Buddhist Poetry by Its Persecutors: The Cases of Li Shen and Li Deyu

As the highest ministers in the Tang empire in 842–45 CE, Li Shen and Li Deyu were responsible for overseeing one of the most intense persecutions of Buddhism. For this reason, scholars have described them as “hysterically anti-Buddhist.” At the same time, the two men wrote poetry about Buddhist sites, texts, and people in a sympathetic manner. This article explores the tension in these two ministers’ writing. I begin by examining works by two of their contemporaries and one of their predecessors in the role of chief minister to establish baseline expectations for literati attitudes toward Buddhist texts, images, jargon, and doctrines. Next, I demonstrate how Li Deyu’s poetry largely falls in line with these expected attitudes but occasionally exceeds them. Third, I demonstrate how Li Shen goes one degree beyond Li Deyu, using Buddhist allusions not only to create ambiguity in the speaker’s poetic gaze but also to suggest the inseparability of illusion and reality. This deep engagement with Buddhist texts and ideas is not, I argue, the result of a contrast between the Lis’ public and private writings, nor about their being secret believers who sought only to purge the church of inauthentic elements. Rather, as Tang officials, they oversaw the regulation of religious matters to ensure the prosperity of the people while they also, as poets, understood Buddhism as a treasury of resources to be deployed—a repertoire of tropes, a storehouse of ideas, and an armory of numinous spiritual powers.