210 CHAPTER EIGHTno longer attracted high-caliber intellects, but the Ch'an school continued to
produce innovative practitioners. The early twelfth century in particular stands
out in this regard. Hung-chih Cheng-chiieh (1091-1157) formulated the dis-
tinctive mo-chao (silent illumination) practice of the Ts'ao-tung lineage,
whereas his rival, Ta-hui Tsung-kao (1089-1163), popularized a distinctively
new approach to Lin-chi k'ung-an practice. Ta-hui, a dharma-heir ofYiian-
wu K'o-ch'in (see Section 8.5.5), insisted that the proper approach to the
k'ung-an entailed focusing on hua-t'ou (crucial phrases) in the dialogues and
converting them from ssu chu (dead utterances) to huo chu (live utterances).
This was accomplished by investigating the dialogues, not in terms of their
meaning in context, but simply as decontextualized acts of verbalizing in and
of themselves. Only then could one break through the process of verbalization
to the Buddha-nature behind it. Yiian-wu, Hung-chih, and Ta-hui were also
notable for being the earliest known Ch' an masters to have left numerous fe-
male dharma-heirs, chief among them being Ta-hui's first student, the nun
Ting-kuang, who became a successful teacher in her own right.
Modern scholars often refer to the Sung dynasty as the beginning of the
ossification of Buddhism in China, but this is largely a perception inherited
from texts composed during the Sung period itself. The monks who drew up
the anecdotal lamp records, codified the k'ung-ans, and perfected the crucial
phrase approach were doing something very creative and new, never before
attempted in the history of Buddhism, and yet they tried their best to disguise
their creativity. The main impression they wanted to convey was that they
were simply preserving a valuable tradition. In this, they were following the
general pattern of Sung intellectual life that we noted previously: a strategy of
trying to eas~_ the shift to a totally new form of society by disguising innova-
tions as mere Clarifications of past traditions. Much of the common perception
of the T' ang as the golden age of Chinese Buddhism stems from the skill with
which Sung writers self-effacingly presented what they viewed as most valu-
able in their past, even as they recast it in radically new forms.
8.7 The Religion of the Masses (1279-1949)
Except for the brief interlude of the Yiian dynasty (1279-1368), when Mon-
gol forces ruled China, the government bureaucracy and monastic system de-
vised during the Sung proved remarkably stable and secure. The major
long-term effect of the Mongol rule on Buddhism was that it drove a number
of Ch' an monks into exile in Japan, thus establishing the Lin-chi (Rinzai) lin-
eage there. Otherwise, the development ofBuddhism in China from the thir-
teenth to the twentieth century was largely an uninterrupted process
characterized by several long-term trends. Lay organizations became more
prominent in Buddhist circles, engaging largely in charitable work. Pure Land
became overwhelmingly the religion of the uneducated masses: the poor,