- This effort to rewrite the Confucian lineage is reminiscent of Shen-hui’s claims for
an esoteric lineage which were announced at the time of the Zen revolution 60
years earlier, and might have been inspired by it. Hartman (1986) points out
parallels between Ch’an and the philosophy of Han Yü’s ku wen movement; both
movements were challenges to the state-supported popular Buddhism of the capi-
tal. Late in life Han Yü was friendly with a monk from Shih-tou’s Ch’an lineage
(275a in Figure 6.3). On Li Ao, see Barrett (1992). - “Han Yü’s bold equation of wen and tao, which is perhaps related to his philo-
sophical equation of thought and action, constituted a dramatic lift for the status
and role of literature in a Confucian society. It demanded for the writer a position
on par with the administrator. Artistically valid literary expression was no longer
a polite accoutrement of the civil servant but rather became a basic requisite for
great political success” (Hartman, 1986: 14). Han Yü himself had repeatedly failed
the examinations under the older system. - It is only at this point that Chou Tun-I was retrospectively made a founder of
Neo-Confucianism, although his ideas had been seeping among the Ch’eng disci-
ples after the Shao lineage disappeared around 1130 (Graham, 1958: xix, 168).
At the same time, Chang Tsai’s system, based on the Supreme Void, lost influence
to the Ch’eng focus on principle. Chu Hsi rewrote the earlier history of these
movements, obscuring the central formative influence of the Ch’engs by ascribing
the origins to Chou Tun-I; whereas Chou was not a militant Neo-Confucian but
a Confucian-Taoist syncretist who added only the Supreme Ultimate to his system. - Plato’s idealism, centered on mathematics, emerged within the first seven genera-
tions of the Greek intellectual community, and his immediate successors took it in
the direction of a rather particularized religion of star worship. But Plato himself
explored a variety of positions, and what became known as “Platonism” did not
settle into a pervasively religious idealism until the Roman period; in the interim,
the Academy was predominantly in the skeptical camp. For India, it is conventional
to interpret the philosophy of the Upanishads as idealist; in Chapter 5 I argued
that this tendency has been exaggerated. - In fact, Ch’an paralleled Hua-Yen as a highly reflexive philosophical consciousness,
but the Neo-Confucians were building from too concrete a level to see this. What
Ch’an cultural capital could produce in abstract philosophy was demonstrated in
virtually the same generation (the early 1200s) in Japanese Zen with Dogen’s
system. Figure 7.2 in Chapter 7 shows that Dogen was both a direct and indirect
pupil of Chinese Ch’an networks, and also a great-grandpupil of Chu Hsi.
7. Japan
- As before, philosophers are divided into major (listed in all capitals), secondary
(listed by name), and minor (listed by number in the key to Figures 7.1 through
7.5). Criterion for ranking is the relative amount of space devoted to them in a
combination of sources (EP, 1967; Piovesana, 1963; Kitagawa, 1987, 1990; Du-
moulin, 1990; Dilworth, 1989; Maruyama, 1974; Najita and Scheiner, 1978;
Tsunoda, de Bary, and Keene, 1958; Totman, 1993; Akamatsu and Yampolsky,
Notes to Pages 310–324^ •^973