long-lasting effects. In the early and mid-700s, tantric Buddhist masters made
a showing at court with their elaborate magical and erotic ceremonies, from
whence their doctrine was exported to Japan as Shingon; but tantric Buddhism
never achieved either a popular or an intellectual following and disappeared
with the changing tides at court around midcentury.
Ch’an had the Buddhist side of the intellectual attention space to itself for
six or eight generations; indeed, in the absence of important activity from
Taoists or Confucians, it dominated philosophical creativity across the board.
Under the law of small numbers, the internal dynamics of Ch’an itself now
produced its own contending positions to fill the attention space. There were
the famous “five schools of Ch’an” during the 700s and 800s, a number which
is only approximate since some successions died out, while the surviving sects
split to fill their space. Some of the weaker sects at the end of their lines
followed the characteristic route of syncretism: the last important figure (291
in Figure 6.3) of the weak Fa-yen sect of Ch’an attempted to syncretize Ch’an
with T’ien-t’ai and Amidaism; T’ien-t’ai Te-shao (292 in Figure 6.3) syncretized
the Ch’an Ts’ao-Tung sect with T’ien-t’ai. After 950, while most of the other
Ch’an sects were dying out or syncretizing, the Lin-chi lineage proliferated,
building new monasteries across China and in the process splitting into sub-
sects, as the Ts’ao-Tung sect had done in its heyday in the 800s. It is a
wonderfully symmetrical case of simultaneous growth and contraction of
different parts of the field under the law of small numbers.^9
It is sometimes argued that the distinctiveness of Ch’an comes from the
influence of Taoism on Chinese Buddhism. Vaguely similar paradoxical stories
center on the early “Taoist” figure Chuang Tzu, and the Tao Te Ching extols
mystical transcendence of words. But at the time of the “Zen revolution,”
contemporary Taoism was a highly liturgical church, with just those elements
of theistic hierarchies, magic, and immortality-seeking that were antithetical
to the Ch’an style. Taoist influence is structurally unlikely as well: the expand-
ing, materially prospering Ch’an Buddhists were making themselves as distinc-
tive as possible, while syncretisms occurred in times of organizational weak-
ness. There is some resemblance between the “light conversation” of the “Seven
Sages of the Bamboo Grove” and the poetic repartee of the Ch’an masters. But
“light conversation” displays little that is comparable to the round of ongoing
spiritual jousts that took place as the Ch’an masters traveled among the
monasteries, testing one another and leaving a trail of iconoclastic moves at
successive levels of reflexivity. Organizationally, the “Seven Sages” lacked the
monastic lineages which were so important in the growth of Ch’an. Insofar as
Ch’an is similar to the “Taoism” of the gentry, it is because they share some
similar social conditions. Ch’an is Buddhism adapting to a niche away from
court settings and temple liturgies, based on the self-sufficiency of country
296 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths