| Chapter 1: | The Life and Times of Zanning |
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109 suggests the complicated situation at the Song court regarding Buddhist-Confucian relations. The story involves an imperial procession to Xiangguo Monastery 相國寺 (Monastery for Assisting the Country) to worship the Buddha. When Emperor Taizu went before the image of the Buddha to burn incense he asked Zanning, “Should I perform prostrations or not?” to which Zanning responded, “The Buddha of the present need not perform prostrations to the Buddha of the past.” Zanning being widely learned, eloquent, and unsurpassed in rhetorical skill, the emperor concurred with his opinion, and with a smile nodded in agreement. As a result, says Ouyang, it became the set policy of the Song government from then on to offer incense but not perform prostrations.
This story goes to the heart of Zanning’s “dual allegiances” and dramatizes how complicated the situation at the Song court was for Zanning. The reemergence of an aggressive form of Confucianism was bound to provoke a reevaluation of the role that Buddhism should play in government affairs. One of the areas most affected was government participation in Buddhist rituals. Zanning, as the leading official at the Song court in charge of Buddhist affairs, was caught in the middle of this reevaluation. The issue was the Buddhist role in government ritual. The question was what role Zanning advocated: one in which the status of the emperor was acknowledged as equal to that of the Buddha, or one in which the superiority of the Buddha’s status was openly accepted.
The image of Zanning as a compliant Buddhist, willing to concede that the emperor’s status was the same as the Buddha’s, shows Zanning cowering, in Buddhist eyes, before imperial authority. In this view, Zanning’s allegiance to Buddhism is definitely lukewarm and not suitable for a model “defender of the faith.” The final section of the Orthodox Transmission is written to counter this impression. This is done in two ways. In the first place the Orthodox Transmission, citing the impossibility of Zanning serving at the court of Taizu (Zanning did not join the Song court until the reign of Taizu’s successor, Taizong, after Taizu had passed away), questions the veracity of the whole account: “The words cited in