ble a “Protestant” type in which priests are independent religious entrepreneurs
living directly off public consumers. In the latter category we should add
religious secret societies, whose members were preponderantly or entirely
laypeople; these resemble in some respects the Christian lay brotherhoods of
the late medieval period, differing in China in that their activities were par-
ticularly likely to include political rebellion.
Of all these organizational forms, the ones which were most often a basis
for autonomous development of intellectual communities were the monasteries
and the large urban temples. These “Catholic” types are the most characteristic
Buddhist organizations. The Taoist church, in contrast, was predominantly
based on the “Protestant” style of decentralized religious organizations; and
these were the forms which brought the religion closest to the immediate
concerns of lay culture. This helps explain why Buddhist organization favored
abstract intellectual creativity so much more than Taoist organization did. It
suggests, too, a reason why Buddhism lost its philosophical creativity at the
end of the medieval period, when its great monasteries and temples lost their
autonomy. Popular salvation-oriented Amidaist Buddhism was structurally
much closer to a Taoist organizational form; when Buddhism became reduced
to little more than Amidaism, abstract Buddhist philosophy died out as well.
We shall see a similar pattern in Europe in the development of scholastic
philosophy in medieval Catholicism, and the shift toward lay orientations in
the Protestant Reformation.The Gentry-Official Culture: The Pure Conversation
Movement and the Dark Learning
For abstract philosophy, the most famous developments were not in religious
Taoism but in an interconnected group of gentry and officials which flourished
for two generations around 235–300 c.e. This was the last occasion in Chinese
history when there was any creativity on the purely philosophical side that had
a significant connection with Taoism. Later Neo-Confucianism would absorb
philosophical Taoism so completely that there was nothing left but the religious
side, with its particularistic practices. Although the earlier movement has
usually been labeled “Neo-Taoist” or “philosophical Taoism,” the question
has arisen whether it is Taoist at all. It included the themes of individualistic
withdrawal from the duties of conventional society, metaphysical mysticism,
and non-action (wu-wei); and it explicitly developed its cultural capital from
the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, and similar texts. All this fits our conventional
picture of “Taoist”; indeed, it is the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” who
best define our retrospective image of what a Taoist should be.
Yet this was very different from the religious Taoism forming at the same168 •^ Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths