What then was the value of learning, absent the nominal goal of govern-
ment service? For the Neo-Confucians, learning and self-cultivation were
the real goal, regardless of achieving government office.
Yet Zhu Xi went on to contrast the moral values produced in the
peaceful environment after the Zhou overthrew the Shang (no more target
piercing), with the collapse of those values when the Zhou disintegrated (a
return to target piercing). Zhu in a certain sense rejects Ouyang Xiu’s
dismissal of the value of Chen Yaozi’s archery skill. Chen, after all, was
only demonstrating his accuracy, not his penetration. For Confucius, Chen
Yaozi’s fault would have been his pride in his skills rather than the skills
themselves. Ouyang Xiu, by contrast, found the idea of Chen–azhuang-
yuan, the man who placedfirst in the civil service exams for that round–
practicing archery deeply disturbing. The two stories of Chen told by other
authors relate a similar distaste for a distinguished literatus practicing
martial arts with any seriousness, or investing any value in it.
Zhu Xi and Ouyang Xiu lived in very different times, however, and their
approaches to the martial arts were not simply the product of abstract
intellectual considerations. The Song Dynasty lost control of north China
just before Zhu was born, and it continued to struggle militarily and
politically with the Jurchen Jin. Zhu’s father resigned his official post
over a peace deal with the Jin. And Zhu himself was zealous in repairing
and maintaining defensive structures when he was a magistrate, in addi-
tion to pursuing his puritanical Confucian values. Ouyang Xiu, in con-
trast, lived in a generally peaceful time, with the only exception being a
minor war with the Tanguts. In Ouyang Xiu’s time the literati were fully
defining themselves as purely civil officials who earned their position
through the civil service exams. This was in contrast to Tang officials,
particularly in the early part of the dynasty, who achieved their positions
because they were members of a hereditary elite. The eleventh century saw
the expanding bureaucratic elite take over both the civil and military sides
of the Song government and fully subordinate the military to civil control.
The disadvantage of this civil dominance, some argued, was a concomitant
diminished military strength.
Song officials looked back to the Tangfubingsystem, and the farmer-
soldier ideal of early times, with great nostalgia. The professional Song
military was extremely expensive to maintain and was not capable of
defeating either the Kitan or the Tanguts. This was a misleading simplifi-
cation of the situation, but it led to the revival of a militia system as part of
a major governmental reform program in the later eleventh century under
Wang Anshi. Wang’sbaojiasystem was built on the preexisting practice in
Archery 127