ian scholars or literati.
Though no one would think of calling them priests, yet they may offer
official sacrifices, like Roman magistrates. Though they are
contemptuous of popular superstition, yet they embody the popular
ideal. It is the pride of a village to produce a scholar. But the
scholarship of the literati is purely Confucian: Buddhist and Taoist
learning have no part in it.

The priest, whether Buddhist or Taoist, is not in the mind of the
people the repository of learning and law. He is not in religious
matters the counterpart of the secular arm, but rather a private
practitioner, duly licensed but of no particular standing. But he is
skilful in his own profession: he has access to the powers who help,
pity and console, and even the sceptic seeks his assistance when
confronted with the dangers of this world and the next.

The student of Chinese history may object that at many periods,
notably under the Yuan dynasty, the Buddhist clergy were officially
recognized as an educational body and even received the title of
Kuo-shih or teacher of the people. This is true. Such recognition by
no means annihilated the literati, but it illustrates the decisive
influence exercised by the Emperor and the court. We have, on the one
side, a learned official class, custodians of the best national ideals
but inclined to reject emotion and speculation as well as
superstition: on the other, two priesthoods, prone to superstition but
legitimately strong in so far as they satisfied the emotional and
speculative instincts. The literati held persistently, though
respectfully, to the view that the Emperor should be a Confucianist
pure and simple, but Buddhism and Taoism had such strong popular
support that it was always safe and often politic for an Emperor to
patronize them. Hence an Emperor of personal convictions was able to
turn the balance, and it must be added that Buddhism often flourished
in the courts of weak and dissolute Emperors who were in the hands of
women and eunuchs. Some of these latter were among its most
distinguished devotees.

All Chinese religions agreed in accepting the Emperor as head of the
Church, not merely titular but active. He exercised a strange
prerogative of creating, promoting and degrading deities. Even within
the Buddhist sphere he regulated the incarnations of Bodhisattvas in
the persons of Lamas and from time to time re-edited the canon[573] or
added new works to it. This extreme Erastianism