Manichaeism once stretched from Roman Spain to China, then vanished almost completely
In the third century a Parthian prophet named Mani founded a faith that aimed to absorb Zoroaster, the Buddha and Jesus into one final revelation. For a while it rivalled early Christianity, became the state religion of the Uyghurs, and reached China, before persecution dissolved it into Buddhism and Taoism.
Mani was born in 216 CE in or near Ctesiphon, in present-day Iraq, and died in 274. According to the Cologne Mani-Codex his parents belonged to the Elcesaites, a Jewish Christian Gnostic sect. His teaching described a cosmic struggle between a good spiritual realm of light and an evil material realm of darkness, with history slowly freeing particles of light from matter and returning them to the divine.
He set out to gather and surpass the partial truths of earlier traditions, from Babylonian religion and Platonism to Jainism, Buddhism and several Christian sects. Most followers saw him as the last in a line of prophets whose messages had been distorted by the likes of Devadatta and Judas. Mani wrote seven works, six in Syriac and one, the Shabuhragan, in Middle Persian, which he handed personally to the Sasanian emperor Shapur I, who tolerated the faith without joining it. Michel Tardieu credits Mani with inventing a distinct form of Syriac script. Worship involved prayer, almsgiving, fasting, confession, hymn singing and a daily ritual meal for the elect.
Spreading by energetic missionary work and a promise of universal salvation, the religion flourished from the third to the seventh centuries and had churches from Iberia to China. Roman and Christian persecution drove it from Roman territory by the end of the sixth century. In West Asia it held on until Abbasid repression in the 10th century.
Eastward it thrived. Merchants and missionaries carried it to Tang China in the seventh century, and it served as the official faith of the Uyghur Khaganate until 830. Banned by the Tang, it revived under the Mongol Yuan in the 13th and 14th centuries before merging into other traditions. The Cao'an temple in Fujian survives, and the faith may have influenced medieval Cathars and Bogomils.
Source: Manichaeism
