years. The pensions for retired officials after the age of seventy which
amounted to 50 per cent of the salary from the eighth century on, were
again raised, though widows did not receive benefits.


4 _Cultural situation (philosophy, religion, literature, painting)_

Culturally the eleventh century was the most active period China had so
far experienced, apart from the fourth century B.C. As a consequence of
the immensely increased number of educated people resulting from the
invention of printing, circles of scholars and private schools set up by
scholars were scattered all over the country. The various philosophical
schools differed in their political attitude and in the choice of
literary models with which they were politically in sympathy. Thus Wang
An-shih and his followers preferred the rigid classic style of Han Yü
(768-825) who lived in the T'ang period and had also been an opponent of
the monopolistic tendencies of pre-capitalism. For the Wang An-shih
group formed itself into a school with a philosophy of its own and with
its own commentaries on the classics. As the representative of the small
merchants and the small landholders, this school advocated policies of
state control and specialized in the study and annotation of classical
books which seemed to favour their ideas.

But the Wang An-shih school was unable to hold its own against the
school that stood for monopolist trade capitalism, the new philosophy
described as Neo-Confucianism or the Sung school. Here Confucianism and
Buddhism were for the first time united. In the last centuries,
Buddhistic ideas had penetrated all of Chinese culture: the slaughtering
of animals and the executions of criminals were allowed only on certain
days, in accordance with Buddhist rules. Formerly, monks and nuns had to