Essays and Memorials
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A campaign to return prose to the directness of antiquity doubles as an attack on Buddhism, and lays the groundwork for the Confucian revival of the following centuries.
- prose reform argued as a moral rather than aesthetic question
- a transmission of the Way, broken and to be recovered
- direct attack on Buddhist institutional power, at personal cost
- the intellectual groundwork of the later Confucian revival
Han Yu argued against the ornate parallel prose of his day in favour of the plainer ancient style, holding that style and moral seriousness were the same question. His memorial protesting the reception of a Buddhist relic at court got him exiled and nearly executed. In essays on the origin of the Way and on the teacher he set out a transmission of Confucian truth broken since Mencius and needing recovery, an idea that became central to later Neo-Confucianism.
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