matter of declining material supports for intellectual life; the fall of the great
dynasties with their material wealth is correlated not with philosophical me-
diocrity but often with the opposite. The Han, T’ang, and Ming were periods
when the stagnation of abstract philosophy, at least outside of Buddhism, was
at its worst.
Here we see the importance not of material supports for intellectual life in
general, but of the particular kinds of structural underpinnings which support
or stifle creativity. The deadening touch in all these stagnant dynasties was
precisely the way Chinese intellectuals were controlled by material incentives
linked to the selection of officials for the state. The Han Confucians worked
successfully to build the core of a Confucian bureaucracy, in the process
bringing philosophy down to the level of rituals and portents, or at best a
scholasticism of state librarians. The T’ang was the period when the formal
examination system took off; the Ming was the dynasty during which the state
became permeated by exam-selected officials and the gentry spent virtually
their entire lives studying to pass through those narrow hoops. Once the
examination system took hold, the principal episodes of creativity among the
Confucian gentry occurred when movements were mobilized to struggle against
the artificialities of the examination life.
We may state the lesson more generally. The stifling effect on philosophical
creativity of the government examination system was paralleled by the dead-
ening effects of requiring certificates of ordination for Buddhist and Taoist
monks. The policy of taxing and regulating these religions by government
certification, set in place during the later T’ang, was directly connected to their
decline in intellectual creativity from that point on. Ch’an Buddhism escaped
for a while by evading regulation, but it too eventually succumbed. Again, it
was not a question of eliminating material foundations. The Buddhist and
Taoist churches survived and even prospered in the Sung dynasty and later, but
only as religions of the lower classes; their upper layer of educated intellectuals
almost entirely disappeared. Within Ch’an itself, the period of its own creative
masters, with their paradoxical encounters and dramatic enlightenment expe-
riences, was dried up in their own formal scholasticism. By the period of Ch’an
decadence in the Sung, tales of the Ch’an masters of the T’ang were formalized
into koan collections treated as texts for a series of exercises to be passed on
the way to higher monastic rank. The examination system of the Confucians
became paralleled by a similar set of formalities within Ch’an.
We encounter here a major theme of the formal organization of education.
Schooling, which we associate with the life of culture, often operates as a
deadening of culture, preserving the ideas of the past at the expense of creativity
within the present. The long-standing Athenian and Alexandrian schools, once
past their founding generations, show a similar pattern of stagnation. In me-320 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths