http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 08 Jul 2016 IP address: 137.132.3.12 clergy, kinship, and clout in yuan dynasty shanxi Jinping Wang National University of Singapore E-mail hiswj@nus.edu.sg During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, people in north China took advantage of a Mongol policy that gave Buddhist officials a status equivalent to what civil officials enjoyed, as a strategy for family advancement. Monk Zhang Zhiyu and his family provide a case study of an emerging influential Buddhist order based at Mount Wutai that connected the Yuan regime with local communities through the kinship ties of prominent monks. Within this Buddhist order, powerful monks like Zhiyu used their prestigious positions in the clerical world to help the upward social mobility of their lay families, displaying a distinctive pattern of interpenetration between Buddhism and family. This new pattern also fit the way that northern Chinese families used Buddhist structures such as Zunsheng Dha¯ranı ¯ pillars and private Buddhist chapels to record their genealogies and consolidate kinship ties. Keywords: Chinese Buddhism; Tibetan Buddhism; Yuan dynasty; Mt. Wutai; Shanxi; North China; Zunsheng Dha¯ranı ¯ pillars; kinship institution In 1300 and 1310 the monk Zhiyu 智裕 at the Buddhist monastic center of Mt. Wutai (Wutai shan 五臺山) had large steles erected to commemorate two fellow monks. These two steles at first sight appear to be a pair of conventional objects of Buddhist piety. Upon closer inspection, however, their early history and inscriptions reveal much at odds with conventional conceptions of Buddhist practice. Not only was the first of the monks commemorated by Zhiyu—Master Liang—actually his father, but the Buddhist cha- pel where these steles were situated also served as an ancestral shrine for Zhiyu’s family, the Zhangs 張, in their home village not far from Mt. Wutai in present Shanxi province. 1 The attachment of this monk to his father, family, village, and himself was also evident in these steles’ inscriptions. In addition to being hagiographies of the two deceased monks, Preliminary versions of this article were presented at University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and the 2013 AAS meeting at San Diego. I have benefited from valuable feedback received from Valerie Hansen, Koichi Shinohara, Stephen Teiser, Iiyama Tomoyasu, Peter Bol, Mark Halperin, and two anonymous reviewers of IJAS. I am particularly grateful to Joseph McDermott for his extraordinarily generous help to revise and polish the article. 1 Fu jixiang 福吉祥, “Lianggong xiaoxing zhi bei” 亮公孝行之碑 (dated 1300), “Xuanshou Wutai deng chu shi- jiao duzongshe Miaoyan dashi shanxing zhi bei” 宣授五臺等處釋教都總攝妙嚴大師善行之碑 (hereafter “Miaoyan dashi shanxing zhi bei,” dated 1310), in Niu Chengxiu, 3.6b–8b, 3.23b–28b. International Journal of Asian Studies, 13, 2 (2016), pp. 197–228 © Cambridge University Press, 2016 doi:10.1017/S1479591416000036 197