172 CHAPTER EIGHTwhen a Taoist emperor ordered the destruction of almost the entire institu-
tion. Eventually, however, the Sangha became accepted as an established part
of Chinese society.
The assimilation of Buddhist doctrine was complicated by Buddhism's hav-
ing come to China in scattered bits and pieces-a random mixture of
Hinayana and Mahayana texts, all claiming to originate from the Buddha-
rather than as a coherent whole. At the same time, the doctrine was undergo-
ing major changes in its Indian homeland. The Chinese had no way of
knowing the historical and cultural background for these texts, so they had to
not only master the basic concepts but also devise a framework in which to
place the variety of conflicting teachings that seemed to grow ever more com-
plex with each new wave of translations. The process of assimilation occurred
in four stages. The first stage, in which Buddhist ideas and practices were
viewed simply as an extension of preexisting Taoist beliefs, lasted from the
time of the first Buddhist missionaries from central Asia to approximately the
beginning of the fourth century C. E. In the second stage, which lasted until
the beginning of the fifth century c.E., Chinese intellectuals began incorpo-
rating Buddhist ideas into a Chinese framework. In the third stage, lasting
roughly until the end of the sixth century C.E., a more concerted effort was
made to understand individual Buddhist philosophical schools and scholastic
treatises on their own terms. The fourth stage, lasting until the ninth century
c.E., was a period of doctrinal synthesis in which various schemes using Chi-
nese philosophical categories were proposed for organizing the entire corpus
of Buddhist doctrine and practice around a constellation of themes drawn
from Mahayana Sutras.
The eighth and ninth centuries C.E. were especially fertile in terms of the
creative attempts at making sense of Buddhism as a totality, but they were also
among the most politically unstable times in Chinese history. A series of re-
bellions and persecutions succeeded not only in decimating the population of
the empire, but also in cutting short many of the great syntheses just as they
were taking shape. Many issues remained unsettled-among them, the rela-
tionship between doctrine and practice, and the attitude of the Awakened
mind toward morality and social convention-but the devastation of the pe-
riod forced a settlement. The school of practice that survived the period most
nearly intact was one of the more iconoclastic of the Ch 'an ( dhyana) medita-
tion traditions, which presented its masters in the guise of spontaneous Taoist
sages. Its texts thus became the norm for the entire Buddhist tradition, and
the spontaneous master, unfettered by social conventions, became the para-
digm for the goal of Buddhist practice.
Ironically, it was just at this time that the government was looking for an
ideology to form the basis of a bureaucracy that would provide China with a
more stable, centralized form of administration. Iconoclasm, even though it
performed a necessary function in preventing the meditative tradition from
being overcome with formalism and routine, could not act as a state ideology.
Confucian scholars thus took the initiative in presenting a reformed version of
their doctrine-known in the West as neo-Confucianism-as the new ideol-