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

The Empress began her career as a rather ordinary, second-string concubine, one of
the battalion of young women impressed into servicing the emperor. Her talents went
unnoticed until a fortuitous coincidence enabled her to showcase them to just the right
person: She happened to pass the privy while the heir to the throne was sitting on the toilet.
Seizing the moment, she seduced him en situ, an act of such audacity and novelty that the
prince would be titillated by her for years to come. As was the custom, however, when the
old emperor died, she was sent to a Buddhist convent along with his other concubines.
(Burying them alive had gone out of fashion.)
The prince, now the new emperor, settled into court life in the "second" capital of
Xian with his new wife who, regrettably, was unable to produce an heir. He quickly grew
tired of her and turned his amorous attentions to one of his young and beautiful concubines.
His wife, trying to divert him from this diversion, summoned Wu, of scatological fame, from
the convent. It was to be the wife's gruesomely fatal mistake. Wu gave birth to a son
then murdered it after carefully planting evidence of the act on the wife and the `diverting'
concubine. Convinced of their guilt, the emperor permitted Wu to oversee their punishment.
First, she had their hands and feet amputated and then she boiled them alive. That done, the
Emperor elevated his Goddess of Mercy to the more exalted rank of Empress of China.
The good Empress Wu insisted that the court be moved from Xian to the old capital,
Loyang, where she immediately proceeded to finance the construction of huge monastic
centers.
During this Golden Age, Orthodox Buddhism saw its responsibility as more or less
ministering to the whole man, not to just his spirit. Accordingly, many urban Buddhist
convents functioned as brothels. And why not? Tantric Buddhism had proven to be an
infection to which the traditional Buddhist body had become inured. Sex and salvation not
only coexisted, they became synonymous. Even Daoism's Single Cultivation quickly became
Dual Cultivation, i.e., sexual yoga that required its adherents to maintain private harems or at
least to reside near houses of prostitution. The truly spiritual who sought salvation alone and
in private were by definition beyond public scrutiny.
Monastic sex centers provided an additional service: They dispensed aphrodisiacs.
Daoist pharmacology had provided Chinese medicine with an array of substances guaranteed
to stimulate sexual activity, and Buddhist nuns specialized in their purveyance.
It so happened that when the Empress was in her sixties there appeared at court on
one otherwise ordinary day an extraordinary fellow, a man who functioned as a kind of
traveling ponce and pharmacist for one of Loyang's largest Buddhist convent/brothels. This
fellow was clearly his own best advertisement and his prodigious work in the bedchambers of
titled ladies quickly gained him the Imperial patronage. Wu, ever the madcap, was so
pixilated by him that she appointed him abbot of Loyang's principal monastery, a post,
considering the state of orthodox Buddhism, for which he was eminently qualified.
CHAPTER 4 ORIGINS OF THE TWO MAIN SCHOOLS OF CHAN
S EVENTH W ORLD O F C HAN B UDDHISM
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