The Administration of Buddhism in China: A Study and Translation ...

was written in 1000,²⁷ the year before Zanning’s death in the fourth year of the xianping era (1001) according to the Shimen zhengtong, and the year prior to the death of the preface’s author, Wang Yucheng (954-1001). The connection of Zanning with Wang Yucheng, moreover, offers important suggestions regarding Zanning’s position at the Song court.

Wang Yucheng was a prominent leader in the early Song bureaucracy. In the emerging debate over the style of culture (wen 文) promoted at the Song court,²⁸ Wang Yucheng expressed a preference for “classical literature” (guwen 古文) as a means for promoting moral virtue (modeled on the prose of Han Yu 韓愈), seeking to make wen the vehicle for inculcating moral values. Wang Yucheng was opposed by another leading court official, Yang Yi 楊億 (974-1020), who did not believe that the purposes of literary writing should be circumscribed by moral criteria, and instead encouraged a breadth of literary learning rather than narrow adherence to classical sources.²⁹ By nature, the literary refinement model prized by Yang Yi was more accommodating toward non-classical literary forms, including Buddhist ones, than guwen, which ultimately judged all literary expression according to Confucian norms. It seems odd, then, that Buddhists were drawn to the guwen movement.³⁰ How was this so?

In the first place, the tension between advocates of Song culture in terms of guwen versus literary refinement was not as sharp in the early years of the dynasty as it would become later on. In the early Song it was still possible to maintain a preference for one position without denying the validity of the other. The reason for this is because in the early Song, following decades of internecine warfare, the preservation of wen itself was perceived to be at stake. The type of wen preferred was a secondary issue, as was the distinction between guwen and literary eclecticism. The early Song marked a return to civil order and literary culture after over a century of militarism. In this context, all men of the intellectual (shi 士) class had a common stake in the preservation of Song civil and literary culture. Against the background of this larger threat, the intellectual and literary preferences of individual groups seemed