Reading Note 3

Every large state struggles to keep control of its outer regions, while regional powers want autonomy to solve their own problems. Believing that the greatest danger comes from a powerful center, the founding fathers of the United States created constitutional limits through the tripartite structure of the federal government and by giving to states all powers not specifically allo- cated to the center. Even so, there are periodic ebbs and flows of power between Washington and the states. In China, historians have viewed the prob- lem the other way around; periods of social chaos are identified as those when the center is weak and the regions are strong.

After the excesses (and successes) of the Qin, the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.– 220 C.E.) had to backpedal a bit on the regional kingdoms, for regional loyalties had been partly responsible for the successful overthrow of the Qin. Since much of the old Zhou aristocracy had been destroyed, a new one emerged in the Han and the Tang dynasties out of the “meritocracy” instituted by the Qin. As part of the continuing struggle to limit the power of outlying territories, emperors began to raise up new councilors on the basis of merit and gave them authority over provinces. But especially in times of crisis, power regularly devolved back to the regional rulers. Pig farmers and slaves became imperial councilors and founded lineages, joining the new aristocracy. David Johnson (1977) writes about several hundred great aristocratic clans that composed the top stratum of society from the Qin to the Tang, some of whose genealogies were preserved over a thousand years at Dunhuang. Patricia Ebrey is able to trace the fortunes of the Cui clan of Boling for nearly a millennium from Tang times until they disappear from the scene in the early tenth century (Ebrey 1978).

Because the newly appointed bureaucrats regularly managed to turn them- selves into an aristocracy capable of eclipsing the emperor, Han emperors began maintaining private secretarial staffs to keep themselves informed. As this private secretariat slowly expanded into a central executive branch of the bureaucracy through the Han and Tang dynasties, many of the palace council- ors were scholars who came from the Hanlin Academy, which had been founded as a center of revived Confucian studies. This was a critical juncture in establishing Confucian scholarship as the basis of the future bureaucracy.

A new stage began with the Song dynasty (960–1279). The emperor’s pri- vate secretariat had continued to grow, with real power in the hands of five to nine grand councilors who supervised the burgeoning administration. As it grew it required an expanded pool of educated persons to fill it. The world’s first civil service system emerged to provide this talent. It was a three-stage pro- cess. Exams were given every three months at the prefecture level, for which youths all over China spent years studying, achieving this first degree around an average age of 24. Those who passed went on to the metropolitan exam in the capital. If you were good enough to pass that exam, the last stage was a pal- ace examination, occasionally even administered by the emperor himself. Every three years about 600 men were granted the most prestigious degree, the “Presented Scholar” (jinshi [chin-shih]). The average age for passing the second level was 30, and for passing the third level was 36—not unlike the BA, MA, and PhD degrees today. The examination system was thoroughly adopted in 605 by the brief Sui dynasty (581–618) and became a central element of the cul- ture and governance of every ensuing dynasty until the exam system’s abolition in 1905.

The social significance of these bureaucratic changes was immense. A whole new elite class emerged, whose philosophy was Confucianism (rujiao [ju chiao], in Chinese, meaning “the doctrine of the literati”). This elite was com- posed of two main privileged groups. One was the shen (official-gentry) who had passed all the exams, acquired degrees, and held government positions. These men were magistrates with typically county-level government posts, although the “law of avoidance” stipulated that a magistrate could not serve in his home county or province and could not even serve in a neighboring county of someone from the same home province. This was intended to prevent cor- ruption and nepotism. As the scholar class grew, the number of successful examinees far outstripped the actual available government posts to be filled; nevertheless, a classical education continued to be the hallmark of the gentry class. The other group consisted of learned men shi (shih, scholar-gentry) who were outside the government, often members of local landowning families. Handbooks prepared for magistrates recommended gaining the cooperation of shis in administering local areas, because they were not subject to the law of avoidance and were the link to common people; “the learned and virtuous scholars are exactly the ones to rely upon in persuading the people to follow the instructions of the officials,” wrote one handbook (Chang 1955:32). They

could also stir up trouble if annoyed. Together the shen and shi formed a large and influential class that vastly expanded over the next three dynasties—Song (960–1279), Ming (1368–1644), and Qing (1644–1911).

The privileged status of the gentry was signified in their dress. They wore black gowns with blue borders, with various additional markers of rank, up to the nine pythons embroidered on the chest of officials of first rank. Only the gentry could wear sable, fox, or lynx. If a commoner needed to address a mem- ber of the gentry, he could check the buttons on his hat. The simple silver but- ton of the lower gentry required “Excellency” (lao ye). Gold buttons indicated holders of high academic degrees and titles; the wearer of a hat with a gold but- ton, a flower ornament, a ruby, and a pearl was an official of highest rank. All such titled officials were “Great Excellency” (da lao ye). Gentry privilege went beyond wardrobe; if they committed offenses, they could not be humiliated by corporal punishment. If a commoner injured another commoner, the penalty was 10 lashes; if a scholar-official, 70 lashes. Commoners could not testify against gentry in lawsuits. Scholar-officials paid lower taxes or were exempt altogether. They could not be required to perform corvée labor or engage in manual work.

This 1869 photograph by John Thomson, a pioneer in photojournalism, shows a scholar-official in elaborate dress.

Benefits of membership in the shenshi class were immense. Membership required passing at least the first level of examinations. And so sons were set to study hard to pass the examinations that led to official appointments. Because the families of scholar-officials benefited by shared status, wealth, and lineage prominence at local levels, tremendous pressure was placed on sons to succeed. The expansion of the class of scholars was assisted by the invention of the book made with cheap paper and woodblock printing.

We know something about life in the schools of Song China (Lee 1977). When a boy was five or six his family decided whether he was bright enough to warrant the expense of a classical (i.e., Confucian) education. (Girls could not sit for examinations. We return later to the life women led during these years.) The rich hired tutors. Sons of poor relatives might be allowed to study with these rich boys, and sometimes an extended family or lineage group would pool money in support of an especially promising boy’s education. The tutors were often young men further along the examination path. An advanced scholar who needed an income might rent a room or set up in a Buddhist tem- ple and recruit pupils from local families. Men who failed the later stages sometimes made a career of tutoring younger boys. There were a few govern- ment-sponsored elementary schools, such as one in Kaifeng with more than a thousand pupils.

Of course, most peasant boys went straight to the fields, and sons of old gentry families had some advantages over a first-generation scholar, much like today in the United States. Sons of scholar-officials might travel with their fathers and inherit their libraries. But in the end, it depended on the hard work, determination, and abilities of the boys themselves. They lived lives devoted to examinations. Men might sit for the examinations a dozen times or more before finally passing or giving up. A popular nineteenth-century novel describes a large lineage in which only two of 60 to 70 brothers and cousins entertained guests; all the rest stayed behind closed doors, studying for exams (Chang 1955:171).

All the exams were devoted to the Confucian Classics. It was as if the sec- retary of the interior, of treasury, of state, the state governors, and all public officials were appointed to these positions based on their expertise in the writ- ings of Plato and Aristotle. The system produced generalists, not specialists; what was wanted to govern the state were junzi (chun-tzu), morally cultivated gentlemen, not experts in irrigation, international relations, or commerce. “A gentleman is not a pot,” reads one of Confucius’s obscurer statements. He meant that a junzi is not trained to a particular purpose (a pot) but is a general- ist. As Stephen Owen wrote:

The same question resurfaced in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, transformed into the “Red versus expert” controversy, which asked whether public projects should be managed by good communists or by specialists. To the surprise of no one who knew the Chinese tradition, it was concluded that “not pot” communists would be the sounder choice. (Owen 1997:38)

Much as the middle class (or bourgeoisie) that emerged in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on a capitalist economic base constructed a new set of moral, religious, and cultural values, so the gentry developed its own moral, political, and educational preoccupations. It came in the form of a social conservatism seeking to discover and restore ancient moral practices, particularly in the domain of kinship. These were sufficiently new, and suffi- ciently based in Confucian ideas, that the Song transformations have come to be called Neo-Confucianism. Two features of Neo-Confucianism will interest us here: the new interpretations that linked personal and family morality to the state and the return to emphasis on li in family and lineage ideology. Those changes were triggered by a number of factors, but we will focus on two of them: the Buddhist challenge to Confucianism and the Mongol and Manchu challenge to Chinese cultural superiority.

It is unknown who first brought Buddhist ideas to China, but the earliest positive evidence of its existence there comes from the first century C.E. It is fairly certain that the news of this foreign faith would have come from the oasis towns of Central Asia, where Buddhism took root very early and where many important monasteries flourished, above all at Dunhuang. According to tradi- tional accounts, the Han Emperor Ming woke up one morning and called his advisors to him. A “golden man,” a divine being, had appeared to him in his sleep. This must be the Buddha, his advisors marveled. So Emperor Ming sent envoys to India who returned with two Indian masters, a white horse, and the Sutra in Forty-two Chapters. They founded the Monastery of the White Horse at Luoyang, where it exists to this day.

In its first few centuries at the end of the Han dynasty, Buddhism was weak and poorly understood. The Three Jewels of Buddhism—Buddha, dharma, and sangha—were known, but in a simplistic way only. It was a highly sophisti- cated and varied philosophy, but foreign to Chinese assumptions. India was very far away, and there was only a single text, not well translated. Initially, Buddhism was treated like some form of Daoism with its emphasis on purity, simplicity, and nonaction. But as the Han began its disintegration because of, as usual, the rise of regional powers that eclipsed the central dynasty, Buddhism came to have broader appeal. For the next four centuries, a variety of small and local dynasties came and went, while the “barbarian” Tuoba Turks founded the Northern Wei dynasty in the old heartland with their capital at Luoyang.

In both the southern Chinese dynasties and in Northern Wei, Buddhist monasteries sprang into existence. In 400, there were 17,000 monasteries and 80,000 monks and nuns in the south. In the north, Buddhism was even more successful: there were 30,000 monasteries and a million monks and nuns. The “great age of Buddhism” is the fifth to ninth centuries—Northern Wei, Sui, and the first half of the illustrious Tang dynasty—when emperors themselves converted to Buddhism and lavishly patronized Buddhist monasteries, carv-

ings, works of art, and translations of scriptures. The Tuoba Turks of Northern Wei embraced Buddhism vigorously, partly as a challenge to the Confucian values of the civilization they sought to emulate and control. These imperial sponsors, and later ones, brought to China the Indian practice of hollowing out sanctuaries in steep cliffs: Dunhuang was one example; the vast stone images of Buddha carved into the hills outside Luoyang were another.

It was, inevitably, a series of traveling monks—Indian, Chinese, and Cen- tral Asian—who did the intellectual work of making the full complexity of Indian Buddhism understood in China. Faxian went to India from 399 to 414 in search of texts he was certain must exist in so learned a land. Although he found a thriving Buddhist culture in which kings respectfully bowed down before monks—something that would never happen in China—he found very few texts. Instead, Indian masters orally transmitted the dharma to their follow- ers. But he learned Sanskrit, one of the few Chinese ever to master that difficult language, and managed to bring a few translations back. In the meantime, the great translator Kumarajiva arrived in Chang’an in 401 from Kucha in Central

Beginning in 493 B.C.E., Chinese emperors earned merit by sponsoring rock-carved images of the Buddha near the old capital of Luoyang. The colossal Buddha in the distance is the grandest of over 2,345 images carved into the rock cliff along the Yi River. Many of the images, carved in deep relief, were hacked away from the rock and carried off by European collectors. Fortunately this one, the grandest of all (the face is said to have been modeled after Empress Wu), was too huge to steal.

Asia. He introduced Madhyamaka philosophy and joined forces with disciples of the Chinese monk Dao’an in the greatest effort of translation in history. A single translation often took four people to divide the work: an Indian monk to orally recite the Sanskrit; another to write it down; another to translate the San- skrit into oral Chinese; and a fourth to record the text in written Chinese. When Xuanzang returned from India in the seventh century, there was another round of vigorous translation, for by then there were many written texts in India for him to collect. By the eighth century there was a canon of over a thou- sand Buddhist texts in good translations, which emperors ordered to be copied by official bureaus set up for the purpose. This became easier after the eighth- century invention of printing. It was first invented to reproduce charms and images cheaply and quickly, but its potential was quickly grasped. In 972 the first printing of the entire Buddhist canon was done by imperial order. The Dia- mond Sutra of 898 still exists in the British Museum (see chapter 2).

Religions grow out of the soil of indigenous social patterns and do not transplant easily. In China, the integration of religion and the sociopolitical order had been refined over a millennium. Buddhism was, first of all, a barbar- ian religion filled with bizarre notions. What did an Indian sage, this Buddha, have to teach a civilization that had Confucius and Laozi? Confucius had placed all emphasis on human life in society. Each person had one life to live, to be fulfilled in the community of family, lineage, and the state. He had refused to speculate on the gods, on Heaven, on the fate of the soul, or whether ancestors were actually sentient and capable of enjoying the gifts that must nev- ertheless be offered them. But here were Buddhists, denying the existence of all the here and now, proclaiming the utter unreality of all phenomena, plus a host of other outlandish ideas.

Monasticism was particularly un-Chinese. A monk was guilty of cutting off the family line, a sin against the ancestors and the height of social irresponsibil- ity. The exemplary Indian story of Prince Sudana shocked Chinese. Prince Sudana, like the Buddha himself, renounced his kingdom by giving his father’s property away, giving the war elephants to the enemy, and putting his wife and son into the care of others. The Chinese viewed this as not filial, not li, and not ren. Interpreters tried to explain: Sudana realized the world is transitory and wealth and properties do not truly belong to the self, which, incidentally, does not really exist, either. By giving all away and seeking enlightenment, he reached the point of becoming a Buddha. Then, through his enlightenment, he brought salvation to his parents, brothers, wife, and son. Is this not the epitome of filial devotion and humaneness?

The idea of reincarnation was particularly troublesome. The Chinese felt the soul was too tied to the body to survive its death. Further, the idea of rein- carnation was a big problem for ancestor worship; how could an ancestor return as someone else’s descendant? The concept of the Pure Land eventually solved that problem; instead of reincarnation into a new existence, one was reincarnated into the Pure Land, Heaven, a suitable abode for ancestors.

Buddhism in its second 500 years in India had developed ideas that made it appeal more to the masses than did earlier Buddhism. The Mahayanist notion of salvation through the intercession of bodhisattvas had powerful appeal to all classes. The theory that merit could be transferred from one person to another made this possible. Bodhisattvas could compassionately bestow some of their enormous stores of merit on their devotees. In China, the most beloved of all bodhisattvas was and is Guanyin, the beautiful Goddess of Mercy, portrayed in thousands of paintings and images. Her name means “taking heed of the

Guanyin of the Southern Sea. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO.

Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 34-10.

The most popular bodhisattva in China is certainly Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. She is the Chinese form of Avalokiteshvara, who probably merged with a popular Daoist goddess to become the most beloved bodhisattva in China.

sound,” the one who hears the cries of the suffering world and responds with compassion. In India she was the male bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara who merged with an early Daoist goddess to become Guanyin. In Japan she became Kannon. The other well-known Chinese Buddha, the slightly ridicu- lous “laughing Buddha,” developed in late imperial times. He began as the Buddhist messiah Maitreya who became identified with a tenth-century monk named Budai (Pu-tai), “Hemp Sack,” who had claimed to be an incarnation of Maitreya. “Hemp Sack” replaced Maitreya in the popular imagery of the pot- bellied Buddha who resembles the Hindu elephant-god Ganesh more than he does the great Buddha-to-come. Perhaps due to his statue’s ubiquity in the West, the plump tenth-century monk is often incorrectly identified in popular culture as being the Gautama Buddha, or Siddhartha Gautama, the original “awakened one” and first teacher of Buddhism, who of course lived 1,500 years earlier.

The Tiantai (Tien-t’ai) sect made the Lotus Sutra the most beloved of all Buddhist texts in East Asia. Though the central narrative of the Lotus Sutra is the Buddha Sakyamuni revealing a new, more authentic truth, the text was not written in India but in Central Asia some time before 250 B.C.E. This new truth is that there is only one path to salvation, not three as previously revealed. The one path lies in the heretofore unrevealed fact that everyone—not just monastic virtuosos—have the Buddha-nature and all will be saved and become Buddhas. Nirvana gets redefined; it is not extinction of existence at death, but extinction of ignorance in this life; that is, Enlightenment. And this enlightenment comes in the simplest of ways, by casting one’s faith in the Buddha. Long passages of the Lotus Sutra describe the people who have already received Buddhahood. There are the traditional hard ways: learning the law, practicing charity, per- fecting self-discipline, enduring forbearance and humiliation. But there are sim- pler ways: boys at play, making Buddha pagodas in the sand; installing Buddha images in the home; embroidering Buddha pictures; or singing the glory of the Buddha, even with a small sound. The simplicity of these teachings brought Buddhism to the common people and made the Lotus Sutra an icon as much as a sacred text.

One other development needs mention, since it became so important when borrowed by the Japanese. Early in the sixth century a mysterious Indian med- itation master named Bodhidharma visited China. Whatever it was he taught quickly blended with a fundamental Daoist idea: that ultimate truth is beyond words. “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.” But how can one reach that ineffable truth beyond words, beyond rationality, beyond the ten thousand things that distract us? Obviously all the words printed in books, even sacred ones, are beside the point; in fact, they obstruct the truth. Bizarre new forms of meditation were devised to break through the constructed world of words and reason to reach the intuitive, wordless, “no-mind” reality beyond. They meditated on paradoxes and non sequiturs in an effort to unravel the intellect in a sudden, explosive, obliterating breakthrough to radical unity of

272 Part IV: East Asian Civilization