of utilitarian versus literary cultivation. The lines of these scholarly networks
that became Neo-Confucianism consisted of those rebelling against the status
quo in the name of traditional Confucian appeals to the moral superiority of
the classic past. This could be given a novel philosophical content by appro-
priating from the Buddhists the religious ideal of the enlightened sage, an
option that was structurally available because the social base of Buddhism was
crumbling.
The same conditions—political struggle rooted in reformers of the exami-
nation system, together with Confucian traditionalists appropriating Buddhist
religious space—had appeared in the late T’ang but with different intensities.
Han Yü and Li Ao, both T’ang officials and professors at the national univer-
sity, around 800–820 had ineffectually attacked government support of Bud-
dhism, especially its ritual displays of magic. At the same time they borrowed
elements of Buddhist philosophy, claiming that Confucianism gave a transcen-
dent cosmological vision as well as rules of social conduct. In imitation of the
Buddhist lineages, Han Yü and Li Ao invented a transmission of an inner
Confucian truth from the mythical sages Yao and Shun through the duke of
Chou, Confucius, and Mencius. Thereafter, they claimed, the transmission was
interrupted by the mundane Confucianism of Hsün Tzu and Yang Hsiung,
until Han Yü himself restored the lineage.^10 Li Ao claimed that he had person-
ally recovered the key insight, apparently a Buddhist-style meditative experi-
ence revealing the nature of the universe. This stance of opposing Buddhism
while borrowing from it in order to set up a rival Confucian cosmology and
mysticism is structurally parallel to the Neo-Confucian movement seven or
eight generations later.
There are a number of similarities in background conditions. The later
T’ang was undergoing a period of political and economic reconstruction after
the severe disruptions of the An Lu-shan rebellion and civil war during 755–
- In addition to the usual power struggles of military governors and palace
eunuchs, scholar-officials were active in proposing ideologically oriented re-
forms (Pulleybank, 1960). There was an archaizing faction attempting to bring
back the arrangements of the ancient Chou dynasty, and a reform party which
wished to dispense with tradition and streamline administration of the econ-
omy and tax system. The former resembles the archaizing pronouncements of
the Sung Neo-Confucians, while the latter is a forerunner of the Wang An-shih
reformers. The political movements were connected to intellectual groupings
among the scholars. Most notable among these were the ku-wen movement in
literary style, which rejected current formalisms and returned to the simpler
prose of classical times, and a critical movement which demystified the classical
texts by putting them in their historical context and rejected them as guides to
current policy.
310 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths