The China of the free love and the God Saizhou

In most of histories and literary works of the imperial China, the sexuality is an aspect of the existence restricted by a few strict regulations of that any deviation can be punished by severe sorrow.

This repressive concept of the sexual relations joined the generalization of the marriages forced by the parents and the concubinage generalized between the ruling class complete a painting of the sexual relations in which the love and the romantic feelings seem excluded.

This ideal concept of a few affectionate relations perfectly regulated by the laws and popular customs, he is impregnating with inadvertent form the concept that every person who approaches the Chinese culture, does to herself of this country. As well as, of course, the one that the proper Chinese do to themselves of how it was his tradition.

The first cracks in this concept idealized (by the ruling classes) of a society perfectly tidy appear with the reading of the realistic novel Jinpingmei, deprived of his value characterizing it as an erotic novel, and the Strange Stories of Liao Zhai, of Pu Songling.

The recent reading of a few apocryphal "Chinese magic Stories", in which protagonists eminently feminine show an absolute scorn for the traditional social norms, with women showing his love, without mufflers, for bachelors and married, that correspond to them of the same form without importing the tradition for them, he adds new information about as she could be really the society of the traditional China.

The illicit loves, any love is in certain form illicitly since it is opposed to the prevailing currents in the society, they must have been so abundant in China as in any other place.

The existence of the marriages for abduction between most of the ethnic minorities of China, used precisely by the young people who were not accepting the paternal impositions and were leaving them before a perfect fact, makes us think that also the Chinese existed between. The existence on the other hand, of deities like Saizhou Dashen, to which the illicit loves were entrusted in the area of the southeast, they show us the mechanisms developed by a society eminently pragmatic to integrate to the social life the young people capable of defying the narrow corset in which his sexual relations had to be framed.

The Big Saint of Saizhou (Saizhoudashan), also called Buddha of Saizhou, it is considered that he was a historical personage in the dynasty Tang, that it came to Xian and later to Luoyang from the Route of the Silk, and that after teaching there during a time it was established in Saizhou (province of Jiangsu). In his hand it was taking a branch of willow, (motive related to the reproduction between the minorities of the north of China) with the one that indicated to the villagers the situation of an ancient temple. They excavated these and really they found a golden Buddha.

According to the traditions it had a love with the goddess of the river Luoyang in Fujian, which took his soul, being deified by the local population. This Goddess of the river Luoyang, with too many resemblances with the Goddess of the river Luo venerated in the center of China from immemorial time, is considered to be later a Guanyin embodiment, the Goddess Buddhist of the compassion, what allows to understand the attributes Buddhists later assigned to the Big Saint of Saizhou.

The legend counts that being pregnant the mother of an emperor crossed the mentioned river Luoyang. His turbulent waters provoked such a fright that his son promised he would construct a bridge. This bridge was dragged by the tumultuous waters, appearing later an elder of white hair taking a boat, on which a beautiful lady was seated. It stopped the boat in half of the river and said to the people congregated in two shores that, that one that on coins should meet to this girl, will be able to marry her. The people began throwing coins and spent a few months there were so many coins that served as prop to the bridge. In the end a Saizhou young man threw a currency to his hair and obtained his target. The old man called him to discuss the marriage and it was already not possible to move, since his soul rose to the sky remaining his body in the pavilion.

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