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A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order: The Case of Wu Zhao (r. 690–705)
Religion (1998) 28, 383–392 Article Number: rl980147
A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order: The Case of Wu Zhao (r. 690–705) S R. B Medieval Chinese held that the circumscribed social space women might inhabit in life was encoded in the nature of their bodies. Gender conceptions common to China’s three religions—Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism—confirmed that women were allied to the passive and inner. Accounts of the only woman in Chinese history to occupy the throne in her own name, Wu Zhao, follow Chinese historians in portraying her as contravening this cosmology. Drawing on recent studies of the religious history of the body, I argue instead that Wu Zhao constructed a legitimizing strategy that took seriously, in ways not contemplated before, these fundamental tenets of Chinese religion. 1998 Academic Press
To tell the story of the rise to power of Wu Zhao, the only woman Thearch in China’s long history, is to risk becoming entangled in a thorny nest of vexing historiographical question.1 As Denis Twitchett and Howard Wechsler remark in their comprehensive account of her career, ‘from the very first, the historical record of her reign has been hostile, biased and curiously fragmentary.’2 Fragmentary, certainly, but the lack of accurate reportage is not really ‘curious’. In China, history writing was always recognized as primarily a didactic exercise, the construction of a mirror trained on the past for the guidance of future rulers. Wu Zhao, by virtue of her ‘usurpation’, represented the best of negative exempts in that she had transgressed one of the primary social codes of Confucian morality. Tradition held that the place of woman was the ‘inner’ world of the family, while that of men was the ‘outer’ world of affairs. Wu Zhao had not only dared to interfere in the outer world of governance, she had boldly established her own dynasty. The historians who recorded our primary sources on the rise and reign of ‘Empress Wu’, intent on ensuring that nothing like this should ever happen again, thus recount in excruciating and monstrous detail forthright confirmations of the wisdom of excluding women from public affairs, while ignoring even the most mundane details of the period.3 In recent years, a growing number of historians have sifted through this body of questionable evidence in an attempt to provide a more balanced picture of Wu Zhao. Yet despite well-meaning efforts to see past the mirror constructed by traditional historiography, a convincing answer to the question of how Wu Zhau managed to achieve power in a culture of male domination remains elusive. It is not my purpose in this essay to review recent assessments of Wu Zhao or to propose a definitive solution to perhaps insoluble historiographical problems. Rather, I will endeavour to show how the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Peter Brown, Elaine Pagels and others on the religious world of women in Christian societies offers a new avenue of understanding, one that opens to our view a wealth of textual evidence that managed to escape Confucian censorship.4 To avoid tedium, I will not express at each point how the insights of previous scholars have guided my research. In adapting insights drawn from studies of gender to the Chinese case, we must proceed with caution. As Bynum writes of her own subject, ‘we do well to begin by recognizing the essential strangeness of medieval religious experience’.5 In that the world of medieval China is even stranger to twentieth-century sensibilities than is that of medieval Europe, we might here begin by explaining how inquiries into the 0048–721X/98/040383 + 10 $30.00/0
1998 Academic Press
384 S. R. Bokenkamp legitimation strategies of a Chinese Thearch have anything at all to do with religion.6 Before ascending the throne and no matter what the constitution of the political factions that made the deed possible, Wu Zhuo had to present herself to the world as a woman capable of rule. Chinese kingship, like that of ancient Rome, required divine sanction. This meant that Wu had to assert, first of all, that heaven provided for rule by a woman and, second, that she was that woman. She had, in short, to offer a compelling religious construction of her gender. To be convincing, this construction had to draw upon accepted paradigms of the medieval religious orthodoxies of the day— Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist alike—but in ways diametrically opposed to traditional interpretations, which held that a woman, by virtue of her gender, could not properly rule. Wu Zhao, in short, was faced with the necessity of constructing, not in our terms but certainly in hers, a feminist critique of the Chinese world order. Wu Zhao served in the lower ranks of concubinage in the imperial palace from roughly 640 until the death of the second Tang Thearch in 649. Soon after that, she was called again into the imperial harem. Through a series of political machinations and deadly intrigue that would be considered normal for any male monarch, she rose to the rank of empress and came to dominate her weak (according to the historians) and certainly often ill husband, Li Zhi. From 657 until the death of her husband in 683, the control of Tang government was largely in her hands. Then, at the age of 60, she became regent to her third son, Li Zhe. She almost immediately deposed him as ‘inept’, as compared with her he must have been, and nominally set his younger brother, Li Dan, on the throne. Finally, in 690, when she was 67 years of age, she dispensed with the pretence of regency and established herself as Thearch of the Zhou dynasty. She ruled until 705, when at the age of 82 and incapacitated by old age and illness, she was deposed in favor of Li Zhe. She died later in that same year. Wu Zhao thus spent over thirty years of her life preparing for a dynasty that lasted only fifteen. It is this period of preparation on which I will focus below. Wu Zhao’s strategy in preparing for her own rule is clear from the outset of her public career. The earliest, and most interesting, piece of evidence is a brief memorial from Wu Zhao’s own hand which led to her participation in the Feng and Shan rites in 666. It is typical of Wu Zhao’s retelling of the Chinese tradition and deserves to be presented at length. The most awesome of archaic Chinese rituals, the Feng and Shan rites were designed to announce to the gods of heaven and earth not the inauguration of a new dynasty but the success of the current dynasty as it began to reach the apogee of its glory. The rites had been carried out only five times prior to this occasion, all during the Han dynasty. The second Thearch of the Tang, Li Shimin (r. 626–49), had three times attempted the rites but on each occasion had been dissuaded by his ministers, who felt that the time was not right. The reasons cited were various, ranging from insufficient economic recovery since the overthrow of the previous dynasty to inauspicious portents. While such excuses may seem to us less than compelling reasons for deferring the rites, they do serve to underscore the profound seriousness with which the Feng and Shan rites were regarded by those of Tang times.7 The principal portion of the Feng rite was to be performed on a round altar at the summit of Mount Tai (in modern Shandong Province). The accompanying Shan rite was to be held on a square altar on a lesser eminence, Sheshou, only slightly elevated above the plains at the foot of Mount Tai. At both of these sites, the officiant sealed in stone coffers announcements engraved on jade strips. The announcement placed at the summit of Mount Tai was addressed to heaven, while that of Sheshou was addressed to
A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order 385 earth. Edouard Chavannes, in his monumental study of Tai Shan, has clarified the symbolism of these acts.8 Mount Tai, as one of the Five Marchmounts, or holy mountains of China, was associated with the East, spring, new growth, and developing yang energies. By sacrificing here, one associated oneself with the ascending side of the temporal cycle. Further, there were boy yin and yang aspects to the rite itself. The announcement of dynastic increase was to be transmitted both to square, feminine earth and to round, masculine heaven. To underscore this symbolism, the spirits of the cynastic founder and his sone were to be invoked as intermediaries (or ‘associates’ pei) in the rite to heaven and their principal empresses were to serve as intermediaries in the rites to earth. Despite the apparent symmetry of this arrangement, with its balance of yin and yang the participation of living empresses in the rites had never been considered. The ritual specialists who had investigated the ancient rites thus presented to Li Zhi the recommendation that the secondary rites to earth be conducted by ministers of state. Nonetheless, Wu Zhao was able to petition that she lead the ranking palace women in performing the Shan rites to the Earth Goddess, thus becoming the first (and the last) woman to participate in the Feng and Shan rites at Mount Tai. According to history’s accounts of the event, Wu Zhao waited until the imperial party had reached the staging area at the foot of the mountain before presenting her request. The empress wrote: The rite for mounting on high [to perform] the Feng sacrifice far surpasses the precedents of antiquity, while the rite for descending to perform the Shan is, I dare state, inadequate. Specifically, [the proposals] hold that on the day of sacrifice to the chthonian spirits, the grand former empresses are to be associates [pei], while the officiants are all to be [male] ministers of state. With all modesty and sincerity, I fear that this is not entirely appropriate. Why is this? The heaven and earth principles each have their fixed positions and the duties of male and female are likewise distinct. As the scriptures and their commentaries relate, the rites of the inner [female] and of the outer [male] are correspondingly distinct. The associate rites at the red-gem alter thus correspond to the feminine nature of the square earth. The presentation of fragrant substances in jade containers in fact should be a duty of the inner. How is it then proper, especially when inviting the former empresses and personally feasting them on the rose-gem mats, that those participating in these inner offerings would be officials whose natal destinies link them to the outer? Examining this matter in terms of the ultimate order of things, this is a serious ritual impropriety.9
From Tan times down to today, historians have emphasized the unprecedent novelty of this request. The remarks of Dennis Twitchett and Howard Wechsler, writing in the Cambridge History of China, are typical: ‘Although there was no precedent whatsoever for the participation of women in the ceremonies, the empress, defying all tradition, planned to play a major role’.10 In fact, however, as Wu Zhao herself states in her memorial, there were no established precedents for the Feng and Shan rites themselves.11 Further, far from contravening tradition, Wu Zhao here takes at full face value the correlative cosmology of yin and yang, earth and heaven, and female and male pei historically associated with the Feng and Shan rituals. Wu Zhao’s use of the terms ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in her memorial reflects more than the social reality of the empress’ position in the inner compartments of the palace. As we will see, she was to continue to emphasize the association of yin with the inner and central. At the same time, she here invokes the inviolable sanctity of the inner to deliver a dire subtext which the ministers of state, though eager to participate in this awesome rite, would not have missed: male officials, at least those in full possession of their manhood, were not allowed into the inner chambers of the living empresses. How
386 S. R. Bokenkamp could it then be ritually appropriate to allow them to feast with the even more exalted spirits of the empresses? There were, of course, biological ‘males’ who were regularly admitted into the inner palaces to serve the empress—eunuchs. However, that possibility would be unthinkable. Eunuchs were not allowed to participate in imperial ritual, and no official would betray his family by submitting to such alteration (not to mention the pain). Nonetheless, this unspoken solution hovers behind Wu Zhao’s approach to the issue. It is no wonder, then, that her request to perform the Shan rites was speedily granted. On the 12th of February 666, the day after the Feng rites on Tai Shan, the Thearch performed the initial rites on Sheshou, then hurriedly retreated with his officials. Shielded by embroidered curtains held by palace eunuchs, Wu Zhao led the female officials of the palace to the square altar to summon with song and to feast the former empresses. Soon after the successful completion of the Feng and Shan rites on Mount Tai, Wu Zhao began urging Li Zhi to conduct the same rituals on Mount Song, the Central Marchmount, some 50 kilometres southwest of Loyang, the city where she would eventually establish her capital. This was something that had never been contemplated before. Three times the rites were scheduled, and three times cancelled—in 676 and 679 because of unrest on the borders and in 683 because of Li Zhi’s failing health. It was not until 696, six years into Wu Zhao’s own reign, that she was finally able to conduct the rites on Mount Song. Thus we know that she spent at least twenty years in pursuit of this unprecedented event. Why was Mount Song so important to her? This simple question requires a complex answer because the central of the five holy mountains of China was central as well to Wu Zhao’s ideological program. While this program is extremely complex, I have so far been able to isolate from surviving texts three images of feminine power that played especially telling roles in the development of Wu Zhao’s critique of ancient tradition. Each of them draws on fundamental themes of the cosmological justifications for the Chinese world order, but in new and creative ways.
The Paired Deity Fu Xi/Nu¯ Gua As the Central Marchmount, Mount Song was the axis mundi, that point where heaven and earth joined and where communication between the two was easiest. Ancient Chinese concepts of kingship, everywhere articulated in the Confucian classics, hold the ruler to be intermediary between heaven and earth. The primary example of this ability to join heaven and earth, yang and yin, is the figure of the first of the ‘Three Sovereigns’ (Sanhaung) of antiquity. The First Sovereign was, in fact, not a single ruler but a paired deity that had been only imperfectly given a ‘history’ as human rulers who shared power. The two parts of the deity, Fu Xi (male) and Nu¯ Gua (female), are generally depicted as half-human, half-dragon, with their serpentine tails coiled.12 This image of paired kingship is undoubtedly that intended when in 674, two years before the scheduled rites on Song Sham, Li Zhi and Wu Zhao took the unprecedented titles of ‘Celestial Sovereign’ (tian huang) and ‘Celestial Empress’ (tian hou). Commemorative stelae erected on the occasion of the pairs visit to Mount Song, for example, play on the symbolic significance of this nomenclature. Even after the death of Li Zhi, the image of the First Sovereign is again and again invoked in support of Wu Zhao, who was by then seen as fulfilling both the yin and the yang aspects of the deity.13 Both of the surviving Acts of Grace, issued by Wu Zhao in 684 and 689 preparatory to her assumption of the throne, begin with references to this ‘First Sovereign.’ That of 689 is particularly explicit:
A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order 387 The First Sovereign . . . took as a model heaven and earth to fashion the regulations. This great sage held the chart [of rule], taking as a pattern both yin and yang to foster the transformation [of the realm]. Now I hold aloft this holy chart.14
The importance of the Fu Xi/Nu¯ Gua image helps to explain why, in preparation for her own rule, Wu Zhao introduced a number of new characters. This was an act explicitly patterned on Fu Xi/Nu¯ Gua’s invention of writing. Texts written in support of Wu Zhao also refer frequently to the myth of Nuu¯ Gua repairing the sky with stones of the five colors. This story of the creation, or rather re-creation, of heaven brings us to the second aspect of Wu Zhao’s political mystique, the image of the mother.
Mother of Gods Myths concerning each of the dynastic founders of China, found even in sober Confucian histories, regularly include mention of their miraculous births. Typically, Heaven itself, through the agency of ‘shooting stars’ or other such celestial emanations, impregnates the founder’s mother. What is most important about such myths is that they generally relate the birth of the founder of a line, not that of heirs in normal dynastic succession. The fathers of the subsequent rulers in a dynastic line are (presumably) known, and they share in semi-divine status by virtue of their imperial descent. In effect, then, thearchs claimed descent not from a first father but from a first mother. Further, in that such stories rationalize ancient Chinese shamanic traditions whereby female mediums entered into hierogamous union with the highest male gods, such tales serve further to underscore the notion that when masculine heaven is to intervene in human affairs, the intermediary of choice is female, not male.15 While it is true that women had ruled in the past as regent until the designated thearch reached his majority, this was never the ‘mother’ role that Wu Zhao had in mind when she forthrightly proclaimed, ‘I gaze as a mother over the realm’ in her Act of Grace of 684.16 Through her resurrection of ancient myths of mother goddess, Wu Zhao sought to return to the powerful precedent of the divinely inspired mothers of dynastic lines, but with a difference. Rather than content herself with giving birth to a line of rulers, she would rule. Historians have so emphasized the image of Wu Zhao as ‘usurping’ the place of a man, that it at first seems strange that she continued to emphasize her gender in the face of long-standing prejudices against female rulers. Yet this is precisely what she did. What is more, she continued to emphasize her role as mother of the realm long after she had dropped all pretence of serving as regent.17 There is ample evidence that she had long prepared this role, which is not so much that of biological mother as that of intermediary to heaven and generator of a new age. In preparing for the Feng and Shan rites, Wu Zhao and Li Zhi visited Mount Song on at least two occasions. On the first of these visits, in 680, she visited the temple of ‘Mother Qi,’ the wife of the legendary sage-king Yu¯ who was said to have turned into a stone that, impregnated by heaven, brought forth the founder of the Xia dynasty. Wu Zhao commanded that steles be erected at two temples on the mountain to commemorate her visit. Both texts survive intact, thanks more to the subsequent fame of the two young writers who composed these inscriptions than to posterity’s reverence for their message. Couched in elegant parallel prose and studded with classical allusions, these writings, while nominally dedicated to the ancient goddesses, make it clear that comparison is being drawn to Wu Zhao as mother and creator of a new heaven and
388 S. R. Bokenkamp earth. One of the writers, Cui Rong (652–705), goes so far as to present the transfer of the mandate and the dawning of a new era as if they had already occurred, though it would be another ten years before Wu Zhao announced the foundation of her dynasty: When the pneumas act as mother, the myriad things all begin their growth. When the moon acts as mother, her glowing countenance shines alike on all. When the earth principle acts as mother, then above and below merge to produce greatness. When the Empress acts as mother, the kingdom is formed . . . The great Tang now removes the old cauldrons [symbols of dynastic rule] and takes new ones. This is a birth in accord with the cycles, a creation which continues that of Heaven.18
This reference to ‘creation’ brings us to the third element of Wu Zhao’s self-created imperial image, that of world-savior.
Creator/Savior As is well known, China lacks a true creation myth. During medieval times, however, China possessed in abundance myths of re-creation. Particularly during the dark days of disunion leading up to the Tang, adherents of the three major schools—Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism—became obsessed with the idea that the cycle of time had descended to its nadir and that a savior was due to recreate an ordered society. The Tang founder played on this myth, particularly in its Daoist variant foretelling the advent of a Savior surnamed Li, to support his claim to the mandate. The power of such saviors to recreate civilization once it had passed through the nadir of dissolution by fire, flood and warfare derived from their oneness with the Dao. The Dao alone could survive the cosmic destruction at the end of each world-cycle, withdrawing into its primal state of undifferentiation, to expand again into existence in gestative rhythms. In the same fashion, only saviors embodying the Dao could emerge from the chaos at the end of lesser cycles to give birth to renewed dynastic order. By Tang times, this myth of re-creation had become inextricably tangled with Buddhist accounts of the Buddha Maitreya, who was likewise depicted as appearing to regenerate the world at the end of a kalpa-cycle.19 In several of her edicts, Wu Zhao refers to this myth as it related to the founders of the Tang, but she presented herself as saviour, too, quite apart from her marriage to and mothering of men surnamed Li. This was the third self-created image of Wu Zhao. Thanks to Antonino Forte’s excellent work on the ‘Commentary to the great Cloud Sitra’ this, the most politically sensitive aspect of Wu Zhao’s program, today tends to be regarded by scholars as an outgrowth of Wu’s Buddhist faith. We shall see that it encompasses other ideologies as well.20 In her appeal to Buddhist understandings of the savior, Wu Zhao adopted the roles of Cakravartin, supreme ruler and protector of the dharma, of the Maitreya Budda and of a Bodhisattva, descended to alleviate human suffering through her compassion. Forte suggests that, in these personae, Wu Zhao’s femineity was regarded as upava, an expediency, for the accomplishment of her soteriological mission.21 It is by no means to be concluded from this that Wu presented herself as really a man. For one thing, femineity in medieval China was anything but expedient. While a few Buddhists may have wished to view Wu Zhao as a crypto-male, the extent to which her gender is asserted throughout the texts written by and for her reveal that this was never a part of her projected image.22 For example, in discussing Wu Zhao’s divine status in his elegant celebration of her Feng and Shan rites on Mount Song, Li Jiao draws primarily on her Buddhist
A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order 389 credentials. Praising her bodhisattva-like compassion, he writes, ‘To provide beneficence to a suffering age, she debased herself to ascend the throne as a female sovereign’. However, this phrase is parallel to the line, ‘To provide a treasured response to living beings, she contented herself with overseeing the court of a male Thearch’, which refers to her period of preparation as equally demeaning.23 The ‘debasement’ mentioned here is thus her descent from divine status, not an assertion that Wu Zhao was somehow really a man. Daoism, through its explorations of the fertile, primordial Dao, proved more productive than did Buddhism of appropriate metaphors for woman as creator. One example should suffice to demonstrate this. In a state hymn composed and performed in 689, Wu Zhao is directly, if implicitly, compared with the creative Dao in ways that recall the ‘mother of the realm’ aspect of her image: Spiritual efficacy cannot be fathomed—as it moves yin and yang, Pregnant with existence, it gives birth to the earthly realm. Now the tally matching heaven has emerged—the Thearch’s enterprise flourishes. She willingly oversees the luminous rites, bringing down confirmation and blessings.24
Far from fleeing her gender, Wu Zhao everywhere asserts it. The images she employs are without exception powerful ones. None of the texts written by or for Wu Zhao betrays the ‘only-a-weak woman syndrome’, which, at least according to Antonia Fraser, ‘has the normally robust female leader . . . pleading the notorious weakness of her sex, generally for good practical reasons, of self-interest’.25 It would be difficult to find a more forthright glorification of the woman ruler than these words penned by Li Jiao: As for the Grand Zhou dynasty’s possession of the realm: Drummed forth from the obscure groves of the Way and its Power; It restores to us the enterprise of the sages and the gods. Having begun in the Women’s Quarters, She provides fulfilment to the families and the kingdom. A brilliant beacon shining out over two dynasties, A pool of virtue flowing to the ends of the world . . . She entered riding a mare, but now pilots flying dragons. From the scattered sand of dynastic decline she has forged the stones of Nu¯ Gua to repair Heaven. Surely not one of the thousand thearchs is able to match her. . .26
Body of a Woman There is much more that could be written on the elaboration of these themes in the lengthy texts that survive from this period, yet I think that enough has been presented to demonstrate clearly the outlines of Wu Zhao’s central strategy for legitimizing herself as woman ruler of the Central Kingdom. None of the images I have outlined above is the creation of Wu Zhao. All three—twinned demiurge, mother of the dynastic line and savior/creator—were present in the fundamental scriptures of Chinese religion. Such archetypal images grew from observations of conception, birth and growth in the natural world. They represent in mythological terms a fundamental fact about women— that they are fertile—and posit female fertility as infinitely powerful and creative. Before Wu Zhao, these myths had served to assert the control of men over that fertility.27 Seldom had their example been invoked to augment the power of living women and never, at least in historical times, for purposes of legitimizing the rule of a woman.28
390 S. R. Bokenkamp As mentioned, tradition held that the place for a woman in Chinese society was the inner world of reproduction, family and home. While the history of the body in early China remains to be written, recent studies indicate that this role was believed to be inscribed at conception. When, in the uterus, sperm surrounded blood—the female contribution to conception—a female child resulted. The inner nature of women was thus yin, physiologically implanted in the womb.29 For male children, the opposite was the case. Theirs was an active, outgoing nature. While each person’s body was seen as a delicate balance of yin and yang forces, the proportions of each made a crucial difference. The bodies of women were regarded as dominated by yin qualities which naturally formed the matrix from which life, often depicted as growing yang, might again arise. As everywhere repeated—in sexual manuals, cosmological accounts and religious texts—women’s bodies were thus powerful only internally and should properly be confined within walls, both social and literal. Wu Zhao fully accepted these archetypal explanations of the nature of woman— passages reiterating them appear throughout the memorials, hymns and poems written in support of her rule—but took them seriously in a way that had not been contemplated before. The first memorial we have from her brush already begins her retelling of tradition: the ‘inner’, the ‘central’, is the place of woman. And since the inner was also held to be the secret place where life begins—where, in spatial terms, heaven meets earth and where, in cosmic terms, the Dao began its fertile growth—why should it not be appropriate that she rule the Central Kingdom? This, I think, was the importance to Wu Zhao of the Central Marchmount.
Notes 1 Not the least of these is what to call her. The standard practice in both Chinese and Western language works is to refer to her as ‘Empress Wu’ or ‘Wu Zetian’, which is in fact the temple-name given her when she was stripped of her rightful title in 716. Before that time, she was known by the title she adopted 690, when she founded her dynasty. This title, Di, is normally translated ‘emperor’. Here I will uniformly translate Di as ‘Thearch’, a term that has been adopted by some sinologists to in acknowledgement of the fact that human Di were held to be semi-divine while the pantheons of Chinese religion are full of fully divinized Di. I will also refer to rulers throughout by their given names, rather than their ancestral-temple names. In other works, readers will thus find Li Yuan referred to as ‘Gaozu’, Li Shimin as ‘Taizong’, and :i Zhi as ‘Gaozong’. Wu Zhao’s sons, Li Zhe and Li Dan, are likewise known to history as ‘Zhongzong’ and ‘Ruizong’. To call them such is to concur in the erasure of Wu Zhao’s reign from Chinese history. 2 Denis Twitchett and Howard J. Wechsler, ‘Kao-tsung (reign 649–83) and the empress Wu: the inheritor and the usurper’, Cambridge History of China, III, pt 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 245. 3 I do not mean to deny by this any of the specific allegations of cruelty or murder for which Wu Zhao has traditionally been held responsible, but merely to reiterate that they are allegations. 4 I refer here to Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages’, Fragments for a History of the Human Body, in Michael Feher (ed.), New York Zone, 1989, pp. 160–219; Peter Brown, the Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York, Columbia University Press 1988; and Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, New York, Random House 1988. Unifying these diverse works is the realization that religions, particularly through their cosmologies and creation stories, encode assumptions about gender that set the terms for subsequent debate and change within a tradition. 5 Bynum, p. 162. 6 That this is so even in modern Asia is evidenced by the extreme case of the historian Lei Jiaji’s Humei pianneng huozhu: Wu Zetian de jingshen yu xinli fenxi [The Bewitching, Delusional
A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order 391
7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20
21
22
23 24
Autocrat: A Psychological Analysis of Empress Wu], Taibei, Taiwan, Liangming 1981. As his title already indicates, despite recourse to modern psychoanalytical terminology, Lei finds in the historical record what earlier historians wanted him to find. Although others adopt a more balanced tone, scholarship in China and Japan, as in the West, has yet to free itself from the icy grip of the official histories and still tends to regard anything written in support of Wu Zhao as mere ‘propaganda’. See Howard J. Wechsler, Offerings of Jade and Silk: Ritual and Symbol in the Legitimation of the Tang Dynasty, New Haven, Yale University Press 1985, pp. 170–94. Edouard Chavannes, Le Tai-chan—Essai de monographie d’un culte chinois, Paris, Ernest Leroux 1910, p. 22. Jiu Tangshu, 23:886; Tang Huiyao 7:98–99; Chavannes, pp. 184 ff. Literally, the final phrase cited here reads, ‘this is an entanglement of the xi and zhang pennons’. in ritual contexts, the xi were the insignia of empresses and zhang the insignia of emperors. Twichett and Wechsler, p. 259 (emphases mine). Wu Zhao, in the parallel prose appropriate to such memorials, puts it this way: ‘although in origin these ritual procedures arise from the ancient canons, yet the regulations for the ascent and descent of Tai Shan have been so defective as not to provide a program of long duration’ (Jiu Tang shu, 23:886). See, for example, Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art, Stanford, Stanford University Press 1989, pp. 156–61. This can be seen from the second part of the title ‘Sage Mother, Divine Sovereign’ that she took in 688. The first part of this title will be dealt with in the next section. ‘Gaiyuan zaichu shewen’, in Wenyuan yinghus, 463: 1b. By Tang times, such stories were so regularized that they needed only be hinted at. At the birth of Li Yuan, founder of the Tang, the candles in the room were said to have flared with a ‘spiritual light’. See Wen Daya, Da Tang chuangye qizhu zhu, (Congshu jicheng ed.) xg. 3, p. 37. ‘Gai yuan guangzhai shewen’, Wenyuan yinghua, 463: 7b. This is evident not only from the title ‘Sagely Mother and Spiritual Sovereign’ that she adopted right before inaugurating of her own dynasty, but from a variety of other texts written after the death of Li Zhi. For instance, in the preface to the Shengxian taizi bei that she wrote in 696, she implicitly compares herself to the Dao, which precedes yin and yang and ‘is hailed mother of all creation’ (Quan Tang wen, 98: 1b). As we shall see below, Buddhist texts written in her support make ample reference to the image as well. Cui Rong, ‘Songshan Chimu miao beo’, Wenyuan yinghus 878: 1b–2a. For more details on these matters, see Stephen R. Bukenkamp, ‘Time After Time: Taoist Apocalyptic History and the Founding of the Tang Dynasty’, Asia Major, third series (1994), pp. 59–88. Antonino Forte, Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End of the Seventh Century, Napoli, Istituto Universitario Orientale 1976. With regard to Wu Zhao’s allegiance to any of the three religions, the safest assertion is that of Rao Zongyi who, after surveying much of the inscriptional evidence presented here, concluded that she had no exclusive belief but drew equally on Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism alike. See his ‘Cong shike lun Wu Hou zhi zongjiao xinyang’, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 45 (1974), pp. 410–11. Forte also states that Wu Zhao constructed her ideology from all three religions and emphasizes throughout his work that he is dealing only with the Buddhist contributions. Forte, pp. 145–53. In line with this idea, Forte even uses the masculine third-person pronoun for all references to Thearch Wu in his translation of a passage of Buddhist encomium written in 695 (ibid pp. 148–59). Third-person pronouns in classical Chinese, when they are employed at all, are gender neutral. In fact, even the Buddhist ‘Commentary’ on which Forte bases his study speaks forthrightly of Wu Zhao as woman and mother: see especially pp. 208–11, and his Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias in the History of the Astronomical Clock, Rome, Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1988. esp. p. 239. Quan Tang wen, 248: 2b Jiu Tang shu, 30:1113. Because the Dao is never mentioned and Wu Zhao was commonly praised for her ‘spiritual efficacy’, the whole song could be taken as referring to her. All of the ‘Confucian’ hymns Wu Zhao composed literally bristle with images inspired by Daoism, reinterpreted so as to highlight her feminist message.
392 S. R. Bokenkamp 25 Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens, New York, Knopf 1989, p. 12. 26 Quan Tang wen, 248:1b–2a. The ‘Way and its power’ is a reference to the Daode jing [Scripture of the Way and its Power] of Laozi. 27 Precisely the same point is made by Edward Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens, San Francisco, North Point Press pp. 55–60, with reference to the archaic nature goddesses of China. 28 There is evidence that earlier women had also drawn upon these themes for empowerment, but always in relatively limited social contexts, such as in local cults or Daoist and Buddhist cloisters. 29 Other accounts speak of the relative proportions of yin and yang pneumas at the moment of conception, so that the respective health of the parents and even the time of day could be determinative of the sex of the offspring. In either case, the bodies of women were receptacles of fertile yin, while the distinguishing organs of men harboured active, outgoing yang essences. See Douglas Wile, Art of the Bedchamber, Albany, State University of New York Press 1992, p. 129; Charlotte Furth, ‘Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century China’, Late Imperial China, 9 (1988), pp. 1–4; and Ann Waltner, Getting an Heir, Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press 1990, pp. 28–47.
STEPHEN R. BOKENKAMP is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of Indiana University and co-Editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions. His publications include Early Daoist Scriptures (University of California Press, 1997) and articles on medieval Daoism and Chinese Literature. Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, U.S.A.
A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order: The Case of Wu Zhao (r. 690–705) S R. B Medieval Chinese held that the circumscribed social space women might inhabit in life was encoded in the nature of their bodies. Gender conceptions common to China’s three religions—Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism—confirmed that women were allied to the passive and inner. Accounts of the only woman in Chinese history to occupy the throne in her own name, Wu Zhao, follow Chinese historians in portraying her as contravening this cosmology. Drawing on recent studies of the religious history of the body, I argue instead that Wu Zhao constructed a legitimizing strategy that took seriously, in ways not contemplated before, these fundamental tenets of Chinese religion. 1998 Academic Press
To tell the story of the rise to power of Wu Zhao, the only woman Thearch in China’s long history, is to risk becoming entangled in a thorny nest of vexing historiographical question.1 As Denis Twitchett and Howard Wechsler remark in their comprehensive account of her career, ‘from the very first, the historical record of her reign has been hostile, biased and curiously fragmentary.’2 Fragmentary, certainly, but the lack of accurate reportage is not really ‘curious’. In China, history writing was always recognized as primarily a didactic exercise, the construction of a mirror trained on the past for the guidance of future rulers. Wu Zhao, by virtue of her ‘usurpation’, represented the best of negative exempts in that she had transgressed one of the primary social codes of Confucian morality. Tradition held that the place of woman was the ‘inner’ world of the family, while that of men was the ‘outer’ world of affairs. Wu Zhao had not only dared to interfere in the outer world of governance, she had boldly established her own dynasty. The historians who recorded our primary sources on the rise and reign of ‘Empress Wu’, intent on ensuring that nothing like this should ever happen again, thus recount in excruciating and monstrous detail forthright confirmations of the wisdom of excluding women from public affairs, while ignoring even the most mundane details of the period.3 In recent years, a growing number of historians have sifted through this body of questionable evidence in an attempt to provide a more balanced picture of Wu Zhao. Yet despite well-meaning efforts to see past the mirror constructed by traditional historiography, a convincing answer to the question of how Wu Zhau managed to achieve power in a culture of male domination remains elusive. It is not my purpose in this essay to review recent assessments of Wu Zhao or to propose a definitive solution to perhaps insoluble historiographical problems. Rather, I will endeavour to show how the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Peter Brown, Elaine Pagels and others on the religious world of women in Christian societies offers a new avenue of understanding, one that opens to our view a wealth of textual evidence that managed to escape Confucian censorship.4 To avoid tedium, I will not express at each point how the insights of previous scholars have guided my research. In adapting insights drawn from studies of gender to the Chinese case, we must proceed with caution. As Bynum writes of her own subject, ‘we do well to begin by recognizing the essential strangeness of medieval religious experience’.5 In that the world of medieval China is even stranger to twentieth-century sensibilities than is that of medieval Europe, we might here begin by explaining how inquiries into the 0048–721X/98/040383 + 10 $30.00/0
1998 Academic Press
384 S. R. Bokenkamp legitimation strategies of a Chinese Thearch have anything at all to do with religion.6 Before ascending the throne and no matter what the constitution of the political factions that made the deed possible, Wu Zhuo had to present herself to the world as a woman capable of rule. Chinese kingship, like that of ancient Rome, required divine sanction. This meant that Wu had to assert, first of all, that heaven provided for rule by a woman and, second, that she was that woman. She had, in short, to offer a compelling religious construction of her gender. To be convincing, this construction had to draw upon accepted paradigms of the medieval religious orthodoxies of the day— Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist alike—but in ways diametrically opposed to traditional interpretations, which held that a woman, by virtue of her gender, could not properly rule. Wu Zhao, in short, was faced with the necessity of constructing, not in our terms but certainly in hers, a feminist critique of the Chinese world order. Wu Zhao served in the lower ranks of concubinage in the imperial palace from roughly 640 until the death of the second Tang Thearch in 649. Soon after that, she was called again into the imperial harem. Through a series of political machinations and deadly intrigue that would be considered normal for any male monarch, she rose to the rank of empress and came to dominate her weak (according to the historians) and certainly often ill husband, Li Zhi. From 657 until the death of her husband in 683, the control of Tang government was largely in her hands. Then, at the age of 60, she became regent to her third son, Li Zhe. She almost immediately deposed him as ‘inept’, as compared with her he must have been, and nominally set his younger brother, Li Dan, on the throne. Finally, in 690, when she was 67 years of age, she dispensed with the pretence of regency and established herself as Thearch of the Zhou dynasty. She ruled until 705, when at the age of 82 and incapacitated by old age and illness, she was deposed in favor of Li Zhe. She died later in that same year. Wu Zhao thus spent over thirty years of her life preparing for a dynasty that lasted only fifteen. It is this period of preparation on which I will focus below. Wu Zhao’s strategy in preparing for her own rule is clear from the outset of her public career. The earliest, and most interesting, piece of evidence is a brief memorial from Wu Zhao’s own hand which led to her participation in the Feng and Shan rites in 666. It is typical of Wu Zhao’s retelling of the Chinese tradition and deserves to be presented at length. The most awesome of archaic Chinese rituals, the Feng and Shan rites were designed to announce to the gods of heaven and earth not the inauguration of a new dynasty but the success of the current dynasty as it began to reach the apogee of its glory. The rites had been carried out only five times prior to this occasion, all during the Han dynasty. The second Thearch of the Tang, Li Shimin (r. 626–49), had three times attempted the rites but on each occasion had been dissuaded by his ministers, who felt that the time was not right. The reasons cited were various, ranging from insufficient economic recovery since the overthrow of the previous dynasty to inauspicious portents. While such excuses may seem to us less than compelling reasons for deferring the rites, they do serve to underscore the profound seriousness with which the Feng and Shan rites were regarded by those of Tang times.7 The principal portion of the Feng rite was to be performed on a round altar at the summit of Mount Tai (in modern Shandong Province). The accompanying Shan rite was to be held on a square altar on a lesser eminence, Sheshou, only slightly elevated above the plains at the foot of Mount Tai. At both of these sites, the officiant sealed in stone coffers announcements engraved on jade strips. The announcement placed at the summit of Mount Tai was addressed to heaven, while that of Sheshou was addressed to
A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order 385 earth. Edouard Chavannes, in his monumental study of Tai Shan, has clarified the symbolism of these acts.8 Mount Tai, as one of the Five Marchmounts, or holy mountains of China, was associated with the East, spring, new growth, and developing yang energies. By sacrificing here, one associated oneself with the ascending side of the temporal cycle. Further, there were boy yin and yang aspects to the rite itself. The announcement of dynastic increase was to be transmitted both to square, feminine earth and to round, masculine heaven. To underscore this symbolism, the spirits of the cynastic founder and his sone were to be invoked as intermediaries (or ‘associates’ pei) in the rite to heaven and their principal empresses were to serve as intermediaries in the rites to earth. Despite the apparent symmetry of this arrangement, with its balance of yin and yang the participation of living empresses in the rites had never been considered. The ritual specialists who had investigated the ancient rites thus presented to Li Zhi the recommendation that the secondary rites to earth be conducted by ministers of state. Nonetheless, Wu Zhao was able to petition that she lead the ranking palace women in performing the Shan rites to the Earth Goddess, thus becoming the first (and the last) woman to participate in the Feng and Shan rites at Mount Tai. According to history’s accounts of the event, Wu Zhao waited until the imperial party had reached the staging area at the foot of the mountain before presenting her request. The empress wrote: The rite for mounting on high [to perform] the Feng sacrifice far surpasses the precedents of antiquity, while the rite for descending to perform the Shan is, I dare state, inadequate. Specifically, [the proposals] hold that on the day of sacrifice to the chthonian spirits, the grand former empresses are to be associates [pei], while the officiants are all to be [male] ministers of state. With all modesty and sincerity, I fear that this is not entirely appropriate. Why is this? The heaven and earth principles each have their fixed positions and the duties of male and female are likewise distinct. As the scriptures and their commentaries relate, the rites of the inner [female] and of the outer [male] are correspondingly distinct. The associate rites at the red-gem alter thus correspond to the feminine nature of the square earth. The presentation of fragrant substances in jade containers in fact should be a duty of the inner. How is it then proper, especially when inviting the former empresses and personally feasting them on the rose-gem mats, that those participating in these inner offerings would be officials whose natal destinies link them to the outer? Examining this matter in terms of the ultimate order of things, this is a serious ritual impropriety.9
From Tan times down to today, historians have emphasized the unprecedent novelty of this request. The remarks of Dennis Twitchett and Howard Wechsler, writing in the Cambridge History of China, are typical: ‘Although there was no precedent whatsoever for the participation of women in the ceremonies, the empress, defying all tradition, planned to play a major role’.10 In fact, however, as Wu Zhao herself states in her memorial, there were no established precedents for the Feng and Shan rites themselves.11 Further, far from contravening tradition, Wu Zhao here takes at full face value the correlative cosmology of yin and yang, earth and heaven, and female and male pei historically associated with the Feng and Shan rituals. Wu Zhao’s use of the terms ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in her memorial reflects more than the social reality of the empress’ position in the inner compartments of the palace. As we will see, she was to continue to emphasize the association of yin with the inner and central. At the same time, she here invokes the inviolable sanctity of the inner to deliver a dire subtext which the ministers of state, though eager to participate in this awesome rite, would not have missed: male officials, at least those in full possession of their manhood, were not allowed into the inner chambers of the living empresses. How
386 S. R. Bokenkamp could it then be ritually appropriate to allow them to feast with the even more exalted spirits of the empresses? There were, of course, biological ‘males’ who were regularly admitted into the inner palaces to serve the empress—eunuchs. However, that possibility would be unthinkable. Eunuchs were not allowed to participate in imperial ritual, and no official would betray his family by submitting to such alteration (not to mention the pain). Nonetheless, this unspoken solution hovers behind Wu Zhao’s approach to the issue. It is no wonder, then, that her request to perform the Shan rites was speedily granted. On the 12th of February 666, the day after the Feng rites on Tai Shan, the Thearch performed the initial rites on Sheshou, then hurriedly retreated with his officials. Shielded by embroidered curtains held by palace eunuchs, Wu Zhao led the female officials of the palace to the square altar to summon with song and to feast the former empresses. Soon after the successful completion of the Feng and Shan rites on Mount Tai, Wu Zhao began urging Li Zhi to conduct the same rituals on Mount Song, the Central Marchmount, some 50 kilometres southwest of Loyang, the city where she would eventually establish her capital. This was something that had never been contemplated before. Three times the rites were scheduled, and three times cancelled—in 676 and 679 because of unrest on the borders and in 683 because of Li Zhi’s failing health. It was not until 696, six years into Wu Zhao’s own reign, that she was finally able to conduct the rites on Mount Song. Thus we know that she spent at least twenty years in pursuit of this unprecedented event. Why was Mount Song so important to her? This simple question requires a complex answer because the central of the five holy mountains of China was central as well to Wu Zhao’s ideological program. While this program is extremely complex, I have so far been able to isolate from surviving texts three images of feminine power that played especially telling roles in the development of Wu Zhao’s critique of ancient tradition. Each of them draws on fundamental themes of the cosmological justifications for the Chinese world order, but in new and creative ways.
The Paired Deity Fu Xi/Nu¯ Gua As the Central Marchmount, Mount Song was the axis mundi, that point where heaven and earth joined and where communication between the two was easiest. Ancient Chinese concepts of kingship, everywhere articulated in the Confucian classics, hold the ruler to be intermediary between heaven and earth. The primary example of this ability to join heaven and earth, yang and yin, is the figure of the first of the ‘Three Sovereigns’ (Sanhaung) of antiquity. The First Sovereign was, in fact, not a single ruler but a paired deity that had been only imperfectly given a ‘history’ as human rulers who shared power. The two parts of the deity, Fu Xi (male) and Nu¯ Gua (female), are generally depicted as half-human, half-dragon, with their serpentine tails coiled.12 This image of paired kingship is undoubtedly that intended when in 674, two years before the scheduled rites on Song Sham, Li Zhi and Wu Zhao took the unprecedented titles of ‘Celestial Sovereign’ (tian huang) and ‘Celestial Empress’ (tian hou). Commemorative stelae erected on the occasion of the pairs visit to Mount Song, for example, play on the symbolic significance of this nomenclature. Even after the death of Li Zhi, the image of the First Sovereign is again and again invoked in support of Wu Zhao, who was by then seen as fulfilling both the yin and the yang aspects of the deity.13 Both of the surviving Acts of Grace, issued by Wu Zhao in 684 and 689 preparatory to her assumption of the throne, begin with references to this ‘First Sovereign.’ That of 689 is particularly explicit:
A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order 387 The First Sovereign . . . took as a model heaven and earth to fashion the regulations. This great sage held the chart [of rule], taking as a pattern both yin and yang to foster the transformation [of the realm]. Now I hold aloft this holy chart.14
The importance of the Fu Xi/Nu¯ Gua image helps to explain why, in preparation for her own rule, Wu Zhao introduced a number of new characters. This was an act explicitly patterned on Fu Xi/Nu¯ Gua’s invention of writing. Texts written in support of Wu Zhao also refer frequently to the myth of Nuu¯ Gua repairing the sky with stones of the five colors. This story of the creation, or rather re-creation, of heaven brings us to the second aspect of Wu Zhao’s political mystique, the image of the mother.
Mother of Gods Myths concerning each of the dynastic founders of China, found even in sober Confucian histories, regularly include mention of their miraculous births. Typically, Heaven itself, through the agency of ‘shooting stars’ or other such celestial emanations, impregnates the founder’s mother. What is most important about such myths is that they generally relate the birth of the founder of a line, not that of heirs in normal dynastic succession. The fathers of the subsequent rulers in a dynastic line are (presumably) known, and they share in semi-divine status by virtue of their imperial descent. In effect, then, thearchs claimed descent not from a first father but from a first mother. Further, in that such stories rationalize ancient Chinese shamanic traditions whereby female mediums entered into hierogamous union with the highest male gods, such tales serve further to underscore the notion that when masculine heaven is to intervene in human affairs, the intermediary of choice is female, not male.15 While it is true that women had ruled in the past as regent until the designated thearch reached his majority, this was never the ‘mother’ role that Wu Zhao had in mind when she forthrightly proclaimed, ‘I gaze as a mother over the realm’ in her Act of Grace of 684.16 Through her resurrection of ancient myths of mother goddess, Wu Zhao sought to return to the powerful precedent of the divinely inspired mothers of dynastic lines, but with a difference. Rather than content herself with giving birth to a line of rulers, she would rule. Historians have so emphasized the image of Wu Zhao as ‘usurping’ the place of a man, that it at first seems strange that she continued to emphasize her gender in the face of long-standing prejudices against female rulers. Yet this is precisely what she did. What is more, she continued to emphasize her role as mother of the realm long after she had dropped all pretence of serving as regent.17 There is ample evidence that she had long prepared this role, which is not so much that of biological mother as that of intermediary to heaven and generator of a new age. In preparing for the Feng and Shan rites, Wu Zhao and Li Zhi visited Mount Song on at least two occasions. On the first of these visits, in 680, she visited the temple of ‘Mother Qi,’ the wife of the legendary sage-king Yu¯ who was said to have turned into a stone that, impregnated by heaven, brought forth the founder of the Xia dynasty. Wu Zhao commanded that steles be erected at two temples on the mountain to commemorate her visit. Both texts survive intact, thanks more to the subsequent fame of the two young writers who composed these inscriptions than to posterity’s reverence for their message. Couched in elegant parallel prose and studded with classical allusions, these writings, while nominally dedicated to the ancient goddesses, make it clear that comparison is being drawn to Wu Zhao as mother and creator of a new heaven and
388 S. R. Bokenkamp earth. One of the writers, Cui Rong (652–705), goes so far as to present the transfer of the mandate and the dawning of a new era as if they had already occurred, though it would be another ten years before Wu Zhao announced the foundation of her dynasty: When the pneumas act as mother, the myriad things all begin their growth. When the moon acts as mother, her glowing countenance shines alike on all. When the earth principle acts as mother, then above and below merge to produce greatness. When the Empress acts as mother, the kingdom is formed . . . The great Tang now removes the old cauldrons [symbols of dynastic rule] and takes new ones. This is a birth in accord with the cycles, a creation which continues that of Heaven.18
This reference to ‘creation’ brings us to the third element of Wu Zhao’s self-created imperial image, that of world-savior.
Creator/Savior As is well known, China lacks a true creation myth. During medieval times, however, China possessed in abundance myths of re-creation. Particularly during the dark days of disunion leading up to the Tang, adherents of the three major schools—Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism—became obsessed with the idea that the cycle of time had descended to its nadir and that a savior was due to recreate an ordered society. The Tang founder played on this myth, particularly in its Daoist variant foretelling the advent of a Savior surnamed Li, to support his claim to the mandate. The power of such saviors to recreate civilization once it had passed through the nadir of dissolution by fire, flood and warfare derived from their oneness with the Dao. The Dao alone could survive the cosmic destruction at the end of each world-cycle, withdrawing into its primal state of undifferentiation, to expand again into existence in gestative rhythms. In the same fashion, only saviors embodying the Dao could emerge from the chaos at the end of lesser cycles to give birth to renewed dynastic order. By Tang times, this myth of re-creation had become inextricably tangled with Buddhist accounts of the Buddha Maitreya, who was likewise depicted as appearing to regenerate the world at the end of a kalpa-cycle.19 In several of her edicts, Wu Zhao refers to this myth as it related to the founders of the Tang, but she presented herself as saviour, too, quite apart from her marriage to and mothering of men surnamed Li. This was the third self-created image of Wu Zhao. Thanks to Antonino Forte’s excellent work on the ‘Commentary to the great Cloud Sitra’ this, the most politically sensitive aspect of Wu Zhao’s program, today tends to be regarded by scholars as an outgrowth of Wu’s Buddhist faith. We shall see that it encompasses other ideologies as well.20 In her appeal to Buddhist understandings of the savior, Wu Zhao adopted the roles of Cakravartin, supreme ruler and protector of the dharma, of the Maitreya Budda and of a Bodhisattva, descended to alleviate human suffering through her compassion. Forte suggests that, in these personae, Wu Zhao’s femineity was regarded as upava, an expediency, for the accomplishment of her soteriological mission.21 It is by no means to be concluded from this that Wu presented herself as really a man. For one thing, femineity in medieval China was anything but expedient. While a few Buddhists may have wished to view Wu Zhao as a crypto-male, the extent to which her gender is asserted throughout the texts written by and for her reveal that this was never a part of her projected image.22 For example, in discussing Wu Zhao’s divine status in his elegant celebration of her Feng and Shan rites on Mount Song, Li Jiao draws primarily on her Buddhist
A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order 389 credentials. Praising her bodhisattva-like compassion, he writes, ‘To provide beneficence to a suffering age, she debased herself to ascend the throne as a female sovereign’. However, this phrase is parallel to the line, ‘To provide a treasured response to living beings, she contented herself with overseeing the court of a male Thearch’, which refers to her period of preparation as equally demeaning.23 The ‘debasement’ mentioned here is thus her descent from divine status, not an assertion that Wu Zhao was somehow really a man. Daoism, through its explorations of the fertile, primordial Dao, proved more productive than did Buddhism of appropriate metaphors for woman as creator. One example should suffice to demonstrate this. In a state hymn composed and performed in 689, Wu Zhao is directly, if implicitly, compared with the creative Dao in ways that recall the ‘mother of the realm’ aspect of her image: Spiritual efficacy cannot be fathomed—as it moves yin and yang, Pregnant with existence, it gives birth to the earthly realm. Now the tally matching heaven has emerged—the Thearch’s enterprise flourishes. She willingly oversees the luminous rites, bringing down confirmation and blessings.24
Far from fleeing her gender, Wu Zhao everywhere asserts it. The images she employs are without exception powerful ones. None of the texts written by or for Wu Zhao betrays the ‘only-a-weak woman syndrome’, which, at least according to Antonia Fraser, ‘has the normally robust female leader . . . pleading the notorious weakness of her sex, generally for good practical reasons, of self-interest’.25 It would be difficult to find a more forthright glorification of the woman ruler than these words penned by Li Jiao: As for the Grand Zhou dynasty’s possession of the realm: Drummed forth from the obscure groves of the Way and its Power; It restores to us the enterprise of the sages and the gods. Having begun in the Women’s Quarters, She provides fulfilment to the families and the kingdom. A brilliant beacon shining out over two dynasties, A pool of virtue flowing to the ends of the world . . . She entered riding a mare, but now pilots flying dragons. From the scattered sand of dynastic decline she has forged the stones of Nu¯ Gua to repair Heaven. Surely not one of the thousand thearchs is able to match her. . .26
Body of a Woman There is much more that could be written on the elaboration of these themes in the lengthy texts that survive from this period, yet I think that enough has been presented to demonstrate clearly the outlines of Wu Zhao’s central strategy for legitimizing herself as woman ruler of the Central Kingdom. None of the images I have outlined above is the creation of Wu Zhao. All three—twinned demiurge, mother of the dynastic line and savior/creator—were present in the fundamental scriptures of Chinese religion. Such archetypal images grew from observations of conception, birth and growth in the natural world. They represent in mythological terms a fundamental fact about women— that they are fertile—and posit female fertility as infinitely powerful and creative. Before Wu Zhao, these myths had served to assert the control of men over that fertility.27 Seldom had their example been invoked to augment the power of living women and never, at least in historical times, for purposes of legitimizing the rule of a woman.28
390 S. R. Bokenkamp As mentioned, tradition held that the place for a woman in Chinese society was the inner world of reproduction, family and home. While the history of the body in early China remains to be written, recent studies indicate that this role was believed to be inscribed at conception. When, in the uterus, sperm surrounded blood—the female contribution to conception—a female child resulted. The inner nature of women was thus yin, physiologically implanted in the womb.29 For male children, the opposite was the case. Theirs was an active, outgoing nature. While each person’s body was seen as a delicate balance of yin and yang forces, the proportions of each made a crucial difference. The bodies of women were regarded as dominated by yin qualities which naturally formed the matrix from which life, often depicted as growing yang, might again arise. As everywhere repeated—in sexual manuals, cosmological accounts and religious texts—women’s bodies were thus powerful only internally and should properly be confined within walls, both social and literal. Wu Zhao fully accepted these archetypal explanations of the nature of woman— passages reiterating them appear throughout the memorials, hymns and poems written in support of her rule—but took them seriously in a way that had not been contemplated before. The first memorial we have from her brush already begins her retelling of tradition: the ‘inner’, the ‘central’, is the place of woman. And since the inner was also held to be the secret place where life begins—where, in spatial terms, heaven meets earth and where, in cosmic terms, the Dao began its fertile growth—why should it not be appropriate that she rule the Central Kingdom? This, I think, was the importance to Wu Zhao of the Central Marchmount.
Notes 1 Not the least of these is what to call her. The standard practice in both Chinese and Western language works is to refer to her as ‘Empress Wu’ or ‘Wu Zetian’, which is in fact the temple-name given her when she was stripped of her rightful title in 716. Before that time, she was known by the title she adopted 690, when she founded her dynasty. This title, Di, is normally translated ‘emperor’. Here I will uniformly translate Di as ‘Thearch’, a term that has been adopted by some sinologists to in acknowledgement of the fact that human Di were held to be semi-divine while the pantheons of Chinese religion are full of fully divinized Di. I will also refer to rulers throughout by their given names, rather than their ancestral-temple names. In other works, readers will thus find Li Yuan referred to as ‘Gaozu’, Li Shimin as ‘Taizong’, and :i Zhi as ‘Gaozong’. Wu Zhao’s sons, Li Zhe and Li Dan, are likewise known to history as ‘Zhongzong’ and ‘Ruizong’. To call them such is to concur in the erasure of Wu Zhao’s reign from Chinese history. 2 Denis Twitchett and Howard J. Wechsler, ‘Kao-tsung (reign 649–83) and the empress Wu: the inheritor and the usurper’, Cambridge History of China, III, pt 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 245. 3 I do not mean to deny by this any of the specific allegations of cruelty or murder for which Wu Zhao has traditionally been held responsible, but merely to reiterate that they are allegations. 4 I refer here to Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages’, Fragments for a History of the Human Body, in Michael Feher (ed.), New York Zone, 1989, pp. 160–219; Peter Brown, the Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York, Columbia University Press 1988; and Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, New York, Random House 1988. Unifying these diverse works is the realization that religions, particularly through their cosmologies and creation stories, encode assumptions about gender that set the terms for subsequent debate and change within a tradition. 5 Bynum, p. 162. 6 That this is so even in modern Asia is evidenced by the extreme case of the historian Lei Jiaji’s Humei pianneng huozhu: Wu Zetian de jingshen yu xinli fenxi [The Bewitching, Delusional
A Medieval Feminist Critique of the Chinese World Order 391
7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20
21
22
23 24
Autocrat: A Psychological Analysis of Empress Wu], Taibei, Taiwan, Liangming 1981. As his title already indicates, despite recourse to modern psychoanalytical terminology, Lei finds in the historical record what earlier historians wanted him to find. Although others adopt a more balanced tone, scholarship in China and Japan, as in the West, has yet to free itself from the icy grip of the official histories and still tends to regard anything written in support of Wu Zhao as mere ‘propaganda’. See Howard J. Wechsler, Offerings of Jade and Silk: Ritual and Symbol in the Legitimation of the Tang Dynasty, New Haven, Yale University Press 1985, pp. 170–94. Edouard Chavannes, Le Tai-chan—Essai de monographie d’un culte chinois, Paris, Ernest Leroux 1910, p. 22. Jiu Tangshu, 23:886; Tang Huiyao 7:98–99; Chavannes, pp. 184 ff. Literally, the final phrase cited here reads, ‘this is an entanglement of the xi and zhang pennons’. in ritual contexts, the xi were the insignia of empresses and zhang the insignia of emperors. Twichett and Wechsler, p. 259 (emphases mine). Wu Zhao, in the parallel prose appropriate to such memorials, puts it this way: ‘although in origin these ritual procedures arise from the ancient canons, yet the regulations for the ascent and descent of Tai Shan have been so defective as not to provide a program of long duration’ (Jiu Tang shu, 23:886). See, for example, Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art, Stanford, Stanford University Press 1989, pp. 156–61. This can be seen from the second part of the title ‘Sage Mother, Divine Sovereign’ that she took in 688. The first part of this title will be dealt with in the next section. ‘Gaiyuan zaichu shewen’, in Wenyuan yinghus, 463: 1b. By Tang times, such stories were so regularized that they needed only be hinted at. At the birth of Li Yuan, founder of the Tang, the candles in the room were said to have flared with a ‘spiritual light’. See Wen Daya, Da Tang chuangye qizhu zhu, (Congshu jicheng ed.) xg. 3, p. 37. ‘Gai yuan guangzhai shewen’, Wenyuan yinghua, 463: 7b. This is evident not only from the title ‘Sagely Mother and Spiritual Sovereign’ that she adopted right before inaugurating of her own dynasty, but from a variety of other texts written after the death of Li Zhi. For instance, in the preface to the Shengxian taizi bei that she wrote in 696, she implicitly compares herself to the Dao, which precedes yin and yang and ‘is hailed mother of all creation’ (Quan Tang wen, 98: 1b). As we shall see below, Buddhist texts written in her support make ample reference to the image as well. Cui Rong, ‘Songshan Chimu miao beo’, Wenyuan yinghus 878: 1b–2a. For more details on these matters, see Stephen R. Bukenkamp, ‘Time After Time: Taoist Apocalyptic History and the Founding of the Tang Dynasty’, Asia Major, third series (1994), pp. 59–88. Antonino Forte, Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End of the Seventh Century, Napoli, Istituto Universitario Orientale 1976. With regard to Wu Zhao’s allegiance to any of the three religions, the safest assertion is that of Rao Zongyi who, after surveying much of the inscriptional evidence presented here, concluded that she had no exclusive belief but drew equally on Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism alike. See his ‘Cong shike lun Wu Hou zhi zongjiao xinyang’, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 45 (1974), pp. 410–11. Forte also states that Wu Zhao constructed her ideology from all three religions and emphasizes throughout his work that he is dealing only with the Buddhist contributions. Forte, pp. 145–53. In line with this idea, Forte even uses the masculine third-person pronoun for all references to Thearch Wu in his translation of a passage of Buddhist encomium written in 695 (ibid pp. 148–59). Third-person pronouns in classical Chinese, when they are employed at all, are gender neutral. In fact, even the Buddhist ‘Commentary’ on which Forte bases his study speaks forthrightly of Wu Zhao as woman and mother: see especially pp. 208–11, and his Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias in the History of the Astronomical Clock, Rome, Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1988. esp. p. 239. Quan Tang wen, 248: 2b Jiu Tang shu, 30:1113. Because the Dao is never mentioned and Wu Zhao was commonly praised for her ‘spiritual efficacy’, the whole song could be taken as referring to her. All of the ‘Confucian’ hymns Wu Zhao composed literally bristle with images inspired by Daoism, reinterpreted so as to highlight her feminist message.
392 S. R. Bokenkamp 25 Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens, New York, Knopf 1989, p. 12. 26 Quan Tang wen, 248:1b–2a. The ‘Way and its power’ is a reference to the Daode jing [Scripture of the Way and its Power] of Laozi. 27 Precisely the same point is made by Edward Schafer, The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens, San Francisco, North Point Press pp. 55–60, with reference to the archaic nature goddesses of China. 28 There is evidence that earlier women had also drawn upon these themes for empowerment, but always in relatively limited social contexts, such as in local cults or Daoist and Buddhist cloisters. 29 Other accounts speak of the relative proportions of yin and yang pneumas at the moment of conception, so that the respective health of the parents and even the time of day could be determinative of the sex of the offspring. In either case, the bodies of women were receptacles of fertile yin, while the distinguishing organs of men harboured active, outgoing yang essences. See Douglas Wile, Art of the Bedchamber, Albany, State University of New York Press 1992, p. 129; Charlotte Furth, ‘Androgynous Males and Deficient Females: Biology and Gender Boundaries in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century China’, Late Imperial China, 9 (1988), pp. 1–4; and Ann Waltner, Getting an Heir, Adoption and the Construction of Kinship in Late Imperial China, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press 1990, pp. 28–47.
STEPHEN R. BOKENKAMP is an Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures of Indiana University and co-Editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions. His publications include Early Daoist Scriptures (University of California Press, 1997) and articles on medieval Daoism and Chinese Literature. Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, U.S.A.