Han Yu: “Memorial on the Buddha’s Bones”

About the Author

Han Yu was born into a relatively poor official family based in Luoyang, the second great city of Tang. His ambition was to become a high official. To achieve his goal, he pursued the cultural and literary education required of young men without good connections. This education, steeped in Confucian traditions, was the basis of the civil service examinations through which one qualified for official rank. Successful candidates needed to memorize volumes of classical texts and to train in poetry and prose styles required by the examinations' format. Han Yu immersed himself in texts and literature, so much so that he once compared himself to bookworms that lived and died in books. Han Yu passed the examinations but railed against a civil service recruiting system that valued stylistic composition over substantial policy formulation.

Once Han Yu was in office, his irascible personality led him into confrontation with other political factions at the court. Three times he was exiled for his outspoken critiques of those in power. Nevertheless, each time he was able to return to the capital and even ascend the bureaucratic ladder because of his abilities. When Han Yu wrote “A Memorial on the Buddha's Bones” in 819, the court was just coming out of a successful but expensive three-year war with a rebellious governor-general in the northeast. Han Yu had played a prominent diplomatic role in that campaign and had been rewarded with high office. However, when he witnessed what he considered the excessive extravagance of the ceremony welcoming the Buddhist relics to the imperial palace and the mortification of the flesh to which some devotees were driven, he harshly criticized Emperor Xianzong. Xianzong was incensed and wanted to execute Han Yu for his temerity, but other officials persuaded the emperor to commute the sentence to immediate exile. Exile meant assuming a remote post (more than twenty-five hundred miles from the capital) with his family. Along the way Han Yu's eleven-year-old daughter died of illness.

In exile Han Yu set up a Confucian school and encouraged Confucian political practices. As part of a general amnesty after Emperor Xianzong's death in 820, Han Yu was able to return to the capital and assume high office. He retired in 824 and died shortly thereafter.