| Chapter 1: | The Life and Times of Zanning |
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trivial and insignificant. As the prospect of continued stability increased, however, so did the importance of differences that separated members of the Song bureaucracy ideologically. The implications of Zanning’s association with guwen on his style of scholarship and view of history will be considered below.
Even so, Wang Yucheng’s admiration for Zanning is odd in light of his general antipathy toward Buddhism. Wang’s attitude toward Buddhism is apparent in the fourth of a five-point memorial to Emperor Zhenzong written shortly after the emperor assumed the throne in 997. The thrust of Wang’s argument is a familiar one: the Buddhist clergy represents an additional class in Chinese society, idle and unproductive, that puts unnecessary and unaffordable strains on the Chinese economy. Wang compares the Buddhist clergy to the military, which established itself, according to Wang, in the aftermath of the villainous exploits of China’s first emperor, the Legalist Qin Shihuangdi. This put added strains on the four “legitimate” orders in Chinese society according to Confucian criteria–– scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants––and increasingly impoverished the farmers, the productive class upon which Chinese society depended. The advent of Buddhism in China from the Han, argues Wang, added a sixth order, the Buddhist clergy, which also depended on the agricultural production of the farmers for their support and led to even further impoverishment. Furthermore, according to Wang, Buddhism attempts to rationalize its existence on the basis of false spiritual claims.31 Wang’s refrain sounds familiar themes in Confucian diatribes against Buddhism, and those launched by the virulent guwen champion of the late Tang, Han Yu, who charged that Buddhism was non-Chinese (“no more than a cult of the barbarian peoples”), subversive of public morality (“our old ways [will] be corrupted, our customs violated”), and based on superstition (“How then, when he [the Buddha] has long been dead, could his rotten bones...be rightly admitted to the palace?”).32
Wang’s attitude toward Buddhism was not isolated. Many scholars who served at the early Song court were drawn from the ranks of officials who