This cultural plurality of early China was never fully
restored after
the Ch'in unification. Instead, the question was now which school of
thought would be established as the ideological partner of the imperial
order. Despite the initial dominance of the Legalists under the Ch'in,
it became clear under the succeeding Han dynasty, even as early as the
second century B.C., that the answer was to be the Confucians. A
Confucian education now became the key to entering the imperial
bureaucracy, and by T'ang times this link was institutionalized through
a formal examination system.
From time to time Confucian dominance might be threatened,
as it was to
an extent by the rise of Buddhism in the mid-first millennium A.D. as a
religion combining services to rulers with mass appeal; but the
Confucians turned the tables on the Buddhists, assisted by a dramatic
onslaught on the monasteries and their wealth mounted by the emperor in
845. Several centuries later, under the rule of the Mongol Yuan
dynasty, it looked for a while as if the Confucians might lose out
altogether; but in the early fourteenth century the Mongol ruler
restored the traditional examination system, so that officials were
once again chosen for their proven mastery of the Confucian tradition.
The major change that came out of these various commotions was the
formation and increasing dominance of what is known as Neo-
Confucianism, a reshaping of the old Confucian tradition to meet the
spiritual and philosophical challenge of Buddhism.
