Pieties and responsibilities: Buddhism and the Chinese literati, 780-1280

Late imperial China commences with the Sung dynasty (960-1279). My thesis asks: during this period of Confucian resurgence, how did literati treat the Buddhist faith? To answer this question, this study turns to the several hundred dedicatory inscriptions written by literati for Buddhist images and reconstructed monasteries. Plumbing these rich yet unexplored sources en masse offers an unparalleled glimpse into religious attitudes among educated, secular Chinese elites.; To provide a basis for comparison with earlier periods, the first chapter takes up inscriptions from the second half of the T'ang dynasty (763-907) and demonstrates that scholar-officials of the time viewed Buddhist monasteries as sacred places, toward which they largely adopted the perspective of the Buddhist clergy. The subsequent four chapters show how this sacerdotal view disappeared during the Sung, as literati reinterpreted on their own terms the spiritual puissance of Buddhism and Buddhist sites. Chapter Two illustrates that while literati continued to honor the faith, several took partisan roles in intra-Buddhist, doctrinal controversies. Chapter Three details Buddhism's ties with the imperial cult and depicts how court-patronized monasteries became places where scholar-officials manifested their fealty toward the dynasty. Chapter Four portrays how Buddhist sites could serve as vehicles for social criticism. A few militant Confucians condemned them as a social evil even as they commemorated them, while other literati extolled virtuous clergy and laypeople as models for commoners and literati alike. In Chapter Five, we see how Sung writers used Buddhist monasteries as venues to realize their filiality, recall their own pasts, and reflect on their ties with the faith.; The study concludes that despite the Confucian revival, Buddhism occupied an integral, manifold place in Sung literati culture. Educated Sung men offered the Buddhist religion no less reverence than had T'ang literati, but appropriated the faith as they saw fit, as part of their larger quest to impose order and coherence on a society undergoing epochal change.