Tracking Bodhidharma (30 page)

Ashoka is remembered and honored even today in India and in Buddhist history as a great humanitarian ruler who spread Buddhism's influence far and wide. Stone monuments created during his reign tell some of his story and indicate that his Buddhist teachings even reached the shores of ancient Greece. He famously established burial stupas that housed the cremated remains (known as “sacred relics”) of the Buddha's body. According to legend he divided up and left tiny remnants of these relics at eighty-four thousand places throughout the known world. Various places in China, drawing from the legend of King Ashoka, claim to
have been among the places where King Ashoka consigned sacred relics for later generations to venerate (though there are no early records in China that confirm this). Recently Nanjing archeologists unearthed a jade stupa repository, several feet tall, purportedly holding relics of the Buddha, that was interred during the reign of Emperor Wu. It's likely that Emperor Wu obtained and venerated these relics to strengthen his association with his revered predecessor, Ashoka the Great.

While the
chakravartin
ideal that Ashoka represented was used by Chinese emperors before him, Emperor Wu went to the greatest lengths to reinforce his connection to that Indian monarch and enhance his own reputation as a
chakravartin
emperor. He may have found this necessary because Huiyuan's famous treatise entitled “A Monk Does Not Bow to a King” caused Buddhists in Southern China to be less deferential to kings than Emperor Wu demanded. Emperor Wu strengthened his religious role by compiling and even retranslating scriptures that enhanced his religious position. He also directed the country's citizens, including the aristocracy, to embrace Mahayana Buddhism and even personally expounded Buddhist scriptures and philosophy in grand public assemblies.

Emperor Wu utilized other symbols to build his Imperial-Way Buddhism. Tellingly, after gaining power he constructed his first of many Buddhist temples at New Woods, the site where he defeated the main body of Baojuan's forces southwest of the capital. He named it Dharma King Temple, evoking a story of the Dharma King (Buddha), who was likened in scripture to an enlightened sovereign. The exact scriptural passages used to justify this fusion of politics and religion came from the famous Lotus Sutra, which proclaimed, in the most widely used translation of that day, the following:

Moreover, the term
Dharma King
was the name of an important Buddhist scripture, the Dharma King Sutra, which espoused the Bodhisattva Precepts with a Confucian twist. I'll talk more about that interesting sutra later.

Equating himself and his specific battle to seize power with the actions of the Dharma King in this fashion was typical of Wu's fusion of political with religious symbols to enhance his own status.

The Buddhist scriptures that Emperor Wu promoted and spread often contained thinly veiled political meaning that was interpreted to nurture Imperial-Way Buddhism. A cornerstone of Emperor Wu's Buddhist order was the Lotus Sutra, cited above, a text that effusively praises the role of bodhisattvas in the world and links those exalted beings to wise kings. This was the same text that the Nichiren sect in Japan used to justify their praise of the Japanese emperor during World War II.

Among the house monks who helped lead the translation, building, and other religious projects undertaken by Emperor Wu was the monk Zhizang (pronounced
Jer-zong
). He resided at Kaishan Temple, where the most honored of the house monks lived. Zhizang was among the two or three highest-ranking monks who taught the Buddha Dharma to the emperor and his family. He was the preceptor for the emperor's oldest son, Crown Prince Zhao Ming (pronounced
Jow Ming
, meaning “Shining Bright”), when the youth himself ceremonially accepted the Bodhisattva Precepts. Zhizang is often included in the lists of monks from Kaishan and other temples who lent their efforts to Emperor Wu's translation and other Buddhist projects.

The teachings set forth in these and other scriptures were not accepted by the entire Buddhist community uncritically. Some Buddhists of the day criticized doctrines advanced by Mahayana Buddhism (bodhisattva-style Buddhism) as being fundamentally non-Buddhist in nature. Such critics were often in the Precepts school, and they were dismissively referred to by Mahayanists as “Hinayanists” (small-vehicle Buddhists that are concerned only about their own salvation, not with saving all beings). Concepts of “Buddha nature” and “emptiness” advanced in the Mahayana texts that Emperor Wu emphasized, like the Nirvana Sutra and Prajnaparamita Sutra, were highly contentious, for they suggested metaphysical ideas that seemed to transcend the basic Buddhist teaching of cause and effect. But Emperor Wu was undeterred by the doctrinal
contradictions some Buddhists found in the scriptures he promoted. He glossed over the delicate theological questions Mahayana Buddhism's metaphysics created and embraced its messianic vision. Metaphysics had always been part of the mysticism used to extend Chinese imperial rule. Astrology,
feng shui,
and medicine were all products of China's long-developed metaphysical proclivities. In such a society, it wasn't too hard for these new Mahayana Buddhist metaphysical ideas to gain acceptance.

Emperor Wu ranked the sutras in importance, composed his own commentaries on them, which he espoused publically, and placed them solidly in the ideological foundation of his rule. He saw this as the proper exalted role, after all, of a
chakravartin
and bodhisattva monarch in China's burgeoning Buddhist society.

The Bodhisattva Path that was so exalted in Emperor Wu's era represents a critical divergence between Mahayana Buddhism of East Asia and Theravada Buddhism, the branch of the religion that remains dominant today in certain South and Southeast Asian countries. The split between these two groups might be traced to different views among the earliest factions of Buddhist sects and how they viewed the historical Buddha. Some scholars suggest that Mahayana Buddhism may have developed with an emphasis on supernatural occurrences credited to or associated with the Buddha, either miracles reportedly performed by him or strange phenomena associated with events in his life. For example, flowers were said to rain from the sky when he spoke, and an earthquake was said to have occurred at the time of his death. On the other hand, Theravada Buddhism tended to emphasize Buddha's more mundane side, especially the practical guidance and logic found in his teachings.

As time went on, the role of a bodhisattva, who in early times was seen as a person who was nearing the apex of Buddhahood in his cycle of lives, took on more supernatural aspects. Eventually certain branches of Indian Buddhism believed bodhisattvas were able to undergo magical transformation and to take on any of a number of different bodies to accomplish their great mission of helping beings. Thus they might appear as a lay person or cleric, male or female, a child, or even an animal. The bodhisattva Kwan Yin, who is worshiped extensively in East Asia, for example, is traditionally said to appear in the world in thirty-two different incarnations, including all of the above.

In the year 504, three years after assuming power, Emperor Wu became disenchanted with Taoism. He had long engaged that native Chinese philosophy, along with its idealistic vision of naturalness and immortality. Taoist ideas, after all, lay at the heart of Chinese medicine and much else in the culture, and the religion was naturally part of most people's concern with their own health and well-being. But Emperor Wu decided to make a formal break with Taoism's philosophy and much of its alchemical hodgepodge. As time went on and his faith in Buddhism grew more fervent, he issued an edict ordering people to turn away from Taoism and support the Buddha Way instead. He also composed a vow entitled “Forsaking the [Taoist] Way, Turning to Buddha,” and led twenty thousand clergy, aristocrats, and commoners in a public ceremony where the vow was recited.

By the year 513 or so, the emperor had become a strict vegetarian. Around that time he also ceased engaging in sex. The
Book of Liang
, the dynasty's official history, says he “did not visit the women's quarters.” Obviously this left the hundreds of concubines that spent their lives hoping for a liaison with the emperor in a hopeless situation. But records say Emperor Wu released most of his harem from captivity, allowing them to return to their old families. He apparently maintained his commitment to celibacy and vegetarianism until his death in the year 549.

Emperor Wu himself took the Bodhisattva Vow on at least four occasions in grand ceremonies. Perhaps the grandest and most significant of these ceremonies occurred in the year 519, when he underwent this ceremony at a place called No Impediment Hall in the Flowered Woods Garden at the rear of his palace.

But the Bodhisattva Vow he recited and the ceremony that the emperor underwent publically in the year 519 were different from what had taken place before. In the years leading up to that grand ceremony, the emperor's house monks had created a new version of these precepts distilled from many previous different versions, and the ceremony was altered. While in former times the vows were designed for and taken by home-leaving monks, Emperor Wu emphasized the still-controversial idea that people who had not left home could also take these precepts. He gave them a new official name, the “Home-Abiding, Home-Leaving Bodhisattva Precepts.”

In 521, Emperor Wu built Tongtai Temple, a place that would thereafter
be an important stage for his religious activities. The temple's location, directly across the street from a rear gate of the palace wall, was convenient, allowing the emperor to pass his double life as emperor and monk out of the public eye. In the years 527, 529, and 546, he repeated his acceptance of the Bodhisattva Vow at this location. After each such event he took up residence in Tongtai Temple as a monk, studying and doing chores with the other clerics who lived there.

Each time Emperor Wu relinquished his position as emperor, he created a crisis for his family and the rest of the aristocracy who enjoyed their high positions through his patronage. The ruling factions that depended on him were then compelled to cough up a big sum of money, essentially a ransom, given to the Buddhist Church, to return the emperor to formal power. After the ransom was paid, the emperor would go back across the street to the palace and resume his imperial duties. But even in the palace, he'd retain his monkish lifestyle, sleeping on a floor mat in an unadorned room of the inner chambers.

Emperor Wu's personal lifestyle and commitment to Buddhist principles faithfully followed the Confucian ideal that a king must be a model for his subjects. Though he spent lavishly on building monuments to his religion, his personal lifestyle appears to have remained simple.

As I mentioned during my visit to Nanhua Temple, until Emperor Wu's time monks of the Buddhist tradition were able to eat meat under certain circumstances, such as if the animal was not killed specifically for the monk to eat. The idea behind this was that the evil karma arising from violating the first precept, the avoidance of killing of sentient life, would not apply to the monk himself. However, Emperor Wu rejected this idea and enforced a ban on all meat-eating among monks. That ban has continued more or less uninterrupted until today in China's Buddhist monasteries.

WHY WOULD A SUCCESSFUL military general and man of letters, a person who had reached the pinnacle of power, embrace a pacifistic religion like Buddhism?

It's doubtlessly true that Emperor Wu saw, in Buddhism's doctrines, a place to find personal refuge from his bloody age. But he also used Buddhism as a way to consolidate his rule using a religious ideology, a divine and popular metaphysic of liberation that provided cover for more mundane political interests. Buddhist doctrines offered a coherent view of life, and combining Buddhism with Confucianism, a philosophy that reinforced social relations and familial solidarity, was especially useful and important. The combination of these two faiths fused ideas of social harmony (Buddhism) and loyalty (Confucianism). These were ideal models for promoting stability in a feudal society.

Less cynically, Buddhism offered a relatively progressive, one could even say “rational,” set of beliefs in a superstitious age. In the years after Emperor Wu seized power, he largely rejected Taoist ideas in favor of Buddhist doctrines. His personal conversion was deeply sincere, not the thin religious profession that can be expected of a politician, then and now. Emperor Wu's conversion to Buddhism bordered on revolutionary. It involved unprecedented scale and cost. Why such devotion?

Doubtless, Emperor Wu's experience with the Jinling Eight, his official and royal friends who met for “pure conversation” about Buddhism many years prior, led him toward his faith. He also developed a deep belief in an afterlife. Where this belief came from is especially telling.

A legend that helps explain Emperor Wu's deep conversion concerns his wife Lady Shao (464—499). The only woman that the emperor ever married, Lady Shao bore him three daughters but no sons. She died prematurely at the age of thirty-six from an unknown illness just prior
to Xiao Yan's two-year campaign to dethrone the mad boy emperor Baojuan.

Prior to Lady Shao's death, Xiao Yan brought a single concubine into his household, a young woman named Ding. Lady Shao despised and resented her husband's new mistress. According to the story, her venomous loathing for the woman led to an event that had deep impact on Emperor Wu's religious beliefs and long effect on Chinese culture. The story says that soon after Emperor Wu occupied the throne, his late wife appeared to him in a dream, begging for his help. She explained to him from the dream that before she died she had secretly persecuted his new young concubine. As a result she suffered rebirth in the body of a snake, a huge boa constrictor like that “found in the South Seas.” Lady Shao begged Emperor Wu to do something to save her from her unhappy rebirth as a reptile.