Social services for the officials were also extended.  Already from the eighth century on, offices were closed every tenth day and during holidays, a total of almost eighty days per year.  Even criminals got some leave and exiles had the right of a home leave once every three 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 Yue (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 greet the emperor as all citizens had to do; now they were exempt from this rule.  On the other hand, the first Sung emperor was willing to throw himself to the earth in front of the Buddha statues, but he was told he did not have to do it because he was the “Buddha of the present time” and thus equal to the God.  Buddhist priests participated in the celebrations on the emperor’s birthday, and emperors from time to time gave free meals to large crowds of monks.  Buddhist thought entered the field of justice:  in Sung time we hear complaints that judges did not apply the laws and showed laxity, because they hoped to gain religious merit by sparing the lives of criminals.  We had seen how the main current of Buddhism had changed from a revolutionary to a reactionary doctrine.  The new greater gentry of the eleventh century adopted a number of elements of this reactionary Buddhism and incorporated them