its own right on which the intellectual division of the attention space could go
on, not with spectacular changes in the level of abstraction, but by trying out
various modes of classification of texts (by content, chronologically, by mode
of exposition), giving rise to many minor puzzles to establish consistency
among the various modes. Classification served the purposes of religious
politics, simultaneously maintaining the alliance among various proponents of
the doctrine while asserting superiority for one’s own sect. Later, as scholarly
Buddhism weakened under political pressure, the classification mode allowed
for syncretistic alliances. The last great Hua-yen syncretizer, Tsung-mi, went
so far as to include Confucianism as the first step in the Buddhist hierarchical
sequence, and to work out elaborate correspondences among the numbered
Buddhist precepts and the various rubrics of Chinese cosmology: the Five
Agents, five emperors, five sacred peaks, five colors, five virtues, and so forth
(Gregory, 1991: 282). Tsung-mi appealed simultaneously to the last surviving
strong Buddhist sect by extending classification to Ch’an (Zen) doctrines (even
though Ch’an itself, at this time in its expansive phase, was militantly anti-
scholastic), while extending a bridge to enemy Confucian and Taoist tenets.
The classificatory mode with numbered lists sometimes overlaps with nu-
merology. Here numbers are regarded as a system of occult correspondences,
linking the world into a net of symbols. Such a system can be used for
divination or magical manipulation. The Cabalism of the Hellenistic period
parallels in this respect the correlative cosmology formulated in the Han
dynasty, which remained such a significant part of the Chinese repertoire down
through the Neo-Confucians (and which we see the syncretizer Tsung-mi
introducing into Buddhism via the p’an-chiao textual classifications). Here it
is important to bear several distinctions in mind.
Numerology is not per se a form of the development of mathematics; that
is to say, mathematics has its own sequence of abstraction and reflexivity, in
relation to which the practice of numerology is a diversion into a side-channel
at a lower, more concrete level.^3 Nor should we regard numerology as a
continuation of primordial or popular magic. Numerology appears not at the
beginning of the intellectual sequences in China, India, and Greece, but after
a phase of abstract development. Numerology is an offshoot of the scholastic
path of development, the textual-scholastic sequence. It is scholasticism itself,
combined with the concreteness that comes from appealing to lay audiences
rather than specialized intellectuals, which produces the upsurge of sophisti-
cated occultism.
Numerology and the divination games of correlative cosmologies are a kind
of busywork of intellectuals, a way of playing the game in the attention space
at times when the external conditions driving creativity on the “mainline” of
the abstraction-reflexivity sequence are in abeyance. It is a version of the
798 •^ Meta-reflections