Mani begins his mission

Mani was born in April 216 near Seleucia-Ctesiphon and grew up in southern Mesopotamia among the Elchasaites, a Jewish-Christian baptising sect to which his family belonged. According to the Cologne Mani Codex, a tiny Greek parchment book found in Egypt, a heavenly “Twin” appeared to him at the ages of 12 and 24; after the second vision, in 240, he rejected the sect’s ritual washings, left it and set out to preach — first at Ctesiphon — accompanied at first only by his father and two other members of the community. In the Coptic Kephalaia he recalls: “In the last years of Ardashir the king I came out to preach. I crossed to the country of the Indians.” He probably went by sea to the Indus region in north-western India, and Manichaean tradition says that during a stay of about two years (c. 240–242) he converted the Buddhist king of Turan in Baluchistan, a vassal of the Sasanians.

In the year of Ardashir’s death Mani returned and appeared before the new king of kings, Shapur I, perhaps dedicating to him on this occasion the Shabuhragan, his only work in Middle Persian. Shapur did not convert, but he allowed Mani to preach and kept him in his retinue for years. Mani taught a dualist faith of Light and Darkness and presented himself as the last in a line of messengers that included the Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus; he wrote his scriptures himself so that his teaching would not be distorted, and he sent missionaries west into the Roman Empire and east to the borders of the Kushan realm. Under Bahram I the Zoroastrian priesthood led by Kartir turned the king against him, and he died in prison between 274 and 277. His religion outlived him: Augustine of Hippo was a Manichaean for about a decade, in 763 the Uyghur khagan adopted it, and in China it was still present when the Ming banned it in 1370.