male and female seemed perfectly natural to them in the physical as well as the spiritual sense.

At this point, the sage directed his remarks more specifically to Genghis Khan. He told him that even a common man with one wife could ruin himself by having too much sex with her. “What must happen to monarchs, whose palaces are filled with concubines?” he asked. Although it was well known that Genghis Khan had sent envoys searching for wise men to counsel him, the sage accused him of actually ordering these men “to search Peking and other places for women.” He specifically named the man who had first brought him to the khan’s attention as one such procurer, having erroneously assumed that all the dancing girls in their original caravan were women for the khan’s harem. He told his host that it was better not to see such women. “Once such things have been seen, it is hard indeed to exercise self-restraint. I would have you bear this in mind.” He specifically recommended that Genghis Khan sleep alone for one month. “To take medicine for a thousand days does less good that to lie alone for one night.”

He ended the sermon with another personal anecdote, possibly as a way to remind his audience that their leader was not the first emperor he had met. He recounted his audience more than thirty years earlier with the Jin Shizong emperor, who had been sixty-six years old at the time of their conversation. Genghis Khan was now turning sixty. At that meeting, the old Jin emperor could scarcely walk and could not get to his throne without an aide on each side of him. The Immortal Sage said that he offered the decrepit and feeble emperor the same advice he was now giving Genghis Khan about avoiding tasty foods and sex. The emperor had obeyed him and then “completely recovered his strength and activity,” he said proudly, as proof of the wisdom of his message. Yet his teachings were not quite as miraculous as he suggested. As the sinologist Arthur Waley pointed out in his study of the sage’s work, he “somewhat disingenuously does not mention that his interview took place in 1188 and that by 1189 the monarch was dead.”²⁶

In addition to proscribing sex and a variety of foods, the sage warned against hunting and other forms of vigorous exercise. Genghis Khan listened politely, but was unimpressed. Mongols do not like to say “no,” so the khan accepted the advice graciously. “Habits are not easy to put aside, I have taken your words to heart,” he told the sage.²⁷ Later he pushed back a bit. “Your advice is extremely good,” he said, “but unfortunately we Mongols are brought up from childhood to shoot arrows and ride.” He assured the Taoist sage that his words had been recorded in their original Chinese as well as in Mongolian translation for future study, but said he would continue to ride and hunt as before.

Genghis Khan mostly wanted to discuss practical matters of administration, and on this, the sage had little to offer other than to lament the Mongol destruction of ruling elites and claim that they had left the land without appropriate rulers. Referring to the modern world, he complained that “today it belongs to the common people.” Rather than create a new form of government, he advised Genghis Khan to follow the model of the Jin dynasty and to appoint local Chinese governors until the Mongols could learn from them. Some of his recommendations reflected good common sense, including the suggestion that the Mongols appoint knowledgeable local administrators—“some talented official who knows that area well to manage it”—but most of his specific policies were nakedly self-serving. The most important of these was to declare a three-year tax holiday to stimulate economic recovery in the area of his hometown.²⁸ Genghis Khan gracefully declined, explaining that such a plan was simply too difficult to implement.

When he was back in China, the Immortal Sage composed a poem about his visit, expressing his frustration at not having a greater impact:

For ten thousand li I rode on a Government horse,

It is three years since I parted from my friends.

The weapons of war are still not at rest.

But of the Way and its workings I have had my chance to preach.

On an autumn night, I spoke of the management of breath.²⁹

Later, a Chinese critic answered his poem with a shorter one, mocking the old sage’s inability to give comprehensible answers to the questions he had been asked by the Mongols.

He rode 10,000 li to the West

but could not answer the question.³⁰

Although Genghis Khan found little useful advice in the Taoist scholar’s chattering, he tolerated the old man better than did those around him. Genghis Khan’s indulgence for the sage infuriated Yelu Chucai, who complained that the sage’s “replies were nothing but commonplace.” Furthermore, “He touched upon matters like the spiritual essence, spirit, and vital force, and quoted stories such as that of Lin Ling-su guiding Hui-tsung of Sung in his mystical journey to the Empyrean Palace. These were the heights of His Excellency Qiu’s preaching of Taoism.”

“Surely you must have heard him say something remarkable?” asked a colleague. But Yelu Chucai could think of nothing. “When well informed people heard” his stories, he said, “they never failed to be convulsed with laughter.”³¹ Yelu Chucai added that despite feeling some sympathy for the elderly sage as a man, he “had no sympathy for his ideas.” In the face of Genghis Khan’s toleration and even favor toward the Taoists, Yelu Chucai proceeded cautiously. “I accepted his poetry, not his principles. At the time of his audiences with the Emperor, I found it difficult to criticize him. As our faiths were different, it would have created a dispute had I attacked him. This is why I disapproved of him in my mind and laughed at him in private.”

Yelu Chucai judged the Taoist sage on theological grounds, but Genghis Khan was not concerned with evaluating their validity or how his thoughts aligned with traditional Chinese philosophy. Recognizing the influence that religious men held over their followers, Genghis Khan wanted to enlist that power in the service of his new Mongol state. Religion is politics by another means, and behind the philosophical discussions, both Genghis Khan and Qiu Chuji had specific and highly important political agendas that only gradually emerged. Genghis Khan wanted the old sage’s help building public support for the Mongols among the Chinese populace. He had thus far conquered only a third of China, and although he had won most of the Jin territory, he had not yet begun war against the Southern Sung dynasty. The Mongols had not established control over all of China; many years of hard fighting remained ahead. The sage’s support could help solidify support for Mongol rule in the territory Genghis already controlled, and it might attract more support from the people living under the Jin and Sung rulers. Genghis Khan expected the Taoists to help him pacify the conquered people and to attract the still unconquered to his fold. As foreign rulers, the Mongols needed some form of Chinese legitimacy. The Confucians, intimately allied with the old elites, showed no sign of conferring any such blessing, but the Buddhists and Taoists did.

Qiu Chuji wanted to convert Genghis Khan and to make Taoism the official religion of his empire. Genghis Khan himself never considered conversion. “Why should I descend from lofty trees,” he offered, according to Yelu Chucai, “to enter into a dark valley?”³² Failing to make Genghis Khan into a disciple, Qiu Chuji had a list of specific favors he wanted from the Great Khan. Before leaving to return to China, he begged for tax breaks and special concessions. Genghis Khan granted most of the old man’s requests, with the expectation that in return the monks would provide a service to society. He asked him to promise that Taoists would recite the scriptures and pray earnestly for the well-being of the khan and his government.

Yelu Chucai had expected the sage to request the tax exemptions for all monks or all faiths, “whether it is a Buddhist monk or any other man who cultivates goodness.”³³ Instead, “he requested to exempt from levies only the Taoists and made no mention of the Buddhist monks.” The sage asked for a gerege, an oval disc, also called a paiza, worn on a cord, which would give him the right to use the Mongolian military system of posts and horses. It was like an all-purpose credit card that never had to be paid. The bearer of a gerege could demand virtually any type of goods or services without paying for them or even offering a rationale for needing them. Normally, only high-ranking officials received a gerege because it conferred tremendous prestige and power on the bearer. The front stated that the bearer had the blessing from heaven and from Genghis Khan, while the back carried the warning that whoever disobeyed the orders of the bearer “shall be guilty and die.”³⁴

Unlike Yelu Chucai’s persistent enmity toward the Taoists, Genghis Khan, whether he agreed with everything the sage said or not, saw no harm in the Taoist teachings. To the contrary, they were compatible with Genghis Khan’s own Mongol traditions, but more important, the khan had won the support of the sage. He wanted to build on that relationship, and so Genghis Khan granted his request and formalized it in an official directive. The sage was given the Golden Tiger gerege showing great imperial favor.³⁵

Even when his meetings with religious scholars produced little spiritual or practical advice, Genghis Khan felt that they were useful on many levels. He knew that spies would report to his enemies that he was being initiated into secret knowledge, and in and of itself that held a certain value. In Central Asia, China exercised a powerful and exotic mystique as a land of non-Muslims who possessed great cunning and harbored secret knowledge, and the fact that an old and venerable monk had traveled so far to share his wisdom with the Mongol leader inspired awe in his new subjects and became a cause of caution for others.

Genghis Khan conducted a series of conversations with sages and priests of various faiths as his camp moved around Afghanistan. To emphasize their mysterious importance, he conducted these meetings in ostentatious secrecy. On some occasions, a special ceremonial ger was erected for the conversation, and nonessential people in the court were forced to leave the area entirely. The meetings were held at night, as “to the left and the right candles and torches flared.”³⁶ Rumors spread that the Mongol leader was being inducted into secret rites and given knowledge that would grant him special powers. Occasionally he invited a select local official who had pledged loyalty to him to join these ceremonies. The official’s inability to understand the Chinese or Mongolian language heightened the mystery and drama of what was being revealed.

These scenes provoked wild speculation among Muslim scholars as to what was taking place. Juzjani, whose credibility was occasionally diminished by his obsessive hatred of the Mongols, said that Genghis Khan had evil powers and was in frequent communion with malevolent spirits. He portrayed him as “adept in magic and deception, and some of the devils were his friends.” Juzjani compared his actions and powers to those of a shaman. “Every now and again he used to fall into a trance, and, in that state of insensibility, all sorts of things used to proceed from his tongue,” he wrote. During these times, he supposedly wore special clothes that he kept in a sealed box and donned only when he needed to prophesy. “Whenever this inspiration came over him, every circumstance—victories, undertakings, indication of enemies, defeat, and the reduction of countries—anything which he might desire, would all be uttered by his tongue.” A scribe recorded his words during the trance. When he emerged, the scribe would read back his utterances to him, and “according to these he would act, and, more or less, indeed, the whole used to come true.”³⁷

Juzjani wrote that in addition to these trances, he “was well acquainted with the art of divination by means of the shoulder-bones of sheep; and he used continually to place shoulder-blades on the fire, and burn them, and in this manner he would discover the signs of the shoulder-blades.” It is unlikely that Genghis Khan put on special clothes and fell into a trance or that he interpreted sheep bones, but Juzjani’s descriptions record precisely the types of activities reported for steppe shamans and give some insight into what may have been occurring in the inner circle of his camp.

Despite Juzjani’s vivid imagination, the meetings with sages probably produced more bewilderment than drama. In the end, Genghis Khan seemed little changed by the Taoist monk’s visit, but Qiu Chuji left as a new man, invigorated by his newly granted authority. He carried papers from the Great Khan giving him the power to free his disciples from taxation, signed and sealed with the official stamps. To the Mongols such a paper was itself a sacred item before which they would bow in respect at the power of the khan and the majesty of the state. The edict was a direct connection to Genghis Khan in his words, straight from his mouth to the hand of the scribe. Content mattered little in a society where few people could read; what mattered was that the document demonstrated that its bearer had a direct connection to the Great Khan.

All too often in history, religious leaders, when provided with a modicum of political power, turn arrogant and haughty. As Qiu Chuji traveled farther from the Mongol court, he exercised his power to issue orders, requisition whatever he wanted, dismiss priests and monks from holy places, and replace them with his followers. He confiscated rival temples and forced the conversion of monks from other faiths. He attracted followers because he now had the power to recognize them as ordained members of his sect and therefore to free them from taxes. He became a petty tyrant whom no one dared to challenge.

The sage and his followers became greedy and boasted of their power. “Even if we make no appeal for funds, we shall certainly receive assistance,” said one of his subordinates. “If by any chance sufficient help is not forthcoming—if we exhaust our own stocks of material and have come to the end of the temple-funds—all we have to do is go round with a gourd-bowl. We can collect as much money as we please.”³⁸

“When I think of returning to those numberless crowds,” Qiu Chuji wrote in a poem on the way home, “deep in my heart are feelings too great to express.”³⁹ Despite the loving tone of his poem, he changed his sentiments when he realized that all of these devoted followers of the Tao would have to be fed. He issued an order saying that because some of his followers “have shown themselves to be unruly and without principle,” one of his disciples would be invested “with full authority to deal with such wherever he finds them, lest the disciples of Tao should themselves impede its mysterious power.”⁴⁰ They were expelled.

In the coming decades, the powers of the sage and the scope of his order steadily expanded. He and his followers reinterpreted phrases in Genghis Khan’s directive in order to grant their sect power over all Taoist monks, and eventually over their main rivals, the Buddhists. The Taoists extended the tax-free status of their clergy and buildings to include their diverse businesses, which expanded rapidly with their new tax advantage over other merchants. Each monastery became a virtual warehouse of goods to be sold tax-free.⁴¹

With the special dispensations granted them, the Taoists grew strong—so strong that in some cases they believed they were exempt from Mongol law. The monasteries operated as tax-free zones for commerce, banking, and manufacturing, with more space devoted to warehousing goods than to worship. They had become a chain of tax-free emporiums across the empire. Men who joined the order became exempt from military service and the onerous tasks of work brigades, highway construction, government transport, and other types of labor demanded by local Mongol authorities. In time, the expansion of the Taoists threatened the revenues needed to administer the realm and feed the massive Mongol army.

The Immortal Sage was so proud of his preaching to Genghis Khan that he convinced himself his brand of Taoism would soon receive sanction as the official religion of the Mongol nation and reach far beyond its original home in China. “Our temples will be renamed by Imperial Command,” he told his disciples. “After my death our religion will see a great triumph. All parts of the world, far and near on every side will become homes of the Tao.” He wanted his disciples to get “our Faith ready here and elsewhere to take control.”⁴² Like Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, Taoism was ready to become a world religion.

Qiu Chuji was fortunate enough to have the most powerful man in the world as his patron, but he had also acquired an implacable foe. Yelu Chucai’s rise to power had only just begun; his book was only the first round in a protracted religious struggle that would soon grip China and, in another generation, help to dismember the Mongol Empire itself.