Ch’an creativity disappeared into the dominance of Neo-Confucianism, and
with it ended fresh intellectual developments in Chinese Buddhism.
The Neo-Confucian Revival
The wave of philosophical creativity that made up Neo-Confucianism fits the
classic pattern of reciprocal expansion and decline under the law of small
numbers. In the network of Figure 6.4, we see Buddhist philosophy declining
and syncretizing, while the Confucians expand and subdivide into contending
factions. The apex is Chu Hsi’s grand synthesis, bringing together the factions
into a dominant Neo-Confucianism, in counterpoint with a new metaphysical
idealism. Neo-Confucianism was known to its contemporaries as “Tao-hsüeh,”
the Tao-learning, implying that it was appropriating (or reappropriating) con-
cepts circulating in the Taoist world, and which had been out of style in
orthodox Confucianism. Neo-Confucianism was in part a religious movement,
which took over cultural capital both from Taoism and from Ch’an Buddhism.
Religious territories were realigning as part of an organizational transfor-
mation in the basis of intellectual life. This is what underlies the historical
moment of philosophical creativity. Neo-Confucianism broke out at just the
time of major political upheaval. The Sung dynasty drastically expanded the
size and intensity of government bureaucracy and the examination system for
selecting officials. Rudiments of the examination system had existed before,
but the Sung was the first to be truly a scholars’ government. It was also a
period of massive economic growth, the takeoff of a market economy freed
from government control. The resulting situation of population displacement,
financial inflation, and government fiscal crisis led to the emergence of party
politics and ideologies. The height of the party struggle, the famous Wang
An-shih reforms, coincided with the generation that crystallized a Neo-Confu-
cian philosophy. Moreover, this period was a high point of the natural sciences
in Chinese history, as well as a time of creativity in poetry.
The Neo-Confucian movement was directly connected to all these net-
works, generally in opposition: to the expanding examination system, to the
Wang An-shih reforms, and to the poets. Neo-Confucianism was in large
measure a reactionary movement; its creative energy in philosophy came from
its oppositional stance in the political conflicts of the time. In some respects
the Neo-Confucians were radical innovators: in overturning the traditional
Confucian stance on religion, as well as in their participation in the scientific
empiricism of the time. The creativity of Neo-Confucian philosophy was a
process of maneuvering in the cultural space opened up through the multi-sided
institutional transformations of Sung society. Let us examine its components
in turn.
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