not only revived but, at the hands of Wang Pi, Kuo Hsiang, and others, pushed
in the direction of both epistemology and metaphysics.
Epistemological debate is not the only route to metaphysics. We have seen
in India how a religion based on world-fleeing ascetic meditation anchored a
skeptical stance toward the reality of the ordinary world. This encouraged
intellectual networks to push to higher levels of metaphysical abstraction: in
part because independence of the core elite of meditators from lay-oriented
rituals and ethical preaching led to a focus on pure insight as the mark of
religious standing; in part because tension within the sacred concepts of the
transcendental and the aconceptual provided just the kind of deep troubles that
motivate layers of reflexive refinement. Transplanted to China, these conditions
fostered further philosophical creativity, reaching its metaphysical high point
with the Hua-yen synthesis of all the Buddhist schools. Here metaphysical
construction literally packed abstraction back into abstraction, taking pains to
incorporate all viewpoints of the intellectual-religious field into a unified sys-
tem. To do so, the Hua-yen philosophers had to push through the particulari-
ties of religious sacred objects and discover the mutual constitution not only
of different abstractions by one another, but also the interdependence of
different levels of abstraction. In demonstrating the interpenetration of change
and emptiness, concepts and phenomenal objects, Hua-yen may well be the
most significant Chinese contributor to world philosophy.
In this light, the most important institutional fact shaping the medieval and
subsequent development of Chinese philosophy was the insulation between the
Buddhist scholastics and the Confucian gentry. During the period when the
great constructive Buddhist systems were prominent, Confucianism was far too
much on the defensive religiously, organizationally, and intellectually to profit
from them even at the level of creative opposition. When Buddhist and Con-
fucian network contacts and intellectual syntheses finally became significant,
the material base of intellectual Buddhism had long since collapsed. The
Buddhist contacts of the Sung Neo-Confucians were confined to the Ch’an
masters. But Ch’an was, on the surface, a predominantly anti-intellectual
movement, and what the Neo-Confucians took from it was a meditation-ori-
ented technique that they could transmute into their own Sage religion, but
little in the way of refined metaphysical concepts.^14
Neo-Confucian metaphysics started over again from a relatively lower level
of philosophical abstraction than the Buddhists had attained. The early gen-
eration of Sung Neo-Confucians picked up the cultural capital of the old
divination schools; and this had been transmitted largely on a concrete level
through lay-oriented practitioners. There is a temptation to regard this empha-
sis on a system of continuous worldly change as the archetypal Chinese
worldview; certainly it is an attractively realistic vision, if regarded on a suf-
318 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths