Social Sciences and History / Unit 5 SSH 0416 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Buddhism Reaches China: What the Anchor States and What the Exam Concludes
The idea
Sample question three asks what Buddhism's spread to China did, and the key is that it challenged the Confucian view of women. The anchor states four parts and never the sentence. First, from its section on India: Buddhism attracted women with the opportunity to reach enlightenment on an equal basis with men, where Brahmanist teaching had excluded them. Second: Confucianism, like Hinduism, fostered a patriarchal family in which women were subservient. Third: Buddhism spread along the Silk Roads into China; the Sui adopted it and the Tang strengthened it. Fourth: in the mid-ninth century the Tang cracked down on hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns, whom Confucian and Daoist leaders called an alien influence on the state, and Emperor Wuzong destroyed some forty thousand temples and shrines.
In practice
Given the question, choose the option that names a challenge to Confucian gender order; distractors will claim Buddhism reinforced Confucianism, replaced it, or arrived by sea. Reason from the parts: a religion promising women equal spiritual standing entered a society whose ruling philosophy held women subservient, and that philosophy's guardians reacted.
Where people slip
The synthesis is the exam's, not the anchor's, and Berger has no passage on it; this course records the gap rather than inventing the sentence. The second trap is overstating the challenge: the anchor also says Buddhism was patriarchal in practice, and Wuzong's persecution shows Confucian order winning the ninth-century round.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it