dieval Europe, too, the universities are a two-edged sword: centers of creativity
during their early periods, associated with a stagnant scholasticism after 1350.
On the theoretical level, what we see in China is the causal dynamics of
material base and inner intellectual networks. Creativity occurs when lineages
recombine intellectual capital in their struggle to divide the attention space;
such recombinations are set in motion at those times when the underlying base
shifts. Hence there is creativity at both the moment of expansion and of
contraction. Ch’an Buddhism was the last wave of Chinese Buddhist creativity,
occurring when the institutional base of government-supported monastic prop-
erties was collapsing under political pressure. Ch’an temporarily found a new
base, the self-supporting monastery in the countryside. The distinctive Ch’an
sensibility was a militant anti-intellectualism, in keeping with its work-oriented
surroundings and in reaction against the textual studies and philosophizing of
court Buddhism. The initial burgeoning of the Ch’an movement was neverthe-
less philosophically creative because it fostered competition among an expand-
ing wave of masters, displaying their enlightenment while traveling among the
newly founded monasteries. Ch’an became an intellectual’s anti-intellectual-
ism—indeed, epitomizing this stance forever after—because its several genera-
tions of status competition built hyper-sophisticated layers of reflexiveness
expressing each new master’s detached superiority to the already sophisticated
symbolic gestures of preceding masters.
Ch’an was a movement of the institutional decline of Chinese Buddhism.
When Ch’an too faded into routinization and its material base decayed, it lost
its threat in the eyes of the Confucian literati. The Neo-Confucians intellectu-
ally cannibalized their fading rival, just as in India the Advaita movement under
Shankara took over Buddhist omni-denial of substance when that religion was
dying. The creative edge of Neo-Confucianism rode on the growth of its new
organizational base, the rapid expansion of the government examination sys-
tem; this is an obverse case to the initial wave of Ch’an creativity under
organizational crisis. There is some irony in the fact that Sung Neo-Confucian-
ism began in the oppositional circles of elite degree holders who objected to
the vulgarization and routinization of the new educational ethos; but Neo-Con-
fucianism eventually became adopted as the content of the examination system
itself once its creativity had faded to rote. For the sociology of institutions, this
irony is merely that of the dynamism of structures over time. Creativity comes
from the moment of rearrangement; old creativity becomes new routine when
the underlying bases stop moving. Later, in Japan, these same late Ch’an
monastic routines and Neo-Confucian academies would give off yet further
waves of innovation, as they became once again energized by new changes of
the organizational base.
Revolutions: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China • 321