In the ninth year of the Wude period of the Tang Dynasty—626 A.D.—the founding Emperor, Gaozu, also known as Li Yuan, was, with the help of his formidable second son, Li Shimin—the man who quelled all rebels and rivals—blessed with wealth and honor alongside a unified, secured nation. Gaozu had four sons: Jiancheng, Shimin, Yuanji, and Yuanba. While Yuanba died young, Jiancheng, Shimin, and Yuanji grew to adulthood and were granted the titles of, respectively, King of Ying, King of Qin, and King of Qi. Jiancheng and Yuanji were romantically involved with Gaozu’s favorite concubines, Zhang Yanxue and Yin Sese, and their affairs were discovered by Shimin. On this account, brothers Jiancheng and Yuanji held a grudge against Shimin, though Shimin did not bring the affair to their father’s attention. As the longstanding rules of imperial succession would have it, when Gaozu passed away, the ruler’s eldest son, Jiancheng, would ascend the throne. But Shimin, a true prince, peerless in merit, almost single-handedly outsmarted and muscled the Li family’s enemies to establish the Tang Dynasty; his feats, winning the praise of Gaozu, evoked jealousy and resentment on the part of Jiancheng and Yuanji.
As it was, Yuanji, being something of a conceited and self-righteous dandy, had long coveted the throne. Jiancheng, weak and rather incompetent, could hardly rival him. Shimin, however, was popular and successful, and as such irked Yuanji. Day in and day out Yuanji brooded over the matter, finally arriving at a scheme which would first employ Jiancheng to bump off Shimin and then, in turn, have Jiancheng killed, making Yuanji the sole heir to the throne.
It happened that one day Princess Pingyang died of illness. Her funeral brought together all civil and military officials as well as family members. With ill intent, Jiancheng and Yuanji invited Shimin to a feast at which they had prepared a poisoned drink for the brother. Shimin, unsuspecting and broad-minded as he was, took the invitation to be an attempt by his brothers to atone for their misconduct. But as the refrain goes, “True heroes never die.” So fate had it that as Shimin raised his cup at the banquet and took a sip, a swallow flew overhead and released droppings that landed in the cup and on his clothing. Shimin left to change his attire when sharp stomach pain suddenly gripped him. Back at his residence, he lay all but dead after a night of vomiting and loose bowels. He knew something must have been amiss with his drink. Upon hearing of what happened and fearing that Shimin and his brothers couldn’t get along, Gaozu made plans to send Shimin to Luoyang and have him rule the territory east of Shanxi independently like an emperor, similar to the precedent set by Liang Xiaowang in the Han Dynasty.
Jiancheng and Yuanji learned of their father’s intention with great fear, knowing full well that their courageous and open-minded brother, Shimin, would prove invincible, especially with his having the assistance of great civil officials like Sun Wuji, Xu Maogong, Li Chunfeng, Fang Xuanling, and Du Ruhui and military officials such as Qin Shubao, Cheng Yaojin, Weichi Jingde, and Li Jing. In another venomous scheme, the brothers plotted to redeploy Shimin’s leading generals to fight the Turks. At this, Shimin, angered by his brothers’ tricks, revealed to Gaozu the details of Jiancheng’s and Yuanji’s affairs with the concubines. Enraged, Gaozu ordered Jiancheng and Yuanji to appear before the imperial court the next day in order to address Shimin’s allegations. Jiancheng and Yuanji, flanked by about five hundred troops, instead waited at Xuanwu Gate, ready to kill Shimin upon his arrival. Much to their surprise, however, Shimin came fully armed. Jiancheng and Yuanji shot three arrows in a panic, each of which Shimin managed to dodge. Shimin fired one arrow in return and killed Jiancheng. Then Yuanji was killed in turn by an arrow from Weichi Jingde before he could flee. The story has been known historically as the “Xuanwu Gate Incident.”
After Yuanji was killed, his wicked soul descended to hell to pay for his sins. Yama, the King of Hell, was fully aware of Yuanji’s god-forbidden conduct—his affairs with his father’s concubines, the murder of Shimin’s fiancée, the poisoning of Shimin, and the conspiracy to have Shimin assassinated. Thus he condemned Yuanji to the lowest rungs of hell, sending him through the Gate of No-Return. After the passage of a thousand years the soul that was Yuanji was devoid of the life form and complete mind originally given to it. All that remained was a waft of envy and hatred. But to this matter we shall return later.
Upon ascending the throne Shimin was dubbed Emperor Taizong, marking the beginning of the prosperous Zhenguan period (627–649 A.D.). Taizong’s magnanimity, almost divine, made him immensely popular with his people. His succession to the throne accorded with both the will of Heaven and the wishes of the people, making for a true blessing to all.
In the 22nd year of the Zhenguan period, a Buddhist monk named Xuanzang returned from a pilgrimage to India in search of holy scripture. Taizong led an entourage of hundreds of civil and military officials to welcome the monk home at Zhuque Bridge; to honor the occasion Taizong later wrote A Preface to the Translation of Holy Scriptures by Sanzang of the Tang Dynasty. Taizong, a wise and loving emperor, died in the 23rd year of the Zhenguan period. Throughout his reign Taizong looked out for the welfare of Buddhism and carried forward Taoism and Confucianism. Having an extraordinary background the likes of which no ordinary man could know, Taizong was in his later incarnations naturally upright, be he an emperor, a king, a general, a minister, a scholar, or a master of the martial arts.
It was said that a thousand years later a certain Noble King of Law Wheel (fa lun) would come to the world in the form of the Buddha Maitreya, imparting a great way and offering deliverance to all. But so as to sabotage the mending of Life’s higher law and thwart all efforts at deliverance, certain old forces would proceed to, in the name of “assisting” with the affair, create for their purposes a clown with human form that lacks any semblance of proper thoughts or normal reasoning, an entity possessed of traits such as stupidity, wickedness, depravity, treachery, ugliness, pretentiousness, envy, and cowardice. Such would be done, ostensibly at least, to “test,” in accordance with the laws of mutual engendering, those who would follow that Buddha’s great Way.
The grotesque figure chosen for such a role would be destroyed afterwards, having perpetrated crimes so heinous as to be forever unpardonable. Who could assume such a role, then? For which life could such a fate be justified? For none excepting one: that being the life at hell’s lowest rung, the one who harbored so deeply resentment toward the great savior who would come to the earth for its redemption. The forces scoured existence in search of such a figure and found, in the end, that there were still traces of sinister qi [1] stemming from envy that carried over from the death of Yuanji—the conspirator from Gaozu’s era. Those remnants were thus channeled into a dark, murky grave here in this world.
In that grave was a toad that had long been present. It happened that as it opened its mouth and was about to croak, the sinister qi that had been brewing for over a thousand years was sucked in and entered. Instantly, the toad’s original soul was driven from the body to reincarnate elsewhere. The sinister qi thus became the wicked soul of that toad. A few years later the toad died, and the qi of the wicked soul that had assumed a toad’s form reincarnated as a human being. His name is Jiang Zemin.
Feeds