Tang Dynasty and Nestorian Christianity

For my blog post today, a couple of disparate reflections:

1.       I wonder what the Nestorian tablet meant to Christians living in Changan during the Tang Dynasty. Assuming that the vast majority of people could not read, what did this object signify to the everyday observer? To a Nestorian Christian, perhaps this monument was a holy and venerable site, an object of worship as much as an inscription of church history. To an imperial official the tablet may have represented nothing more than a quaint foreign artefact, of no particular importance at all.

2.       Hansen describes Changan as a city under constant surveillance, a heavily codified and rigid separation of classes. How would being a Nestorian Christian affect a person's place in this hierarchy? How far could a Christian rise in the imperial government? I gather that the Emperor was very lenient with regards to other religions in the capital city, but both Hansen and Bundy suggest that Nestorian Christians experienced some prejudice at the hands of ethnic Tang Chinese.

3.       Bundy suggests that:

"The loss of cultural and intellectual centres as well as internal political strife making communication with Baghdad difficult, if not impossible, combined to weaken missionary activity and, probably, to increase the rapidity of general cultural assimilation."

This would suggest that a religion, as a social body, needs networks of economic and information exchange. To view religion in this way seems very different than the approach we have taken in this course thus far. We have been asked to understand religion in terms of localized practices... this quotation asks us to imagine religions in terms of institutions, institutions which attempt to unify and control localized practices. Are these schema compatible?