seventh world of chan buddhism - Zen Buddhist Order of Hsu Yun

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.
CHAPTER 2 CHINA
S EVENTH W ORLD O F C HAN B UDDHISM
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