Chapter 7 China 267Much as the middle class (or bourgeoisie) that emerged in the West in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries on a capitalist economic base constructed a
new set of moral, religious, and cultural values, so the gentry developed its own
moral, political, and educational preoccupations. It came in the form of a
social conservatism seeking to discover and restore ancient moral practices,
particularly in the domain of kinship. These were sufficiently new, and suffi-
ciently based in Confucian ideas, that the Song transformations have come to
be called Neo-Confucianism. Two features of Neo-Confucianism will interest
us here: the new interpretations that linked personal and family morality to the
state and the return to emphasis on li in family and lineage ideology. Those
changes were triggered by a number of factors, but we will focus on two of
them: the Buddhist challenge to Confucianism and the Mongol and Manchu
challenge to Chinese cultural superiority.
The Buddhist Challenge to Confucian Civilization
It is unknown who first brought Buddhist ideas to China, but the earliest
positive evidence of its existence there comes from the first century C.E. It is
fairly certain that the news of this foreign faith would have come from the oasis
towns of Central Asia, where Buddhism took root very early and where many
important monasteries flourished, above all at Dunhuang. According to tradi-
tional accounts, the Han Emperor Ming woke up one morning and called his
advisors to him. A “golden man,” a divine being, had appeared to him in his
sleep. This must be the Buddha, his advisors marveled. So Emperor Ming sent
envoys to India who returned with two Indian masters, a white horse, and the
Sutra in Forty-two Chapters. They founded the Monastery of the White Horse
at Luoyang, where it exists to this day.
In its first few centuries at the end of the Han dynasty, Buddhism was weak
and poorly understood. The Three Jewels of Buddhism—Buddha, dharma, and
sangha—were known, but in a simplistic way only. It was a highly sophisti-
cated and varied philosophy, but foreign to Chinese assumptions. India was
very far away, and there was only a single text, not well translated. Initially,
Buddhism was treated like some form of Daoism with its emphasis on purity,
simplicity, and nonaction. But as the Han began its disintegration because of,
as usual, the rise of regional powers that eclipsed the central dynasty, Buddhism
came to have broader appeal. For the next four centuries, a variety of small and
local dynasties came and went, while the “barbarian” Tuoba Turks founded the
Northern Wei dynasty in the old heartland with their capital at Luoyang.
In both the southern Chinese dynasties and in Northern Wei, Buddhist
monasteries sprang into existence. In 400, there were 17,000 monasteries and
80,000 monks and nuns in the south. In the north, Buddhism was even more
successful: there were 30,000 monasteries and a million monks and nuns. The
“great age of Buddhism” is the fifth to ninth centuries—Northern Wei, Sui,
and the first half of the illustrious Tang dynasty—when emperors themselves
converted to Buddhism and lavishly patronized Buddhist monasteries, carv-