The Blurring Boundary: Nonviolent Religious Conversion
Abstract
This article introduces the concept of "blurring-boundary" to illustrate the ways Nestorianism adopted in Tang Dynasty to secure legal recognition and to conduct its localization within Chinese society. Through an analysis of the Nestorian Stele and the Zhixuan Anle Sutra, this paper demonstrates how Nestorianism expressed Christian doctrine by drawing on the linguistic structures and cosmological terms of Buddhism and Taoism, thereby gaining acceptance in the ideological system within Tang China. Unlike Buddhism's broad popular base and Islam's community-based mode for communication, Nestorianism adopted elite-targeted communication strategies aimed at the imperial and scholar-officialdom, emphasizing political obedience, metaphysical compatibility, and linguistic adaptation in its attempt to participate in the royal network dominated by Buddhism. Through comparative religious and political discourse analysis, this paper highlights a distinctly "non-confrontational" mode of religious adaptation that offers a new perspective on the mechanism of coexistence within dominant cultural systems.While this paper mainly focuses on textual strategies rather than practical networks, it aims to provide theoretical reference for future research on religious transmission and cultural boundary.
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