A Chinese wedding prayer, found at Dunhuang and dating to roughly the seventh century, describes prosperity mainly in terms of slaves. Imagine at a wedding hearing the bridegroom recite this conventional prayer:
Gold and silver to fill my coffers year after year,
Wheat and rice to fill my barns at every harvest.
Chinese slaves to look after these treasures.
Foreign slaves to tend my livestock,
Fleet-footed slaves to attend me when I ride,
Strong slaves to till the fields,
Beautiful slaves to strum the harp and fill my wine cup,
Slender-waisted slaves to sing and dance,
Midgets to hold the candle by my dining couch. [1]
Being a small man and leading a life of poverty, hunger, sexual deprivation, and hard labor doesn’t appeal to most men. Being the wife of a rich man surely provided a much more comfortable life for a woman than most men and women had. Moreover, a husband’s access to dancing girls did not necessarily threaten his wife’s position.
The Christian understanding of sacrificial love was circulating in China by the seventh century. Imagine a Chinese bridegroom hearing a Christian priest reciting Paul’s teaching:
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her … let each one of you love his wife as himself [2]
Christ giving himself up for her, the Church, describes the painful death of crucifixion. Loving one’s wife as oneself excludes the distinctively male self-abasement and self-effacement fashionable in highly competitive, urban cultures such as ancient Rome and ancient Baghdad. Even when institutional support for Christianity in ancient China was destroyed near the end of the Tang Dynasty, Christians continued to exist in China. Perhaps the fundamental Christian belief in sacrificial love for the other clung within hearts.
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Notes:
[1] Trans. Whitfield (1999) p. 182. The prayer is conventional in that it does not address the specific circumstances of the particular marrying couple. Even in seventh-century China, it was probably regarded as a traditional wedding prayer.
[2] Ephesians 5:25, 33
[image] Detail, Asking the Way in a Winter Landscape, formerly attributed to Zhao Lingrang (act. ac. 1070-1100). China, Qing Dynasty, 18th-19th century, Freer Gallery, Washington DC, F1916.90
Reference:
Whitfield, Susan. 1999. Life along the Silk Road. Berkeley: University of California Press.