DEPENDING ON THE IDEOLOGICAL CLIMATE and political vicissitudes, Wu Zhao’s patronage of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism waxed and waned at different junctures of her corule with Gaozong, her regency, and her reign as emperor of the Zhou. From the outset, however, Wu Zhao had a conflicted relationship with the Daoist establishment. On the one hand, Daoism was the ideology most amenable to female power, glorifying the latent force of the female water element, illuminating the potency of the mother, and prescribing that the Daoist sovereign cleave to “the role of the female.”1 On the other hand, the ruling Li clan claimed Laozi (Li Er 李耳) as a blood ancestor, thus insinuating the figure of the Daoist sage into the apparatus of Tang legitimation. In this respect, Daoism impeded her from establishing her own dynasty.
Many passages in the Daodejing, the canonical Daoist text attributed to Laozi, testify to the awesome female power contained in the dao. One cryptic prescription for Daoist governance announces:
The spirit of the valley never dies.
This is called the mysterious female.
The gateway of the mysterious female is called the root of heaven and earth.
Dimly visible, it seems as if it were never there, yet use will never drain it.2
Another section speaks of a nameless, silent, amorphous, primordial entity that might be styled the dao, but might also be called “mother of the world” (tianxia mu 天下母).3 And again, we are told, “the female always overcomes the male with stillness.”4 Throughout the text, the passive, the unseen, the submissive, the nebulous, the hidden, and the low-lying (like the female-identified element water) invariably overcome that which is in motion, visible, strong, and active. That female overcomes male is a cosmic and natural principle. For all of these reasons, Kristofer Schipper contends that “the body of the Tao is a woman’s body.”5 Edward Schafer terms this “aqueous” and “inchoate” female entity the “Lao-tzu Goddess,” remarking that she might be considered “the ancestress of all of the water goddesses of China.”6
Wu Zhao was keenly attuned to this advantageous Daoist prescription for her exercise of power. As Gaozong’s empress, she had her only daughter, the Taiping Princess, ordained as a Daoist priestess.7 As grand dowager, one of her reign era names projected the image of the Daoist ideal of “effortless action” (wuwei 無為). Inaugurated in 685, her Chuigong (With Hanging Robes and Folded Hands) era referenced the “Successes of Wu” (Wucheng 武成) chapter in the Book of History, in which King Wu (of her namesake Zhou dynasty) simply “let his robes fall and folded his hands, and the empire was perfectly ruled” (chuigong er tianxia zhi 垂拱而天下治).8
In part II, it was mentioned that in “Same Organism,” the opening fascicle of Wu Zhao’s treatise, Regulations for Ministers (promulgated the year Chuigong was inaugurated), Wu Zhao described ruler and ministers as interdependent parts of the body politic—she, the still mind-heart (xin 心); they, the active body (ti 體). Drawing on classical authority to delineate her vision of the ruler-minister dynamic, the text continues:
The Yellow Emperor had four officials who investigated the Four Quarters. Therefore Shizi 尸子 records: “The Yellow Emperor had four eyes.”9 Thus we know the position of the emperor is respected and exalted, like the nine levels of heaven, mysterious in the extreme. The ruler can not solely attend to the affairs of the ten thousand areas, therefore she installed the various ministers to act as her claws and teeth, her ears and eyes.10
Ministers served as her extended senses, instruments for gathering intelligence. Wu Zhao remained mysterious, unseen, and withdrawn, a vessel into which secrets and intelligence might be poured. As mind-heart of a shared body politic, she rhetorically adopted a traditional female posture of passivity and motionlessness. Her stillness and occupation of the interior locale—in short, her very femininity—imbued Wu Zhao with power. The mysterious dao resides in characteristics that are essentially female: in all that is weak, soft, yielding, motionless, and passive.
In addition to this textual acknowledgment of the power vested in the feminine realm, Daoism is rife with female deities. Timothy Barrett has noted that Tang Daoism, which assigned both importance and power to women, had incorporated an array of female divinities, including the Queen Mother of the West, the mother of Qi, the Mysterious Woman (Xuannü 玄女), and the mother of Laozi.11 Edward Schafer has observed that through elegant similes and “veiled transformation,” skilled fourth- and fifth-century poets began to summon “glimpses of the celestial world,” leading their readers to a hallucinatory terrain populated by Daoist divinities.12 Such ethereal landscapes and their godlike denizens underwent further sophistication in Tang verse. As Schafer puts it,
In T’ang times, when the monarchs claimed descent from the revered author of the Laozi, already elevated to the status of a cosmic divinity, when princesses of the blood—like high-born abbesses in medieval Europe—took holy orders, when highly competent poets did not disdain to renew themselves through periodic retreats in hermitages attached to great Taoist friaries, this noble heritage was even more refined and elaborated.13
To win over the female sovereign, poet-officials in Wu Zhao’s court evoked astral wonderlands populated by a colorful array of immortals.
Though Daoism, with both its powerful intrinsic female element and its rich tradition of female deities, offered Wu Zhao a potent ideological tool to express her authority, the Daoist establishment’s close identification with the Tang dynastic house severely hampered her utilization of the faith. In order to show other powerful aristocratic families that they were not merely martial upstarts of mixed Han Chinese and central Asian blood, the Li imperial family had claimed descent from the Daoist sage and founder Laozi.14 This claim and their patronage of the Daoist establishment bolstered Li prestige and anchored the newly risen Li family in Chinese tradition.15 As empress and grand dowager, Wu Zhao’s credibility as a ruler who protected and honored the Daoist establishment was predicated upon her connection to her Li in-laws. As she approached the inauguration of her own Zhou dynasty, however, this credibility rapidly deteriorated, particularly as she looked to the rival Buddhist faith for validation. Charles Benn notes that Wu Zhao “fully supported the T’ang Taoist ideology” as empress, but as her political power grew, her attitude toward the Daoist church grew progressively more tepid; by the time she founded the Zhou in 690, while “she was not hostile to Taoism, she did not foster or patronize it much either.”16 Naturally, Wu Zhao’s shifting needs influenced the development of the cults of Daoist goddesses within her pantheon.
Part III examines the emergence among Wu Zhao’s political ancestors of two powerful female Daoist divinities, the Queen Mother of the West and the mother of Laozi. Chapters 8 and 9 explore the respective roles that these female deities played in amplifying Wu Zhao’s political authority. Chapter 10 looks at the rationale behind Wu Zhao’s calculated decision not to enshrine a powerful Daoist transcendent, Wei Huacun.
