Let's briefly review the context in which these new ideas about government
emerged in the 11th century.
Recall in the last sequence, we talked about the changes
that took place in Chinese society, economy, in the world,
in fact, that China inhabited between the eighth century when the Tang
Dynasty was at the peak of its powers before the An Lushan rebellion
and the 11th century.
The new dynasty, the Song Dynasty in this case, which was founded in 960
had now come to exist in a multi-state world.
It wasn't simply that there was a Chinese dynasty
and tribal peoples around the edges.
Now, those tribal peoples had learned how to build states.
And in the Northeast, there were the Khitans,
who had created the Liao Dynasty, and in the Northwest
there were the Tanguts, who had created the Xia Dynasty.
Domestically, there had been great changes as well.
Now, 50% or more of the population lived in the South.
And by the 1070s, probably the bulk of officials-- certainly the bulk
of officials who were making policy-- were coming from the South.
The South was different from the North, which had lost population.
The South had a riverine economy, that is,
water transport was easily available and cheap.
It was commercializing and commerce was playing an ever larger role.
And in fact, in the Song Dynasty for the first time taxes on commerce
start to become a larger share of government revenues than taxes on land.
It was a world socially without great clans.
The aristocratic or state aristocracy that
had come into existence during the medieval period
and survived well into the Tang Dynasty to the very end
had now disappeared for reasons we've already talked about.
And instead, there's a new group of people.
People we call literati, but importantly,
people who are selected for government on the basis of learning.
The world had changed, and the challenge in mid 11th century
was, what should government do in this very different world?
I've said it was the people who replaced the great clans were
people we called literati.
That's how we translate the Chinese word "shi."
It's a word we've come across a number of times since the times of Confucius.
A word that has gone through Chinese history
as the common term for the elite, for that particular top layer,
small top layer of society that was both a cultural elite and a social elite
and a political elite.
I've translated the term "shi" as literati because by the 11th century,
a growing number of people are starting to see that what makes one
a shi is not heredity, not the family you came from,
which would have been true in Tang, but the learning you have acquired.
Learning that can be proven and demonstrated, and above all, tested.
In the late 10th century, the government decides
that given that there are no longer aristocrats, no longer families
of long service to government, that they're going to recruit officials
through an examination called the civil service examination.
These would be people who entered government on the basis of learning
and that learning would be tested by competitive examinations.
And this is important to keep in mind because when Wang and Sima and Su
passed, what the examination tested was, in fact, one's literary ability.
The very first test in the examinations was
a test of your ability to compose poems.
To give you some sense of how literatus saw themselves, let me tell you
a joke, a literati joke from the late 11th century.
Well, it doesn't make much sense to tell a joke without an audience
so here we're going to show you a clip of how I told it once in class
and you'll see how the class reacts to it.
So let me tell you a story, which I actually
read in a book written around 1090 or something like this.
And this story is of a prefect-- remember,
there are provinces, prefectures, and counties.
A prefecture would be an area around the size of Rhode Island, for example.
And the prefect is like the governor of Rhode Island--
has just arrived at his post and he goes to the major Buddhist temple
to say hello to the abbot, who is one of these Chan or Zen abbots.
And then the abbot receives him.
The abbot is sitting up on a chair on the dais in the temple courtyard,
and the prefect comes in, da dum, da dum, big retinue and everything.
And the abbot says, hey, come on up, sit down.
Doesn't go through a whole elaborate ceremony.
And then they're chatting and then 50 minutes later some military guy
comes in from the local garrison.
And the abbot gets off his chair, gets off the dais,
walks down and bows and scrapes and goes through a whole
politeness routine to this military guy.
The prefect is really, really pissed off.
And the abbot comes back, and he says to the abbot,
how come when I came in you greeted me so impolitely?
You just sat here, and now this lowly military man comes in
and you do through this whole elaborate routine of politeness.
And the abbot says, oh, he says, you know, impoliteness is true politeness.
Politeness is impoliteness, a really zen answer.
And so the prefect goes over and starts to slap him upside the head saying,
hitting is nonhitting.
Nonhitting is hitting, right?
Well, every story has a point.
There's no such thing as a free joke in a lecture.
So what's the point?
There are two implications to this.
The first is the tension between military and civil.
We had gone back to the period after the Tang Dynasty,
military figures had the power.
They may not have always had the cultural prestige,
but they certainly had the power.
What's happened now is that our prefect, a civil official,
is making it very clear to the monk that civil officials have
precedence over the military.
So that's a political change.
Who controls power?
What kind of government is this to be?
It's going to be a civil government, and civil interests
will triumph over military interests.
The second issue is ideological.
The monk is being dismissed by the official on the grounds
that he's just talking nonsense.
He can't say what he's saying.
The official doesn't say it.
The official regards himself as a good Confucian scholar official.
The monk is a Buddhist, a Chan Buddhist, a Zen Buddhist.
Ideologically speaking, if we had gone back to the eighth century,
really certainly the first half of the eighth century,
the leading philosophical voices in society would have been Buddhist.
Today, in the 11th century, it's different.
The leading voices now are starting to become Confucians,
a new kind of Confucianism, which says our ideology, our ideas,
ought to be guiding us as we take control of government
and try to figure out what government should do.
So the literati had started to think about their role in society
in the 11th century, and I think that's the subtext of this joke I just told.
And they're asking how government can serve the common good.
To be honest about this, we can trace these attitudes back
to the Tang Dynasty.
One of the first people to talk about it and talk
about in a new view of government and the role learning should play
was a man named Han Yu, who's known to us as the founder of the Ancient Style
Movement, the ancient style in literature,
turning back to antiquity to find models for the present
and representing those models through your own literary style
and the content of what you write.
Han Yu may not have had so much influence in his own times,
but in the 11th century he became, in some sense, one of the most important
of literary intellectuals.
Ouyang Xiu, for example, whose works you're going to read in a second
as well, turned back to Han Yu for a model.
Liu Zongyuan, another Tang ancient style writer contemporary with Han Yu,
also was influential in the 11th century.
Wang Anshi was one of the people recommended by Ouyang Xiu.
Su Shi was one of the people recommended by Ouyang Xiu.
And Sima Guang was a person who was deeply
suspicious of all these literary types with their ideas of transforming
the world through government and taking their models from antiquity.
So we're going to stop now, and we'd like you to read some of the writings
by Ouyang Xiu and Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan,
and tell us what you think about them.