KING AND COURT 597(Yukcho), which were to be subordinated to the State Council. This had been
an important issuc at the he ginning of the dynasty because assertive kings found
that the State Council posed an obstacle to their will. King Taejong strength-
ened the Six Ministries in 1405, and in 1414 he limited the jurisdiction of the
State Council to conferences on important matters of state and permitted the
individual ministries to by-pass the State Council and submit memorials directly
to the throne. It was only twenty-two years later that King Sejong restored the
primacy of the State Council in 1436 hy requiring that the ministers report to
and obtain concurrence (sosa) from the council for their proposals.
The young King Tanjong further strengthened its powers, but the usurper King
Sejo restored T'aejong's practice of allowing direct memorials from the min-
istries in the 1450S and 1460s. Since these shifts of policy reflected the ebb and
flow between royal and bureaucratic authority, Yu's position was clearly sup-
portive of the State Council and the paramountcy of the hureaucracyY
Yu was again inspired by the commentaries of Chung Chang-Cung, Fan Yeh,
and others on this question. Chung had written that when the founder of the Later
Han, Emperor Kuang-wu. came to the throne (in A.D. 25). hc attempted to reverse
the usurpation of imperial authority by officials at the end of the Former Han
and assume direct responsibility himself for the supervision of the ministries,
but "In seeking to right what had gone wrong, he overcorrected and did not entrust
government affairs to subordinates."13
Fan Yeh in the History of the Later Han also pointed to the problems that arose
when the ruler chose to rule directly, without a prime minister:
In later ages there were many times when [the ruler] was suspicious of people
and the responsibilities of the prime minister were divided up and not left
unified. The ruler regarded authority as residing in himself and the officials
regarded [the seat of] government as residing in the ruler. There was no place
where responsibility could be entrusted so that the state could put down rebel-
lion and the people enjoy peace and quiet. For that reason worthy men were
not able to put into practice what they had learned, and worthless Illen were able
to gain haphazard acceptance in the midst [of the worthy officials], only because
official [organization] was not correct and responsibility was not delegated
exclusively [to a single prime ministerl. If you want to investigate the ancient
[system] in order to establish official posts. you IllUst have a single prime minis-
ter to control the empire, for only then can you say that it will be well governed.^14Commentators on Tang organization pointed out another variant of the same
problem, the transfer of authority from the apex of the regular bureaucracy to
personal secretaries of the emperor. This phenomenon hegan in the 660s when
Emperor Kao-tsung recruited the so-called Scholars ofthc Northern Gate (Pei-
men hsUeh shih) to draft documents. Emperor HSUan-tsung of the mid-eighth
century then created the Han-lin Academy to honor scholms. an event that should
have pleased all Confucian statecraft writers, hut the measure drew their ire