capital under court patronage, but also in a few large, well-endowed mountain
centers. For centuries the core of the Buddhist community supported networks
of intellectuals with considerable autonomy for their internal maneuvers. De-
centralized bases allowed rival sects and distinctive identities. What transmuted
this rivalry into intellectual creativity in the realm of philosophical abstraction
was the unifying focus of a few organizational centers where the networks of
leading monks crossed. The great translation centers at Loyang in the Toba
dynasty and again during the T’ang at Ch’ang-an along with its Hua-yen
temple; the famous monasteries at Lu-shan and Mount T’ien-t’ai in the south,
and Shao-lin ssu in the north near Loyang: open to all comers, these places
focused intellectual capital and generated debate. Multiple factions intersected
at a few centers of attention.^3
By around 500 c.e., the lineages of Buddhist philosophers in China were
about six generations deep. They had already split into a number of factions:
the Madhyamika–Three Treatise school, several Pure Land sects, the Sautran-
tika school, apparently also a lineage specializing in meditation (Ch’an, but
without the antinomian qualities that later became the “Zen-like” trademark
of this school). In the 500s came several new waves of popular Buddhism,
including Amidaism. Buddhism was fanning out to fill a broad doctrinal and
intellectual space. These positions had all been imported from India or modified
from Indian doctrines. So far there was no Chinese philosophical creativity in
its own right, as imports filled all the niches of intellectual space. The great
translator Kumarajiva indiscriminately imported rival positions, both Nagar-
juna’s dialectical negation and the Sautrantika philosophy of world elements.
Even so, the network structure that we see in Figure 6.1 for these generations
has the familiar shape: chains from one outstanding leader to another, and the
simultaneous appearance of opposing positions. For all his lack of originality,
Kumarajiva served structurally as an energy node; his translation school at
Ch’ang-an became a center of attraction, and out of it proceeded the founders
of a variety of important positions and new monastic centers.
Under the law of small numbers, the intellectual field was now becoming
crowded. By 600 appeared creative developments driven by the internal struc-
ture of Chinese philosophy. The first great development of Chinese Buddhist
philosophy, T’ien-t’ai, was a synthesis bringing order into the array of Buddhist
schools. Imports were no longer substituting for indigenous creativity. When
Hsüan-tsang returned from India in 645 he received popular honor, but his
imported Yogacara doctrine did not dominate the attention space; instead,
within his own circle of translators an opposing doctrine was stimulated in
response to the challenge of Indian sophistication, Hua-yen metaphysics. A few
generations later came what I will call the Ch’an (or Zen) revolution, in
response to a crisis in the material basis of the intellectual field.
Revolutions: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China • 283