| Chapter 1: | The Life and Times of Zanning |
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Zanning’s approach.20 While the attempt to establish harmony and reconcile differences between respective positions presented considerable challenges, it was not a problem for Zanning personally. First and foremost, Zanning was a Buddhist and was identified as such at the Song court. The positions he occupied in the bureaucracy were directly connected to his Buddhist allegiance. He was also a civil servant and literatus with the political responsibilities and social obligations that such positions imply. The arrangement was a natural one as Zanning envisioned it.21 He was merely following the precedent of leading Buddhist academics of the past, promoting Buddhism with an aim “of gaining for the clergy status and recognition in the favored class of Chinese society.”22 The problem was that not everyone agreed with the arrangement of allegiances suggested by Zanning. The harmony conceived by Zanning as Buddhist first and Official second was a potential pretext for conflict to others in the bureaucracy who did not share his Buddhist allegiance. It also proved problematic to Buddhists who were critical of Zanning’s close cooperation with the secular establishment.
Ultimately, as Chinese society redefined itself in terms of its Confucian heritage, the duality of Zanning’s identity became problematic. In spite of his broad learning, Zanning could never win full admiration as a Confucian scholar. The situation was not much better with Buddhism. As Buddhist influence waned in intellectual circles, a new popular-based Buddhist practice displaced the old scholasticism. In the eyes of the new Buddhist sectarian movements, Zanning appeared somewhat tainted by the strong secular influences over his thought. Zanning’s divided legacy is reflected in the biographical accounts of his life.
Numerous sources contain biographies of Zanning. Of these, I would like to isolate two as especially important for suggesting the duality of Zanning’s character: the secular account of Zanning’s achievements by Wang Yucheng 王禹偁, the Zuojie senglu tonghui dashi wenji xu 左街僧錄通慧大師文集序 (Preface to the Collected Works of the Great Master ‘Comprehensive Wisdom’ [Zanning], the Buddhist Registrar of the Left