2 Searching for a New Foundation in the Eleventh Century

Let us return to our literatus as a young man in the 1050s. Let us sup- pose he had concluded that the Tang order could not be revived. Let us also suppose that he was ambitious, both for himself and for his coun- try, that he hoped not only to pass the examinations and hold office but also to define a common purpose for contemporary society. When he looked around for answers, he would have found disagreement among the literati over what the goals for the times should be and how they could be attained. This chapter traces the unfolding of these debates and locates the first Neo-Confucians within them by discussing three successive developments that shaped ideological arguments in the elev- enth century. The first trend was the politicization of learning. As the importance of examinations for literati political careers increased, so did calls for reforming the examinations. From the start, changing what the exami- nations tested was seen as a way of changing what literati learned and how they thought about politics, culture, and morality. These contro- versies were an outgrowth of an emerging national debate over what the Song should try to achieve, but they were also a cause of that de- bate, because careers depended on examination success.

43 44 Searching for a New Foundation

The second development was the undermining of the ideological foundation of empire. Layer by layer, mid-eleventh century intellectuals were taking apart ideas about history and the cosmos that in Tang times had justified empire. Although this deconstruction of the early imperial model did not produce a new consensus, in retrospect we can see that shared convictions about how the individual was connected to history and cosmos were taking shape. Neo-Confucians contributed to these new convictions, to be sure, but they were not their sole authors. The third element was the imposition of an ideological program on government. For most of the last fifty years of the Northern Song pe- riod, one group of literati—those associated with Wang Anshi’s New Policies, not the Neo-Confucians—held power at court and put their an- swer to the question of what the Song should accomplish into effect. The new social and economic policies aimed to transform society, and a na- tionwide school system and a new curriculum aimed to transform how literati learned, but they also split the literati into ideological factions. Neo-Confucianism was one of the alternatives to the New Policies pro- gram. Its eventual success represented a rejection of the New Policies path and had profound consequences for the rest of Chinese history.

Literati Opinion and the Civil Service Examinations In 1050 the court was led by men who were merely trying to cope: to maintain dynastic continuity with an emperor who lacked an heir, to balance the budget in the face of rising deficits, and to maintain de- fenses against the Khitans to the northeast and the Tanguts to the northwest. But literati knew that some of the most famous writers of the day had once proclaimed more ambitious goals. From the 1020s into the , they had accused the court of losing control over cir- cumstances and had called on the emperor to take charge or, at the very least, to bring to court those who wanted to accomplish something. Their rhetorical strategy had been to measure their own times against antiquity, not the great Tang empire, and to condemn the reigning ap- proach to government as a misplaced Daoistic ideal, inappropriate to a great state, of not interfering in society and letting the people take care of themselves. (989–1052), the leader of this group, had argued that this was not the time for a quietist vision of rulership: in