The warden Shinshu had lost the Patriarchate and with it the spiritual headship of Zen. But as a compensation Fate had in store for him worldly triumphs of the most dazzling kind. Leaving the rural monastery of Konin, he entered the Temple of the Jade fountain in the great city of Kingchau. His fame soon spread over central China. He was a man of “huge stature, bushy eyebrows and shapely ears.” The Empress Wu Hou, who had usurped the throne of China, notoriously cultivated the society of handsome priests. About 684 A.D. she summoned him to the Capital. Instead of commanding his presence at Court she came in a litter to his lodgings and actually knelt down before him. The friendship of this murderous and fiendishly cruel woman procured for him temporal dignities which in the eyes of the world completely outshone the rustic piety of the Sixth Patriarch. Shinshu at the Capital became as it were the Temporal Father of Zen, while Eno at his country monastery remained its spiritual pope. The successors of Eno became known as the Fathers of the Southern School; while the courtly and social Zen of Shinshu is called Zen of the North.

Was it in sincere goodwill or with the desire to discredit his rival that Shinshu invited Eno to join him at the Capital? In any case Eno had the good sense to refuse. “I am a man of low stature and humble appearance,” he replied; “I fear that the men of the North would despise me and my doctrines”—thus hinting (with just that touch of malice which so often spices the unworldly) that Shinshu’s pre-eminence in the North was due to outward rather than to spiritual graces.

Shinshu died in 706, outliving his august patroness by a year. To perpetuate his name a palace was turned into a memorial monastery; the Emperor’s brother wrote his epitaph; his obsequies were celebrated with stupendous pomp.

His successor, Fujaku, at first remained at the Kingchau monastery where he had been Shinshu’s pupil. But in 724 the irresolute Emperor Ming-huang, who had proscribed Buddhism ten years before, summoned Fujaku to the Imperial City. Here princes and grandees vied with one another in doing him honour. “The secret of his success,” says the historian,[7] “was that he seldom spoke and generally looked cross. Hence his rare words and occasional smiles acquired in the eyes of his admirers an unmerited value.” He died at the age of 89. On the day of his interment the great streets of Ch’ang-an were empty. The whole city had joined in the funeral procession. The Governor of Honan (one of the greatest functionaries in the State), together with his wife and children, all of them clad in monastic vestments, followed the bier, mingling with the promiscuous crowd of his admirers and disciples.

Religion was at that time fashionable in the high society of Ch’ang-an, as it is to-day in the great Catholic capitals of Munich, Vienna or Seville. When I read of Fujaku’s burial another scene at once sprang into my mind, the funeral of a great Bavarian dignitary, where I saw the noblemen of Munich walk hooded and barefoot through the streets.

I shall not refer again to the Northern School of Zen. One wonders whether the founders of religions are forced by fate to watch the posthumous development of their creeds. If so, theirs must be the very blackest pit of Hell.

Let us return to the Southern School, always regarded as the true repository of Zen tradition.