Zen as Conservative Innovation
The outburst of Zen lineages occurred in the same generations as the radical
Pure Land movements, and took the opposite side of the field from them.
Instead of proclaiming social and religious transformation, Zen was conserva-
tive; it reasserted the traditional Buddhist stance in its purest form, meditative
detachment from the world. Nevertheless, conservatives in a situation of struc-
tural opposition are forced into their own path of innovation.
The leaders of the Zen orders began, like the Pure Land founders, as
offshoots of the Tendai establishment, the great Mount Hiei center from which
all the action emanated. Whereas Pure Land quickly shifted to popular recruit-
ment in the provinces, Zen retained its upper-class connections; soon it was
taking ex-emperors into its ranks, and several of its famous leaders were sons
and grandsons of emperors. Zen became known as the religion of the warrior
class, but it never broke its links with the court aristocracy. Throughout the
civil wars, including the effort of the ex-emperor Go-Daigo to restore direct
rule in the 1330s, leading Zen masters such as Muso Soseki maintained close
ties with the emperor, while making the transition to patronage by the victo-
rious Ashikaga shoguns. Although Zen has the reputation of having provided
a religious ideology for the samurai, this was largely a matter of social con-
nections. The truth is that Zen monasteries were far more peaceful than either
the Pure Land orders or the traditional power centers such as Mount Hiei;
abjuring political involvement, they rarely became involved in the internecine
combat among monasteries or in secular warfare.
Zen was structurally more cosmopolitan than the Pure Land orders and
pursued an intellectual trajectory at a higher level of reflexivity. Only the Zen
networks made contact with China. The reason for this connection should not
be taken for granted. Chinese Buddhism at this time was far from flourishing.
Ch’an was on its last legs. The great creative period was far in the past, and
the major activity of recent Ch’an leaders was the historical compilation of
their legendary doings into the koan collections. As Figures 6.3 and 6.4 display,
the fanning out of rival Ch’an lineages during the centuries from 700 to 900,
typical of the filling of dominant attention space under the law of small
numbers, had given way to the winnowing out and amalgamation of lineages.
Virtually all other Buddhist sects had disappeared except Ch’an and Amidaism;
in the defensive mode, Ch’an had become doctrinally syncretist, reversing its
anti-scriptural path of pure and direct enlightenment which had prevailed in
the heyday of its organizational expansion. Hua-yen (Japanese Kegon) and
T’ien-tai (Tendai) survived only by being carried along inside Ch’an houses.^6
Heinrich Doumoulin (1988: 284, 287) traces no lineages after 1300, and refers
to the period after the Sung as a time of “syncretistic tendencies and decline,”332 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths