Seventh World

Preface
by Ming Zhen Shakya
This book must be read slowly - I can't emphasize this too much.
Please take your time - not just because the style in which it's written is such that if too much is read at one sitting the sentences turn to mush, but because hurrying is so counter-productive. Instead of a gradual, unified expansion, there is just an unsatisfying jumble of parts.
Books about religion may be entertaining or not, but they are never novels. It isn't somebody else's life we're reading about. It's our own. Even the historical development of Chan can provide useful lessons if we take the trouble to relate the many tales of trial and error, of mistake and correction, to our own individual lives.
If you want to get started with an actual Chan practice, you can follow the instructions given in Chapter 10 as you read the long historical passages of the first section. Likewise, if you want to begin learning Chan psychology, you can also leave-off the history and turn to Chapter 5.
I've tried to present a fair account of modern Chinese Chan Buddhism, an account which wouldn't be offensive to those who practice other forms of Buddhism or be rejected as being too unorthodox or "western" by those who practice the many varieties of Chan. I expect complaints.
I hope that I haven't been mean-spirited just as I hope that those who object to my ideas or the way I've conveyed them will be constructive in their criticism.
When free of meanness, dissension is beneficial. Americans like to recall how Republican Abe Lincoln once commented upon the way that his Democrat opponents constantly argued amongst themselves. "They are like alley cats that fight and caterwaul all night long." said Abe, adding, "The trouble is that next morning we discover that what they were doing was making more Democrats."
For those parts that are inaccurate, absent, ambiguous or offensive. I apologize. I can only hope that in the course of voicing differing views and corrections, we make more Buddhists.
Reverend Ming Zhen Shakya (formerly Chuan Yuan Shakya)
Order of Hui Neng, Sixth Patriarch of Chan
Nan Hua Monastery, Caoxi (Ts'ao Ch'i)
Guangdong Province
People's Republic of China
May, 1988 (Revised January, 1996)
Nan Hua Zen Buddhist Society
Las Vegas, Nevada

India
"You Gods who abide here and who belong to all men,
Extend your shelter to us and to our cows and horses."

- Rig Veda
Preface
It was around 5,000 B.C., give or take a millennium, that the many tribes of prosperous Caucasian nomads who loosely inhabited the Danube River Valley of Eastern Europe coalesced into a single, identifiable people. Unified by the attractive force of a common language, known today as Proto-Indo-European, and solidified by a common aggressiveness (if not hostility) towards outsiders, these semi-civilized people had bred their way out of the stone age into an astonishing era of organized warfare and civil advancement. They were mostly tall and blonde, and such genetic differences as there were between them and the smaller, darker, Mediterranean peoples they encountered were amplified by diet. For, aside from some farming and fishing, they tended huge herds of cattle and sheep and had all the milk and meat necessary to maintain height and strength. Their animals, at once the cause of their mobility and the provision for it, yielded wool and leather for cold weather clothing and shoes and, as they constantly moved to greener pastures, furnished them with transportation in the form of litter, sled and cart-pulling oxen.
Their greatest art - perhaps their only one - was their language. They loved to sit around fires under the stars and, enlivened by honey beer, tell and listen to wonderful stories of love, adventure and war. Marvelous poems were gracefully carved out of their splendid language; and so great was their appreciation of the glorious lines that frequently they blinded the bards who memorized them to keep the fellows from straying out of earshot.
As their population increased, so did their requirements for land. They fanned out taking their cattle, sheep and language with them. Too powerful to be stopped, they simply went wherever they wanted to go; and they brought to their relations with other men that same refinement of taste and delicacy of feeling that would characterize their Viking descendants. Whenever they encountered a superior civilization, which was usually always the case, they hacked it to pieces. No sweet-lipped vegetarians, they were meat eaters and killing came as naturally to them as a smile.

But once they bit off and chewed a hunk of culture, some of them would settle down to digest and assimilate it.
They learned quickly. Whenever they chose to occupy a town they had razed, they efficiently rebuilt it; and as soon as they got their hands on a few saddled horses they became expert equestrians. Having mastered this latter discipline, they became a swift as well as unstoppable Wehrmacht. (They never forgot the debt they owed the horse.) They also learned to sail.
Great clans of these nomads moved gently into unpopulated areas of interior Europe and cruelly into coastal or riparian cities. Time, isolation and the absorption of words from the languages of the various peoples they subjugated altered their speech. As the centuries and the miles passed between their branchings, they came to call themselves by different names. They were the Germans whose Norse gods Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frigga are yet commemorated in our Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and whose language differentiated into Gothic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch and ultimately English. They were the Slavic peoples whose language became Russian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Czech and Polish. As Celts they invaded the British Islands where their language became Gaelic, Manx and Welsh. As Hellenes they sacked the cities of an already ancient Aegean civilization, took from the vanquished their system of writing, adapted it for their own speech by adding vowel symbols to it, and recorded their precious language, Greek. They went down into the Italian peninsula where their language became Latin and eventually, through the efforts of Imperial Rome, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Rumanian, and Italien. They were the Persians and the conquerors of Afghanistan.
It was around 1500 B.C. that they demolished the immaculate cities of the Indus Valley and, crossing that boundary of the then known world, began to trek across northern India, singing their Vedic hymns and calling themselves Aryans which in their language, there called Sanskrit, meant 'aristocrats' or 'nobles.' (They always thought of themselves as noble: Erin, Iran and Aryan are cognates.) The small, dark and peaceful Panis and Dasas farmers they met and conquered gaped at these strange tribes who held their language and their cows so sacred.
The Aryans gaped, too. In fact, the people they encountered in India gave them a culture shock from which they would never recover. It was not simply a racial trauma. They had encountered small, dark people before but they had killed them and taken their lands and property without prejudice; and nubile women - no matter what size or color - were routinely appended to their caravans. What shocked the Aryans was the religion these people practiced.

The gods of the Aryans were lion hearted, sun-delighting, manly fellows who appreciated all nature for what it was - the exquisite setting for adventure. They had little taste for the blood of their devotees, being propitiated more by the sacrifices of individual valor than by the easy rituals of multitudes. A mere few dozen of them were able to provide all that moving warriors required: good weather, plump women and grass, beer and victory. There was Indra, warrior god whose weapon was the thunderbolt. There was Agni, god of fire who imbibed Soma, their divine intoxicant; and Savitri, god who excited and inspired. There was Rudra, the wild god of storms, poisons and medicines. And over all there was Varuna, who, as god of gods permeated all space, decreed the natural order (rita) of things, and marked the unremarkable extent of the Aryans' excursion into metaphysical arenas. The Aryan religion was not a vehicle for salvation. The gods were regarded as powerful parents, brothers or friends. They made the world the wonderful place that it was and surely would have been insulted to think that anyone sought to be saved from it. And no one, mortal or divine, countenanced such nonsense as reincarnation. When the Aryans killed a man, they expected him to stay dead.
But the Dasas farmers were sedentary folk who did not crave a warpath's endless sunny days. Laboring long hours under a broiling sun, they found their meaning in moonlight. This was the kind time, the time for joy and rest. Bound to the land in rhythmic embrace, they understood little beyond the references of animal husbandry. They saw the feminine earth and the masculine moon as the divine couple, the Cow and the Bull, the power and the law the power obeyed: Shakti and Shakta, Kali and Shiva. And so, for learning the sacred order to which their Mother Earth conformed, they looked not to the sun but to the sanctuarial moon. As many farmers still do, they numbered their days and marked their seasons by a lunar calendar and even took a lunar cue for determining the proper times to plant seeds into their beloved Mother Earth. They knew that the moon directed the tides of the earth to ebb and flow and that their women menstruated in unison (as still occurs today in small, close communities) according to lunar phase and were fertile, therefore, according to the same directive. And from the time of conception until the time of birth their offspring (as does everyone else's) required exactly ten lunar cycles to gestate. But they also saw, as any fool could see, that semen was the color of the moon and menstrual blood - that mysterious female product - was, especially when seen by moonlight, the color of earth. Further, they believed that the moon's attraction for the earth was as sexual as their attraction for their women; and, seeing the hopeless distance between the lovers, saw themselves as lunar stand-ins, clay agents of the argent moon. Though it was they who placed the seeds in the earth, it was the moon who inseminated their Great Mother Earth and caused the crops to grow. And just as the moon contained a mysterious inner force which caused it to wax and wane, die and three days later be resurrected, they, via that same interior force, would be reborn from the womb of their Holy Mother Earth. Everything... their crops, their present and future lives, depended upon the union and the issue of the Moon Sire and the Earth Dam. Photosynthesis they took for granted.

To the sun-dazzled Aryans, this might have seemed peculiar but not, certainly, particularly offensive. What shocked them was the manner in which the common folk participated in the divine assignation. The natives, as lunar representatives, believed themselves ordained to deliver a god's ravishments and saw this embassy as no small responsibility. How could puny men carry such love as this? As all lovers are, in principle at least, inclined to do, they were eager to show that no pain was too much to bear... no sacrifice was too great to make to demonstrate this proxied devotion to their paramour. To prove that they were equal to the burden, they allowed their priests, at harvest time, to select someone to be, as it were, the representative of the representatives. They fattened him and treated him like the divine consort he was to be, and then, as the planting season was about to commence and it was necessary that the moon impregnate their mother earth, they roasted the fellow alive so that his screams might prove how very much pain they were willing to bear for love of her... or else they sliced him up, alive and raw, all to the same effect. Whipped up by the priests into an orgy of passion, they reveled in their loathsome foreplay. And when the moon-man was thoroughly dead and silent and could be prodded into no further terms of endearment, the priests distributed a portion, slice or crackel, to each farmer who rushed home to complete the coitus by sticking the flesh deep into his plot of land. The sacrifice, when properly made, assured a good crop. It worked every time.
The Aryans were, of course, appalled. It wasn't so much the atrocity - they were not tidy killers - it was the organized suspension of rationality, the human descent into taurian frenzy, the evaporation of individual identity and the wild, collective residua - a mob fornicating for the stars with the blood-semen of a neighbor's tortured flesh. To the Aryans, a simple lot, it didn't seem at all right. Other things that seemed amiss were the ubiquitous depictions of the divine couple. They had goddesses of their own and knew what goddesses should look like. Was not Dawn personified as the loveliest of women? But this earth mother was the ugliest female they had ever seen. "Kali" she was... "black"... black as plowed earth... black as moonlit blood... black as night, her special time. She was horrific, adorned with human skulls, mouth open, tongue protruding and dripping with the blood of man's carnivorous existence. And everywhere the Aryans looked - in temples, homes, town squares and roadsides - they found stone bull- phalli erected to service her. The farmers could not understand the Aryan's consternation. To them the phallus was a simple "lingam", a "plow". What could be more natural?
But if all this wasn't enough to give a sun worshiper nightmares, the natives were all obsessed with insane thoughts of rebirth and reincarnation, return and renewal. Death was only a temporary condition. (Why, if a warrior lived long enough he might kill the same man half a dozen times!) This was too much for the Aryans who, in the novelty of feeling both prudish and cerebral, ceased to be racially liberal. Clearly, these little, dark and flat-nosed natives were literally lunatics... moon-mad and quite sub-human of a caste or kind that was untouchable at worst, and fit for dirty manual labor at best.

(The Divine Bull sadly looked down and slowly tossed his head, showing one crescent horn and then the other; while Kali, yielding and implacable, displayed a mother's love by ignoring the rebuffs and waiting patiently for the Aryans to take root and become farmers.)
Doubtlessly, the terrible power of the native shamans awed and intrigued the Aryan priests, the Brahmans, who, as notable impresarios of ceremony and masters of imitative magic, knew a good ritual when they saw one. Time and again they had demonstrated the extent of their skill. Regularly, in one memorable extravaganza, they even orchestrated the sexual intercourse of their queen with a sacrificed, dead horse. (With liturgical showmanship like this, it is no wonder that the Brahmans would eventually have all India at their feet and liking it.) But though the horse ceremony was inspiring, the extent of its vicarious participation was limited to individual arousal, ingenuously if not ingeniously resolved. Kali's priests, however, officiated at cosmic fornication, brutally and collectively actualized by all, except one, of the communicants. The Rig Veda sang pretty hymns to lovely Dawn. But in Kali's choir, screams of orgiastic ecstasy saluted the divine form. This competitive challenge could not be long ignored.
There was, however, another form of native worship that fascinated the Aryans. Here and there, from the Ganges River valley and delta to Burma and as far east into South China as they cared to explore, they encountered ascetics... men who disdained the society of their fellows to explore a solar system that existed within their individual bodies. Yogis they were... who drew the moon-fluid back into themselves and experienced the extraordinary bliss of orgasm without ejaculation. Though impoverished and emaciated, they were yet the extravagant hosts of some mysterious, inter-cranial satyricon; and their serenely smug expressions confirmed that behind their eyes there was indeed a divine union being consummated. These yogis were fearless, supremely self-controlled, indifferent to cold, heat and pain and oblivious of even the necessity to breathe regularly. They were strange men with even stranger powers. And power, of course, was something the blonde observers could understand and thoroughly respect.
And then, after years had passed and the Aryan invaders had completed their conquest of northern India and settled down to become country squires, they became apprentices of that mystic power, students of that new theology which explained without solar hegemony the politics of divinity.

Much about them changed. As hostile, aggressive nomads, they had organized their society around simple tribal formats: chiefs, councils of elders, generals, priests, warriors, craftsmen, and so on. It was the kind of flexible class structure that moving, militaristic societies require, the flexibility being mandated by the need for men of lower rank to rise and take the place of killed or wounded commanders. Dreams of dynasties fade quickly in early morning body- counts. And, though the young sons of leaders may indeed have inherited the stuff of leadership, veteran fighters are disinclined to audition their talents. In order to have mature heirs to his power, a chief must survive for at least two generations - even as his sons must survive for one; and longevity seldom accrues to the pugnacious or the transient. Their society must, therefore, allow for movement in the ranks.
Priests, on the other hand, can live a long time. They can have many sons who, especially in societies in which language is loved but writing unknown, are able to spend their years of draft exemption safely memorizing that holy writ which only their fathers know and can teach. The Aryan priest class defined and owed its existence to hereditary privilege. Yet, since they were mortal men and in times of defeat would be regarded by the victorious as prime candidates for slaughter (being so ill suited for more constructive employment) they readily deferred to their warrior kings and carefully maintained their subsidiary or auxiliary positions. But though secondary, their rank was nonetheless important. Priests alone can read in planetary alignment or goat entrails those indicators of impending disaster or auspicious circumstance which are so vital to command decisions. They also comfort the maimed, eulogize the fallen, inspire the weary and generally help to sustain a high level of morale by delivering their gods' sanctifying blessings upon each campaign.
But when fighting nomads build houses and settle into more or less peaceful domesticity, changes must occur in their societal status quo. As slave-taking conquerors the Aryans constituted an elite leisure class. Thorstein Veblen - that eminent observer of this class of unemployed achievers, anticipates their altering requirements: "Chief among the honourable employments in any feudal community is warfare;" notes Veblen, "and priestly service is commonly second to warfare. If the barbarian community is not notably warlike, the priestly service may take the precedence with that of the warrior second." And sure enough, though the warrior class ranked first during the years of the Aryans' militaristic expansion, the priest class began its assault upon that station when generals became gentry.

For it was then, after those agrarian preoccupations with death and rebirth and the phases of the moon had at last entered the warrior imagination, that the native religion could issue its seductive challenge. The new heroes would be those who were victorious on interior fields of battle. Thus did Aryan chieftains became spiritual yeomen who happily fought under the aegis of kingly (raja) yogis.
What they learned was wonderful. The new teachings, a collection of inspired essays composed over many years by various masters, were called the Upanishads (knowledge acquired 'sitting near' a master). Though contrary to the doctrinal spirit of the Vedas, they were nevertheless accepted as a suitable addition to the sacred lore. That mysterious and impervious force that renewed the moon and earth was now identified: Tat tvam asi! Thou art that! So thundered the Upanishads to ears that had never so much as heard a rumor that man was one with god and could realize his own divinity.
To intelligent, rational men who had seen visions of gods and goddesses and knew that what they had seen was real, the Upanishads explained that all spiritual essences, in gods and in men, were but manifestations of the One, the Absolute, ground of all being. In this One all opposites were united - spirit and matter, light and darkness, male and female. The absolute was both the power and the law that the power obeyed, the Shakti and Shiva whose consummated union could be experienced in the human breast. For this One was indeed apprehensible. Through simplicity, humility, non-attachment, a steady gaze that turned inward to its Source, and, of course, lots of priestly instruction in the necessary skills, the One could be experienced as indescribable and liberating bliss.
The Brahmans immediately recognized in the confusions of such revelations their opportunity to effect a switch in the social order of precedence. To accommodate the new teachings, they quickly reorganized the Vedic pantheon, moving minor deities, such as Vishnu, into the foreground and identifying major deities, such as dangerous Rudra, the ruddy one who was made white from the ashes of so many burnt offerings, with the more versatile Shiva. They even enrolled Kali in a finishing school and beauty spa so that she could acquire table manners and a new luscious figure and debut as the beautiful Parvati.

What they did next is unrivaled in theocratic history. Although in the Rig Veda the term 'brahman' meant prayer, a calling out to god, (hence those who called out - the cantors and the priests - were brahmans) they now proclaimed that the One god of which all other gods were manifestations, was named, coincidentally enough, Brahman. Brahman, then, was not only the prayer and those who recited the prayer but it was also the one to whom the prayer was addressed. The word was god and theirs the voice that spoke it! Brahman was the Absolute, the ground of being and godhead; and, though ordinary citizens had a portion of this divinity within themselves as abiding spirit or Atman, the Brahmans, as special vectors of this divine spirit and force, were Brahman in the flesh! They were gods whose earthly manifestation was intended, for mortals, to be instructive and, for themselves, to be the last stage of a launching sequence that would send them to eternal life among their brother stars.
They supplemented their sorcery handbooks with a new compendium of ethics, word-magic and ritual, the Brahmanas. And they dictated into the sacred record those revelations which established themselves as divine beings whose word was law, whose bodies were inviolate and whose presence at all ceremonial events in every individual's life was indispensable and well worth the fee they charged.
The Upanishads, then, not only facilitated an expansion of religious consciousness but, as interpreted by the Brahmans, also provided for transitions and stratifications in the social order; for as the Brahmans interpreted the new teachings, the cause and effect doctrine of Karma meant nothing less than rebirth that was positionally contingent upon performance: the caste system.
The flexible social structure previously enjoyed was thus replaced by a rigid edifice. Only the King (Rajah), whose office was now hereditarily fixed, lived elsewhere. All other members of society fitted into this new complex. The Brahmans, as gods, naturally occupied the penthouse. The Kshatriyas (warrior class) lived very well in the upper stories. The Vaishyas (artisans, merchants and tradesmen) were at ground level while the Shudras (peasants and slaves) labored in the basement. Under the foundation, and crushed by it, were, of course, the Pariahs, the untouchable outcasts.

The Karma doctrine happily relieved the high-born of any of the onerous burdens of noblesse oblige. Mistreatment of the wretches who occupied the bottom of this social structure was actually consonant with the divine intent. Low birth was an act of divine punishment and no responsible upper-caste member of society cared to thwart the obvious will of god. And who would complain? The mistreated wretches supposed that in their previous lives they had been nobles who had sinned and had incurred thereby the punishment of their present, lower- caste birth. And, pain being an expiatory necessity, the more abuse they received, well... the sooner they would be reborn into a higher caste where they could assist, similarly, those of lower rank. Karma had a way of making everyone feel good about himself.
The Brahmans quickly capitalized on their new position. No longer mere singers, divine or otherwise, they were able to impart divinity to the actual words they spoke, to utter syllables that were intrinsically powerful. Since each incantation was not only a divine utterance but divinity, itself, it reasonably followed that if a Brahman wanted to harm someone he simply stuttered while reciting a prayer at one of the fellow's ceremonial occasions. If he felt particularly vengeful, he delivered a line backwards. And if sufficiently provoked, he resorted to the omission of an entire stanza! (The ensuing calamity is terrible to contemplate.) On the other hand, if a Brahman wanted to bestow a blessing, he simply rendered the proper prayer with perfect elocution. Good diction fetched a high price.
Brahmans were also able to huckster themselves as brokers of every man's apotheosis, an even more lucrative profession. According to the Brahmanic prospectus, a lower-caste investor was unconditionally guaranteed to be born a Brahman at his very next incarnation. There was always room at the top for anyone who cared to make financial sacrifices.
Thus did Brahman wives and Brahman children owe their high standard of living to the enunciation of Sanskrit syllables. Thus did the glorious Upanishads give rise to fraud and voodoo. And thus did the Brahmans construct Hinduism's eternal triangle: karma (conduct), caste (reward or punishment for that conduct), and reincarnation (the means by which the reward or punishment was administered). This triangle was the Brahmans' scepter. With it they could indulge themselves with the obliging Earth and make a cuckold sign whenever they saw the outraged Moon.
Among the Kshatriya were men who considered the Brahmans idiots.

As they interpreted the new teachings, a person needed no priests to tap directly into that mysterious inner force. He could accomplish the connection by himself through the not entirely simple expedients of either self-knowledge or self-conquest.
The self-knowledge or discriminating (Samkhya) philosophy was the most intellectual rendition of indigenous religious thought to be given formal expression during the years of theological development. Founded by the legendary sage, Kapila (for whom, as it happens, the city of the Buddha's birth, Kapilavastu, was named), Samkhya called that mysterious inner force or spirit the Purusha and identified it as the one eternal or sacred being. In opposition to this was matter, Prakriti, which was ephemeral and profane. Man's essential problem was that he tended to be ignorant of his true, sacred nature and identified instead with his material incorporation into the impermanent cosmos. The things of the ego and the flesh, falling into this latter category, were the troublesome things; and involvement with them sullied and obscured the Purusha and kept a man in ignorance. Neti! Neti! Not this! Not this! came the philosophical admonition whenever a man foolishly saw his existence in terms of his earth bound, mortal self. Earthly life, being the unsatisfactory and impure experience that it was, had to be relentlessly subjected to the discriminating intellect's scrutiny until all its profane preoccupations were safely culled and discarded.
Raja Yoga, the complementary method of Samkhya salvation, further disenfranchised the ego and the flesh while guiding the gaze inward until, at last, the true self was recognized and liberated from its confining darkness. Then, peace and joy in magnitudes indescribable, would be experienced.
But the Samkhya path to Nirvana was not a boulevard. By knowledge, then as now, the Samkhya meant knowledge of philosophy and logic rigorously applied. A thorough grasp of metaphysics was prerequisite. By discrimination, the Samkhya meant uncompromising search and destroy forays into the terrain of even egoistic whim. And the yogic discipline was not the fifteen minutes twice a day stuff of householders. It was retreat to an ashram and effort expended during every conscious moment. These demands would have been sufficient to narrow the path to single file; but what constricted it and steepened it even more, making it even less usable to the ordinary spiritual soldier, was the Samkhya's atheistic approach to the sacred. There were no gods, no statues, no stirring myths, no hymn-sings for the devoted, no Saviors whose recounted deeds excited the popular mind. There were, in fact, no heroes of any kind to tighten, with evangelical zeal, the spiritually slack.

The other method of salvation, the way of the self-conquerors (Jaina), had heroes to spare. If we follow Joseph Campbell's enviable Masks of God, Oriental Mythology, we find such tantalizing (from a Buddhist point of view) Jain savior-figures as Rishabhanatha (Lord Bull) who "enjoyed as a young prince the pleasures of the court" only to "renounce the world and give himself up to the practice of austerities" and achieve "illumination beneath a banyan tree in the park." Other saviors assisted the Jains in "reaching the other shore" of salvation and in attaining Nirvana. There was Lord Parshva, (eighth century B.C.), another Kshatriya prince who left a life of luxury at the age of 28 to pursue the self-conquering path and who, while experiencing perfection for the first time, was assailed by demons, darkness, cyclones, etc., but nevertheless remained "absolutely unmoved." Thousands, including Parshva's royal family and the wife he had abandoned, were converted to his Way as he preached the fourfold discipline that would lead all out of sorrow to the safety of the distant shore.
Disquietingly familiar as all of this is to us, it was doubtless refreshingly new to the intelligent folk of northeast India in the eighth century, B.C.
The Jain's gospel must surely have seemed vehicularly sound to many upwardly mobile members of society for, according to the Jains, there were only two castes: householders and monks. For householders, the basic rules of conduct forbade gambling, lying, stealing, harming living things, consuming alcohol or other intoxicants, and extra-marital sexual activity. In addition, householders were expected to refrain from accumulating excessive property and possessions and to support the monks, the former requirement being a fortuitous solution to the latter. Monks were further required to abjure all domestic or social relationships including, of course, those of a sexual nature. For monks, absolute solitude was essential to the pursuit of perfection.

As to kind, the rules seemed reasonable; but as to degree of application, they presented some problems. For example, while ahimsa (causing no harm to living things) obliged Jains to be vegetarians, that same rule also proscribed any eating or drinking after sundown and before sunrise lest in the dark one should swallow an innocent insect. It also prohibited bathing since, while submerged, one might drown one's innocent lice and so on. The simple act of walking became an occasion of great distress for in the course of setting one's foot down an innocent ant might interpose itself between sole and ground. The price of even the tiniest failure was excruciatingly high. Jains believed in karma the way no one before or since has entertained that pernicious notion. One false move and a Jain could find himself committed to rebirth as a snowflake or a pebble or a flea ....and try working your way up from those abysmal depths! Eons of miserable existence were required before a soul again attained male human birth and the chance to free itself from the endless round of reincarnations. (Since women were incapable of conquering themselves, they were not permitted to train for the ultimate, solitary assault upon the high reaches of salvation. They could become 'nuns'- which even today is an all too frequent euphemism for 'housekeepers.' But if they were very good females they were sure to be reincarnated as males.) Jainism was clearly not for everyone. Yet, people flocked to join it.
In the sixth century B.C., Jainist ranks swelled under the dynamic leadership of another Kshatriya nobleman who preferred the purgations of asceticism to the sumptuous board of his family's home. An adept of heroic accomplishments (hence his name, Mahavira... Great Hero), he proselytized with particular success. And Jainism, bleak and frightening as it was, became a formidable movement.
A few members of the Vaishya caste also managed to involve themselves in religious matters. Inclined to see things from a materialistic point of view, these merchants proclaimed that all metaphysical speculation was bunk. They developed the Charvaka and Lokayatika schools which asserted that this world was the only world anyone was ever likely to know and this life was the only life anyone was ever likely to live and a person would have to be a damned fool not to take the cash in hand and spend his profits on his pleasure. To them, unsecured promises of future payment had the same degree of reliability in religion as they had in business. But hedonism, then as now, requires a man to be able to afford all his pleasures and, if able to afford them, not to exhaust their delightful novelty. Boredom is ever the enemy of extravagance. Both schools of thought were largely unattended.

Those people who could or would not leave home and hearth behind to experience fires in their bellies and sun and moon fusions in their brains, had to remain in their towns and villages and, as means of securing the good life, choose between the voodoo of the Brahmans, the dry intellectualism of the Samkhya, the fear and loathing of the Jains, and the human sacrifice of the Shudras and Pariahs. For them, life continued without an awful lot of spiritual hope.
Until, of course, in the year 563 B.C., in northeast India, there was born to King Suddhodana and Queen Maya of the Shakya Clan of Aryans, a blonde son whose eyes were "as wide and as blue as the lotus" (Suvarnaprabhasa Sutra). The royal pair, whose family name was Gautama, named their heir Siddhartha, "All-prospering." Thirty-five years later he would claim another identity: The Awakened One. The Buddha.
We know very little about him. He was an only child. His mother died soon after his birth and the aunts who raised him spoiled him as doting aunts invariably do. "I wore garments of silk and my attendants held a white umbrella over me..." he is said to have confided, "and my perfumes were always from Benares."
Writing had probably not yet come to the kingdom. Beyond the hunting, drinking, singing, dancing, and uninhibited lovemaking of life at court, there was little for an introspective youth to learn. In what by this time must surely have been the fashion of Kshatriya princes everywhere, he grew tired of all the fun, so that when, at nineteen, he married his cousin Yasodhara, he doubtless was as jaded as a Turkish pasha and as bored.
As H.G. Wells reconstructs Siddartha's situation, "A great discontent fell upon him. It was the unhappiness of a fine brain that seeks employment. He felt that the existence he was leading was not the reality of life, but a holiday - a holiday that had gone on too long."
Beyond the palace gates, sitting immovably in distant ashrams, were those yoga masters who knew how to end the picnic.
But as we have seen, Samkhya truth was not the kind that could be casually acquired. Training demanded undivided attention and the young prince had, at that time, other matters to attend to. As his father's only son, he surely felt obliged to produce an heir. However, after years of marriage, he and Yasodhara were still childless. Leaving court to enter an ashram was unthinkable.

We can imagine the pressures mounting against him - his wife's tears, his father's questions and advice, his friends' taunts. Finally, in their tenth year of marriage, Yasodhara delivered a son. Free at last to pursue his spiritual journey, he got up in the middle of the night, entered his wife's bedroom, kissed her and the baby good-bye, and walked out for good. He was twenty-nine.
Mounted on his favorite stallion, Kantaka, and accompanied by his faithful servant, Channa, he rode to the edge of the forest, stripped himself of his jewelry and regal garb and, instructing Channa to return his horse and the last of his material possessions to the palace, walked alone into the darkness.
He entered an ashram and spent several years mastering Samkhya philosophy and the techniques of Raja Yoga; but, still intellectually and spiritually unsatisfied, he departed. He then encountered a group of ascetics whose austerities exactly balanced his former life of luxury and, being impressed by their simplicity and zeal, decided to join them. He began a series of dangerously long fasts. When he nearly died of starvation, he decided that deprivation was as senseless as surfeit and pledged himself to a code of moderation. He abandoned asceticism and began to eat, in amount and variety, all the food he needed. And when his strength had fully returned and savior-history continued to repeat itself, he sat down under a fig tree saying that he would not get up until he had found a solution to the human dilemma.
While watching Venus rise as the morning star, he experienced satori and at last understood the cause and cure of human strife. Though devils naturally appeared to tempt him and the earth of course shook, he remained absolutely unmoved. He got up, named his way and his truth the Aryan Path, the Noble Middle Way, and began his forty-five year ministry. He was at the time thirty-five.
We can see him clearly... an Apollonian figure strolling barefoot through the marketplaces... a prince in homespun clothes, sleeping in the grass.
In 483 B.C., at the age of eighty, he died. His death was caused by eating either poisoned mushrooms or tainted pork. The record is unclear and no one now knows for certain which it was.

There is even less certainty about the specifics of his message. Not a syllable of his truth was written down in his lifetime.
Nor when it finally was recorded, was it done so by anyone who had witnessed a single word of all that he was alleged to have said. In fact, the Buddha's teachings were allowed to roam free for hundreds of years before, in 80 B.C., in distant Sri Lanka, their wild descendants were finally corralled in print by the Pali Canon.

China
How wonderful! How mysterious!
I carry wood! I draw water!

- Anonymous Dao poet
Of all the world's ancient civilizations, China's is the youngest. This is somehow surprising to westerners who tend to think that China's ancient kings reigned contemporaneously with tyrannosaurus rex. But bones, pottery and other artifacts incontrovertibly countermand the dictates of sentimental supposition.
Such archeological evidence as there is in China reveals that prior to 25,000 years ago its sparse populations were proto-caucasian, the blue-eyed Ainu of northern Japan being thought to be a remnant of these early inhabitants. Then, for reasons unknown, these ice-aged occupants disappeared from Chinese soil; and there is no record of anybody at all being there until mongolian people from Siberian regions - with their narrow, snow-glare adapted eyes - began to descend into China about 10,000 years ago.
The immigrants were very tough people. They had been bred for survival, having become an identifiable race of men when, in times ancient to themselves, they had been geographically isolated by ice. Culturally they had also been snow-bound, for they found in the conditions of their isolation few occasions for refinement. Hardship, by way of temperatures that plunged annually to -70 degrees Fahrenheit, had syphoned off the froth. The stock that remained was strong and indelicate.
It can be no surprise, then, that their gods were not the effete divinities of tropical surplus - those bored and precious deities who languish, grape in hand, among the nymphs and fauns of sylvan settings. These hardy people dwelled far north of Eden's luscious vales; and perdition in such places does not come by way of talkative and wily serpents. The gods of arctic regions are gods of weather and seldom do they rest.
Perdition came in disorienting blizzards, in floor ice that prematurely thawed, in smothering snow drifts, in sleet that drenched a furskin garment and guaranteed frostbite or death.
Unexpected changes in the weather were people's sorest tests and trials; and if they were improperly prepared for alteration or severity, they would fail, simply and finally. The unforgiving climate had no appellate process.
And since their lives depended on it, they studied the testimony of wind and cloud, raindrop and snowflake, looking always to the four cardinal directions from where the evidence came. These were the gods to whom they prayed; and they understood perfectly that they would be saved or damned according to the quarternary will.
In dreams and reveries, or in times of extreme distress and grievous need, or even in moments of great peace, sitting by their fires at night, they could see the gods of the four horizons appear as mysteriously as the aurora borealis and ride their splendid horses across the frozen stars.
And also, during the long nights of their nomadic sojourns, they reverenced the north god's emissary, Polaris, and the Great Dipper that rotated around it nightly to mark the hour even as it rotated around itself annually to mark the twelve months of the solar year. They watched its nightly wheeling in the clear skys of clement weather and saw in its entrancing spins the ribs of a great protective umbrella. It was their compass, clock, calendar and benediction.
The only being they recognized as supreme was the sky itself that spanned the four horizons and embraced their anxious world. And so the immigrants descended into China in nomadic waves, following their herds and culturally traveling very light. Not much about them was commendable until, around 2,200 B.C. their society suddenly burst with art and artifact of a quality worthy to be called Chinese.
Mesopotamia was a well-traveled adult of 2,000-plus when China was born.
The locale of this cultural efflorescence was a northern plain through which the Yellow River flowed. There, in a landscape colored by ocher dust carried down from Mongolia in wind and water, the settlers found the paradise necessary to begin a civilization.
The river was the umbilical cord that provided their embryo community with all the nourishment it needed: fish, waterfowl, clay, transportation and, in that arid region, water itself. Surrounding fields of wild grasses provided fodder for their animals and cereal grains for themselves, while nearby forests yielded game, fur bearing animals, nuts, lumber and firewood. They settled in and called themselves the Hua (prosperous) people. Before long they were domesticating cattle, pigs, sheep, dogs, goats and chickens and were employing the potter's wheel to fashion their crockery.
Perhaps the millennia spent upon bleak tundra recesses or in dark, dense pine woods predisposed them to regard with special reverence the gold and verdant plains and to see as religious mysteries the gorgeous changings of deciduous trees and perennial plants. The idea of cyclic return entered their consciousness, never to depart. Whatever waxed, would wane. Whatever flowed, would ebb. Whatever bloomed would wither. And they intuited accurately that the phase of decline or demise was integral to the process since it engendered, in its concealed vitality, a new moon, a new tide, or a new blossom to replace the one that was passing away. The Hua people felt with awe the seasonal throbbings and touched with wonder the pulses that were surely divine. Gods and the occasions for worship were everywhere.
There were gods in trees and gods in stones. Mountains were gods as were the creeks that rippled down them. There were gods in glades and gods in seeds and there were even gods in the amazing objects that craftsmen made with their own hands.
At first, people regarded all things merely as repositories of benignant or malignant energy. One pot might contain great quantities of good energy while another pot - quite similar in appearance - might be virtually impotent, or worse, might be loaded with an evil force. (Four thousand years removed from these people, we can feel a secret sympathy. We, too, know which persons, places or things jinx us and which always seem to make Fortune smile in our direction. We all have our sacred charms and lucky sweaters.)
But gradually, the luck or energy contained in a tree or mountain was personified. People began to believe that the mountain was inhabited by a kind of genie, a creature that was not simply empowered to help or hinder them in fulfilling their desires but that sometimes had desires of its own.
One god who definitely had desires of his own was the river; and this god, by any measurement of godhood, was a very great god, indeed. But unlike the gods of the four directions who usually provided alert devotees with signals of their intentions, the god of the river was singularly uncommunicative; for though the people scanned the waters for a sign, they could find none that heralded his plans.
The Yellow River rose in the mountains of Tibet and, falling from those heights through narrow gorges, became a monstrous gouge that dug up tons of the mongolian loess deposits that gave it its name. Once burdened with this yellow silt, the river meandered languorously from one flat horizon to the other... for most of the year. But each summer, sooner or later, when distant Himalayan snows began to melt, the river, its tributaries engorged, would become violently aroused and without mercy would innundate the land. People's lives and livestock, homes and granaries would be swept away in angry torrents.
And whenever such disaster was impending, the Hua men, infected with the Orient's peculiarly virulent machismo, would decide that the river god was becoming testy because of an obvious lack of good sex. The cure for this ailment being found (where else?) in the sweet flesh of a timid girl, they quickly selected a pretty virgin, decked her in fetching clothes and launched her upon a raft into the roiling waters. Then they waited for the river god to consume her in lascivious gulps and prayed that when his passion was spent he would withdraw to his bed and let them withdraw to theirs.
Through the ages, year after year, the Hua were obliged to place the burden of their civilization's survival upon the frail shoulders of a trembling girl. Nobody could think of a better way to cope with a randy river.
(Nobody, not even down to modern times, has found a better way. Due mainly to centuries of foolhardy engineering projects which attempted to contain the water by building up the banks but succeeded only in containing the silt and building up the bed - at some points it is 70 feet above the plain - in l93l, from July to November, the river flooded 40,000 square miles. A million people drowned or died from disease and famine. Eighty million were left homeless.)
(The river's prurient ways have, incidentally, inscribed themselves upon the Chinese idiom. Where westerners use the color red - scarlet particularly - to indicate passion and rampant lust, the Chinese use yellow to the same effect.)
With no godless technology available to protect them, the Hua became understandably obsessed with winning friends and influencing spirits. The affections of gods were clearly not to be trifled with. People had to find out where they ranked in the divine popularity polls.
Hindsight was as infallible a judge to them as it is to us. A man whose flocks multiplied upon a certain mountain believed himself to be favored by that mountain's god just as a man who happened to break his leg while walking over the same terrain knew to a certainty that his relations with the mountain could use some improvement.
Was there a way of determining in advance, i.e., before a journey was started or before a flock was moved, how the proprietory spirits would respond to the intrusion? You bet. A medicine man or shaman could tell, for a nominal fee, of course.
Shamans had the power to enter a trance and then, in that condition, to dispatch their spirits to a targeted deity. At this point, shamans divide into two classes; one, loquacious professionals (known to us today as mediums or spirit channels) who generally target deities according to the specifications of a particular client or to the demands of an assembled group; and two, retiring amateurs (known to us as mystics, contemplatives, or ascetics) who seek their gods for profoundly personal motives which have noth- ing to do with coin, fame, or power.
The professional shaman would contact the specified deity who, if kindly disposed towards his visitor, would enter the shaman's body and use his or her vocal chords to communicate with his human interlocutors.
Not everybody could become entranced. Shamans were very special people who had to be handled with considerable care and respect since the gods were so prejudiced in their favor. (Unhappily, as we shall see, it was a prejudice that would often, in CIA parlance, terminate extremely.)
The population of spirits was soon greater, by many orders of magnitude, than the population of mortals. They were everywhere. And just when the Hua thought they could not squeeze another spirit into their land, air, and water, an army of ancestral spirits began to invade their domiciles.
For if a stone could house a spirit, was it not reasonable to suppose that a house could house a spirit?
In the Hua's ancient ordering of survival, family bonds were very tight. Huddled against arctic blasts they had come to appreciate each other's closeness and warmth not as figures of speech but as palpable necessities.
For so long as a man was a nomad, his spirit could not become intimately associated with a particular place. When he died, his remains could be anyplace at all. But when a man became a settler, he could likely be born, live, and die in the same cozy little building. His family could look at his bench and almost see him working there or look at his bed and almost hear him snoring. He would be buried nearby. So thoroughly could he become identified with his surroundings that it seemed inconceivable that his spirit, too, should not inhabit his home and that he could have just as many personal preferences as a mountain god. Maybe more.
Unfortunately, ancestral spririts were not necessarily nice to those who shared their addresses.
To be sure, a girl would fondly remember and pray to her dead mother whose gentle spirit would always be there to guide and protect her. But when, as a bride, this girl moved into her husband's home, she was alone and defenseless against any resident spirits who were inclined to be jealous and unfriendly. First, she likely would find an ogre inhabiting her mother-in-law's living body - a discovery she would share with the rest of the world's brides. But the Hua bride, unlike most others, could not find relief upon the death of her tormentor. The old lady's tenacious spirit would hang on demanding postmortem obedience and obeisance. And without proper propitiations and constant accedence to her will she would become a spiteful poltergeist, causing food to be burned, utensils to be lost, knives to be broken, or more daughters than sons to be born. Lord! Best to keep the old witch happy.
Beyond the hierarchy of ancestral spirits within each home, there was, within each town, a hierarchy in the total ghost community. And a ghost gained status in this society according to the quality of the homage paid it by its descendants. If a ghost was embarrassed by its family's miserly lack of displayed affec- tion, i.e, if it was dispatched to the hereafter without the furniture and appliances needed to maintain a proper household, it 'lost face', a rebuff which made it miserable and decidedly mean. Therefore, to insure that a ghost would continue to use its influence to enhance and not worsen the lives of its kin, the living made a great show of their high regard for the dear departed. All kinds of costly items went into the hole with the loved one. Funeral expenses were a frequent cause of bankruptcy.
(In the later years of Hua prosperity, if the deceased happened to be of rich or royal stock and was used to being waited on and entertained, scores of living servants, poets, musicians and, of course, virgins and courtesans, where applicable, went into the hole, too, to keep the loved one eternally in the style to which he had become temporally accustomed.)
But filial sacrifice did not end with the funeral. It was necessary to fete the ghost upon anniversaries of the auspicious occasion of his birth. Since all of his descendants were obligatory guests, birthday parties for the dead could easily keep living families hungry and in debt.
In order to maintain good relations with the dead, it was necessary to consult them, to get their advice and learn their preferences. Ghost-talk, to the entrepreneurial shamans, became a growth industry; for a surprising number of people who had been sullen or uncommunicative in life turned out to be absolutely gregarious in death. Ancestral spirits always had a lot on their minds.
And so, in those early days of religious development, every community bristled with imps, nixies, pixies, fairies, genii, ghosts and spirits of every creed and denomination.
As each area's airways became clogged with squadrons of destructive spirits and shaman interceptors, the Sky's suzerainty became a matter of some urgency. This supreme spirit and god above gods not only contained all other spirits but could, if it so desired, direct them. And it was high time, indeed, to charge it with maintaining some kind of order.
Just as a man whose flocks multiplied upon a mountain was believed to be favored by that mountain's god, a man whose tribal leadership brought prosperity to his people was believed to be favored by the great leader, the sky god.
But then... the more such a leader and his tribesmen thought about it... the more 'favored' seemed insufficient. 'Fathered' was deemed closer to the truth.
And so the sky, the fate-decreeing god above gods, using as his medium of insemination the comestible pearl-white seeds of a wild grass - known to us as Job's tears - proceded to impregnate a human female who was and remained a virgin. Their offspring, not noticeably inconvienced by the impediment, burst into the world as a human male. So began the Xia Dynasty, (2000 - l500 B.C.) the first of China's three ancient ruling families.
The Son of Heaven was naturally more than just a head of state. He was a pontiff, a bridge between earth and sky, an arbiter of conflict between flesh and spirit, and a mediator between man and all other gods. He alone possessed the majesty to confront his father and demand, or, perhaps, respectfully request, that his peers, the lesser gods, be forced to cooperate in providing for the commonweal.
The Xia Son of Heaven and his royal heirs never succeeded in becoming more than titular sovereigns, functioning far more as shaman-priests than kings. For any tendency towards strong central government or true monarchy had been inhibited by the lay of the kingdom.
Xia communities were strung for miles along the river like beads upon a strand. They could easily be plucked, individually, by even small raiding parties. Defense against a marauder's hit-and-run tactics was, and could only be, a local matter.
And as the Hua prospered, their fierce, semi-civilized cousins - horsemen from the north and from surrounding nomadic tribes - had indeed begun to raid their farms and ranches, carrying off their women and possessions.
Tribal chieftains raised a militia and did what they could to take the battle to the enemy. But the Hua were stationary targets, while the raiders were moving targets, and this unfair advantage frustrated the chiefs and made them contentious. Therefore, as noblemen are wont to do, they raided each other in order to replace the women and property they had lost.
The Son of Heaven continued to raise his arms and beseech his father to straighten out the mess, but the sky simply did not care to get involved. By l500 B.C. it had disowned its sons completely. With only bards to tell the story, the Xia's dynastic period ended in calamity.
But the age of literacy was on its way and from out of the scribbles of legendary time, one clear line began to be drawn: the mighty Shang dynasty came forward to make its considerable mark.
This time the divine semen was carried in the egg of a wonderful songbird. A Shang lady ate the egg and gave birth to a new Son of Heaven, one who understood the value of protective shells. The Shang kings ushered in the age of bronze and gave their warriors thick hide battle dress and metal weapons, making them a vastly improved military force. They had chariots, too, that provided their archers with protected, mobile platforms.
The Shang Sons of Heaven presided over a different kind of realm. It was much larger, stretching all the way to the Yellow Sea, and far more populous. It called itself the Middle Kingdom and, modestly enough, what it considered itself central to was the rest of the universe.

Consolidating new lands that had been acquired through war and pioneering presented difficult but routine problems; the problems which confounded the Shang were those presented by lands within their original territories.
The Yellow River basin, being annually refertilized by the rich mongolian silts that were brought by summer flood and winter wind, was marvelously productive. In response to this generosity, the population had increased rapidly; and in response to this increase, huge chunks of forestland had been converted to farmland. As these farms extended into areas that were beyond the river's capacity to water them, the Shang devised irrigation systems. But, as more and more farms were situated farther and farther from the river, these rudimentary irrigation systems were disastrously insufficient.
Outlying farms depended entirely upon rainfall, and the only rains that fell upon the entire basin were the occasional tail-ends of storms in the China Sea. Hardy wild grasses, native to the area, had adapted perfectly to the climate; but the crops introduced by the farmers wanted a bit more in the way of pampering. The god of rain, a capricious and miserly deity whose niggardly ways had previously been a sore but manageable irritation, now became as wretched a troublemaker as the river god. And the river god had become even more incorrigibly concupiscent since the destruction of the forests had worsened the flooding problem by adding the run-off silts of soil erosion.
Fortunately, the supply of virgins, while not unlimited, was at least adequate for the rutting river's needs. But rain presented different problems. Difficulty with the river was as ancient as the Hua people, themselves. But rain did not become a problem until there was already in place an enormous number of shamans.
At the Shang seat of government, at the first indications of drought, a great rain dance was performed under the open sky. It was an appeal, not to the rain god - he had already proved obdurate, but to the supreme being, the sky, itself.
Led by the king, the living Son of Heaven and shaman extraordinaire, the people solemnly swayed, rhythmically imploring the great spirit to intercede on their behalf and command the rain god to do his job.
If no rain was forthcoming, the 'pity' ploy was used. The king slowly removed his robes and exposed his delicate body to the broiling sun. And if the sight of his son's sunburned body wasn't enough to make tears cascade down the divine cheeks and onto the parched earth, then, clearly, the spectacle was just not pitiable enough.
A surrogate for the king was chosen and in an attempt to raise the pity-quotient a great fire was lit and the surrogate Son of Heaven was roasted.
But in the provinces, removed from the Heavenly scion's presence, the dance was choreographed differently. The people chose a shaman whose oracular talents had clearly demonstrated divine affection; and during the public dancing and shaman stripping, they waited for the clouds to form. But if the sky remained a coldly indifferent blue, they lit a fire and, hoping that the pleas for rain might command more attention if they came from one of the gods' old, familiar throats, they proceeded to reduce the shaman population by one. Being favored by divinity had its occupational hazards.
If the loss of a favorite pair of vocal chords could not make the god lacrimose, nothing could.
Learning the divine will was the Shang king's singular obsession. How could he prevent the attacks of northern horsemen? What should he do to keep peace among the tribes? And why-oh-why did Heaven put too much water in one place and not enough in another?
Shamans from all over the kingdom converged at court to help the king discover clues to the divine intentions. But the shamans, who liked the pay and loved the attention, wanted a bit more in the way of job security. They saw it clearly in their best interests to devise a better way to reconnoiter the heavenly landscape.
Divination, using instruments that were more easily disposed of than their larynxes, was the obvious answer. Segments of turtle carapaces or sections of animal bones (the shoulder blades) were designated "yes" "no" or "undecided" and the shaman, after stating a given question, applied a hot poker to the bone or shell which, responding to the intense heat, cracked. If the targeted god was adamantly negative, the crack went directly to the "no" section. If, on the other hand, he was affirmatively inclined, the crack went directly to "yes". If he couldn't make up his mind or didn't particularly care to commit himself either way, the crack went to the undecided section. It was an ingenious solution; but it was also limited. For there were lots of questions that just could not be answered with a simple yes, no, or maybe.
And so the shamans drew little pictures on the bones to represent actions, numbers, or the names of persons, places and things.
Writing began, then, not as a means to record inventories, signify ownership, or to engage in any kind of commercial accounting; nor was it devised as a means by which men could accurately communicate with each other and have a permament record of the messages conveyed. Had this been the case then more efficiency, clarity and uniformity of line would have informed the initial efforts. But this was not so. Writing, in China, began as a divinatory discipline. It was intended to be esoteric, as cryptic as the symbols of fortune tellers and astrologers are even today. The baffled ignorance of clients contributes greatly to any conjurer's mystique.
To complicate these literate beginnings, each clique of shamans had its own idiograms.
But many shamans, particularly the mystics who were unimpressed by courtly clients and their literate interrogations, continued in hallowed ways to communicate with the ancient gods. Women, in particular, cultivated a rare spirituality and, lost in blissful trance, acquired carnal knowledge of the four great directional gods. The god of the East, the direction from which the rains came, was the most important of their divine paramours. And, since such women were sure to command the attention of this master of the rain, they were frequently burned. Fire and white ashes became forever associated with the eastern god.
But the sacrifices of so many humans, animals, and objects of art and craft did little to lessen the burdens on the living. The floods, the droughts, the marauding northmen, the insatiable ancestors, the plethora of gods, the worsening intertribal wars, the confusing advice of conflicting divinations, and the corruptions which such quackery and fraud occasioned, all contributed to the Shang's collapse.
By the dynasty's fall in l028 B.C., the population of spirits had put the airways into virtual gridlock. It was the kind of paralysis that made foreign invasion inevitable. Powerful westerners, the Zhou, swept in and cut their way through the traffic.
And, as the Xia kings came by way of the seeds that were so important to early farmers and the Shang kings came by way of the protected egg that answered militaristic needs, so the Zhou kings became the immaculately conceived sons of heaven by way of a god's footprint into which a Zhou lady stepped. The divine footprints would lead them out of the chaos.
The Zhou moved quickly to establish order. They replaced tribalism with feudalism, appointing their relatives to the vacant positions of defeated chiefs, and then enfeoffed both them and the chiefs that had been their allies. People were no longer members of a tribe: they were vassals. In the new system, the people belonged to the land; the land belonged to the barons; and the barons belonged to the king or so he liked to think.
With the exception of the four directional gods, the sky, and the irrepressible ancestors, the Zhou Son of Heaven evicted the armies of spirits that had tenanted his kingdom. Professional shamanism was 'officially discouraged,' i.e., professional shamans were executed. Order meant conformity and conformity could be obtained only through an organized, literate priesthood - a priesthood that was bound by standardized ritual, ceremony, and, above all, codified divinatory pronouncements. Benevolent despots, the Zhou realized that the kind of order they wished to mandate had to emanate from qualities inherent in each individual and group. Personal responsibility and not bribery of spirits was what they sought. The divine footprint into which their queen had stepped marked the path of virtue.
Not once in all the Shang's obsessive interrogation of the spirits had the word virtue (de) appeared. Rebounding from such neglect, virtue became the Zhou's motto even as order became the operative word of their decrees.
Believing that human nature was inherently good and that error resulted more from confusion than from deliberate intent, they created The Book of Change, the Yijing (I Ching), an extraordinary instrument which, even three thousand years post-publication, remains one of the most cunningly contrived works in all of religious literature.
On its surface, the book appears to be a divinatory almanac, the illusion of supernatural involvement being facilitated by the random selection - through tossing sticks or coins - of one of sixtyfour hexagrams, each of which has its own specific textual advice.
To be effective, an oracle must be bold, brief and cryptic; and the Yijing is precisely that. It identifies the nature of the inquiring person's problem in opening lines called 'The Judgment' and proceeds to suggest, in lines called 'The Image,' a winning strategy.
In fact, the book is a psychological tool designed to cut through the emotional thicket of confusing data which often confronts a person who must make a difficult decision. The underlying assumption, of course, is that the person subconsciously knows which course of action is preferable or morally superior but that he is unable consciously to see this choice because the pros and cons of argument have momentarily confounded him. The Yijing, through its cleverly ambivalent coachings, tricks him into seeing the choice he unknowningly prefers. It does not matter which of the sixtyfour hexagrams he 'draws.' All of the advice is slanted towards benign or moral conduct. In its vague but authoritative manner, the book counsels emotional restraint, caution, respect for life, and so on, and especially to someone who is agonizing over a decision, miraculously serves to clarify an ethical and desirable choice.
Naturally, when employed for purposes of prophecy the Yijing is as worthless as a cup of soggy tea leaves.
The Zhou, able now to place all military resources under one centralized command, took the initiative in action against northern barbarians and recalcitrant neighboring tribes. Having secured the peace, they moved immediately to undertake comprehensive irrigation projects, to dig canals for river drainage, to build roads and many public works, and to construct long stretches of walls along the northern forntier - not to keep out men, for men could easily climb the walls, but to keep out horses, for without their mounts the northmen were no threat at all.
At many places where the walls ended, garrisoned trading centers were established; enemy northerners obtained foods, pottery and metal implements while the southerners obtained horses for themselves. Horses were the single most prized possession in the Hua kingdom.
For five hundred years art and science flourished: poetry, painting, medicine, ceramics, metallurgy, textiles, astronomy, architecture. Society began to stratify: aristocratic ruling families, military men, educators, farmers, artisans and, at the absolute bottom of the heap, merchants.
The kingdom began to trade internationally. Seaport cities thronged with sales representatives from India, Tibet, Persia and the Levant.
But while the Hua treated foreign visitors with courteous tolerance they were not so well disposed towards their immediate neighbors. Achievement had made them incredibly arrogant toward those of less technological attainment. To the Hua, only the Hua were human beings.
Diet and some genetic commerce with the western provinces had given the Hua a different look from their northern cousins whom they now regarded as obvious barbarians... 'dogs' in the figurative sense. But the Mang people who lived south of the Middle Kingdom, in South China, Vietnam, Burma and Thailand, whose eyes were rounder, like a puppy's, and whose hair sometimes had an spaniel's wave or even a poodle's curl, were truly dogs, or half-dogs. In fact, according to Hua belief, a Hua king had once promised the hand of his daughter to anyone who could bring him the head of his enemy. A dog accomplished this feat and what could the king do? The dog, as considerate as he was brave, removed the mating spectacle to the south, far beyond the royal range of vision. By some accounts, the offspring were reptilian and simian as well as canine. (So authoritatively was this genesis tale publicized that a thousand years later southern peoples were still sacrificing to their ancestral dog. Chinese idiograms for southern peoples in current usage still contain these animal elements.)
Little by little, inexorably, the army of nature spirits returned to occupy Hua territory; but their effect was largely salutory. For not only did the nature gods serve to mitigate some of the more brazen antics of the ancestors, but, by fostering or renewing the idea of spirits in objects, it could be seen that to a dead rider, the spirit of a clay horse could carry him just as far as the spirit of a flesh horse; or that the spirit of a little paper chair provided as much comfort to the loins of an ancestral spirit as did a fullsized ottoman.
Relieved of much of his financial obligations to the dead, the average man prospered.
The king, too, found life easier. No longer the passive instrument of divine communication, the god-shaman, he became the principal actor, the god-priest, who officiated at ceremonies and conducted rituals. And he succeeded in his new role according to the exactitude with which he invested his performance. For the notions of sympathetic magic had thoroughly saturated his religious imagination. Like produced like. When a quality in one place was altered or engendered, a similar quality in another place responded similarly. (Today, for example, we still find in many societies, that pregnant women will not eat 'twinned' fruits and vegetables for fear of allowing the quality of twoness to enter their bodies and produce twins. A similar idea informs voodoo practices in which a doll modeled after a specific individual can, when pierced through its leg, cause pain to be felt in the leg of the human model.)
Therefore, if the Son of Heaven wanted order in heaven and on earth, he merely had to conduct all appropriate rituals with exacting order. If he erred in performing a ritual, then, somehow or someway, he would precipitate disaster.
Enthralled by the schemes of magical power, the Zhou kings, with prodigious precision, conducted their religious rituals conscious that every finger movement was duplicated elsewhere in the motions of heaven; and that every syllable uttered was a note in the music of the celestial spheres, a pitchpipe's cue that kept the earth and stars in tuneful harmony. The kingdom prospered all because order had been virtuously determined and ordained.
And to oversee all of this virtuous order, to manage all the public works and provide for the regulation of commerce, industry and education, and, of course, to collect taxes, fees and fines, a vast bureaucracy was established. There followed nepotism, graft, spite, extortion, bribery, jealousy, and not a little hate.
More and more the barons cared less and less for the king's order. More and more they saw themselves as sovereigns of their own states, charged by destiny to keep the cadence of the times. Men of action who appreciated precision more in military drill than in ceremonial chants, they grew restive in their capi- tals.
And so, while the Son of Heaven kept the sky from falling by keeping his head at the correct tilt, the new monarchs looked to each other's lands, lowered their lances and squared-off.
The Zhou kings who had succeeded so well in keeping order among the distant planets were inexplicably unable to maintain the slightest semblance of order in the center of the universe, their own Middle Kingdom. Civil war was the order of the day.
To combat the disorder of the warring states, two contesting groups of philosophers offered their assistance: the Confucians, who believed that man was inherently good, and the Legalists, who believed that man was inherently evil.
The Confucians saw civic order as a consequence of family order. Family relationships were natural relationships which involved inherent responsibilities. Thus, virtue consisted in dutiful conformation to these natural laws, i.e., dharma. Fathers naturally instructed their sons who naturally obeyed. Heaven directed its offspring, the king, who naturally complied. In like manner, the king's magistrates patron- ized and punished the childishly submissive common man who did as he was told - or else! - and dead ancestors rose to the challenge of guiding their living descendants who, of course, kowtowed in perfectly natural ceremoniousness.
According to this scheme, when an individual constrained himself and sacrificed his narrow interests to the larger interests of his family, there was harmony and prosperity in the family. And when such self-sacrificing morality was inculcated at the family level, honorable sons would rise to take positions of responsibility in the family of families, the government bureaucracy.
The Confucians left nothing to chance. Every person's conduct was governed by rules of deportment. Every possible human relationship was reduced to an appropriate dharma equation. Only friends were equals; everyone else was superior or subservient to somebody else: age over youth, male over female. Society was completely stratified. Laws, however, did not apply to the upper strata. Gentlemen were expected to settle their disputes honorably and in private; and Confucianism's celebrated Golden Rule was applied only to members of one's own class.
The virtues which Confucianism most extolled were calmness and scholarly refinement, a dispassionately maintained appreciation of decorous academics. Since conduct towards other people, dead and alive, constituted The Good, a man was required to examine his conscience not to determine how well he was faring in the eyes of one, supreme, ethical god whose commandments and judgments applied equally to all, but merely to determine how well he was behaving in the rather prejudicial eyes of his ancestors and in the equally colored estimations of other members of his particular pecking order. This unvarying, societal perspective conduced, as indeed it must, to superficial morality, to humanism robbed of empathy. Men of refinement did not hesitate to order a suspect of a crime beaten, or to have a few of his bones crushed, before questioning him, so as not to waste time listening to irritating denials.
And all the rectitude did nothing to lessen intrigue; for kinship took precedence over kingship. We find, for example, in the Confucian Analects (13:18), "The Duke of She told Confucius, 'In my country there is an upright man named Kung. When his father stole a sheep, he bore witness against him.' Confucius said, 'The upright men in my community are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this.'" Thus, it was not merely permissible to cover-up the crimes of one's family, it was morally right and desirable to do so. And what happened when someone else was accused of the crime? Ah... too bad for him. Confucianism, in practice, did not always work the way it was designed. People who lived outside the family circle were quite likely to find intrafamily morality somewhat demoralizing.
Clearly, the families Confucians had dedicated themselves to preserving were those of the privileged classes to which they belonged. During the several hundred years of the Warring States Period (475-22l B.C.) major conflicts over usually trivial causes occurred on average every few years. Confucian overlords conscripted hundreds of thousands of ordinary farmer/family men to fight and die in settlement of their noble squabbles.

The Confucians also mocked the old gods and ridiculed those who continued to believe in them. They regarded all spirits, except those of their own ancestors, as nothing but troublemakers whose communications were prescriptions for discord; but these other gods were precisely those upon whom the poor depended. Ancestor worship entailed enormous expenditures of time and money. Only the rich could afford, for instance, the enforced idleness of the obligatory three year mourning period for a deceased parent or, during livelier days, could pay for the elaborate costumes and costly feasts of ceremonial occasions. Any fool could see how well a properly appeased ancestor provided for his descendants. Common folks who couldn't improve their lots by such progenitorial bribery resented those who could. They continued to look upon the old gods as the great equalizers who would provision and avenge them.
But as war followed war the old gods could not even save themselves. Only the great gods of the four directions and a few of their ladies remained. For the rest of the pantheon, it was Gotterdammerung.
The Zhou dynasty withered and died beneath an impotent sky and catastrophe awaited as even Heaven, itself, seemed to abdicate in favor of a new and venal creed. Legalism had made its terrible appearance.
The Legalists had an entirely different view of the needs and the nature of man. Since people were by nature vicious, lazy, dirty, deceitful and greedy, to mention but a few of their more genial characteristics, and could be managed only by small rewards and big punishments, harsh and frequent discipline was absolutely essential. Only when a man was afraid to do wrong could he be expected to do right.
Therefore, consistency and severity were Legalist operative words: Never fail to apply strict punishment to anyone who breaks the law and there will soon be harmonious order. According to their guide book, the Han Fei Zi, "The severe household has no rebellious slaves; it is the affectionate mother who has spoiled sons. A ruler... does not devote himself to virtue but to law."
Therefore, the king decides what his law should be, proclaims it to as wide an audience as possible and then uses his power to see that it is universally obeyed. Justice was a concept that did not apply to the quality of the law, but to the non-exceptional enforcement of it.
If a righteous state saw a neighbor behaving in an unseemly manner, living, for example, in the corruption of unbridled and indulgent peace, the righteous state was obliged to conquer and correct. A state at remedial war was a virtuous state.
For so long as the Zhou kings had been committed to the delicate ethics of Confucian family welfare, they could hardly condescend to subscribe to such unrefined sentiments. There was, however, at the Middle Kingdom's barbaric far-western frontier, another kingdom which didn't at all mind stooping to conquer.
The Qin (Ch'in) kings had weighed the differing Confucian and Legalist treatises and found the Legalist argument the most gravely to their liking. And as the other states mortally wounded each other, Qin armies advanced to administer the coup de grace. One by one they picked them off until, in 221 B.C. the Qin controlled all of the Middle Kingdom which was now, for the first time, called China - Land of the Ch'in.
The triumphant Qin monarch surveyed his vast, united domain and declared himself Emperor, the first of a dynasty that he estimated would last ten thousand years. It lasted fourteen. But the Emperor Qin Shihuangdi would make the ten of them that he presided over very, very memorable. His name was not to be one of history's footnotes.
The Emperor immediately discarded the old, fractious nobility and their feudal system. Now, individual peasants could own land. The obverse of this coin was that now individual peasants would pay taxes directly to the Emperor's collectors. The aristocratic middleman had successfully been removed.
He also made it possible for a man to rise socially. Any conscripted farmer who displayed uncommon valor on the battlefield was rewarded when he returned home by the gift of five neighboring families.
He kept the streets clean and commercial transactions equitable by punishing such misdemeanors as littering or giving short measure by an array of importunities which included flogging, facial tattooing, mutilation by branding iron, and chopping-off of fingers, hands, feet, or testicles.
He was tougher on felonies. Death came fast by strangulation or decapitation or slow by a variety of ingenious means.
To inspire a winning spirit in his soldiers and to show how little he cared for losers, he ordered, on one ordinary day, the execution of 400,000 prisoners.
He also instituted the practice of collective responsibility. If a crime was serious (and what crime wasn't?) a man's entire family could be charged and exterminated along with him. If, for example, an individual failed to pay his taxes, his entire village could be held accountable. At the very least, the village head was forced to share the guilt. Thus, mutual civilian responsibility provided for mutual civilian surveillance. And if this wasn't enough, and it certainly should have been, to raise the esprit de corps of his tax collectors beyond all conceivable bounds, cash rewards were paid to informants! Think of it! Citizens who would have been happy to squeal just to remove themselves from punitive consideration were able actually to make a buck. In the ancient, vast, and international brotherhood of Internal Revenue Service agents, none has ever had it better.
Preferring to be absolutely certain of a defendant's guilt before they punished him so lavishly, Qin magistrates made confession a vital part of the testimony. Prongs, pincers and other instruments of torture were displayed upon the judge's bench and when confessions were not voluntarily given, the instruments were used. In keeping with the fairness of public trial, the defendant was tortured in full view of his peers. To be certain that witnesses or even the plaintiffs or victims were telling the truth, they, too, could be subject to such pointed interrogations. (The practice of judicial torture was not outlawed in China until the 20th Century.)(Anno Domini)
There was no arguing with the Emperor Qin Shihuangdi. He tolerated no difference of opinion. All books, except Qin history, divination, agriculture and medicine, were rounded up and burned. Anyone who quoted from a banned book was publicly executed. To show his contempt for the allocutions of Confucian scholars, he rounded up hundreds of them and buried them alive.
Even gods were subject to his wrath. Once, while crossing the Chang Jiang (Yangtze) River a gale sprang up and defiantly rocked the Emperor's boat. Qin Shihuangdi held the river goddess responsible. Seeing her sacred mountain nearby, he ordered 3,000 prisoners to cut down every tree on the mountain.
Now that he had the attention of his people, the Emperor moved to realize two consuming ambitions: the completion of his tomb and the connection of all the various segments of northern wall into one Great Wall.
Millions of men were dragged from their farms and sent to work either at the northern frontier wall or to his capital city, Xi'an, the location of his tomb.
Multitudes died building the Great Wall. Many men were executed for poor performance. Many were worked into fatal exhaustion. Many were killed in construction accidents. Many succumbed to disease and malnutrition.
At Xi'an, 700,000 men worked on the tomb. They excavated a vast subterranean parade ground and filled it with thousands of full-sized, individually sculpted, clay soldiers and horses that marched eternally to the glory and protection of Qin Shihuangdi. Rivers of mercury flowed through the underground landscape. The gallery's vaulted ceiling was a map of the stars.
The effect of all this conscription was predictable. The number of able-bodied farmers, already critically diminished by years of warfare, was now fur- ther reduced by impressed service at the wall and tomb. With insufficient manpower to operate the farms, the crops failed and in the resultant famine, hundreds of thousands of families starved to death.
Walls do not long impede determined invaders. The Greeks entered Troy. The Germans zipped past the Maginot Line. The Northerners invaded China.
There is a quirk in the human spirit which manifests itself as an inability to see a man's character as being unredeemably corrupt: No man's soul is so inked over by crime but that a white spot remains upon which some exonerating good may be written. It is as if we could balance a tome of iniquity with a phrase of benevolence. Thus, for example, it is said of the leaders of the three axis powers of World War II, Mussolini, Hitler, and Hirohito - three men whose malignant vanity required the torture and murder of millions upon millions of innocent people and the plunder of the accumulated treasuries of whole continents - that they, after all, made the trains run on time, built good roads and inexpensive autos, and wrote excellent haiku poetry.
And so it is said of this beast of ancient China, the Emperor Qin Shihuangdi, this tyrant whose vile ambition brought such unspeakable sorrow to so many millions, that he was, after all, responsible for standardizing the weights and measures of China. Before him, axles were a hodgepodge of differing widths.
We surely should have no difficulty in understanding that while he reigned, life in China was something intelligent men tried to avoid. In fact, for the entire duration of the Warring States period, thoughtful souls of the Middle Kingdom believed that on the whole, they'd rather be elsewhere. Sailing to distant, fabled lands had a definite appeal. So did walking as far as possible. Fortunately, peripatetic members of the intelligentsia did not find themselves without a desirable destination. They turned southward... for down south, in the barbaric lands of the semi-dogs, strange and mysterious things were happening, things that were inviting, intriguing, and wonderfully sanctuarial.
The Dao had found its followers... and northerners went to join the parade.
It is a peculiar fact that whenever anyone speaks of ancient Chinese culture, invariably he speaks of the culture of northern China. It is as if southern lands did not exist until an hour before the northern Chinese discovered them. So easily dismissed is southern culture that even the Dao (Tao), China's greatest gift to religion and to philosophy, is considered an Indian import... a variation of culture expressed originally in the Upanishads. The "Dao" is considered a simple renaming of Brahman's One, Absolute and Ultimate Reality.
But the native populations the Aryans encountered in 1500 B.C. had not confined themselves to the Gangetic plain or delta. They occupied China as well as the Indo-China peninsula. The base upon which 8th Century B.C. India is credited with stamping her metaphysics covered a vast area; and no one can say when or where the doctrines specifically originated or which areas most contributed to their refinement.
We can note the appearance in Daoism's bible, the Dao De Jing (The Way and The Power), of the same union of opposites - the power and the law the power obeys, female and male, earth and sky, dark and light, and so on, which characterized indigenous Indian beliefs at the time of the Aryan invasions. Daoism's Yin and Yang restates this concept.
We can also note that though the 8th Century B.C. Upanishads are regarded as the first formal expression of such "opposed unions", they clearly are not the first written record of them. While the Upanishads continued to be spread only by the vector of memory, the Dao De Jing was being passed in documentary form from hand to hand. The descendants of the Hua knew how to write! If being first to publish counts for anything, the religious copyrights belong to China.
And this was what the Warring Years and Qin Shihuangdi's megalomania accomplished; an exodus of literati! Northern artists of both vision and verse brought their talents and their consummate skills with them and applied these resources to whatever they observed and learned and taught.
Having no need for mnemonic repetitions, they extracted truth's marrow from the bone-dry cadences of scriptural recitations, poetically reconstituted it in brief but haunting lines, and presented it to the public for mass consumption. Daoism's extraordinary accessibility still remains its special genius.
Master calligraphers, with the merest suggestion of line and hint of color, they made profound obeisance to the sheltering landscape's mysteries: mountain, water, tree, tiger and man. And bamboo... always bamboo.
Though no language in the world approaches the philosophical precision of Sanskrit, Indian philosophy, for all this precision, as well as Indian art and poetry, lacks the delicacy and elegant simplicity of expression that is the hallmark of its ancient Chinese counterpart.
The difference in attitude remains striking: where Hinduism beats its breast, Daoism shrugs its shoulders.
As determined by two scholars, one, a legendary 6th Century B.C. spiritual explorer called Lao Zi (Lao Tzu), and the other, a flesh and blood prospector named Zhuang Zi (Chuang Tzu) (350-275 B.C.), the Dao staked its claim upon the gentle ways of non-attachment, noninterference, of going with the flow, of finding nothing personal in nature's importunities.
Meditation was an essential step in the Dao path. And Dao scripture paid immediate homage to the practice. Meditation, then as now, is a peculiarly ineffable experience. There are no words to describe it simply because meditation is largely a function of the brain's right hemisphere, the hemisphere that does not program words or contain a vocabulary. And so we find in the opening lines of the Dao De Jing, the oldest Dao scripture we have, an acknowledgement of this wordless experience: "The Dao that we can talk about is not the Dao we mean."
The stated object of Dao training remains the creation of an 'Immortal Foetus,' an interior child, called in Western Alchemy 'The Lapis' or 'Child Mercurius'.
The devotee must first attain androgyny, an advanced spiritual state called "the Valley Spirit" or "Mysterious Female" (represented in the Yin/Yang symbol (for men) as the black dot within the white comma and (for women) the white dot within the black.) In western terminology this event is called "Divine Marriage" or "Attaining the Grail" (the search for the blood-filled uterine chalice - hence "Percival" the Questing Knight whose name means "Pierce the Valley"). This quest/event is also illustrated in the famous Oxherding pictures, the Magpie Bridge of Androgyny uniting the Oxherder and the Spinning Maiden, celestially represented as two stars, Al-tair and Vega, within their respective constellations, Aquila and Lyra, which meet on either side of the Milky Way.
The Immortal Foetus or Divine Child is alchemically nourished by the purification of sexual energy. Using techniques similar to those of right-handed sexual yoga, the Dao monk generates heat in his abdomen and groin by using certain breathing exercises, becomes sexually aroused by this heat, gives form to the sexual force by imagining it to be molten ball of metal, restrains his worldly desire to ejaculate his semen by contracting the muscles of the abdomen, buttocks, groin, neck and chin, and mentally directs this 'seminal' fluid ball up the spine and through a bodily orbit where eventually it is distilled in the cauldron (Manipura chakra) and then stored in the brain as a kind of gestating, luminous blue pearl essence. The practice is extremely difficult to master. Needless to say, women have a much easier time in acquiring the necessary control.
During these meditations the monk, in his androgynous "other" identity, enters a visionary world, the sacred but adventurous precincts of the Tushita Heaven.
The gaze of the Daoist is always turned inward to his spiritual life. He is constantly aware of his spiritual relationship to everything in both his waking life and his dream life. Perfection in the techniques of meditation hone his intuitive faculties and give him extraordinary insights. He sees life's essential elements as they exist in pristine form, unsullied by the crimes of ego. Like a child, he has no ego. It has been consumed by the fire.
Southern culture turned out to be one of China's best kept secrets. Owing, perhaps, to the propaganda about the southerners' backward and barbaric natures, nobody in the north seems to have thought that southern lands were worth invading. (No wonder southerners persisted in sacrificing to their canine ancestor. Was it they who planted the story about the king's reward?)
The considerable difference in temperament that existed between northerners and southerners was most likely occasioned by climate. Southerners had not been bred to survive their environment but to accommodate it. They did not live north of Eden's vales: they lived within the sacred precincts. And their gods surely were the effete deities of tropical surplus.
As farmers, they of course studied weather, but their devotion to the Four Directions was far more genteel. Rain was a regular gentleman caller.
Their dispositions, too, had been largely formed by the lay of the land. Over the hard wheatlands of the northern plains, armies could march and horses could gallop. Brutal winters gave men time to suffer and scheme. But in the south where rice was grown in flooded paddy after flooded paddy, armies could not march and horses could not gallop. Water buffalo were prized over horses, and water buffalo were hardly suitable for pulling chariots. In the south, the misty mountains and green valleys were a promulgation of peace.
Why not practice yoga's sublime skills? Why not let the sun and moon cohabit in one's brain and the Milky Way's own semen circulate in one's bloodstream? Why not know ecstasy and bliss and peaceful oneness with the Eternal Dao? Why not, indeed?
And doubtless, that is why, when word of this wonderful religion sizzled like a lit fuse along the Chinese grapevine and many of the Middle Kingdom's thoughtful men and women heard the buzz, they tuned- in, dropped-out, and headed south to the safety and civility of the most beautiful mountains on earth.
The Chinese half of Zen Buddhism was finally in place.

Scriptures
"Chan... A special transmission outside the sutras; No reliance upon words and letters; Direct pointing to the very Mind; Seeing into one's own nature."

- Bodhidharma, First Patriarch of Chan (Zen) Buddhism
During the Buddha's forty-five year ministry he converted thousands to his way and his truth. But what exactly that truth and way were we cannot determine either by scripture or by consensus. There is a lack of documentation and a surfeit of opinion.
Soon after the Buddha's death a group of his disciples convened in order to collect his teachings and put them into memorizable form. Convinced that their individual memories could survive war, pestilence, famine, senility, etc. and still remain in perfect accord, they dispersed to teach and to proselytize.
Anyone who has ever tried to recollect two consecutive verses (if not lines) of his national anthem can guess the outcome. There were soon so many memory lapses and so much disagreement that it was necessary, a hundred years later, in 380 B.C., for the priests to reconvene in order to reorganize the teachings. They had no new solution to the problem; and perhaps because they had no alternative, they once again resorted to memory.
No one knows when the Aryans gained the knowledge of writing. The earliest document we have from India comes from one of Alexander the Great's scribes who recorded events of the young conqueror's invasion of India in 327 B.C. The earliest native writing that has come down to us are some of the Emperor Ashoka's edicts preserved in stone inscriptions. Ashoka reigned from about 268 to 232 B.C.
By 250 B.C., then, it surely was possible to commit the teachings to print, still, to our knowledge, no one elected to do so. Religious teachings were traditionally transmitted through the priestly generations by rote and it probably was not in the clergy's interests to break that tradition. He who possessed the sacred knowledge possessed the sacred power; and it was considered sacrilegious to place that power into vulgar hands.
Regardless of the reasons, the Buddha's teachings were not committed to print until 80 B.C. when the priests of Sri Lanka finally relented and wrote down all that they could remember. How much credence can we accord texts (the Pali Canon) compiled so long after the actual teaching?
Let's consider their version of the Buddha's deathbed pronouncements - one of the least controversial texts in Buddhism. According to the Mahaparinibbana Sutta this eighty year old man, expiring in the agony of food poisoning, halted his death throes long enough to:
1. Instruct his followers to discontinue the practice of calling each other 'friend' as they had done throughout his lifetime. In the future, junior disciples were to address senior disciples as Sir or Venerable One. Senior disciples could still call junior disciples 'friend' or, if they chose, address them by their given names. (He neglected to specify how junior disciples should address each other.)
2. Give permission for priestly communities to alter or abolish as they chose any of the minor precepts of his Path. (He did not specify which precepts were minor.)
3. Order that his beloved disciple and former servant, Channa, be ostracized from the community as punishment for having presumed upon his long and close association with the Buddha and for having behaved in a haughty manner towards the other disciples.
4. Pronounce them all (with the obvious exception of Channa) spiritually accomplished, secure and without doubts (thereby putting his Imprimatur on their doctrinal opinions and versions of events); and, having made all this perfectly clear, added,
5. "All conditioned things are transient. Work diligently for your salvation." Then he died.
For unintentional humor, it is a deathbed scene Charles Dickens could not have improved upon.
Unfortunately, with the advent of writing came even more scriptural profusion and diversity. Not content with their monopoly over existing editions of prescribed truth - ordinary laymen had no private libraries - priests, elders and Buddhist scholars of every stripe began to create new sacred literature to suit themselves and their audiences. Those with Brahman pretensions compounded their works with Brahmanism. Those with Jainist sympathies mixed Jain beliefs into Buddhist dogma. Intellectuals, gravitating as usual to hard-core Samkhya expositions, laced their disquisitions with the headier stuff of metaphysics and yogic discipline; and the spiritually unripened, as is their custom, penned tracts which offered salvation through obedience to endless rules of righteous conduct. For the young at heart, touching stories about the Buddha's efforts to save innocent life - such as the time he changed himself into a rabbit and jumped into a frying pan, substituting himself for the scheduled entree - were ingenuously recorded. Most astonishing of all were the fevered writings of those turgid authors who claimed that the Buddha had exhorted his flock to indulge in any and all kinds of licentiousness. As they quoted him, he advocated fornication with any and all kinds of women including those who would render the coupling incestuous, adulterous, or child-abusive; killing any animal and eating any meat, including human flesh; lying; cheating; stealing; and committing various other high crimes and misdemeanors to obtain nirvanic 'liberation.' As the Guhyasamaja Tantra Scripture explained, "Perfection can be gained by satisfying all one's desires." For some, then, Buddhism threatened damnation for stepping on an ant; for others, Paradise was gained by sleeping with one's Nana.
Buddhism was truly becoming a universal religion: all things to all people. There was virtually nothing so sordid, bizarre or infantile in any man's strategy for salvation but that he could find it prescribed in holy writ.
As H. G. Wells summed up Buddhism's literature in his Outline of History: "There seems to be no limit to the lies that honest but stupid disciples will tell for the glory of their master and for what they regard as the success of their propaganda... It is one of the perplexing absurdities of our human nature."
In what, then, did original Buddhist views consist? We can only assume that when the Buddha established a new religion and attracted people to join him in seeing life from his vantage, his points of view had to be appreciably different from those of his competitors.
There was, for example, no caste system in Buddhism. And as there was no caste (punishment or reward), there could not be karma (as judicable actions) or reincarnation (the means by which reward or punishment applied.)
Paradoxically, while Buddhism denied there could be any such thing as good or evil, in order to experience that tranquil, non-judgmental state directly, a devotee had to behave himself. Morality without being judgmental - a new con- cept!
Buddhism did adhere to the traditional views of reality versus illusion, i.e., of heaven versus hell, of Eternity versus Greenwich time, of Nirvana versus Samsara, of ego-consciousness versus Buddha awareness, and so on. In short, Nirvana was real and Samsara was merely the world of appearances, the world which the fictitious ego apprehended with its untrustworthy senses and distorted with its ego- centered consciousness. What the average fellow called reality, Buddhism insisted was merely illusion or Maya. To experience "true" reality, the ego had to be transcended.
As to supreme beings, the Buddha acknowledged the existence of many Buddhas, Mahasattvas, Bodhisattvas, Celestial Kings, and an assortment of god- like mythic creatures who reposed in Nirvana's Tushita Heaven, the locus of the Eighth and Ninth Worlds. All such beings were encountered by those individuals who attained exalted spiritual states.
He did not embrace, however, any great cosmic god of gods who was endowed with personality, will, and a secret and somewhat prejudiced agenda. He saw no god who created and destroyed at his pleasure the people, places and things of our universe. The cosmic ground of all being was The Void, the Tenth World, the destination of the ego-emptied practitioner who had completed his blissful tour of the Eighth and Ninth Worlds. For any of religion's practical purposes, the great god of Buddhism is the Buddha Nature which can be said to exist only in conscious, thinking creatures. (Does a stone have Buddha Nature? No. Does an amoeba have Buddha Nature? No. Does a dog have Buddha Nature? Maybe. Does a dolphin or a whale have Buddha Nature? Count on it.)
Again, as there is no willful, exterior great god, there is no willful, interior petty god, i.e., no individual ego that directs its own precious destiny. Dispelling the notion that in reality each human being is a separate, autonomous self is perhaps the single most important aim of Buddhist discipline.
Basically, the Buddha propounded Four Noble Truths: 1. Life in Samsara is bitter and painful. 2. Egoistical cravings cause this bitterness and pain. 3. These cravings can be overcome. 4. The way to overcome craving is to follow the Eightfold Path's ethical and commonsense approach to life and to practice such spiritual exercises as meditation.
It would seem at first glance that there is not much here to argue about; yet, areas of disagreement became vast.
Consider dietary laws. Generally speaking, the priests of Sri Lanka, an island, may eat seafood. Japanese priests may eat seafood and filet mignon, too, providing somebody donates it to them. Chinese Buddhists are vegetarians no matter where they live or what they are given. What about sexual conduct? Japanese priests may marry. Chinese priests are celibate. Thai priests may not so much as touch the flesh of a female human being or even sit at a dining table with a female priest or even sit at a dining table with any male who is not a priest. At the other extreme, priests of any 'left-hand' yoga or tantric order receive instruction in ritual sexual intercourse. What about reincarnation? Most Chinese and Japanese Buddhists vir- tually ignore the subject while the lives of Tibetan Buddhists are so shot through with transmigrations that there is no room left to house the creation of a single, unique, wholly-new individual. Everybody is, or was, somebody else.
Disagreement among the various factions - Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western - became outraged criticism. Enough mud was slung to transpose two continents.
Nothing limited scriptural extravagance. With fanatical zeal authors deified Siddhartha Gautama and provided him with the obligatory miraculous birth. (Gods cannot be brought by the stork like the rest of us.) Queen Maya was said to have conceived him in the course of dreaming about a six-tusked elephant which modestly penetrated her side. She delivered the agile baby while the usually indifferent flora and fauna took enthusiastic note.
Each time a literate priest had a spiritual brainstorm, he satisfied the demands of publication by resurrecting the Buddha's cousin, Ananda, who supplied a convincing blurb or personal testimonial. "Thus have I heard the Blessed One say..." the sutras begin. In such a way were thousands of pages of direct quotations of the Buddha written hundreds of years after his death.
To complicate matters even further, it was the copying scribes' practice to enter any text in order to amend it for clarification. Thus, the great rule of Buddhist scripture: the older the text, the shorter the text, and the more authentic.
With so much of such varying quality being written by so many, schism had to result.
It took only a few hundred years after the Buddha's death for Buddhism to split into two rival systems, the conservative Theravadin, called pejoratively Hinayana (little raft) and Mahayana (great raft), each with its own canon and each containing many different schools. Yanas are actually means to accomplish something or vehicles here considered to be rafts used for crossing the troubled waters that separate the ordinary, ego- defiled consciousness of Samsara from the pure consciousness of Nirvana. "Getting to the other shore" is the traditional way Buddhists describe the event of salvation.
It is not in the beginner's Seventh World or in the adept's concluding Tenth World (the Void) that we find any major differences between these two rafts.
While a detailed discussion of the intervening Eighth and Ninth Worlds is beyond the scope of this work, it may be sufficient to note that Buddhist theology embraces a Trinity of Divine Persons: Buddha; Bodhisattva; and Future Buddha. When that androgyny-inspiring Savior- figure, the Bodhisattva, is seen as a celestial entity, the salvation raft is said to be in Mahayana waters. When, however, one's Guru or Perfect Master is seen to embody the Savior, the raft is navigating the Hinayana. Thus, a single, celestial Avalokitesvara-Guan Yin may deliver multitudes; while a relatively unknown Master can deliver only those few disciples who actually gain access to him. Theravadins therefore require that many masters attain perfection.
In either case, the devotee delivers the Immortal Foetus or Divine Child, the prototype of which is Maitreya (Mithras), the Future Buddha.
A third vessel, the Vajrayana (lightning raft) was added to the fleet when tantric Buddhism melted into the Bon religion of Tibet between the Seventh and Ninth centuries - subsequent to the Muslim invasions of India. The Vajrayana raft supports the entire range of Buddhist belief; from "right-hand" sexually conservative methodologies to "left-hand" libertine forms; from primitive superstition to ultrasophisticated theology; and, of course, from the devotion to a Perfect Master to the devotion to Avalokitesvara, of whom the Dalai Lama is said to be an Avatar.
In order for Chan to become the sleek "salvation" vessel that it eventually proved to be, it had to jettison a thousand years of confused literature. But its boat did not bob about unballasted in salvation's treacherous waters. Chan retained a few Mahayana scriptures (from the Prajna Paramita Sutras) and the Sixth Patriarch's Platform Sutra. In addition, it weighted itself nicely with the elegant literature of Classical Daoism and with the numerous instruction manuals through which Dao masters publicized esoteric lore.

Origins of the Two Main Schools of Chan
The Sixth Patriarch, noticing that a certain young monk spent all of his spare time sitting alone in the meditation hall, approached the monk and asked why he was so zealous in his practice. "Because I want to become a Buddha," the monk replied. "You can make a mirror polishing a brick," said Hui Neng, "sooner than you can make a Buddha sitting on a cushion."
During the years of interstate warfare and the tyranny of the Qin Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, Daoism had continued to flourish in the idyllic mountains of South China. The religion's spiritual requirements, however, could hardly be met by the multitudes of people who came not for eternal salvation but for temporal refuge. As is the habit of the spiritually unconfirmed, short cuts were sought. "Circulating one's semen in the bloodstream" is not a practice one learns between successive Tuesdays nor between months of successive Tuesdays. The quest for soma, aphrodisiacs, elixirs of longevity, and chemical agents to quicken the Immortal Foetus became, in the popular mind, the great Dao obsession. Bareboned chemical formulae soon began to replace the voluptuous phrases of Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi. Everyone wanted to be an instant Immortal.
The Emperor could easily have followed the Daoists into the mountains, flushed them out and finished them off. He did not. Instead he brought several adepts to his court and provided them with the latest technology for developing the divine elixer. Not wishing to waste his time on fools or neophytes, he tested the adepts. According to some rather quaint history, each candidate was required to insert his penis into a glass of wine and then to draw the beverage up into his bladder. Thus were the men were separated from the boys.
That the masters actually submitted to the test and then stayed on to try to concoct the sacred elixer, tells us something about the directions the Dao was taking.
Daoist metallurgy and chemistry had, however progressed sufficiently to produce such astonishingly "magical" results as would induce wild optimism amaong those who wanted immortality. Without any understanding of the operative laws of nature, people truly believed that it was possible to brew if not a fountian of youth then at least a phial of it. The Emperor had tolerated Daoism for no other reason than that he intended to live forever.
He came to a curious end. He had a dream in which he battled a makara - an amphibious creature associated with the Svadhisthana Chakra. The dream inspired him to participate in the killing of a whale or some other large sea animal. For reasons no one understood, he immediately grew sick and was dead within a few weeks.
A peasant rebellion quickly toppled what was left of Qin Shihuangdi's dynasty, and a more civilized chain of rulers, the Han, (206 B.C. - A.D. 220) came to power. Chinese life returned to normal, and in the more relaxed atmosphere, the pressure was taken off the Daoist ashrams. As persons unsuited to the spirituality and simplicity of Dao existence returned to ordinary life, monastic Dao- ism returned to its pristine Way.
It was then, during the Han, that Buddhism made its entry into China. It treked into the north by way of the trans-asiatic Silk Road and into south via the sea ports, particu- larly Guangzhou (Canton). Two entirely different receptions were accorded it.
In the northern cities of power and learning, the Confucian ruling class, having reasserted its political dominance after the overthrow of the Qin dynasty, dismissed with patrician hauteur the various Buddhist scriptures that were slowly being circulated. They found the new teachings to be little more than a collection of barbarian superstitions, alien and antithetic to their sophisticated beliefs.
In the south, where people already were barbarians, the scriptures were greeted as an agreeable variation on existing themes of Daoist philosophy.
Northern Confucianism preached the virtues of collective identity, of the need for an individual to subordinate his own interests to those of his family and clan. A man served the past and present members of his family and they, in turn, served him. There was collective responsibility and collective compensation. In such a team-oriented system, Buddhist notions of self-reliance were decidedly subversive. Not even the Son of Heaven functioned as an individual.
From any Confucian point of view, the new religion was objectionable. Intellectuals, whose leisurely scholarship was familially financed, regarded the Buddha model with considerable alarm. The thought that an educated nobleman would abandon his birthright in order to pursue - as a vagrant! - some far-fetched, independent salvation was worse than contemptible. Further, reincarnation and karma were clearly bizarre blasphemies. A man's ancestral ghosts were fully accounted for. There were no unclaimed spirits hanging about waiting to inhabit new bodies; and, thanks to the very thorough ghosts, nobody required additional hardships or favors for karmic retribution to supply. Magistrates, their pincers at the ready, blanched at the prospect that a man's punishment could await him in a life beyond their reach. They scoffed at the suggestion that any suffering they imposed upon a defendant might stand not only to his credit but to their own discredit in that other-worldly judgment. Warlords found not the slightest merit in the code of non- violence; and landowners, whose fortunes depended upon the sweat of serfs, took no comfort in the vision of thousands of ecstatic beggars ambling through their estates. All of these reactions were predictable: To any upper class, a classless society has little to commend it.
In inland, heavily populated northern cities, where long and bitter winters were the scrims and scrolls of so much tragedy, those who controlled the granary controlled the destinies of both gods and men. Buddhism could not get very far for so long as the ruling class ruled against it.
But in the rural south, food was abundant all year round and markets were not monopolized. Salvation through individual effort, aceticism and filial divorcement was already legitimatized by Daoism's (and all yoga's) ideal of disciplined retreat. Although a lack of cash for weaponry and a need to be self-reliant had conspired to create Daoist/ Indian martial arts, a non-violent nature was still an indispensible characteristic of the man of Dao; and reincarnation could hardly pose a threat to any man who believed he could obtain immortality in his present life. Begging was not regarded as a fit occupation for anyone; but since the man of Dao was not, by definition, a Confucian aristocrat, he was quite used to working. Being of such humble station, he did not require those additional self-effacements obtainable through begging's spiritual exercize. Besides, in the sparcely populated south, the remoteness of most Dao retreats served to moot the issue. There weren't too many people around to beg from.
But when the Han dynasty fell in A.D. 220 as northern barbarians invaded and seized power, the old Confucian guard became an enemy of the new state. The spectacular success of Buddhism in the lands from which it had emigrated did not go unnoticed by the new elite. Orthodox Buddhism found immediate favor at the Imperial court. Everyone welcomed the tons of scripture that were being carried in on the backs of camel, horse, pilgrim.
Buddhism had entered North China through a commercial network. In natural tandem with this commerce had grown a continuously enlarging class of merchants and urban artisans who operated outside the feudal system and the niceties of Confucian privilege. Since serfs create no markets, lest it be in serfs themselves, merchants were happy to support any institution which promoted social freedom - thereby increasing customer volume - and which also advocated easy pardon for transgressions. (Recall the harsh punishments imposed for giving short measure.)
When northern, non-Chinese dynasties converted to Buddhism they took with them this host of eager merchants and a small army of unemployed theologians who, to their everlasting delight, quickly discovered in the diversity and inconsistency of this mountain of imported scriptures, a treasure trove, a glory hole, a motherlode of argumentation.
Several scriptures emerged as favorites among the northern clergy: the Vinaya (rules governing monastic life), which relieved them of work, taxes, military service and the onerous hazards of civilian law; the Lotus Sutra, an exposition of Mahayana truth; and the Lankavatara, the 'consciousness doctrine' sutra. The Canon, as translated, was not endearing. The foreign language was more philosophically subtle than the native language! Local interpreters despaired of trying to capture butterflies of Sanskrit nuance with the clumsy chains of practical Chinese. Their renderings were often mangled, unlovely, and difficult to comprehend.
Southern scholars, on the other hand, had their customary easier time of it. Through the yogic grapevine, Indian metaphysical concepts were already incorporated into Dao metaphysics.
Northern scholars, adhering to traditions inherited from Confucian culture, were cold-climate gentlemen of leisure. They enjoyed sitting in their libraries demonstrating and remonstrating for hours on end. Southern monks, independently poor, did not use such leisure time as they had for idle discussions. They pursued salvation through focussed attention on work (Karma Yoga), through disciplined meditation, or through renunciation, the vaunted Indian method of retreating to "the forest".
Also, Buddhism of the North was born a child of politics and population. When the rulers converted, the masses converted. Organization was required to manage the numbers, and orthodox Buddhism best fuctioned as a mass-transit vehicle of salvation or at least as a means of crowd control for both clergy and laymen. Northern Buddhism, then, saw salvation consisting in scholarship and in merit acquired by the good work of providing the public with temples, shrines, statuary and such. Southern Buddhism was and remained a vehicle for more relaxed and solitary spiritual travel.
Soon after it had embraced the new religion, the North's new ruling class had cause to regret lavishing so much affection upon it. According to the imported rules, monasteries were tax-free havens and monks were exempt from any activity which might remotely be construed as work. Further, fund raising was not seen as work and, in consideration of native disgust with beggars, a genteel solicitation of donations was held to be an acceptable substitute for food-begging. Money that might have been spent in more secular pursuits poured into Buddhist coffers. The monks, it seems, offered much in return for the donations they received. Aside from being lauded publicly for their generosity, men who wanted to be favorably reincarnated could purchase their way to that goal through performing meritorious deeds, i.e., giving land and money to the Buddhist sangha. The purchasing power of the clergy usually surpassed that of civilian authorities. Therefore, without having to contribute their coin to the costs of government or their bodies to the national defense, the sangha was able to live quite high on the establishment hog (literally, since at the time most were not vegetarians.) Within a few hundred years, thousands of Buddhist monasteries, stuffed with tens of thousands of monks and nuns, covering hundreds of thousands of acres, appeared throughout China. By the time that Bodhidharma came to China, the country could boast or despair of an estimated thirty thousand monasteries inhabited by some two million monks and nuns.
As monasteries and shrines competed with each other in opulence, fortunes in metals were invested in statuary and religious objects. Buildings were palatial and the priests and nuns who inhabited them were fed and attired in a manner guaranteed to make them feel at home in such luxurious surroundings. Since the soiling of hands was forbidden, somebody had to be brought in to do the work. And though a simple soul might suppose that slavery would violate a Precept or two, such was held not to be the case. Thousands of temple slaves were purchased or received as donations.
To the chagrin of merchants, Buddhist monasteries became centers of banking, pawnbroking, marketing and that other adjunct of commercial investment, fortune telling. To the consternation of kings and treasury ministers, more and more wealth, though under their noses, was out of their reach. And so, whenever Buddhist monaster- ies got too greedy or were too obviously created as tax shelters owned, built, and administered by rich families for purposes that had nothing beyond appearance to do with religion, the threshold of official tolerance would be crossed. Periodically Buddhist lands and property were confiscated and the ranks of this resplendent Sangha thinned considerably. Ultimately, such priests as remained were forced to tolerate more spartan accommodations. The priestly menu was drastically revised: meat dishes, plain or fancy, were permanently stricken from the carte du jour.
While monastic centers occasionally suffered, village Buddhism managed always to prosper. Local churches did what local churches have to do in order to survive: they adopted orphaned gods and ceremonies and traded scriptural veracity for the pronouncements of fortune-tellers and the incantations of magicians and quacks. The village temple was the focal point of village culture; and people didn't usually come to it in order to work, physically or mentally, for the attainment of wisdom. Most came for gos- sip, laughs, cures, sympathy, food, excitement, and to get their futures predicted. Most came, in short, to be entertained.
Aside from official criticism of monastic centers, northern Buddhism also encountered opposition from its growing rival, Daoism.
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