Gods in Power Games

Wu Zetian as imagined by Copilot Designer

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," Leo Tolstoy told us. It has come to be known as the Anna Karenina Principle. Is there a similar principle in politics? Something like: “All happy dictators are alike”?

This doubt struck me as I was reading the fifth chapter of William Dalrymple’s latest book, The Golden Road. Titled ‘The Fifth Concubine’, this chapter is about Empress Wu Zetian of 7^th century China. Dalrymple informs us that she was “the only woman who became emperor in her own right in 3,000 years of Chinese history.”

She came from rather humble origins. Daughter of a merchant, Wu was admitted to Emperor Taizong’s harem as a concubine of the fifth grade. That was a lowly position, not much more than that of maid. But Wu was so beautiful that the aging Emperor was besotted and gave her the title of ‘Enchanting Miss Wu’.

After the old Emperor’s death, his son, the new Emperor, made Wu his Empress. It didn’t happen all of a sudden, of course. You don’t rise in politics so quickly, especially if you come from a lowly background. Wu knew how to climb the ladder with poisoned steps, creeping like a smooth snake at times and hitting like a killer when required. She eliminated the original Empress from her way. She kept her own sons too far enough from the throne. When her husband had a stroke, Wu ascended the throne in spite of the staunch male chauvinism that guided the Confucian political structures.

Wu replaced Confucianism with Buddhism. As simple as that. One of the best uses of religions has always been in the power games of politics. Gods have never been of as much use to ordinary citizens as they are to aspiring dictators. Wu brought Buddhist monks and scholars together, even from India, and got them to write scriptures and history and codes of behaviour as she wanted them. She constructed monasteries, erected immense statues of the Buddha, and towards the end claimed that she was a divine incarnation. She bestowed upon herself the title of ‘Heavenly Empress’. The 55-foot statue of Buddha that she got constructed continues to dominate the Longmen Grottoes even today. Dalrymple says that the Buddha in this statue was modelled after Wu herself.

Wu Zetian's Buddha

She decimated dissenters and critics mercilessly. She could do all that in a country that was notorious for its male chauvinism, because she had God on her side. The pinnacle of her triumph, according to Dalrymple, is the construction of the Heavenly City of the Bodhisattva Maitreya in Luoyang. Wu claimed that she was an incarnation of Maitreya and she got many giant statues of Maitreya carved all over China.

Wu might have considered herself the greatest human being in the world, more divine than human. But she committed a lot of sins all along her way upward. Towards the end of her life, she became aware of all those sins. She repented. In the end of half a century of inhuman reign in the name of gods. At the age of 75, she got someone to inscribe a prayer for forgiveness on a gold tablet that was 14 inches long. This tablet was discovered by a peasant in 1982 in a crevice on Mount Song. In that prayer, Wu begs gods to remove her name from “the register of punishable sinners”.

We will never know whether the gods were kind to her after her death. The men who succeeded her were certainly not. They did whatever they could to erase her memory from history. Dalrymple says that they “compiled long accounts of her sins and murderous misdemeanours” and turned her into “a one-dimensional cartoon villain, as sadistic as she was lascivious.”

History wreaked vengeance on evil sooner than one would imagine, even in those ancient days. Today, with all the digital and other evidence available all over the place against our leaders, I wonder how history will deal with them once they are out of power, even if the temples and statues they built for gods may survive to the end of the world.