Duoshe: How Civilizations Survive on TenTao

I Asked an AI Two Opposite Questions, and It Called Me Profound Both Times

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A very comfortable conversation

For a while, I talked to an AI about civilizations and religions almost every day.

Once I asked it: is the point of religion to continue a people's future in an organized, disciplined way?

It began its reply: "This is a very profound perspective that captures the core of the sociology of religion." Then it went on to Dunbar's number, to Durkheim, to how religion lets strangers trust each other. Every paragraph followed me down the road I was already on, and every paragraph made me think: yes, I got it right.

A few minutes later I changed direction: isn't religion just about making people obedient, making them good, making them have children, sacrificing their own happiness, a form of mind control?

After the Temple Burned: How a People Packed Its State into a Book

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The year 70

In Rome there is the Arch of Titus, built around 81 CE. On the inside of the arch is a relief: a line of Roman soldiers carrying a seven-branched menorah, returning in triumph from Jerusalem.

The relief inside the Arch of Titus: Roman soldiers carrying in procession the menorah from the Temple in Jerusalem. The winning side carved this scene in stone, and two thousand years later it has become the picture most often quoted by the losing side.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Anthony M., CC BY 2.0

That menorah came from the Second Temple in Jerusalem. In 70 CE, the Roman army broke into Jerusalem, and the Temple was burned.

394 CE: The Last Line of Hieroglyphs

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the wall of Philae

On the upper Nile there is a small island, and on the island the Temple of Isis at Philae.

The Temple of Isis at Philae, first pylon. In the twentieth century, when the Aswan dam was built, the whole temple was taken apart and moved to a higher island nearby.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photographed by Vyacheslav Argenberg, CC BY 4.0

On 24 August 394 CE, a priest named Esmet-Akhom carved an image of a god on the temple wall, and beside it a short inscription, praying that the inscription would "last for ever."

He probably didn't know he was the last.

This is the last known inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Why Iranians Say "We Are Not Arabs"

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A line you often hear

Talk to Iranians and you will soon hear it: we are Persians, not Arabs.

To outsiders it may sound odd. Iran is an Islamic Republic, and Islam arrived in the seventh century with the Arab armies; modern Persian is written in the Arabic alphabet. The religion and the script both came from the Arabs, so how can the identity not be Arab?

This question is a good test of a very popular claim: "Iran was taken over by Islam."

The end of an empire

Sasanian Persia was a tough empire. Shapur I, one of its founding kings, defeated a Roman emperor and had the scene carved into a cliff.

The cliff relief at Naqsh-e Rostam: on horseback is the Sasanian king Shapur I, and the one kneeling before him is a Roman emperor. Iranians of the third century could not have imagined how their empire would end four hundred years later.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Are the Hungarians Descended from the Huns?

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A widely circulated claim

In Chinese one often hears the claim that the Hungarians are descendants of the Xiongnu. The reason looks intuitive: the Chinese name for Hungary contains the character Xiong, and the English "Hungary" contains "Hun."

Is it right? To answer, the question has to be taken apart first: when we say "who is descended from whom," do we mean the name, the language, or the blood?

First a note on terms. The Chinese word Xiongnu refers to the Xiongnu of the Mongolian plateau; the people who reached the gates of Rome in European history are the Huns (Attila's people), appearing in the fourth and fifth centuries. Whether the two are one lineage is still disputed by scholars. Below, "the Huns" means the European branch.

How Old Is Caste, Really?

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nagpur, October 1956

On 14 October 1956, in the central Indian city of Nagpur, at a very large gathering, a sixty-five-year-old man led the crowd in taking vows to convert to Buddhism. Over the next two days, the number who followed him is given as anywhere from over 300,000 to 600,000. It was one of the largest mass conversions in human history.

Ambedkar speaking at the conversion ceremony in Nagpur, 14 October 1956.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

The man who led was Bhimrao Ambedkar. He was born into an "untouchable" family; as a child at school he had to bring his own sackcloth to sit on and could not touch the water tap. He went on to earn doctorates at Columbia University and the London School of Economics, and became chair of the committee that drafted India's constitution.

Year 4609 of the Yellow Emperor

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A proclamation in Wuchang

In October 1911, after the Wuchang Uprising had taken the city, the revolutionaries set up the Hubei Military Government. The proclamations they issued were no longer dated "the third year of Xuantong," but "the 4609th year of the Yellow Emperor."

In front of the Hubei Military Government: the crossed flags are the "Eighteen-Star Flag," the eighteen stars standing for the eighteen provinces within the Pass. The soldiers on guard had been Qing New Army men a few months before.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

That year was not written casually. Behind it lay a "dispute over the calendar" that had gone on for almost ten years.

Why the Yellow Emperor

In the age of emperors, years were counted by the emperor's reign title. To use someone's reign title was to accept his rule.

The Cross in Chang'an, 781

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A stele in the Xi'an Stele Forest

In the Xi'an Beilin Museum stands a stele almost three metres tall. Its crown carries a cross. Under the cross is a lotus, and around it, auspicious clouds.

The "Stele on the Spread of the Luminous Teaching of Daqin in China," Xi'an Beilin Museum. The main text is in Chinese characters; Syriac is carved along the foot and the sides.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by G41rn8, CC BY-SA 4.0

The inscription is in Chinese characters, and at the foot and on the sides run lines of Syriac. The title across the top is nine characters long: the Stele on the Spread of the Luminous Teaching of Daqin in China.

It was erected in the second year of Jianzhong under the Tang, that is, in 781.

Is the World Becoming Religious?

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A sociologist admits he was wrong

In the mid-twentieth century, sociology had a theory that had nearly become consensus: modernisation makes religion decline. The richer a country, the more widespread its education, the more advanced its science, the weaker religion becomes, until it retreats into a corner of private life.

The American sociologist Peter Berger was among the best-known representatives of this "secularisation theory."

In 1999 he edited a book called The Desecularization of the World. It contains a line that has been quoted again and again: the assumption that we live in a secularised world is false. The world today, with some exceptions, is as furiously religious as it ever was.

For the figurehead of a theory to overturn it in public is rarer in academia than a religious revival. The evidence he saw: the Islamic revival since the 1970s, the return of religion in Russia after the Soviet collapse, the fast growth of Christianity in the Global South, and the ever-larger American evangelical movement.

Christianity's Future Is in Africa

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two numbers

In 1910 about two thirds of the world's Christians lived in Europe.

A hundred years later, in 2010, only about a quarter (26%) remained in Europe. Nearly as many Christians (24%) lived in sub-Saharan Africa, where in 1910 Christians were still relatively few.

These two numbers come from the Pew Research Center's 2011 report Global Christianity. They mean that the equation many people carry in their heads, "Christianity = a Western religion," no longer holds, at least in numbers.

Thought to be a colonial legacy

The common explanation is that this was the work of missionaries in the colonial age.

Missionaries mattered, of course. But the historian of religion Philip Jenkins points out in The Next Christendom (2002) that the truly explosive growth of African Christianity came largely after colonial rule ended. And its main actors were often not foreign missions but churches the Africans ran and led themselves: indigenous independent churches, Pentecostal churches, and older-denomination churches led by African clergy.

Why Buddhism Vanished from India

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A strange fact

Shakyamuni was born in what is now southern Nepal, awoke at Bodh Gaya in India, and spent his life teaching mainly in the Ganges region. In the third century BCE Ashoka of the Maurya dynasty strongly backed Buddhism and sent people everywhere to spread it. For over a thousand years after that, India produced great Buddhist seats of learning such as Nalanda and Vikramashila, and both Xuanzang and Yijing studied at Nalanda.

Xuanzang as painted by a Japanese artist. He lived at Nalanda for about five years, and on returning to Chang'an he brought back more than six hundred scriptures.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, CC0

But by the thirteenth century Buddhism was almost impossible to find in India proper. A large part of India's Buddhists today are the neo-Buddhists who converted with Ambedkar in 1956, and their descendants.

Russell's Table of Equivalents

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A table of seven lines

In 1945 the British philosopher Russell published A History of Western Philosophy. In the chapter on St Augustine he suddenly inserts a "dictionary," which he says is a way to "understand Marx psychologically":

Yahweh = dialectical materialism
The Messiah = Marx
The Elect = the proletariat
The Church = the Communist Party
The Second Coming = the revolution
Hell = punishment of the capitalists
The Millennium = the communist commonwealth

Russell goes on to explain that the words on the left give the words on the right their emotional weight; and it is this emotion, familiar to those brought up in Christianity or Judaism, that makes Marx's eschatology seem credible.

Russell in 1950, around the time he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a well-known unbeliever himself, the author of Why I Am Not a Christian*.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Rijksmuseum, CC0*

Confucianism on the Indonesian ID Card

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A question argued for over a century

Is Confucianism a religion?

The Chinese-speaking world has argued about this for more than a hundred years. In 1912 Chen Huanzhang and others founded the Confucian Association in Shanghai, with Kang Youwei as its spiritual leader; in 1913 and again in 1916 they petitioned to make Confucianism the "state religion" of the Republic of China, and failed both times. Their opponents said Confucianism is philosophy, ethics, moral instruction, not religion; Confucius "did not speak of prodigies, force, disorder or spirits" and said to "respect the spirits but keep them at a distance."

Chen Huanzhang (1881–1933), from Gaoyao in Guangdong, a Columbia University PhD in economics and the founder of the Confucian Association. He wrote The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School*, and later set up a Confucian Academy in Hong Kong.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain*

Are Seventy Percent of Koreans Christian?

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A widely circulated answer

Among the things I had saved was an answer to this effect: Chinese native belief is declining and a foreign religion will inevitably replace it, "and South Korea is the clearest example, where seventy percent of the native population already believes in Jesus."

The line has real impact. A clear number, a clear conclusion, and a touch of urgency. I did not doubt it at the time and saved it.

Later I went and checked the Korean census.

What the census says

Statistics Korea surveys religion in the census every ten years. The 2015 results:

No religion: 56.1%
Protestant: 19.7%
Buddhist: 15.5%
Catholic: 7.9%

Korea's 2015 census, "What is your religion?" The dotted line is the seventy percent in that answer.　Data: Statistics Korea

Is Hua Tuo's Name Sanskrit?

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A paper by Chen Yinke

In 1930 the historian Chen Yinke published an article in the Tsinghua Journal, titled "Cao Chong, Hua Tuo and Buddhist Stories in the Records of the Three Kingdoms."

Chen Yinke (1890–1969). He knew over a dozen languages and read Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan; he was forty when he wrote this paper.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

The article discusses two stories everyone knows. One is Cao Chong weighing the elephant, the other is the miracle physician Hua Tuo. Chen Yinke held that Buddhist stories from India had been mixed into both.

This scholar, who wrote of "independence of spirit, freedom of thought," went blind in old age, suffered greatly in the campaigns of the 1960s, and died in Guangzhou in 1969. Many of the hypotheses he left have waited ever since for someone to prove or overturn them.

The Conquerors' Religion

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A counterintuitive ending

In the thirteenth century the Mongol Empire conquered nearly half the known world: from the Pacific to Eastern Europe, from Siberia to the Persian Gulf.

By the intuition that "the strong export their faith," the conquered should have converted to the conquerors' religion. History went the other way: a few generations on, Mongol rulers one after another converted to the religions of the lands they had conquered. More interesting still, they did not all convert to the same one.

The west: Islam

In Persia, Genghis Khan's grandson Hülegü founded the Ilkhanate. The early Ilkhans followed shamanism and Buddhism, and were rather friendly to Christianity.

In 1295 Ghazan took the throne and formally converted to Islam. He was the first Ilkhan to convert, and he went on to make Islam the state religion and require courtiers and army commanders to convert as well. The Persian vizier and historian Rashid al-Din recorded this history in his great work, the Jami' al-tawarikh.

Why the World's Largest Religious Building Is Not in India

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A temple to Vishnu

Angkor Wat in Cambodia covers about 162 hectares and is generally held to be the largest religious building in the world.

The façades of the first and second levels of Angkor Wat. It faces west; in Hinduism west is the direction of Vishnu, and also the direction of death.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0

It was built in the early twelfth century under the Khmer king Suryavarman II as his state temple, and possibly his tomb. It was dedicated to Vishnu, one of the chief gods of Hinduism. Its bas-reliefs show stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and the Indian myth of the "Churning of the Ocean of Milk."

Buddhism, the Only Major Religion That Is Shrinking

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A set of numbers

In 2025 the Pew Research Center published a report counting how the world's religious populations changed from 2010 to 2020.

Most religions grew: Muslims by 347 million, Christians by 122 million, Hindus by 126 million, the unaffiliated by 270 million.

There was one exception: Buddhists fell from 343 million to 324 million, about 19 million fewer, and their share of world population dropped from 4.9% to 4.1%.

In ten years, only the number of Buddhists got smaller.　Data: Pew Research Center, 2025

It was the only major religion whose absolute numbers fell over the decade.

Reason one: older, fewer births

Pew's analysis says Buddhists are the oldest and have the fewest children of any religious group in the world: in 2020 the median age of Buddhists was 40, nine years above the global median; from 2010 to 2015 the fertility rate of Buddhists averaged only about 1.6, the only religious group below replacement level.

The Three-Act Narrative

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A shape that looks familiar

Look at a few stories first:

Humans originally lived in the Garden of Eden, fell through original sin, and in future will enter heaven through redemption.
Israel once had a glorious kingdom, was exiled for faithlessness, and in future the Messiah will come and rebuild the kingdom.
Humans originally lived in a classless primitive society, later fell into class oppression and alienation, and in future will enter communism.

Utterly different in content, identical in shape: perfect past → suffering present → bright future.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Garden of Eden, 1530. In one picture, from the making of man and the stealing of the fruit to the expulsion, all at once. Everything begins in a perfect garden.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, public domain

Iran's Fertility Rate

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A popular intuition

In discussions of East Asia's low fertility I often see a claim, one I once largely accepted myself: a secular society is doomed not to have children, only religion-driven populations can sustain high fertility, so East Asia must either find a religion or head for exhaustion.

The example behind this claim is usually Israel: a developed country with a total fertility rate close to 3, and still higher among the ultra-Orthodox.

The intuition is partly right: in surveys in many countries, the more devout the group, the more children they have on average.

But if "religion determines fertility" is a law, Iran is hard to explain.

Iran's numbers

After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran became an Islamic republic led by religious scholars. In the early revolution, the government encouraged childbearing, and the family planning programme of the Pahlavi era was shelved.

Is Sweeping the Graves at Qingming a Religion?

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An argument in a comment section

Every year around Qingming a question surfaces online: is ancestor worship at Qingming a religion?

I once saved an argument from a comment section, and its positions are quite representative:

One person said: "Remembering the dead has nothing to do with religion. Missing your family is a perfectly normal feeling."
Another replied: "Then why burn paper, set out offerings, kowtow? By Occam's razor, missing your family does not need any of these rituals. Yet for thousands of years the Chinese have kept making them."
Someone brought out the textbook definition: "A religion has four elements: an object of belief, doctrine, ritual, a centralised organisation. Ancestor worship has no doctrine and its organisation is scattered, so it does not count."
Someone else said: "It has all four: ancestors, family instructions, sacrifice, ancestral hall. It is only that people are atomised now and the halls are gone."

The argument is interesting because it touches a real problem: where did the ruler we use to define "religion" come from?

Churches Run Like Companies

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A service like a music festival

I once saved a piece a netizen wrote about a church service he attended in the American countryside:

The stage was set up like a rock band: electric guitar, electric bass, drum kit, synthesiser, in place of the organ and choir he had pictured. The pastor preached like a TED speaker, with a ceiling camera automatically following his face, big screens on either side playing in sync, and slides behind him changing with the sermon. Before new believers were baptised, a short interview film was shown, telling the story of "confusion, struggle, finding the Lord, being saved."

A service at Lakewood Church in Houston. The church's auditorium was originally a basketball arena, the home court of the Rockets.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0

Jainism: The Richer It Gets, the Smaller It Grows

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An extreme religion

Many people first hear of Jainism because it is "extreme."

The core Jain teaching is non-violence (ahimsa), and it is pushed to the limit: devout monks cover their mouths and noses with cloth so as not to breathe in small insects; they sweep the ground with a whisk as they walk so as not to tread on ants; some followers do not eat root vegetables, because digging them up harms the life in the soil.

A monk of the Śvetāmbara Jains with a white cloth (muhpatti) over his mouth so as not to breathe in small insects while speaking. Everyone has worn a mask lately; they have worn theirs for over two thousand years.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, photo by Samyak Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0

How New Religions Survive

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1830

In March 1830, in western New York State, a new scripture was published: the Book of Mormon.

Its "translator" was a twenty-four-year-old man, Joseph Smith. On 6 April 1830 he and a few followers founded a church, later called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, generally known as the Mormon Church.

Joseph Smith (1805–1844). He died at thirty-eight in a jail in Illinois, shot by a mob with blackened faces.　Source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Nobody then would have bet on its survival. In 1844 Smith was killed by a mob. In 1847 Brigham Young led the believers all the way to Salt Lake City. In 1890 the church formally announced that it was giving up polygamy, and only then made peace with the federal government.

"All Dharmas Are Made by the Mind": The Original Says Something Else (Part 1)

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Search online for "simulated universe Yogacara" and you will find a batch of articles that put Yogacara, quantum physics and "consciousness is the base layer of the universe" together, very satisfying to read. One netizen said the world is only a "three-dimensional great dream, moment by moment."

I want to read it against the original: what does Yogacara itself say? What does the original of "all dharmas are made by the mind" say? This is Part 1, covering only the Yogacara side. Part 2 turns to the simulated universe.

One thing first: both parts read the relevant claims as thought experiments, and do not decide for any side.

1. What the original says of "all dharmas are made by the mind"

The most often cited source of this line is the Avatamsaka Sutra. In the eighty-fascicle version, fascicle 19, chapter "Verses of Praise in the Yama Palace," a verse spoken by the bodhisattva Jue Lin (Awakening Forest). The original runs:

We May Be Living in a Simulation: Where It Parts Ways with Yogacara (Part 2)

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1 covered the Yogacara side: the original of the Avatamsaka Sutra is "everything is made by the mind alone"; Vasubandhu used dreams, hungry ghosts and hells to argue that outer objects need not exist; the exit is called the turning of the basis. This piece goes on to the simulated universe, to see where it parts ways with Yogacara.

This series is called Duoshe, "possession." The word has a premise: consciousness can leave this body and move into another shell.

In 2003 the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper whose premise is also a single one: consciousness need not grow in a brain; as long as the computation is fine enough, it can exist on other material too.