CHAPTER 6
£Revolutions of the Organizational Base:
Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China
Political and economic conditions affect ideas not directly but via the interme-
diate level of organizations supporting intellectual networks. In this chapter I
focus on the middle level of causality. The example of medieval and early
modern China allows us to see how creativity occurs under transitions both
on the way up and on the way down, in times of organizational growth and
organizational crisis and destruction.
Transplanted from India, Buddhism dominated the intellectual life of me-
dieval China. This should be no surprise. At its core, Buddhism is an intellec-
tuals’ religion. Not that its doctrines are overtly favorable to intellectualism.
On the contrary, the world of “name and form” is the obstacle to enlighten-
ment, and intellectual attachments are just one of many to be rooted out. At
the same time, the very structure of Buddhism as a hierarchy of meditators
brings its practitioners to focus on these mental obstacles. As its hierarchies
mounted higher and its historical traditions lengthened, the subtlety of its
analyses mounted too. It is characteristic of Buddhist meditation to take apart
the world on the path toward Emptiness, and this gives scope for metaphysical
constructions of just how the world of illusion is produced. Once such philo-
sophical systems were formulated, there was strong incentive within Buddhism
to take them apart in turn. This anti-intellectual religion bred its own intellec-
tuals of an especially probing sort.
In external respects, too, the organization of Buddhism provided fertile
ground for intellectual life of an extreme purity. As practitioners of a monastic
religion, devoted to withdrawing from the world, its monks were not preachers
or administerers of sacraments to lay congregations. This ideal of Buddhist
monasticism often slipped away into practices of making a livelihood from
preaching, ritualism, or magical display. But the core form, the organization
of world-withdrawing meditators, gave Buddhism its central identity. Detached
from family life and practical concerns, focusing on the analysis of inner
experience, viewing even the particularism of gods and the ritualism of religion
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