most of the leading monks (especially the famous intellectuals) lived, radical
Ch’an moved into self-supporting monasteries, usually in remote mountains
(see map, page 282). This had the effect of making Ch’an monasteries relatively
safe from political purges and economic confiscations, and hence contributed
to the survival of Ch’an Buddhism at a time when most other Buddhist sects
were failing. Ch’an was not entirely original in requiring monks to work; some
rural monasteries in the pre-T’ang southern dynasties had used this method of
self-support as a temporary expedient during political troubles. Within Ch’an,
the obligation to work was connected to the doctrine of sudden enlightenment:
ordinary physical actions—chopping wood, carrying water—could be a path
to the ultimate religious status. In this respect Ch’an is something like a
Protestant ethic; and its opposition to deep trance-inducing meditation rein-
forced its tendency to reduce barriers between the religious and secular realms.
But enlightenment, sudden or not, was apparently not easy to come by; and
the abbots seem to have extracted a great deal of labor out of the lower-ranking
and novice monks by this incentive. The Ch’an monasteries prospered materi-
ally at the same time that their reputation grew.
In the 800s and 900s, Ch’an monasteries proliferated throughout China.
This was the period of the famous masters whose doings were later to provide
the study texts for Zen monks in China and Japan: Tê-shan (781–867), famous
for shocking his pupils into enlightenment by hitting them with his staff;
Lin-chi (d. 867), known for his sudden shouts; and a host of other witty
paradoxers. This full-blown Zen was vehemently anti-intellectual and anti-li-
turgical; study of the scriptures was generally abjured, and a fortiori the
philosophers; even the Buddhas and Boddhisattvas were regarded as obstacles
to immediate enlightenment: “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha!”
Nevertheless, one would have to call this an intellectual’s anti-intellectualism,
for only on the basis of subtle understandings and the ability to express them
delicately and poetically was one honored for this kind of stamping on sacred
icons. Ch’an is philosophical reflexivity turned to a high level of self-conscious-
ness. The creative conflicts which energize the intellectual attention space were
here transformed into the repartee of words pointing beyond words, of gestures
stripped to their capacity for pure contentless communication.
Ch’an from 650 through 900 was in the factional mode of the intellectual
field. In Figures 6.2 and 6.3, we see the Ch’an lineages splitting and subsplit-
ting, while the other Buddhist lineages are dropping out. The urban-based
intellectual schools fell away. T’ien-t’ai and Hua-yen, which had absorbed all
the earlier intellectual schools, managed to hang on only by syncretizing with
the Ch’an or Amidaist monasteries. Amidaism too was flourishing materially,
but is not represented on the network chart among significant intellectuals. A
few more exotic materials were still being imported from India, but without
Revolutions: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China • 295