the practice began of selling these certificates to raise revenue. Ordination
carried economic advantages such as exemption from taxation and corvée
labor. The system gradually became very corrupt. Local officials began to sell
ordination certificates for their own benefit; many ordinations were purely
nominal (Weinstein, 1987: 59–61). During the period of disintegration after
the collapse of the T’ang (900–960), entry examinations for monasteries were
administered not by monks but by government officials. These exams were
similar to the Confucian ones; they called for composing an essay and a
commentary, plus reciting a sutra and practicing meditation. Only Ch’an
escaped from these restrictions, partly because its monasteries were remote and
self-sufficient, partly because Ch’an monks avoided taking full ordination
except under special circumstances.
The self-identification of Ch’an as a distinctive kind of Buddhism began
with a controversy over legitimate lineage succession. In the year 734 the monk
Shen-hui (670–762) created a furor in the capital by declaring that the sixth
head of the Ch’an lineage was not Shen-hsiu (600–706)—a popular preacher
who had resided at Loyang as a favorite of the empress Wu—but Hui-neng
(638–713), hitherto a relatively obscure southern monk. The attack was based
on the story that the fifth patriarch Hung-jen (602–675), had secretly given
the succession to Hui-neng on the basis of his having won a contest of poems.
This incident, which had allegedly taken place 60 years before, was not
mentioned in any other document. The controversy among the Ch’an monks
of the capital raged for 20 years. In 753 Shen-hui was arrested and banished
to the remote south; but two years later the government collapsed after military
defeat followed by rebellion and civil war. In 757 Shen-hui was back in the
capital as a popular religious leader, and was even delegated to lead a money-
raising campaign for the bankrupt government by selling monastic ordination
certificates.
On the surface, this looks like a quarrel over political favors at court. The
“Northern school” patriarch Shen-hsiu had been intimately connected with
Empress Wu’s Buddhist theocracy, which had been violently deposed, and other
court supporters of the Ch’an lineage at the capital fell from power in the 730s
and 740s (McRae, 1986: 242); the creation of an alternative lineage was
perhaps an attempt to dissociate Ch’an from unpopular political memories.
More deeply, it was only the most dramatic manifestation of structural and
doctrinal movements that had already been in motion for two generations.^7
In Shen-hui’s polemic, the bone of contention between the “Northern
school” of Shen-hsiu and the “Southern school” of Hui-neng was the latter’s
defense of sudden as against gradual enlightenment. This seems to have been
an exaggeration. Neither of these was an organized school until after Shen-hui’s
attack, and both branches shared a broad set of ideas and practices (McRae,292 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths