heaval or new self-discipline. The openness of mass recruitment meant that
successful religious organizations shifted toward a bureaucratic form of ad-
ministration. Inadvertently an organizational weapon was shaped which could
become a state within the state, or an administrative adjunct allied to the
secular ruler. The far-flung organizational network extracted economic re-
sources from traditional routines and reinvested them in new circuits of capital.
As Buddhism became rich, it transformed the economic base of Chinese society,
just as it later would the economy of Japan. Buddhism was bound to clash
with Confucianism, for it undermined the status order that Confucian ritualism
upheld.
Buddhism came into conflict with Taoism for a different reason. The
autonomous organization of religious specialists nevertheless had to gain a
foothold by appealing to lay supporters. Especially in the early period of
Buddhism in China, when it confronted a localistic structure of clans, tribal
conquerors, and autarkic estates, Buddhists accommodated to the traditional
idioms of concretized magic. Cosmopolitan monks, enveloped in religious
charisma as the result of their own pursuit of transcendence, were treated as
possessors of magic usable for fecundity in childbearing or fertility of crops,
for rainmaking, luck-bringing, or fortune-telling. At higher social ranks, the
court aristocracy adopted the most elaborate Buddhist rituals for political
impressiveness and status display. At a later period tantrism, developed in India
at the time when autonomy of Buddist organization from the laity was crum-
bling, became popular at the Chinese court for its rituals invoking an aura of
magic power by means of pictures, music, and gestures. On a more modest
scale, little emotional eddies of magic ritual with cheaper props went at a retail
rate among the common people; in this market niche Taoists were already on
the ground, and remained more successful than Buddhists.
Taoism and Buddhism began as market competitors which gradually settled
into adjacent but overlapping niches. Taoism developed, not as an organization
of specialized religious practitioners but as a combination of several forms of
lay practice, including the leisure pursuits of Chinese gentry, the ideologies of
political dissidents, and the ritual lore of low-status folk magic and medicine.
Taoism first acquired a churchlike organization as a political movement. In the
Five Pecks of Grain movement at the end of the Han, its political-military
power was based on exchange of ritual magic guaranteeing health in return
for payments to support a regional government. Taoism only gradually, and
in imitation of Buddhism, developed the more autonomous structures of mon-
asteries with rules of celibacy. Taoism had no strong central organization, and
there was a large variety of sects, perhaps 80 or more, many composed of lay
practitioners (Welch, 1965: 144).
Taoist religious ideology centered on the overlapping themes of health, lon-
Revolutions: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China • 275