PERSONNEL POLICY 655
able and moral men for office. Lu noted that in the classical age officials appointed
to office were required to submit letters of thanks and name others who were
worthier than they to replace them, but in contemporary times officials wrote
perfunctory letters of thanks without bothering to recommend others. Lu wanted
to dismiss any official who failed to do so and to require that all such letters of
thanks be forwarded to the king for his future reference. Candidates with the
most recommendations would be deemed suitable for the next vacancy, and each
set of officials would have recommended their own replacements instead of leav-
ing it to the Ministry of Personnel.
Lu naIvely assumed that current officials would then create a mass stampede
to exit their posts in favor of those worthier than themselves. The many schol-
ars who had withdrawn from active life to pursue self-cultivation and study would
be attracted back into the national search for talent because the horde of infe-
rior men would recommend them to the throne.^29
In the mid-seventh century Wei Hslian-t\mg blamed the decline in the qual-
ity of T'ang magistrates on the monopoly of personnel review and recommen-
dation by "the hands of only a few men" employed by the Ministries of
Personnel and War. Not only were they isolated in the capital from the realities
oflocal affairs in a vast empire, but they were also open to private influence and
opportunities for profit. Wei sought to reinstate a division of function modeled
after the Chou practice in which the prime minister and COllrl officials made rec-
ommendations for rank, salaries, promotions, and dismissals, while the Ssu-t'u
and Ssu-ma recommended worthy men for their first appointments. He also
wanted to restore the right of officials to appoint their own subordinates.
Wei insisted that officials required a thorough education in school of the so-
called six ritual matters: capping, marriage, funerals, ancestral worship, local
ccremonies for the honoring of guests, and formalities governing meetings
between colleagues, along with the ethical norms governing fundamental social
relationships. He felt such training was necessary to break the domination of
the aristocracy over the bureaucracy. Wei sought to eliminate these habits by
reducing the responsibilities of the Ministry of Personnel and requiring all offi-
cials from the third to the ninth rank to recommend candidates for office)"
Emperor Kao-tsung (r. 649-83) did in fact ask his officials to recommend
others for office, but his prime minister, Li An-chi, complained that each offi-
cial who did so was immediately charged by his opponents for favoring his own
faction offollowers (p'eng-tang), and many had chosen to remain silent rather
than run the risk of criticism. 31 While Yu Hyongwon was honest enough to include
this remark in his book, however, it did not convince him that there was any
weakness in recommendation as a system for evaluation.
Yu's last reference to the T'ang period was Lu Chih's criticism during the reign
ofTe-tsung in the early 790s, a crucially important opinion to Yu since it exerted
such influence on his own plans for reform. Lu argued that if you recruited offi-
cials according to what they said, there was no way to guarantee that their actions
would match their words; if you judged them by behavior alone, many talented