BUDDHISM IN CENTRAL ASIA AND CHINA 211women, children, and merchants without a Confucian education. Any young
man who underwent training as a Confucian bureaucrat had to unlearn the
simple faith he had learned at his mother's knee. Pure Land even came to per-
vade the Ch'an monasteries during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), when the
nien-fo was combined with k'ung-an practice, and monastics adopted the slo-
gan that Ch'an and Pure Land were essentially one. The union ofCh'an and
Pure Land is perhaps best symbolized by the k'ung-an that became most pop-
ular at this time: Who in the mind is reciting the nien-fo? Ch'an retained
some of its intellectual respectability among the educated elite, primarily as a
lively alternative to the staid bureaucratic orthodoxy. A gentleman might be a
Confucian in the way he conducted government and family affairs, but a
"Channist" in his private moments as a poet or artist. In this way Buddhism
functioned as an unthreatening counterbalance to the institutions and ideol-
ogy of the Confucian state.
The peaceful coexistence of Buddhism and Confucianism during the Ming
dynasty-and the use of Buddhist themes by Confucians to inculcate their
ideals among the Buddhist public-is best illustrated by the great novel that
appeared at this time, The Journey to the West. Although the novel is loosely
based on the story of Hsiian-tsang's pilgrimage to India and contains many
figures from the Buddhist pantheon and Chinese folklore, the author, Wu
Ch'eng-en (1500-82), was a Confucian. The Buddhist virtues he teaches in
the novel are essentially those where Buddhism and Confucianism concur.
The monk Yuan Chuang (Hsiian-tsang) and his companions are allegorical
figures. The monk represents moral conscience; the resourceful yet mischie-
vous magical monkey-king, Sun Hou-tzu, is human nature with all of its
weaknesses and potentials; the pig fairy, Chu Pa-hsieh, reflects greed and other
base motives. In the course of the adventures, the monkey-king learns self-
discipline, loosely defined so as to fit either the Buddhist or neo-Confucian
mode, in order to tame his wayward tendencies. In this manner, the Buddhist
reader is taught Confucian ideals in a palatable way-a fine example of a Con-
fucian turning the Mahayana strategy of skillful means to his own uses.
As the religion of the masses, Buddhism also became the religion of the
disaffected. Some of the lay Buddhist organizations-such as the White Lotus
Society, loosely connected with the T'ien-t'ai school-actually staged insur-
rections against the Mongol and Manchu rulers. The White Lotus rebellion at
the end of the eighteenth century (1796-1804) took the ruling Manchus 10
years to suppress. A few notorious temples, such as the center at Shao-lin,
trained monks in the martial arts, but the Sangha as a whole remained aloof
from such affairs.
Modern historians tend to write disparagingly of the lack of dynamism and
creativity in Chinese Buddhism from the late fourteenth to early nineteenth
century, but we must remember that stability, silence, and lack of innovation in
a monastic tradition are not necessarily bad. Although they may induce a life
of ritualism and complacency, they also afford the opportunity for sincere
monastics to devote themselves fully to a life of practice undisturbed by violent
social or sectarian upheavals. The purpose of monasteries and convents is to