208 CHAPTER EIGHTThese trends influenced Buddhism on many levels. On the level of popu-
lar devotion, the various pantheons of Taoist immortals, Buddhist bodhisattvas,
and local spirits were organized in the popular imagination into a bureaucratic
hierarchy, mirroring the political process occurring on Earth. On the institu-
tional and doctrinal levels, the early Sung rulers were concerned with placing
the Sangha on a more stable, rational basis. The Chinese Buddhist Canon was
printed for the first time, at state expense. This massive undertaking required
11 years and 130,000 wood-printing blocks, and yet was only one among
many such public printings of Buddhist texts intended to standardize the
teaching. Large monastic estates were created, with government support bal-
anced by standardized discipline and strict government controls over ordina-
tions. A small number of these monasteries were designated as Vinaya
monasteries, the only places where ordinations could be conducted. These
functioned more or less as boot camps for new monks who would then take
up residence in the other monasteries (Strong EB, sec. 8.5.1). To provide a
standard code for these centers, the Vinaya expert Yiian-chao (1048-1116)
eventually devised a Vinaya (Lii) school, based on the commentaries that the
T'ang scholar Tao-hsiian (596-667) had written on the Dharmaguptaka
Vinaya. This established the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya as standard in Chinese
monasteries, a position it has held up to the present.
The question of who would be put in charge of the remaining monaster-
ies led to intense political jockeying between the two main surviving T'ang
schools: Ch'an and T'ien-t'ai. Ch'an prevailed for several reasons. To begin
with, it could produce records to show that its lineage, unlike T'ien-t'ai's, had
not lapsed during the persecution of 845. Also, the lineage of masters por-
trayed in these _records was, in effect, a line of native Chinese Buddhas, which
satisfied nationalist sentiments. The nonverbal nature of the transmission made
it a convenient rallying point, in that all were free to intuit the nonverbal level
in their own terms; and it satisfied the conviction, dating back to the time of
Arcane Learning, that nonverbal intuition characterized the clearest under-
standing of the highest principles.
As a result, the vast majority of imperial monasteries were designated Ch'an
monasteries, with only a small minority left as teaching monasteries, headed
by members of the T' ien-t' ai school. In a large sense, however, this was a hol-
low victory for the Ch' an monks. Life at the two types of monasteries differed
little, in that both were run on the same tight schedule of study and medita-
tion. The only differences were that k'ung-ans were read at the formal meet-
ings in the Ch' an monasteries, whereas Siitras and scholastic treatises were read
at similar meetings in teaching monasteries; and the designation of the
monastery was what determined the lineage from which the abbot would
come. Only a small cadre of monks actually studied with the abbot, there-
maining monks being free to come and go. Many of them actually spent their
time traveling among Ch' an and teaching monasteries to broaden their educa-
tion. This gave rise to the system of the three men (traditions) that identified a
monk's affiliation: lu-men (the disciplinary tradition in which he had been or-
dained); tsung-men (his lineal tradition, that is, the Ch'an lineage under which