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

Impact

Han Yu's piece had little immediate impact, other than his exile. Emperor Xianzong did not end his sponsorship of ceremonies venerating the relics. The imperial family continued to present donations to the Dharma Gate Monastery until the final years of the dynasty. However, the memorial did provide justification for Confucians who opposed Buddhism's social, political, and economic influence. In 845 the imperial court took action against many wealthy monasteries—confiscating land and wealth and returning approximately two hundred fifty thousand monks and nuns to taxable lay life. Part of the justification was that Buddhism was harming the society, as Han Yu had argued. That justification was a veneer, however, over economic motivations of a court that was increasingly unable to collect taxes and that needed cash to maintain campaigns against rebellious governors-general.

The longer-term impact was that Han Yu was credited by later Confucian scholars as the instigator of a Confucian revival. In the subsequent Song Dynasty (960–1279), when Neo-Confucianism came to dominate intellectual life, Han Yu was cited as the person who was able to recapture the ancient ideals of classical Confucianism embodied in the works of Confucius and the later philosopher Mencius. Han Yu was held up as a paragon of Confucian values: He was a successful scholar and poet, a successful official who stuck to his moral vision despite the threat of exile or worse, and a successful head of a large family.

The memorial also needs to be seen in the larger context of Han Yu's Confucian project. He promoted a style of learning that focused on classical texts. Doing so, he believed, rekindled the traditional moral values that linked private cultivation with public service: To become educated obliged one to serve in office, as Confucius had argued. Once in office, one had to employ the moral values of the classical Confucian texts. Han Yu advocated close study of the Four Books—Analects, Mencius, Doctrine of the Mean, and Great Learning—as the repository of Confucian values. These books and Han Yu's notion of reviving classical ideals became the cornerstone of the Neo-Confucian movement. Neo-Confucianism, in turn, became the ideology of the civil service examinations and the imperial bureaucracy until 1905.