theology and magic. Later the material bases for multiple factions were dras-
tically curtailed with the general material decline of the empire; accumulated
cultural capital was then largely forgotten.
China. In the early creative period of the Warring States, intellectuals circu-
lated among the Chi-hsia Academy and the courts at Wei, P’ing-yuan, and
Ch’in. The greatest of these were centers of intersecting circles. Political and
prestige rivalry between the major courts was overlaid by the autonomous
organizational movements of Confucians and Mohists; these conditions fos-
tered a third party of unaffiliated intellectuals who carved out a variety of
positions across the turf provided by a focus on the life of debate. Again in
the great period of Buddhist creativity, there was competition among several
organized factions intersecting physically at a few places: the capital of the
pro-Buddhist dynasties, especially the T’ang, with its court and great monas-
teries, counterbalanced by the great intersectarian monasteries at T’ien-tai,
Lu-shan, and Shao-lin ssu. A later period of creativity in the Sung was based
on intellectual exchange among factions centered on the two northern capitals,
Loyang (the old capital and cultural center for out-of-office officials) and
Ch’ang-an, where the ups and downs of Wang An-Shih’s reform movement
were taking place. Here was a multiple meshing among political-literary fac-
tions of the gentry, reforming and traditionalist officials of the examination
system, and the quasi-religious schools of the Neo-Confucians and occultists.
In the Southern Sung there were again interconnected rival centers: Chu Hsi’s
academy, which was the most successful of the private schools living off and
simultaneously opposing the examination system; and the professors of the
national university such as Liu Chiu-Yuan.
The stagnant periods of Chinese intellectual life were either dominated by
a single center or drastically dispersed. The huge but uncreative national
university of the Han, reaching 30,000 students at its height, exemplifies the
former. We see the dispersion and loss of focus in the later period of Ch’an
Buddhism, when its monasteries proliferated in rural China but interconnec-
tions among its lineages faded away; it was then that Ch’an creativity gave
way to its own version of scholasticism, making koans out of the exploits of
its earlier leaders. The huge development of the material conditions of educa-
tion in the Ming shows dispersion without creative focus. There were hundreds
of thousands of students in small scattered schools, supporting an industry of
printed books (Chaffee, 1985). The national university and the mass gatherings
for the provincial and metropolitan examinations did not stimulate the debate
of philosophical factions, but only encouraged the individual pursuit of scho-
lastic forms.
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^507