estates. The difference is that the Taoist gentry owned their own property; the
Ch’an monks owned theirs collectively, and hence had to pay more attention
to organizational hierarchy in the legitimation of lineage masters.
After 1000, the organizational bases of Buddhism within Chinese society
were undermined once again. This time the threat was not confiscation of
property or political purges. Buddhist monasteries and temples in the country-
side and remote mountains were no longer threats to the increasingly powerful
central bureaucracy; instead, Buddhism was strangled slowly by government
regulation, instituted for the most part as fiscal measures. Sale of ordination
certifications was revived under the Sung dynasty in 1067. This soon gave rise
to market manipulations as individuals bought certificates not for their own
use but for resale, speculating on future rises in price (Ch’en, 1964: 241–244,
391–393). The long-term result was an inflationary spiral reducing the value
of the certificates. The Sung government also began to raise money by selling
the higher monastic ranks, and in the 1100s added a series of monastic titles
to spur further purchases. The church prospered physically under this system;
there were 460,000 monks and nuns in 1221, still a substantial number, if a
proportional drop from the previous high of 700,000 around 830, when the
population was half as large. No doubt the market for ordination certificates
had an expansionary effect at the lower levels. But Buddhism died intellectually
as governmental regulation set in. Only Ch’an was creative for a while, a direct
consequence of its efforts to move to remote areas where it could escape
government regulation.
Eventually even Ch’an creativity weakened and dried up. Externally, the
religious economy of the monasteries, once so important in opening up the
agrarian state–coercive structure of China, was now surpassed by a burgeoning
market economy in the secular society of the Sung. The status appeal of
Buddhist culture for the upper classes faded. Once members of the educated
gentry or court nobility might have frequented the more intellectual or colorful
Buddhist circles, or even pursued careers as abbots of the wealthier monaster-
ies. Now there was a massive new pull on the cultivated classes from the
expansion of a government examination system and of Confucian schools
connected with it. Under declining resources, Ch’an lineages dwindled and
narrowed across the intellectual space.
Even this last organizational transition had its own form of creativity.
Stories of the classic paradoxes and repartees of the great Ch’an masters were
now collected: The Record of the Transmission of the Light in 1004, The Blue
Cliff Record in 1128, the Wu-men Kuan in 1229. Lineage factionalism was no
longer important; old rivals assembled into a grand retrospective coalition of
this movement in decline. The later Ch’an masters added successive layers of
poetic commentaries and meta-commentaries. In place of the live experiences
Revolutions: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China • 297