Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages by Chen Sanping;

Author:Chen, Sanping;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Sacral Kingship and “Son of God-King”

The Iranian title bagapuhr, whether interpreted as “son of god” or “king's son,” reflects not only the deep-rooted traditions of sacral kingship in Chinese, Altaic, and Indo-Iranian cultures but also the connections between the three cultures in this regard, if not the common origin of all these traditions.

The rendition of the Chinese “son of heaven” by devaputra and bagapuhr (“son of god”) has rather faithfully translated the Chinese concept of sacral kingship that a ruler is someone who has “descended from heaven,” as the Arab authors were still able to interpret the title many centuries later. These two renditions are also remarkable in that they were very distinct in their respective languages, deviating from both the usual Indo-European sacral kingship titles and the general theophoric “god-given” names.

I mentioned earlier the paucity of -putra and -puhr theophoric constructs in Indo-Iranian languages. The same can also be said about the “son of god” regnal titles. It is not surprising that the only other case for bagapuhr to be interpreted as “son of god” is the Pahlavi Christian (and Iranian Manichaean) appellative for Jesus, which Sylvain Lévi has also tried to attribute, albeit not very convincingly, to Chinese influence via the Iranians. It is worth noting that the only other “son of god” royal epithet found in contemporary West and Central Asia is the semibarbaric Greek title , literally “god-father,” assumed by several Parthian kings.101 One can compare it with the classic Greek terms for the Christian “son of god” and , the Greek equivalent of Divi filius, Augustus's patronym,102 to see how distinct the Parthian title was.103 It is further notable that the appearance of this regnal name may simply be due to the fact that a deceased royal father had called himself .104 In this sense, would mean not exactly “son of god,” but rather something similar to Augustus's patronym Divi filius (as the adopted son of Caesar, who had of course already been deified as a deus), and the “devalued” title of bagapuhr when the Iranian kings started to call themselves baga. In other words, it was a form of “son of god-king.”

In contrast to the above distinction, however subtle, between the ancient Sinitic and Indo-Iranian civilizations on the manifestation of sacral kingship, there appear to be much stronger parallels between the Sinitic and Altaic civilizations in this regard. The most striking parallel is the Steppe belief in Tängri, the universal sky god.105 From this angle, it is hard to find another religious notion or deity that is as close as Tängri to being an equivalent of the Sinitic Tian, in both physical and metaphysical senses, among all ancient civilizations. This equivalence is made even more prominent by the opening passage of both the Kul Tegin and Bilga Kaghan inscriptions, in which the blue Tengri on high is paired with the brown earth below to give birth to the humans,106 which parallels the Chinese heaven and earth gods (Huangtian Houtu).

This remarkable similarity extends to sacral kingship.

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