274 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
raries, when a man dies, pray to the Buddha. This is assuming one’s parent
was not a person of virtue but an inferior person who had accumulated bad
deeds and sins. Could there be a less kind way to treat one’s parents? And if
in fact one’s parents had accumulated bad deeds and sins, how could they
escape the consequences by your bribing the Buddha? (Ebrey 1991:79–80)
That Zhu Xi wrote his famous Family Rituals at all was part of the Confu-
cian backlash. Patricia Ebrey, the translator, describes the work as “a militantly
Confucian book to combat Buddhist rites and other non-Confucian practices.”
The glitz of Buddhist culture—all the temples, images and icons, works of art,
and showy festivals—prompted a Confucian response. Confucianism had
mostly dwelt in the home, in public courtesies, in the texts, the examination
halls, and in the discourse of the intellectual class. But in 630, at a time when
there were well over 50,000 Buddhist monasteries, Emperor Tang Taizong
ordered all counties and prefectures to erect temples for the worship of Confu-
cius. The most famous one of all was at Qufu, in Confucius’s own hometown
in Shandong Province. In 1684, Emperor Kangxi described visiting Qufu and
meeting Confucius’s 64th-generation descendant, Kong Shangren, and being
shown the wall where Confucius’s ninth-generation descendant hid the Clas-
sics when Qin Shihuang burned all the books. During the Cultural Revolution,
Qufu would have been destroyed by the Red Guards but for the intervention of
Premier Zhou Enlai. It is once again a place of pilgrimage, now for “Confucian
Capitalists” from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore. It would be as great a
mistake to write off Confucianism in the twenty-first century as it was in the
seventh century.
During Kangxi’s visit early in the Qing dynasty, Confucius’s descendants
had a problem that was a typical preoccupation of the gentry during the seven-
teenth century. They had maintained their large lineage ties so diligently for so
many generations that they had now run out of burial space in the family cem-
etery. There was simply no room to expand into lands registered to others
(Spence 1974). The Kong family was the classic great lineage idealized by the
Confucian elite throughout the centuries, although the actual existence of such
lineages varied tremendously throughout Chinese history. Beginning with the
Song dynasty, it had another period of flourishing, thanks to Zhu Xi’s Family
Rituals. This movement was fueled during the Song as an answer to Buddhism,
and during the Ming and Qing as an answer to successful invasions by Mon-
gols and Manchus.
It may be a little hard to understand how China, at a cultural peak during
the Song dynasty, could have been so easily conquered, first by the Jurchen Jin,
then by the Mongols (1279). Chinese intellectuals, looking back on their own
history during the Ming and Qing, also brooded about it but came to a different
conclusion than modern historians. For the latter, the explanation, or part of it,
lies in the emphasis on high culture, on virtue, and on peace in the thought of
the shenshi and in the disdain in which wu, force or military prowess, was held.
Warfare and military might was what had always troubled society from antiq-