‘Impossible’ is a word that historians, as well as philosophers, should be wary of using. The Han had re-established Confucian philosophy as the guiding light of the emperor’s rule, Legalism as a philosophy was discredited (however useful its ideas may have been to the administrators) and the anti-establishment nature of Daoism had been pushed aside, so the Confucian way ahead looked clear for the foreseeable future. Certainly the Confucians didn’t contemplate that any barbarian thought could ever challenge the inherent superiority of the teaching of Confucius and his successors, but they hadn’t reckoned on Buddhism.
Traditionally it was believed that Emperor Ming of the later Han Dynasty, who ruled from 58 to 75 CE, dreamed of the Buddha and sent an embassy to India to invite Buddhist monks to China. The story of the dream is undoubtedly legendary, but in fact the arrival of Buddhist monks in China can be dated as early as 65 CE, when they established a community in Pengcheng (in modern-day Jiangsu province) under the protection of a Han prince, Liu Ying, who was also a patron of Daoism. This arrival of alien ideas from an alien land was totally unexpected, but in the longer term it was to have considerable effects on the course of Chinese philosophy.
One advantage possessed by Buddhism as far as its eventual infiltration into Chinese thought was concerned was its ‘otherness’, which was not catered for by official Han Confucianism. In many aspects its strong philosophical core meant that it could be approached as a new development in philosophy. Another advantage arose because of the legends of the departure of Laozi to the western hills at the end of his life. This enabled Daoist-leaning thinkers such as Prince Liu Ying to assert that the Indian Buddhists had in fact learned their ideas of non-being from Laozi himself, so that Buddhism was authenticated as a ‘Chinese’ phenomenon and its scriptures (or sutras) as simply translations into Sanskrit of the Dao-de Jing.
Gradually some Chinese scholars began to explore Buddhism, and they started to translate the Buddhist sutras into Chinese. In so doing they applied the terminology of Daoism to many of the Buddhist concepts, further strengthening the case that Buddhism was in fact a teaching which was acceptable to a Chinese audience. Indeed, Buddhism in China developed a specifically Chinese flavour as a result of these translations, the most significant of which was the development of the Chan school of Buddhism, more commonly known in the West by its Japanese name of Zen.
One of the core aspects of Buddhism, of whatever school, is the search for enlightenment, the spiritual achievement of separation of the soul from an otherwise unending cycle of life, death and rebirth. Traditionally, enlightenment was to be achieved by a diligent study of the teaching of Gautama Buddha, transmitted through the sutras, and it was understood that this achievement would be brought about by a gradual process of spiritual self-improvement leading ultimately to the end-state known as nirvana. The Chan scholars and teachers, however, took a different line. Enlightenment would not occur, they believed, just as a result of diligent study, because the transition from one’s ordinary appreciation of things to the enlightened state must always be a huge leap rather than a small, final step in a process. The Chan Buddhists therefore taught their pupils by posing questions which could not be logically answered – for example, the injunction to conceive of the sound of a single hand clapping – and, when the pupil had exhausted his mind in trying to find impossible answers, exposing him to a sudden shock such as a blow or unexpected noise, so that his consciousness would be hurled across the spiritual abyss that had previously separated him from enlightenment.
Buddhism would not immediately secure a huge following in China during the Han period, but in the less stable period from 222 CE, when the Han Dynasty fell, through the so-called Six Dynasties period, culminating in the Sui Dynasty (589–618 CE), there was a flourishing of Buddhism and the establishment of monasteries in which the development of Chinese Buddhism could be nurtured. This rise of the Buddhist monasteries enabled people who wanted to escape the chaos of political life to withdraw from secular Chinese society. There was also the fringe benefit of withdrawal from the taxation and labour obligations of Chinese citizenship. But the monasteries had one problem in their relationship to the Confucian-leaning state, in that one obligation of the citizen was to have sons who could continue to observe the Confucian Rites on behalf of the ancestors. To enter a state of monastic celibacy was to abandon this Confucian obligation, and this aspect of Buddhism in particular was to lead to antagonism between the state and the monasteries.
During the Six Dynasties period there was an explosion of Buddhist art in painting and sculpture that is known from archaeological excavations, and it is clear that in parts of China Buddhism developed a strong following, with the monasteries accumulating great power as adherents donated their wealth and lands to the Buddhist communities. This was to lead to political and economic struggles between the state and the Buddhist population, and these would come to a head under the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE). This political situation meant that Buddhism tended to be considered as both politically and philosophically subversive of the state.
The short-lived Sui Dynasty, which had reunited China following the Six Dynasties period, fell because of military over-extension in failed campaigns to conquer the Korean peninsula. The resultant economic hardship led to popular unrest and the eventual transfer of the Mandate of Heaven to a new regime, known as the Tang Dynasty. The Tang was to provide nearly three hundred years of united rule of China, and is known as a time of great literary and artistic creativity. One of its early achievements was the reintroduction of Confucian civil service examinations. The examination system ran alongside the hereditary practices surviving from the Six Dynasties period, but was extended during the Tang Dynasty so that it could increasingly provide the necessary officials versed in the Confucian canon who could run a Confucian administration.
One of the early problems of the Tang, however, was that of how to cope with a sizeable Buddhist population within the framework of a Confucian state. The first Tang emperor, Gao Zu, needed to balance the cost of the campaigns by which he had risen to power in 618 CE, and by 626 CE he had ordered a drastic purge of Buddhist clergy and action to confiscate the great wealth which the Buddhist monasteries had accumulated. In its proposals to reduce the number of temples, the order was also directed against Daoist establishments. Before the order could be put into effect, however, Gao Zu’s sons successfully carried out a plot to take over the Imperial succession. One of the conspirators, Tai Zong, having subsequently killed his brothers and forced his father into retirement, then acted immediately to rescind the order.
Tai Zong, despite his apparently pro-Buddhist attitude, did not adopt Buddhism as a state orthodoxy. In 628 CE he commanded that a Confucian temple should be established in the Imperial University, and two years later he ordered the preparation of an official edition of the basic Confucian texts, together with new explanatory commentaries. On this basis, and despite the presence of a number of ministers whom we know to have been Buddhist in their personal lives, he maintained a basically Confucian state, although he did in the early years of his reign honour Buddhist practices and among other things was instrumental in the establishment of Buddhist temples in memory of war dead. In the later part of his reign he was less prominently a Buddhist sympathiser, and indeed issued an edict to the effect that Daoist adepts were to have formal precedence over Buddhist clergy. There was also a move to have him declared to be a descendant of Laozi, which may have been part of an intention to gain a link to earlier messianic Daoist rebellions of the second century CE. But despite his attention to Buddhism and Daoism, Tai Zong in 637 CE commissioned an investigation into the history of Imperial Rites with a view to performing sacrifices on the sacred mountain, Mount Tai. In 641 CE he set out to do this, although the appearance of a comet, regarded as an inauspicious sign, caused the project to be abandoned.
The life and reign of Tai Zong, who died in 649 CE, shows clearly how the influences of Confucianism, Daoism and the newer Buddhism vied with each other in the Chinese consciousness, and the reference to both Buddhist and Daoist temples in the proscription of 626 CE indicates that there was an ongoing religious Daoism in China, in contrast to the philosophical Daoism of pre-Imperial times. Tai Zong’s political skill was in maintaining a balance between the various strands, and implementing an administration which was at least nominally Confucian.
There was one point in the Tang Dynasty where Buddhism did achieve a very high profile. In 683 CE, Zhong Zong, the son of the previous emperor Gao Zong and his consort, Wu Zhao, was placed on the throne by his mother but deposed by her a mere two months later, when she took the Imperial throne as the only empress to have ruled China directly. She was conscious of the fact that Confucian theory made it impossible for a woman to become emperor, so she took advantage of a Buddhist sutra (the Da Yun Jing) which predicted that seven hundred years after the Buddha’s death there would arise a pious woman who would rule an empire to which all other nations would submit. Wu Zhao argued that she was indeed the woman foretold by the sutra, and further that she was an incarnation of Maitreya, the future Buddha. In 690 CE the Empress Wu declared a new dynasty, the Zhou, of which she was the sole ruler until her death in 705 CE, after which the Tang Dynasty re-established itself under her son Zhong Zong. Although he personally was a devout Buddhist, Buddhism never again established such a high profile in official circles as it had done under his mother’s reign.
Confucianism regained its earlier hold over the administration of the state, and there is evidence in the taxation system that there was a concerted attempt to model the administration on that of the Sage Kings of antiquity. An official manual of administration, the Tang Liu Dian, was drawn up between 722 and 738 CE. It was modelled on pre-Qin manuals of the Rites, and based its schedules of grain tax and commodity ‘tribute’ on the traditional accounts of the progress of Yu the Great in recovering the Chinese lands from the great flood of legend. This might be seen as window dressing, to ‘prove’ that the Tang emperors were good Confucians, but archaeological evidence makes it clear that the officials administering the tax system were straining to follow the manual to the letter. Inscribed clay tablets excavated from the Han Jia granary at Loyang show that the procedures in the Tang Liu Dian were meticulously followed. More remarkable still, paper tax records, recycled to make grave clothes in the Central Asian deserts, have been deciphered and translated. They include records of goods collected, and a separate set of records of unpaid items. The latter includes entries such as ‘The tax due from Li Yikang and Bao Zhuiwei is deficient’, and even ‘Today we got Li and Wang’s deficiencies paid in’. Clearly the Chinese-appointed tax collectors were operating under difficulties. Perhaps the most remarkable find, however, is a bolt of linen fabric found in the grave of a minor official in Astana, now the capital of present-day Kazakhstan. It would have been a valuable item, part of his official salary, and it carried an official inscription giving its origin – ‘Yun County, Guangdong district, from He Sijing, 1 roll of tax linen. Ninth year of Kaiyuan, eighth month [September 721 CE]. Special Officer Wang.’ Yun County was in southern China, so the cloth would have been collected by officials, sent to the capital at Loyang and then transported to the central Asian city of Astana to pay the official’s salary. The Confucian system was alive and well.
During the time of the Empress Wu, Buddhism had gained strong official encouragement, and there was a great deal of development in Chinese Buddhist thought. The empress herself sponsored translations of sutras from the Sanskrit, and appointed Buddhist monks to official positions in her court. This Buddhist tendency gradually faded from Chinese official circles after her death, until a rebellion led by An Lushan in 755 CE threw the Empire into a state of confusion from which it did not emerge until 763 CE. Nevertheless, through the political upheavals of the Tang Dynasty to this point, three distinct schools of Buddhism had established themselves in China, namely the Tian Tai school, the Fa Xiang school and the Hua Yan school. The Tian Tai school arose early, and was a developed Chinese form of Buddhism. It was eclipsed in the second half of the seventh century by the Fa Xiang school, which was a more emphatically Indian school, despite its representing a more primitive form of Buddhist thought than Tian Tai Buddhism. It was only after the death of the Empress Wu that Chinese-inspired Buddhism regained its sway, but it did so through the Hua Yan school. Each school based itself on a particular sutra, so they were in effect rivals within the Buddhist strand.
The role of An Lushan in the political fortunes of the Tang Dynasty is interesting in two ways. The official history of the Tang reports of him that he was of Turkic origin, showing that, rather like the first Qin emperor, he came from beyond the Chinese heartland, and also that his father was a shaman. This latter piece of information shows that the practice of shamanism, a form of occultism, survived into the Tang period, and was known about by the Chinese, whose own cultural spectrum, as we have seen, included religious Daoism. Although perhaps a minority interest among the so-called ‘literati’, occultism still had its adherents among the population, and both religious Daoism and Buddhism were to influence the next major development of Chinese philosophical thought.
After the An Lushan rebellion was over, the history of the Tang Dynasty became more fractured.
Scholars were also regrouping after the ascendant phase of Buddhism. One notable document, written in 819 CE by the Confucian Han Yu (768–824 CE), was a memorial complaining to the Emperor Xian Zong about the ceremonial proposed to accompany the veneration of a purported relic of the Buddha. Han Yu began by categorising Buddhism as an imported barbarian phenomenon that drew nothing from prior Chinese traditions. He argued that Chinese decline during the Six Dynasties arose from the failure of the (vegetarian) Buddhists to use animals in ritual sacrifices, and sidestepped the Buddhist leanings of the early Tang emperors by blaming officials for not eliminating Buddhist and Daoist monks and nuns from China. Then he praised Xian Zong for deterring people from becoming monks and nuns and forbidding the construction of Buddhist and Daoist temples. He continued:
But now I hear that Your Majesty has commanded a multitude of Buddhist monks to welcome the Bone of the Buddha to Fengxiang, proposes to mount a viewing platform to watch as it comes into the enclosure and has commanded people from all the temples to observe the ceremonial. Although I am most stupid, I can only assume that Your Majesty is not confused by the Buddha into performing this veneration in order to seek prosperity from the gods. It must just be because the people are happy at harvest time, and to go along with the people’s feelings, that Your Majesty is making the capital the site of a spectacle for high and low by means of this charade.
Han Yu then warned Xian Zong that even so, the people would mistakenly believe that the emperor was a follower of Buddhism, and so would be led to follow Buddhism themselves, to their own disaster. Han Yu’s recommendation to the emperor was to have nothing to do with the relic. Were Buddha alive, he argued, and had he come to China as a visiting ambassador, he would be treated to the normal courtesies but then escorted back to his own country. However, Buddha having died long ago, this ‘foul rubbish of a rotted bone’ should not be permitted to sully the Imperial court, without even so much as a shamanistic purification rite known from the legendary period.
Han Yu’s objection to the veneration of Buddhist relics, and his reassertion of Confucian tradition, is typical of the resurgence of Confucian thought in the later part of the Tang Dynasty. As the regime disintegrated under a range of economic and military pressures, survival was perhaps more important than ideology, but the contribution of Han Yu and other Confucian scholars would be crucial in the general realignment of philosophical thought that would take place under the Sung (960–1279 CE).