Chapter 2. Printing and the Literati: Buddhism's Position from the Song Onward¶

Huichang, followed by the wars of the late Tang and Five Dynasties, broke the last two links in the three levels of dependence: the teaching seats dispersed and peace disappeared. Under the Song, Chinese Buddhism came to rely on three new things: woodblock printing, a new body of donors, and a neighbor that competed with it for the literati. This chapter considers, in order, what each supplied, eliminated, or took away.

In the dynasty's twelfth year, Song Taizu ordered men to go to Yizhou to carve blocks for the Buddhist canon. Twelve years later the blocks were complete, 130,000 in all: the Kaibao Canon, China's first printed Buddhist canon.¹ Its weight must be assessed against the three levels of dependence. Previously, the survival of all scriptures depended on copying; copying depended on teaching seats that gathered people; teaching seats depended on peace. One Huichang and one Huang Chao could burn the Tiantai commentaries so thoroughly that copies had to be recovered from Goryeo. Woodblocks freed the first link from human hands. So long as the blocks survived, fire consumed only one batch of paper. Thereafter came the two Fuzhou canons, Sixi in Huzhou, and Qisha in Pingjiang, public and private editions following one another. Texts could no longer be burned out of existence.² The comparison in Essay 8 gains another line: Indian Buddhism stored its life in the manuscripts of a few great monasteries. One fire at Vikramaśīla sent the last copies up in smoke. By the end of the tenth century, China had acquired something Indian Buddhism never obtained: texts that could not all be burned. The first link in the three levels of dependence was henceforth almost beyond the reach of disaster.

But woodblocks could repair only the first link. Doctrinal interpretation is a craft, and a craft resides in people, not paper. Essay 10, Chapter 2 has already said this: the Tiantai texts welcomed back to Wuyue contained all their words, but people capable of lecturing on them had to be trained anew. The result of that training is revealing too. No more than two generations into Siming Zhili's Tiantai revival, the Home Mountain and Off-Mountain factions began to fight. Essay 10, Chapter 2 mentioned this dispute: arguments over a system's internal details could exhaust a school's entire intelligence. Here we add an observation from printing history. Both sides held exactly the same texts, all newly printed. Yet the disagreement was precisely not about whether texts were available: throughout the dispute, both sides had books to cite. The criticisms in Zhili's Commentary on the Essential Purport of the Ten Gates of Nonduality specifically named other people's texts: the partial emphasis on pure suchness, and “numinous knowing” as Guifeng's special term. The questions and answers collected in the Record of the Teachings and Practices of the Venerable Master of Siming directly challenged the insistent use of “following conditions” and “remaining immutable” as two principles distinguishing the schools of nature and characteristics, identifying this as coming from Xianshou. The preface to the Twenty Questions on the Distinct Teaching's Principle Following Conditions began its questions directly from Fazang's doctrinal commentary (Volume I, Part II, Essay 22, Chapter 5). The issue was whether Zongmi's numinous knowing and Fazang's following conditions should be brought into Tiantai contemplation. The observation from printing history therefore needs restating: new editions spread other schools' texts as well, giving the dispute a shared textual basis.³ Printing ensured that everyone had books; it could not ensure that two people read them the same way. Once the paper problem was solved, the teaching-seat problem remained exactly where it had been. The recovery of the doctrinal schools under the Song therefore stopped at a half-revival. Tiantai continued amid internal disputes, Huayan was taught within Chan monasteries, and Yogācāra became almost a lost discipline. Blocks could save texts, but not a lineage of learning. Only people could save that lineage, and the patrons who supported such people had now changed.

The new donors were the second new thing. The donor structure of the medieval period had been thoroughly broken up at the end of the Tang. Aristocratic estates were destroyed, replaced by bureaucratic literati who entered through examinations and moved with their appointments. The new donors gave differently from the old great clans: old donors gave land; new donors gave words. An inscription, a preface to a collection of recorded sayings, or an exchange of poems with monks was the merit a Song literatus offered a monastery. In Jingde 1, Daoyuan presented a history of Chan to the court. Zhenzong ordered Yang Yi and other academicians to revise and publish it: the Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp. Thirty years later, Vice Chief Councilor Wang Sui abridged it to fifteen fascicles, which the Institute for the Transmission of the Dharma cataloged and incorporated into the canon.⁴ The writings of a school that did not establish itself on written words were polished by Hanlin academicians and published by the court. The scene encapsulates Song Buddhism and confirms the paradox recorded in Essay 10, Chapter 3: the school that did not establish itself on written words became the school that produced the most writing, because its new donors were the people under heaven most skilled in writing.

How deeply the literati became involved can be seen at three levels. The shallowest was genre: recorded sayings, lamp histories, verses on old cases, and evaluative commentaries. Every genre of Song Chan literature took shape around literati reading habits. The traffic in literary form went both ways. The recorded sayings of the two Cheng brothers and the Classified Conversations of Master Zhu were themselves transplants of the Chan recorded-sayings form. Confucians and Buddhists first converged in literary form. The second level entered the design of practice. Of the thirty fascicles of the Recorded Sayings of Dahui, the Dharma talks in fascicles 19–24 were all addressed to scholar-officials, and the letters in fascicles 25–30 almost all answered their questions: half the collection was written for officials. Dozens of high officials personally attained realization in contact with Dahui, including Zhang Jiucheng, Lü Benzhong, and Li Bing. Dahui expressly said that Chan lay neither in quiet nor in bustle, and that studying this way did not prevent one from serving in office or making a living. The critical phrase “no” was a practice one could carry into government offices and investigate there. The form of critical-phrase Chan was set by the scholar-official's schedule. This was more than donor influence: the donors' needs directly shaped the design of the practice.⁵ The deepest level was the creation of doctrine itself. Throughout the Tang and Song, the literati never entered it. Among authors of doctrinal classifications and commentaries, laypeople such as Li Tongxuan were famous exceptions (Essay 10, Chapter 2). But in later centuries this level too gradually opened to laypeople. In the late Ming, Qu Ruji compiled the Record of Pointing at the Moon: a layman became the editor of a lamp history. Yuan Hongdao wrote the Comprehensive Treatise on the Western Land, later included by Zhixu in the Ten Essentials of Pure Land. By the late Qing and Republican period, Yang Wenhui and Ouyang Jingwu's Chinese Inner Studies Institute transferred the entire transmission of doctrinal learning into lay hands. The return flow from Japan mentioned in the previous chapter reached its destination here; this is the subject of Essay 14.⁶ Viewed together, the sequence of the three levels matters: the literati first rewrote Chan's outward form, then its methods of practice, and finally took over its teaching seats. Each deeper level took a few more centuries.

When donors changed, the criteria of selection changed with them. Essay 7 examined esoteric Buddhism adjusting its methods to suit the court. The same rule operated amid different tastes in China: here the patrons preferred literary craft and repartee to initiations and ceremonial majesty. Cases, verses on old cases, and evaluative commentaries proliferated; recorded sayings became a genre that could sit beside poetry and prose collections. Pure Land associations suited the taste as well. Literati already liked forming societies. Shengchang founded the Society of Pure Conduct at Zhaoqing Monastery in Hangzhou, with Chief Councilor Wang Dan as its head, repeating the old alliance of laypeople and eminent monks.⁷ Forms that could not attract literati writing quietly declined. Commentarial learning was dense and short on amusement, unsuited to refined enjoyment in a study. Vinaya learning was too minute to enter poetic exchanges. This time the elimination took place at the literatus's writing desk. No one was suppressed; certain forms were simply ignored.

The third development occurred on the state's side and supplies two pieces of evidence for the previous chapter's conjecture. The Song made ordination certificates into marketable securities. In the tenth month of Zhiping 4 (1067), the court began selling certificates with the recipient's name left blank. The standard price during the Yuanfeng reign was 130 thousand cash per certificate. By Jiading 5 of the Southern Song (1212), it had risen to 1,500 min. A batch was sold for famine relief, another for military funding, others for river works or city walls. Overissue under the Southern Song sent certificate prices up and down like those of paper notes and vouchers.⁸

Who were the buyers? In an instruction of Daguan 2, Song Huizong named them. The ban was meant to suppress private transfers at low prices; the lawbreakers were “powerful and wealthy households that amassed others' property.”⁹ Northern Song buyers sought relief from service. Under the corvée system, wealthy households taking their turn at yaqian service in government offices risked ruin. One ordination certificate exempted a person from service liability. In the Southern Song, the introduction of a poll-tax exemption levy reduced the tax advantage, and certificates simply became financial instruments: stores of value, means of payment, and objects of hoarding and speculation. When Su Shi requested certificates in Hangzhou, he calculated their market value: one hundred were worth 17,000 guan. Prices behaved like those of financial instruments too: 510 guan at the end of Shaoxing, 800 with the Kaixi wars, and as high as 1,500 min during Jiading. One fact matters most: most buyers of expensive certificates never shaved their heads. Certificate and person had parted company. What was traded all along was exemption from service and preservation of value, with nothing to do with entering monastic life. Poor people who actually wished to become monks could not afford them; they sought unauthorized ordination or waited for the court's gracious grants of ordination. We must also see what the poll-tax exemption levy amounted to: privilege had not been abolished but bought out in money. The state converted every exemption into an item for which it charged.

Eligibility for monastic life was priced and sold by the state. It is easy to denounce this; understanding it matters more. It was the written form of the Huichang understanding. The state no longer demolished monasteries, because monastic places themselves had become annual revenue. Buddhism no longer expanded beyond the line, because each place required payment to the treasury. The quotas described in Essay 9, Chapter 3 reached their end point here: the quota itself became a commodity. The hand that issued certificates no longer revoked them; it sold them instead. Suppressing Buddhism and selling certificates were two movements of the same hand. The first collected once; the second collected forever. In fiscal terms, the Song were cleverer than Wuzong.

The second piece of evidence is taxation. What Huichang recovered was not merely land but the right to tax it; the Song made that right a standing system. Buddhist and Daoist monastic land paid the two taxes on the same basis as lay land. The tax-exempt temple ceased to exist in institutional terms. During the Southern Song's Shaoxing reign, the state went further and introduced the monks' and Daoists' poll-tax exemption levy, also called “leisure money,” assessed annually by grade. The personal levy on renunciants was heavier than that on registered lay households. Only two openings for privilege remained: land bestowed by the imperial house and scholar-officials' merit monasteries attached to family graves. The latter soon became an affiliation through which powerful families evaded tax; repeated prohibitions could not end it. The Ming tightened the rules until monastic and lay land alike paid grain tax and performed service. The Qing divided monastic land into two columns: ritual lands of monasteries and temples, publicly occupied or granted and free of grain tax, were listed as exempt; other grain-paying acreage was treated like lay land.¹⁰ Follow the line from its beginning. In the early Tang, monasteries lay outside taxation. After the two-tax system, privilege began to contract. Huichang reduced it to zero in one stroke. From the Song onward, monasteries formed part of the tax base. Before Huichang, the state asked why monasteries paid no tax. After Huichang, no one asked again: tax-exempt monasteries were gone, and taxpaying ones stayed forever. The previous chapter said that Huichang and Xiande settled an exchange. Here are its terms in full.

The third new thing cut deepest: a neighbor that competed with Buddhism for the literati. Tang and Song critics of Buddhism attacked its outward manifestations. Han Yu's memorial on the Buddha's bone and Ouyang Xiu's “On Fundamentals” addressed foreign and Chinese ways, resources, and ritual morality—all external matters.¹¹ Yet Han Yu's position already contained something taken from Chan. Chen Yinke determined that although the transmission of the Way seemed to derive from the final chapter of the Mencius, it was actually shaped by Chan's claim to a separate transmission outside the teachings. The critic of outward manifestations borrowed his first useful tool from the other side.¹² Buddhists were practiced at answering such external attacks. Qisong wrote A Collection in Support of the Teaching, opening with the “Treatise on Filial Piety” and placing filial piety before the precepts. In the century-long dispute over monks bowing to laypeople discussed in Essay 9, Chapter 1, Buddhism this time answered of its own accord.¹³

The truly formidable move came later. Neo-Confucianism changed tactics and struck at Buddhism's core. The generation of the two Cheng brothers and Master Zhu rebuilt Confucianism. The Supreme Ultimate, principle, and qi supplied metaphysics; maintaining reverent attentiveness and quiet sitting supplied a theory of practice; academies and lecture meetings supplied teaching institutions; the transmission of the Way supplied a genealogy. “Half the day in quiet sitting, half in reading”: the arrangement looks familiar.¹⁴ This judgment need not be marked as a conjecture; its evidence has three layers. First, the participants' own admissions. Cheng Yi wrote Cheng Hao's route into his “Account of the Life of Master Mingdao”: he ranged widely among the schools, passed in and out of Laozi and Buddhism for several decades, and found the way only after returning to seek it in the Six Classics. First he went in and out, then returned to seek: the source of his practice was stated by his own side. Zhu Xi's record is fuller. At fifteen or sixteen he asked Daoqian about Chan; Daoqian was a Dharma heir of Dahui Zonggao. At eighteen he went to the provincial examination with only a copy of the Recorded Sayings of Dahui in his book chest; the next year he passed using Chan ideas. Only at twenty-four, after meeting Li Tong, did he set Chan aside for the time being. The most famous student of Dahui's practice designed for scholar-officials was thus Neo-Confucianism's great synthesizer, who later turned to a teaching of his own.¹⁵ Second, every transplanted form is tangible: recorded sayings as genre, lecture meetings as institution, quiet sitting as practice, and transmission of the Way as genealogy, already counted above. Third, both parties identified the borrowing. Zhu Xi mocked Zhang Jiucheng as outwardly Confucian but inwardly Buddhist, and the Ming Confucian Chen Jian followed him in distinguishing the teachings of Lu and Wang: an identification from inside the Confucian house. Late-Ming Buddhists said Song Confucians covertly took Buddhist principles: an identification from the Buddhist side. Together, the three layers support a judgment: Neo-Confucianism was the doctrinal classification Buddhism encountered in China, with the direction reversed. Doctrinal classification made opponents into one's own preparatory course (Essay 10, Chapter 1). Neo-Confucianism placed Buddhist cultivation of mind and nature inside the framework of the transmission of the Way, then declared that orthodoxy belonged to Confucius and Mencius and that Buddhism and Daoism were wrong turnings: everything you teach, we have too, and ours is earlier and more orthodox. Incorporate what is most central to an opponent into one's own system, then declare the opponent unnecessary: India had a precedent. The avatar doctrine enrolled the Buddha in Viṣṇu's genealogy; Advaita built emptiness into the Vedānta system. After that, people no longer needed Buddhism itself. Neo-Confucianism was China's displacement through absorption, the Confucian house's Advaita. The label is this volume's wording, not a new factual claim. The facts are all in the three layers of evidence above. The effect was similar too. From the Song onward, intellectual leadership passed to Neo-Confucianism. First-rate discussions of mind and nature took place in academies rather than monastic teaching seats. Buddhism retreated from being the scholar-official's philosophy to being his leisure: practicing Chan became a refined pursuit outside working hours, no longer the serious business of grounding one's life. Yet the outcome differed from India's. Indian Buddhism was absorbed to death; what Chinese Buddhism lost through absorption was only intellectual leadership. The reason returns to Essay 8's conclusion: Hinduism took over Buddhism's funerary and memorial functions as well, while Confucians refused precisely this role. The Master did not speak of the strange, feats of strength, disorder, and spirits. Mourning and sacrificial rites belonged to grief and respect, without inquiry into where the dead went. Neo-Confucianism provided none of the following: a destination after death, deliverance for the deceased, or food for hungry ghosts. Displacement through absorption pushed Buddhism out of the center of literati thought, but funerary and memorial rites faced no competition. Buddhism withdrew into them and took the form described in the next chapter.

The title means Buddhism’s position from the Song onward, including the Song itself. The three incoming forms are the transmission of the Way as a genealogy, recorded sayings as a literary genre, and quiet sitting as a practice. “Exclusion by absorption” names the chapter’s displacement through absorption. The chip labeled “Mind” concerns mind and nature.

The three supports are woodblock printing, literati patrons, and taxation. “Giving calligraphy” includes literary contributions—inscriptions, prefaces, and exchanges of verse—not only handwriting. “Two taxes imposed together” means that monastic and lay land alike are subject to the two-tax system. The separate exemption payment is mianding qian, the annual levy on monks and Daoist clergy for exemption from personal service, assessed by rank. Priced ordination certificates form a third item, not another name for that levy. The closing trade of growth for continuity remains the chapter’s institutional judgment.

With the three new things in place, Chinese Buddhism's position from the Song onward can be stated in one sentence: printing preserved the texts, literati restored part of what the teaching seats had lost, and the tie to the treasury's annual revenue secured stability in peacetime. Neo-Confucianism took intellectual leadership; mind and nature, and death, remained in Buddhist hands. The Tang had given Buddhism the empire's main hall: chief councilors supervised translation workshops, and national preceptors passed in and out of the palace. The Song gave it a seat within the establishment. The seat was not high, but it was very secure. For the next thousand years, Chinese Buddhism had no further chance to become the state religion, and no further risk of being abolished. It surrendered growth in exchange for permanence. The next chapter examines how the two surviving schools came to live as one family in that seat.

References¶