These scholarly movements were rooted in the increasing focus on formal
civil service examinations. From beginnings early in the dynasty, these had first
become important around 700; although the size of the examination system
was small compared to the Sung, by the late 700s it had become an important
route for recruiting high-ranking officials, and there were large numbers of
unsuccessful degree candidates (Pulleybank, 1960: 104; CHC, 1979: 179,
213–215, 274–277, 329–330). There were similar criticisms and struggles as
in the Sung: some wanted expansion of the system to ease the competitiveness;
others criticized the inflexibility of examination-based recruitment and the
remoteness of its cultural content from current reality.
Han Yü was in the midst of the networks linking all of these factions. His
ideological predecessors were the ku-wen literary reformers, whose classi-
cal emphasis Han Yü expressed as a Confucian ideal of moral regeneration
through the return to tradition. Some of his colleagues in the ku-wen movement
had already expressed the idea of an esoteric Confucian lineage of sages, and
Han Yü may be the only figure who reaped public fame from the ideas of the
group (Pulleybank, 1960: 97, 112). Han Yü’s special advantage was his wide
connections to the most creative poets and writers of the time. His father was
allied with one of the most famous poets in Chinese history, Li Po (699–762);
his older brother was connected to the founders of the ku-wen movement. Han
Yü himself became a notable poet, participating in a network of other impor-
tant poets, and acquired the stature of one of the classic prose stylists.
The various reform movements came to a head around the turn of the
century. The literary reformers were allied for a time with the political and
economic reformers, an oppositional group centered on the Crown Prince from
about 785 until it briefly acceded to power in 805. Here again there is an apt
parallel to Wang An-shih’s movement in the Sung, with its roots in the poets
and classical scholars of the previous generation. In the T’ang case, everything
aborted; not only were the economic reformers thrown out of power by
factions of palace eunuchs and the military, but also the proto–Neo-Confu-
cianism of Han Yü and the ku-wen movement soon petered out. The struggles
among the intellectual factions did not line up the same way in both instances.
The Sung Neo-Confucians were strongly opposed to the poets, while in the
T’ang both were united in pressing for reform of the examination content.^11
And the split between cultural conservatives and institutional modernizers,
although latent in the T’ang groupings, never came to the sharp break that
characterized the Sung controversies.
The main line of opposition was between the most extreme claims of the
Confucian movement and the Buddhists, but this became acute only when Han
Yü began his famous polemics around 805–820. The Confucian sage religion
was appropriating cultural capital from the Buddhists, and this was shaped in
Revolutions: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China • 311