Written by Afsheen Sharifzadeh, a graduate of Tufts University focusing on Iran and the Caucasus. This article surveys the Manichaean religion (Āyin-e Māni), which was founded in Sasanian Iran in the 3rd century AD but quickly expanded into the Roman Empire, Inner Asia and China, with a pocket surviving in Fujian into modern times

The only extant statue of the Iranian prophet Māni (摩尼 Móní), carved into a cliff at the Cǎo’ān nunnery (photo 3) in 1339 A.D. by Chinese Manichaeans during the Yuan Dynasty, Jinjiang, Fujian province, China. In China, Māni assumed the configuration of “Māni, Buddha of Light,” (Chinese: Móní guāng fó 摩尼光佛 ) depicted with straight hair draped over his shoulders and sporting a beard in a Chinese Manichaean icon from the 14th or 15th century A.D. (photo 2) The distinctive features of the prophet (arched eyebrows, fleshy jowls) are still apparent in the carving. By report, the statue had a mustache and sideburns, but they were removed by a 20th-century Buddhist monk trying to make the statue more like a traditional Buddha. UNESCO designated the site of the Manichaean Cǎo’ān a World Heritage Site in 2021 as a unique relic of an extinct world religion.

Background
Māni (216–274 CE) was an Iranian prophet born near the Sasanian Persian capital of Ctesiphon, who reported having received two revelations, the first at the age of twelve and the second at twenty-four, from a spiritual being whom he later designated as his heavenly “Twin” (Greek: σύζυγος súzugos “yokefellow”; Aramaic: תאומא tɑʔwmɑ “twin”). Following successive revelations by Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus Christ—the three ‘Apostles of Light’—Māni styled himself as the ‘final seal’ (or παράκλητος Paráklētos ‘Paraclete of Truth’) in a line of prophets whose respective religions had come to predominate in the great cultural spheres of Rome, Persia and China. This self-understanding was shaped within the religiously plural environment of Sasanian Persia, where all three traditions were already widely practiced. Māni was born, according to later tradition, of noble Parthian stock on his mother’s side; his father Pattig had joined the Jewish-Christian sect of the Elchasaites in Asōristān (Sasanian Mesopotamia) and raised the boy within it, a milieu whose heterodox character provided fertile ground for the synthesis and universal claims of his later teaching.

In essence, Māni’s message calls upon the faithful to liberate the divine light that is imprisoned in matter so that it may return to the realm of pure spirit (the World of Light). Salvation is thus understood to depend upon spiritual knowledge and progressive purification from material attachments, since the physical world itself is held to be intrinsically evil. The prophet himself is credited with the composition of a substantial corpus of sacred writings. Seven works were written in Syriac—a liturgical Aramaic language understood in Asōristān—while a further treatise, composed in Middle Persian for King Shapur I, set out the principles of the religion and was known as the Šābuhragān (Chinese: 二宗经 Èrzōng jīng). Māni was also a famed painter who disseminated his teachings through illuminated picture books, above all the Ārdahang (New Persian: Aržang ارژنگ; Coptic: ⲉⲓⲕⲱⲛ Eikōn; Chinese 大門荷翼圖 Dà ménhéyì tú, transcribing an Parthian title reconstructed as *dō bunɣāhīg “of the two principles”), as well as through hymns of praise and dramatic performances, employing a range of media to convey his message.

Manichaeism may fairly be called the first deliberately universal religion. Māni envisioned his teaching as a creed for the whole of the known world, intended to embrace and surpass all previous religious traditions and to explain all that exists in heaven and on earth. Owing to its zealously missionary character, within two centuries this dualistic doctrine had won adherents across a vast geographical range, from Hispania, Gaul, Rome and Numidia, through Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Transoxiana, as far as China, where it has endured in an altered form into modern times. Distinct regional expressions emerged as the religion spread, such as a ‘Chinese’, ‘Roman’, or ‘Egyptian’ Manichaeism–yet in the early centuries these were held together by a single ecclesiastical structure, centered on the seat of the Archegos (ἀρχηγός, “leader”) at Ctesiphon, in the province the tradition called Babylon, whose authority ran to the farthest communities of the faith.

Whilst the entirety of the existing Manichaean corpus was recovered fragmentarily in Egypt and China in the 20th and 21st centuries, this speaks naught to the religion’s historical distribution or popularity elsewhere. Indeed, Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) was a Manichee prior to his conversion to Christianity, which followed a disillusioning experience with Faustus of Mileve, a fellow Numidian and a prominent Manichaean teacher active in Carthage. At the opposite chronological end of the tradition, the last recorded Archegos resident at Ctesiphon, known to the Muslims as Abū Hilāl al-Dayhūri (r. 754–775 AD), was likewise of North African extraction. Further testimony points to a substantial Manichaean presence in the Latin West. Hilary of Poitiers wrote that Manichaeism was a significant force in Roman Gaul by 354 A.D, while numerous Manichaean monasteries existed in Rome in 312 AD during the time of Pope Miltiades. In Central Asia the religion attained an even more striking degree of political recognition, when the Uyghur Khaghanate, under the influence of its Sogdian urban elites, adopted Manichaeism as its official faith between 763 and 840 CE.

Yet despite this remarkable geographical spread and occasional institutional support, Manichaeism stands almost alone among the major organized religions of the pre-modern world in having suffered a near-total extinction. Subjected over the centuries to sustained and often severe persecution across the regions in which it had once flourished, it ultimately survived only in scattered remnants and in disguise.

(1) Phases of Manichaean history (3rd-17th centuries A.D.) (2) The spread of Manichaeism (~300-500 A.D.)

Manichaean Cosmogony, Social Organization and Ethics
Māni’s teaching, which is essentially Gnostic in character, sets forth a fantastically detailed system of divine and demonic forces, preserved in fullest detail in the Kephalaia, the great compilation of his discourses set down by his disciples. Setting aside the syncretic elements of his religion and considering notions unique to Manichaeism, the following may be enumerated. The Manichaean narrative begins with a primordial cosmological battle between two independent and eternal ‘realms’ or ‘natures’, existing beyond the bounds of the physical universe: the World of Light and the World of Darkness. The conflict between these two intangible realms composed of the substances Light (Spirit) and Darkness (Matter), respectively, continues to define all of reality.

The drama unfolds when the demonic powers of Darkness, driven by greed, launch an assault upon the World of Light, whereupon God, the Father of Greatness, summons forth divine emanations of himself to defend his realm. However, in the course of the ensuing combat, the two substances become disastrously intermixed at the hands of merciless demons. Then, a second set of Light divinities are summoned, who create the world, sun, moon and stars as an intricate mechanism designed to separate the two substances. But demons retaliate to this tactic by further dividing the imprisoned Light still more finely and dispersing it throughout the material constituents of Earth. Thus human beings, animals, plants, water, soil and other features of the visible world are understood to be sparks of Light trapped in the illusion of matter, causing the Light particles to become defiled by the Darkness encapsulating them. Therefore, the Manichaean view explained the existence of evil by positing a flawed creation in the formation of which God took no part, and which constituted, rather, the product of an attack by evil beings against God. The appearance of the Prophet Māni is accordingly interpreted as a further intervention by the World of Light to reveal to mankind the true source of the spiritual Light imprisoned within their material bodies.

Animals were held to be the abortions of she-demons, and accordingly poor in Light; their dimness of mind, since mental activity was itself a manifestation of Light, was the visible proof. Plants, by contrast, and in particular melons, cucumbers, grapes, and other fruits distinguished by a marked luminescence, were believed to contain high concentrations of Light particles, which might be liberated through the digestion of the Elect, as will be described below.

Man’s charge was accordingly conceived as twofold in its support of the World of Light and its struggling, non-omnipotent God. First came adherence to the rules and observances of the Manichaean Church, and the embodiment of the virtues of Light, among them patience, honesty, non-injury, kindly speech, temperance, wisdom, joy and charity. The framework’s center of gravity is worth remarking. Its gravest sin was not lust or drink but injury to the Light in any form; for the Elect even procreation stood condemned, since to beget a child was to forge another prison for the Light. About gender roles the surviving precepts say little, and about the classification of desire, nothing; an ethic that graded every act by its effect on the Light had no need to legislate for the body otherwise, and in this austerity it recalls the Gāthās of Zoroaster, which likewise address the soul and pass over the stations of society in silence. Secondly, the ascetic elite, designated the Elect, were entrusted with the task of liberating the dispersed Light from its entrapment in demonic matter, above all in fruits and vegetables, and assisting its return to the World of Light. The ascent was believed to proceed by way of the two heavenly ships, the sun and the moon, whose waxing and waning marked the freight of Light they carried before its passage onward through the Milky Way. In this way Manichaeism made cosmology into ethics: its adherents lived as though the entrapment of the Light were literally true, because for them it was, and every meal, every abstention, every act of gentleness was a physical operation upon the imprisoned Light.

An artistic restoration of ‘The Work of the Religion Scene’ (MIK III 4794 recto, detail), from an illuminated manuscript of the Aržang, or Māni’s ‘Book of Pictures, recovered near Turfan, China. The composition functions as a didactic diagram illustrating the central aim of Manichaean practice: the liberation of Light from its captivity in Darkness. Lay-followers are shown offering vegetarian food, believed to contain a high concentration of Light particles, to the Elect, whose consumption of this nourishment effects the release of the imprisoned Light. Through the chanting of hymns, the freed light is depicted as departing from the bodies of the Elect and ascending toward the World of Light. The moon and the sun function as vessels of Light, conveying the freed particles back to God, while above the scene the Father of Greatness, symbolized by his right hand, reaches down to receive the shipment

Manichaean social organization divided the faithful into two classes: the Elect, an elite body of monks committed to itinerant missionary activity and a life of ascetic discipline, and the Hearers, lay-followers who continued to lead relatively ordinary lives. The relationship between the two was conceived as reciprocal. The Hearers sustained the Elect with alms, and took upon themselves the labors, the sowing and harvesting of crops, the begetting of children, that the faith held sinful because they wound and imprison the Light, yet without which no community can live. The Elect, kept pure by this division, interceded for the guilt so incurred, for the Hearers depended in turn upon the Elect for their salvation. The Elect observed twelve commandments, kept a chaste, vegetarian and mendicant manner of life, and were “sealed” with the three seals of mouth, hands and breast, ensuring purity of speech, of action and of feeling. They lived in monasteries, yet went forth on foot to spread and strengthen the faith, and took their single vegetarian meal only after nightfall.

Since neither community was regarded as wholly capable of fulfilling all its respective religious obligations, regular rites of atonement were observed, in the form of confession (xwāstwānīft in Parthian), which were performed on Sundays for the Hearers and on Mondays for the Elect. Hearers who lived righteously were believed capable of reincarnation as Elect, or perhaps as fruit, whose Light could then be freed through consumption by the Elect. The souls of the Elect themselves, disentangled from the darkness that had encased them, returned at death to the World of Light, received there upon deliverance by “Jesus the Splendor”, the radiant figure whom Māni honored as his forerunner and whose apostolate he claimed to continue.

Icon of the King Jesus; a digital reconstruction of the enthroned Jesus (光明夷數 Guāngmíng Yíshù ‘Jesus of Light’) image on a Manichaean temple banner from ca. 10th-century Gāochāng, China. It is the oldest known Manichean Jesus portrait.

Moreover, the Hearers were expected to provide alms of vegetarian food to the Elect, for it was believed that within melons, gourds, grapes, fruit-juices and similar substances Light particles lay imprisoned, and that the digestive tracts of the Elect were miraculous purifying instruments that could set them free. At the daily meal ceremony the bodies of the Elect thus served as a kind of altar, upon which the food was offered and consumed; sequences of prayers and songs of praise followed, for the ascension of the freed Light back to the World of Light. These rites reached their fullest elaboration at the Bēma festival (Greek bēma, lit. “platform, judgment-seat”; Mid. Pers. and Parthian gāh rōšn, “Throne of Light”), held at the close of the Manichaean fasting month in commemoration of Māni’s death: a large portrait of the prophet (Greek eikṓn, Mid. Pers. pahikirb) was set upon a splendidly adorned throne of five steps, the empty seat awaiting its master, and presided over the assembly and its meal.

(1) Sacrificial ceremony for the 1013 birthday of Lín Dèng (林瞪; 1003-1059 A.D.), an important Chinese Manichaean leader who lived during the Northern Song Dynasty in Băiyáng township, Xiápǔ county, Fujian province, China. Today in Băiyáng Township, the “Xiápǔ Manichaean manuscripts” are used for rituals conducted for Lín Dèng in the three villages of Băiyáng 柏洋村, Shàngwàn 上万村, and Tǎhòu 塔后村 (2) Master Chen Peisheng officiates prayer scene at Puxi Fushou Palace (福寿宫), Fuzhou, China. (3) A Yuan-era black glazed bowl found at the Cǎo’ān Temple excavation with the engraving on the bottom “Church of Light” (明教會 Míng Jiàohuì), a name for the Manichaean faith known in China as 明教 Míngjiào “Religion of Light”

Syncretism in the Cases of Egypt and China
The remarkable degree of syncretism in Māni’s teachings allowed local beliefs to be folded into the structure of his own system. By a process loosely analogous to molecular mimicry in immunology, deliberate resemblances between Manichaean teachings and native beliefs made the new faith quickly intelligible, and quickly adopted. The names of Māni’s deities and mythological actors were often replaced by names drawn from the local religion, while prayers, hymns and other forms of worship were in many cases taken over wholesale with little variation. Thus Abbā dəRabbūṯā (“Father of Greatness”, the highest Manichaean deity of Light) might in Middle Persian texts be translated literally as pīd ī wuzurgīh, or replaced outright by Zurwān, the supreme principle of the Zurvanist branch of Zoroastrianism. The names given to the gods for the Iranian mission were drawn systematically from the Zoroastrian pantheon, and the renaming extended even to the system’s non-Iranian figures: Jesus, Adam and Eve appear as Xradesahr, Gēhmurd and Murdiyānag, and the primal figure Nāšā Qaḏmāyā, “the Original Man”, was rendered Ohrmazd Bay, after the Zoroastrian god himself. To the Zoroastrians of Mesopotamia, Persia and Transoxiana, the new religion thus arrived speaking in the names of their own gods.

This process continued in Manichaeism’s meeting with Chinese Buddhism, where, for example, the original Aramaic קריא qaryā (the “call” from the World of Light to those seeking rescue from the World of Darkness), becomes identified in the Chinese scriptures with Guanyin 觀音 (Avalokiteśvara; lit. “watching/perceiving sounds [of the world]), the bodhisattva of Compassion. During and after the 14th century, some Chinese Manichaeans involved themselves with the Pure Land school of Mahayana Buddhism in southern China. Those Manichaeans practiced their rituals so closely alongside the Mahayana Buddhists that over the years the two sects became indistinguishable. The Cǎo’ān temple in Fújiàn stands as the monument of this synthesis: its statue of the “Buddha of Light” (Móní guāng fó 摩尼光佛), carved in 1339, is the only known statue of Māni to survive anywhere, and it survives because it wears the aspect of a Buddha.

(1) 10th-century Manichaean Electae (women), discovered at the capital of the Uyghur Khaghanate, Gāochāng 高昌 (قۇچۇ Qocho; قاراغوجا Qara-Khoja), Turfan oasis, China (photos 2-3) The ruins of Gāochāng, designated the capital of the Uyghur Khaghanate in 850 A.D., Turfan, China

According to Chinese adherents of Manichaeism during the Míng dynasty, their religious tradition made its way into China via a mōžak (Chinese mùshé 慕闍), a teacher of the church’s highest rank, during the reign of Emperor Gāozōng of Táng (650–683 AD). Bishop Mihr-Ohrmazd, a disciple of that mōžak, followed his mentor into China and was granted an audience with Wǔ Zétiān, who wielded significant power during the Táng dynasty from 684 to 690 AD and ruled as the emperor of the Wǔ Zhōu dynasty from 690 to 705 AD. According to later Buddhist sources, during this audience with Empress Wǔ in 694 AD, he presented the Šābuhragān (Chinese: Èrzōng jīng 二宗经), which apparently became the most popular text among Chinese Manichaeans. In 731 AD, Emperor Xuánzōng sought a summary of their foreign religious beliefs from a Manichaean, resulting in the creation of a text known as the “Compendium of the Teachings of Māni, the Awakened One of Light.” This text interprets the prophet Māni as an incarnation of Lǎozǐ.

The Compendium was an instrument of scrutiny, however, and the scrutiny ended in proscription: in 732 AD, an imperial edict condemned the religion as a false teaching masquerading as Buddhism and forbade it to the Chinese, while permitting the foreigners of the empire to practice it among themselves. Its fortunes reversed again three decades later, when the Uyghur khaghan Bögü accepted the faith at Luòyáng in 762/763 and made it the religion of his steppe empire; and the Táng court, which owed the Uyghurs its survival of the Ān Lùshān rebellion, was thereafter obliged to tolerate Manichaean temples in China proper (the rebel himself was a Sogdian, his surname Ān 安 denoting the men of Bukhara and his name a Chinese rendering of Sogdian Rokhshan, “the luminous”; the Táng were thus driven into the arms of the Religion of Light by a man who already bore its name). The arrangement lasted exactly as long as Uyghur power. When the Khaghanate fell to the Kirghiz in 840 the protection lapsed, and in 843 the Táng moved against the religion with severity, closing its temples and killing its clergy; the faith survived by going underground and moving south, where Sòng officials record its adherents with hostility as “vegetarian demon-worshippers” (Chinese: chīcài shìmó 吃菜事魔), and where, in Fújiàn, it entered the long Buddhist assimilation whose end is Cǎo’ān.

Egypt was evangelized in Māni’s lifetime by his early disciple Adda who arrived in Alexandria, according to Manichaean narratives recovered at Turfan in China. Lower Egypt served as an early transit for the faith into the Roman Empire, from which it spread to Carthage and Western Europe. However, Upper Egypt in particular has been seen as a Manichaean stronghold. At the village of Kellis in the Dakhleh Oasis, excavations have recovered Manichaean psalms, letters and wooden codices from a living fourth-century community; and the great Coptic Psalm-book found at Medinet Madi in the Fayyum oasis praises Jesus in stanza after stanza in the manner of a Christian psalter, until the closing doxology declares: “Glory and victory to our Lord, our Light, Māni and his holy Elect” (Psalmbook 52). This inherent flexibility likely facilitated its widespread acceptance across various milieus by permitting the harmonization of its teachings with pre-existing religious beliefs. On many occasions, Manichaeans were notorious for their ability to pass as adherents of the majority faith at a moment’s notice. Paradoxically, however, this malleability may have contributed to the eventual evaporation of Manichaeism, akin to sand slipping through fingers, as adherents may have found it effortless to revert to the majority religion when the need for spiritual conformity arose. In times of persecution, layers of Manichaean-specific doctrines could be relinquished without the necessity of renouncing the majority faith in its entirety.

The ruins of Kellis, Egypt. The oases of Upper Egypt once served as a stronghold of Manichaeism, with much of the the current Manichaean corpus being recovered from 20th-century expeditions there

Under the Caliphs

The Arab conquest at first eased the Manichaeans’ condition, for the fall of the Zoroastrian state church ended a persecution of four centuries’ standing; under the Umayyads the community was largely left in peace, the Archegos kept his seat at Ctesiphon, and exiles returned from beyond the Oxus, so that the eighth century opened as the most hopeful the church had known in its homeland since the death of its founder. The hope was misplaced. To the early Abbasids, seated in Mesopotamia amid the largest Manichaean population on earth, the faith came to embody the archetype of secret unbelief, the religion that hides inside other religions; and the caliph al-Mahdī (r. 775–785) raised against it a formal inquisition, the first in Islam, with a standing officer, the ṣāḥib al-zanādiqa, charged expressly with hunting its adherents out. Suspects were made to curse Māni and spit upon his portrait, the very image that had presided in glory over the Bēma; those who would not were executed, and the caliph on his deathbed bound his son to the work.

The Muslims called the Manichaeans zindīq, taking over the Middle Persian zandīg by which the Zoroastrian priesthood had condemned them five centuries before, a word evidently derived from zand, “interpretation,” and denoting one who follows commentary in place of scripture; the new inquisition thus prosecuted under a name coined by the old one, and Māni’s church holds the distinction of having been declared heretical, under the same word, by two world religions in succession. The term soon widened, as terms of persecution do, to cover dualists, freethinkers and the impious of every description, and it survives so in Persian and Arabic to this day. Ibn al-Nadīm, whose Fihrist of 987 preserves the fullest outside account of Māni’s books and doctrine, remarks that in his youth he had known some three hundred Manichaeans in Baghdad, and that at the time of writing scarcely five remained. By then the seat of the Archegos had been withdrawn beyond the caliphs’ reach to Samarkand, and the church’s center of gravity had passed, with its refugees, to the Uyghur east; in the lands of Islam the religion thereafter survived chiefly as an accusation, a charge to be leveled at poets and viziers, while Persian letters kept a gentler name for it, āyin-e Māni, the creed of Māni, remembered less as a heresy than as the religion of the painter of the Aržang.

Rediscovery

For fifteen centuries the religion was known almost wholly through its enemies: through Augustine’s polemics, the Greek heresiologists, and the Zoroastrian and Muslim refutations. Its own voice was recovered only in the twentieth century, and piecemeal, from the two ends of its old missionary world. The German expeditions to Turfan (1902–1914) brought back thousands of fragments in Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian and Uyghur; the sealed cave library at Dūnhuáng yielded the great Chinese Hymnscroll and the Compendium itself; the find at Medinet Madi in 1929 restored the Coptic Psalm-book and the Kephalaia, the great compilation of the prophet’s discourses; the excavations at Kellis recovered the letters of an ordinary fourth-century congregation; and in 1969 the Cologne Mani Codex, a Greek parchment small enough to lie in a child’s palm, gave back the prophet’s own account of his youth among the Elchasaites. The Xiápǔ manuscripts, which came to light only in 2008, have carried the recovery into the present century. Few religions have been so thoroughly erased, and none so strangely restored.

The recovered corpus is, in effect, a map of the religion’s method. The same church speaks Coptic in Egypt, Parthian, Persian and Sogdian in western and central Asia, Chinese at Dūnhuáng and Greek in the little codex; each community had received the faith in its own dress, and many a fragment, taken alone, might pass for a text of the religion it wore. What the church’s enemies condemned as duplicity, the manuscripts reveal as constitution: Māni had built his religion to translate to all humankind, and it spread across the world by that gift, and vanished into the world by the same one. At Cǎo’ān the two histories stand in a single image, a Buddha on a cliff face etched with the prophet’s own features; and in the villages of Xiápǔ, offerings are still made before Lín Dèng with liturgies that name the gods of Māni’s church, by villagers who learned only in recent years what it was their fathers had handed down.

Further reading:

S. N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China, 2nd ed. (Tübingen, 1992)

J. BeDuhn, The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual (Baltimore, 2000)

I. Gardner and S. N. C. Lieu, eds., Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (Cambridge, 2004)

Z. Gulácsi, Mani’s Pictures (Leiden, 2015)

H.-J. Klimkeit, Gnosis on the Silk Road: Gnostic Texts from Central Asia (San Francisco, 1993)

N. J. Baker-Brian, Manichaeism: An Ancient Faith Rediscovered (London, 2011)

W. Sundermann, “Mani” and “Manicheism i. General Survey,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica; and, among the primary sources, Ibn al-Nadīm, The Fihrist, trans. B. Dodge (New York, 1970)