The legendary beauty made China a Buddhist country with the help of Indian and Chinese bhikkhus overcoming stiff opposition from the proponents of Confucianism. But she stopped at nothing to satisfy her gargantuan appetite for power.
The Virocana Buddha statue erected by Emperor Wu Zetian
China has had only one fully-empowered de-jure Empress and she was the 7 th.Century AD ruler Wu Zetian. She was not only a Buddhist but had made Buddhism China’s State religion, relegating indigenous faiths such as Daoism and Confucianism to second place.
Wu Zetian (where Wu is the family name and Zetian the given name) built lavish Buddhist temples and introduced to China, Buddhist knowledge and practices which she got from India thanks to bhikkhus of the likes of Xuanzang (602-664 AD). The Nalanda University-trained Xuanzang helped her to turn China into a Buddhist country.
Zetian was a legendary beauty who was nicknamed the “flower girl” but behind the alluring exterior was a person hard as steel. Not a believer in equanimity and non-violence that one would associate with Buddhism, she was pushy, crafty and ruthless in the extreme, justifying her excesses by claiming a “divine right” to rule.
Mythical divine right
The mythical divine right was concocted by bhikkhus from Nalanda and Ujjain in India. Indian bhikkhus had made a beeline to China under her rule partly because of the welcome they received and partly because of the decline in Buddhism in India due to the resurgence of Brahminical Hinduism.
A confident Zetian clashed head-on with rivals and opponents, especially the proponents of Confucianism, challenging the latter’s ingrained prejudice against women in public life.
Born in 624 AD, Zetian came from a Buddhist family. Father Wu Shiyui was a lumber merchant who also held gubernatorial posts thanks to his links with the Tang Emperor. But when Zetian was ten, her father passed away. Due to her good looks, she was admitted to the Tang Emperor Taizong’s harem. But being a junior, she was designated as the Emperor’s ‘fifth grade concubine’. Though it was a lowly position, Zetian was assigned to the ailing Emperor’s bed chamber, which gave her access to the inner family of the Emperor.
According to historian William Dalrymple (author of The Golden Road, Bloombury London 2024) Zetian had a liaison with Crown Prince Gaozong. She also came into contact with Xuangzang, the bhikkhu from India who was trying to convert the Emperor to Buddhism. Xuanzong was translating Indian Buddhist works. Her familiarity with Xuanzong stood her in good stead later on when she was trying to turn China Buddhist.
In 649 AD, Emperor Taizong passed away, his death being hastened by an Indian Brahmin doctor’s “mercury-based concoctions”, says Dalrymple. The Emperor’s death dealt a blow to both Zetian and Xuanzang as the former could lose her enviable job on the Emperor’s side and the latter lost the chance to convert the Emperor to Buddhism when he was about to accept it.
But the never-say-die Zetian used the political vacuum to manoeuvre herself into power step by step. Eventually, Xuanzang got in Zetian a willing and generous patron for his bid to turn China into a Buddhist country.
Crown Prince Gaozong who had taken a fancy to Zetian, promptly admitted her to his Imperial harem with the grandiose title “Lady of Luminous Demeanour”. By 652 AD, Zetian’s liaison with Gaozong had produced six children which enabled her to dominate both him and his mother, the Empress. The henpecked Emperor looked on helplessly as Zetian drove his mother into exile and had her family brutally killed.
Xuanzang
She then pressed Gaozong to make her the Empress in place of his mother. Her wish was fulfilled in 655 AD when, at 31, the ex-fifth grade concubine was made Empress of the realm. To celebrate the event, Zetian organised a “vegetarian” feast for 5,000 bhikkhus on the advice of her “guru” Xuanzang, Dalrymple states.
The moment she became Empress, Zetian ordered the execution of Gaozong’s mother on a trumped up charge that she had murdered one of her children and had resorted to witchcraft. Zetian was not content with being just the wife of the Emperor. She was craving for a monopoly of power and the status to go with it.
At first, she cleverly used Emperor Gaozong’s deteriorating health to grab de facto power. In 674 AD she assumed the title of “Heavenly Empress” and goaded Gaozong to give bhikkhus a status equal to the Daoist clergy.
De facto emperor
When Gaozong died in 683 AD, Zetian became the de facto Emperor but not de jure, as the de jure Emperor was her eldest son. But when the eldest son became too big for his boots, she engineered his eviction and put her 22- year-old second son on the throne. But the second son had a speech defect which she used to dominate him.
In 684 AD, the marginalised Confucius Establishment struck back. But Zetian ruthlessly suppressed the rebellion.
The rebel leaders were captured, tortured and executed, Dalrymple states. The victory boosted Zetian’s confidence and she fancied seizing power from her second son too.
But to get de jure power in Confucian China, one had to be a male. To resolve this conundrum, Zetian got bhikkhus from India to concoct a divine lineage for her which would portray her as a “Bodhisattva”, a spiritually elevated person on the way to becoming a Buddha. That would devalue all earthly criticism about being a woman Emperor.
She got ten, mostly Indian bhikkhus to work out a divine origin. The Indian bhikkhus composed a commentary on the Mahayana text The Great Cloud Sutra which interpreted the sutra to mean that Zetian was actually the great future Buddha Maitreya. Many of her subjects were coaxed into declaring that they saw strange occurrences that presaged Zetian’s becoming a Chakravartin (Emperor).
Devi Vimalaprabha
According to Dalrymple, the 37th. Chapter of the sutra stated that Goddess Vimalaprabha (Heavenly Lady Pure and Radiant) who was one of Buddha’s female disciples, would come to rule the world to make everybody happy. Zetian was identified as Devi Vimalaprabha.
Finally on September 11, 690 AD, at Luoyang located in the confluence area of the Luo River and the Yellow River in Henan province, a proclamation was read out saying that Zetian is China’s Chakravartin. Whereupon, she promptly terminated the Tang dynasty and inaugurated her own ‘Zhou’ dynasty. Buddhism was made the State Religion and the Daoist clergy were demoted to second position.
A sketch of Empress Wu Zetian
According to Dalrymple she decreed that all State functions would have Buddhist rituals, the chanting of Sutras, Mantras and Spells, and vegetarian meals would be provided to the Buddhist clergy. Following the edicts of the Indian Emperor Asoka, the slaughtering of animals as well as fishing were prohibited. She introduced the Zhou calendar in place of the Tang calendar. And Wu Zetian was to be referred to as “Chakravartin Empress Wu of the Zhou dynasty, Divine Sovereign, the Golden Wheel of the Law and the Peerless Maitreya.”
Upon becoming Emperor she constructed the Heavenly City of the Bodhisattva Maitreya in Luoyang in the Henan Province. It was a “city within a city replete with Buddhist symbolism, Dalrymple states. It was designed to be a fitting place for the Maitreya to descend from the Tusita heaven to be received by Devi Vimalaprabha attired resplendently.
zThe Tusita heaven is a celestial realm in Buddhist cosmology where the future Buddha, Maitreya, resides and prepares for his rebirth on Earth.
Dalrymple states that Zetian’s greatest commission was a stunning 55-ft.
image of the Vairocana Buddha, the Lord of the Universe and the Primordial principle behind all that exists. Bhikkhu Xuanzong had brought the sketch from India.
One of the most celebrated Indian bhikkhus in Wu Zetian’s realm was Bodhiruci from South India. He was asked by Wu Zetian to translate 120 Sanskrit and Prakrit scrolls left unfinished by Yuanzuang. According to Dalrymple it was bhikkhu Bodhiruci who actually declared the Empress to be Chakravartin.
By 699 AD, Empress Wu Zetian’s health was deteriorating. She got back her deposed son known as the “Prince of the Buddha’s Light” to live with her. In 1705, there was an attempted coup against her which made her hand over power to the Crown Prince.
Her abdication was curtains down for State patronage for Buddhism in China. But Buddhism remained in China. China still has the largest Buddhist community on earth, according to Dalrymple. And that is evident among pilgrims who throng the holy Buddhist site of Bodh Gaya in India, he points out.
