God's Chinese Son Read Free

having turned to shoreland. Shoreland will turn into water, Watercourse back into shoreland. 2
     
    In those days, death was seen as a silence and a perpetual waiting, without hope of an awakening. Though there might be various forms of solace brought by burial with precious possessions, and from the attention of those who survived one, there was no way back to life. In the words of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, death took one to the terminus:
    To the house from which he who enters never goes forth;
    To the road whose path does not lead back;
    To the house in which he who enters is bereft of light. 3
    But starting perhaps as early as 1500 b.c . the Persian seer known as Zoroaster or Zarathustra gave rise to a pattern of belief we have come to call millenarian, in that it promised the possibility of a final world in which there would be "cosmos without chaos," a world of "making won­derful," without imperfections, an eternal peace beyond history, a change­less realm ruled by an unchallenged god. 4 Resonant and immensely powerful, these beliefs entered the thinking of many peoples, not least those of Syro-Palestine, through whom they inspired the biblical prophetic visions of Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel, and through them came down to Jesus of Nazareth and his later follower the author of the Book of Revelation. These teachers and prophets foresaw that before this new world was attained there would be a final, apocalyptic battle between the two forces, a battle in which, after much agony, the good would triumph and the evil be driven from the earth.
    Quite independently as far as we know, and somewhat later, a similar shift occurred in China. The elements of both balance and closure had been long accepted by the Chinese, finding their most famous expression in the Book of Changes during the first millennium b.c . According to this text, the creative forces are at best a "wavering flight over the depths." In cases of conflict, "a cautious halt halfway brings good fortune," and each earthly attachment, like fire, "flames up, dies down, is thrown away." 5 In the fifth century b.c . work the Lao Tzu, which so influenced later genera­tions in China, paradox, balance, and the absence of dogmatism were essential to each other. "Turning back is how the way moves," the author wrote. "Weakness is the means the way employs." In all our varied exis­tences, "the myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two." 6
    But these apparently established certainties eroded in China also, just as they had in other civilizations. Linked often to a transformation of that same Lao Tzu text whose message had once seemed to be so different, by the second century a.d . in China the idea of a "Way of Great Peace"—a "Taiping Tao"—had begun to take hold, along with a "Way of the Celes­tial Masters." These movements had messianic elements, in that they looked to a supreme deliverer who would force the human race from the miseries of its current state, and end history as it had been known by instituting the period of Great Peace. "Come quickly, join with me!" ran one of these second-century texts. "My followers are numerous. ... I will not suddenly abandon you. ... I myself will change destiny. In this pres­ent age I will choose the good people. You must not select yourself; by [your] upright behavior and self control I will recognize you." 7
    Between the third and sixth centuries these apocalyptic visions grew in sharpness and intensity, as different strands within Taoism and Chinese Buddhism complemented and reinforced each other. Now the coming period of destruction—marked by sickness, famine, the tyranny of cruel and arbitrary rulers, and often accompanied by a great and terrible del­uge—was given a specific time in the near future. Only a handful of the human race, guided by a celestial savior and his representatives on earth, would survive this