Cen Wenben(岑文本): The Chancellor Who Wanted to Abolish Money
Paul Peng
He wrote the edicts that governed the Tang empire at its zenith. He was the trusted confidant of Emperor Taizong, the greatest ruler of the age. He held the seals of state. He drafted the laws. He managed the machinery of a civilisation that stretched from the Korean peninsula to the Silk Road.
And he believed, with the full conviction of his Taoist philosophy, that civilisation was a mistake.
Cen Wenben (岑文本, 595–645 CE) was the chancellor who quoted Laozi to argue that money should be abolished. He held that craftsmanship was a source of national weakness. He insisted that commerce—buying, selling, trading, profiting—corrupted the human soul and destabilised the social order. He was not a hermit. He was one of the most powerful men in the Tang dynasty, and he used his position to advocate for an economic policy rooted in the most radical passage of the Tao Te Ching: “Abandon wisdom, discard cleverness, and the people will benefit a hundredfold.”
The Emperor’s Pen
Cen Wenben was born in 595 CE in Jiyang, Nanyang—present-day Xinye County in Henan. He was brilliant, read everything, and wrote with a clarity and speed that made older officials take notice. When Li Shimin—the future Emperor Taizong—was consolidating his power, he gathered the finest literary minds of the age to staff his administration. Cen Wenben was among them.
He rose through the ranks of the Palace Secretariat—the nerve centre of the Tang government. He became the official who drafted imperial edicts, then Vice Minister of the Secretariat, then Viscount of Jiangling. Emperor Taizong trusted him absolutely. When the emperor went to war, Cen Wenben went with him. It was on campaign against the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo, in 645 CE, that Cen Wenben fell ill and died in Youzhou—exhausted by the relentless demands of running an empire from a military camp. The emperor wept at his bedside. He had given his life to the Tang state. And all the while, he believed that the state should stop doing most of what it did.
The Debate on Abolishing Money
The great policy document that preserves Cen Wenben’s Taoist philosophy is his Reply to the Issue of Abolishing Money (《答废錢议》). Some officials, concerned about the moral dangers of commerce, proposed abolishing money altogether and returning to a barter economy. Cen Wenben supported the proposal, and he grounded his support in the Tao Te Ching.
He begins with a statement of first principles:
“Abandoning wisdom and discarding cleverness is the supreme virtue of a sage. Breaking away from embellishment to return to simplicity is the noble plan of ancient kings.”
The first sentence is a direct quotation from Laozi, chapter nineteen: “Abandon sageliness, discard wisdom, and the people will benefit a hundredfold.” This is one of the most radical passages in all of Chinese philosophy. Laozi is not calling for reform. He is calling for the dismantling of civilisation—the abandonment of the very categories that define human culture. Cen Wenben takes this as his governing principle. The “supreme virtue of a sage” is not to govern well. It is to un-govern.
The War on Commerce
From this principle, Cen Wenben derives his economic policy. Agriculture is the only legitimate sector, because it is the only one that works with nature rather than against it. Commerce is the opposite:
“When merchants engage in multiple schemes, poverty arises. When scholars possess numerous skills, scarcity follows. There has never been a case where exalting carving and craftsmanship, or competing in luxury and indulgence, could bring about national stability, family security, the promotion of virtuous customs, or the cultivation of moral education.”
Cen Wenben is arguing that the very act of buying low and selling high corrupts the human heart. “Multiple schemes” means calculation, manipulation, the endless ingenuity of the marketplace. Both destroy the wholeness that is the natural human state. His final verdict is uncompromising:
“We should reject luxury and beauty and promote simplicity. Carved jade and cast gold should be discarded like weeds. Those who wield hoes and plows should be honoured as virtuous. Then agriculture will thrive. Diligent farmers will be encouraged. Laziness will be reformed. Idle people will naturally disappear.”
The Paradox of the Imperial Taoist
Cen Wenben died serving an emperor who embodied everything his philosophy rejected. Emperor Taizong was a builder, a conqueror, a lawgiver, a patron of the arts. He built Chang’an into the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the world. His reign was a monument to the very “wisdom and cleverness” that Cen Wenben, quoting Laozi, urged the sovereign to abandon.
And Cen Wenben himself was the instrument of that wisdom. Every edict he drafted, every policy he helped shape—all of it was an exercise in the kind of administrative intelligence that his own philosophy declared harmful. He knew this. His Reply is not a naïve proposal. It is a statement of the ideal, written by a man who understood perfectly well that the ideal was unattainable. The Tang empire was not going to abolish money. But the ideal had to be stated—because without it, there was no standard by which to measure how far the world had fallen.
Why This Matters for the Living Tradition
From a Zhengyi perspective, Cen Wenben represents the purest statement of the Taoist political ideal—and the clearest demonstration of its limits. The ideal is genuine. The Zhengyi tradition has always valued simplicity, frugality, and harmony with natural rhythms. But the Zhengyi tradition also knows that the ideal cannot be imposed by decree. Cen Wenben wanted to legislate simplicity. The Zhengyi approach is different: it cultivates simplicity in the individual heart, offers it through ritual and teaching, and trusts that a community of transformed individuals will gradually transform the world around them.
The chancellor who wanted to abolish money and the priest who performs the quiet liturgy are working on the same problem. The difference is not in the goal. It is in the method. To explore more about Taoism in the Tang dynasty and its living legacy, see our guide to Laozi and the art of minimal government.
What the Chancellor Left Behind
Cen Wenben died on campaign, far from home, in the service of an emperor whose methods he could not reconcile with his principles. His collected works in sixty volumes are mostly lost. What survives—the Reply to the Issue of Abolishing Money, fragments of other memorials, poems and essays gathered in the Complete Prose of the Tang—is the record of a mind that held the highest office and the deepest doubt about the value of office.
He was not a hero of Taoism. He was a chancellor who read Laozi and could not unsee what he had read. And his Reply remains, fourteen centuries later, as a standing challenge to every government that believes its task is to do more, build more, manage more: Abandon wisdom, discard cleverness, and the people will benefit a hundredfold.
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