bellion, but the text of the edicts, which include in the same condemnation native soothsayers and magicians, indicate that, whatever may have been the immediate occasion, the persecution, like many that followed, was animated by hostility to heterodoxy as such. The crisis was brief, and under the favour of the next king the temples and monasteries were rebuilt.

In the following centuries the Chinese histories record many memorials of ministers and other officials protesting against the alien religion as incompatible with genuine Chinese principles of society and government and numerous edicts of rulers intended to restrict its spread; but it is clear that these measures were not very thoroughly or persistently enforced. In 844 A. D., however, the emperor Wu Tsung inflicted on Buddhism a blow from which it never fully recovered. An investigation made by the board of sacrifices early in that year showed that there were then within the empire more than 4,600 Buddhist monasteries and 40,000 or more minor establishments. By imperial decrees the buildings, with a few specified exceptions, were to be destroyed, the bronze images, bells, and metal plates coined into money, the iron statues recast into agricultural implements, those of gold and silver melted and turned in to the auditors of the treasury. The extensive lands of the monasteries were sequestrated by the state; the 260,500 monks and nuns were ordered to return to the secular life; the convent serfs, to the number of 150,000, were similarly registered. These edicts embraced not only the Buddhists but the Nestorian Christians (Ta-ts'in) and the Mu-hu (Magians, Zoroastrians?) to the number of 3,000; the foreigners among these were to be sent back to their native country. A decree of the preceding year (843) had put both the Mo-ni (probably Manichæans) and the Buddhists among the Uigurs under the ban.

The indictment of Buddhism in these various memorials and decrees is substantially the same. It is a foreign religion of which nothing was known in the good old days;

since its introduction, in the time of the Han dynasty, evils and disorders of many kinds have afflicted the empire, and have been at their worst under the rulers who favoured the foreign faith. Its doctrines are heretical; that is, at variance with the teaching of the national religion and ethics as these are embodied in the Confucian literature, and are nonsense besides; the tales it gives out for veritable history are absurd fabrications; it promotes many superstitions, such as the worship of idols and the veneration of relics; it withdraws men and women from useful-and taxablelabours to a life of idleness; by playing on the superstitions of the masses, especially their fears of the hereafter, it persuades them to impoverish themselves to support these lazy drones and to provide means for the building and furnishing of the costly temples and pagodas; ever widening areas of the richest land are withdrawn from taxation by donations to the monasteries; the celibate ecclesiastics breed neither tillers of the soil nor soldiers for the king's armies; and, worst of all, it teaches sons to neglect their parents, neither serving them while living nor ministering to them when dead, and leaving no descendants to perpetuate the ancestral worship— religion, in a word, consists in not caring for anybody but yourself. From the point of view of religion, of morals, or of economics, Buddhism is a pernicious evil which must be extirpated.

Succeeding emperors somewhat mitigated the stringency of Wu Tsung's measures, allowing the rebuilding of the destroyed monasteries, not so much out of favour to Buddhism as from regard to the influence of the buildings on the natural and spiritual climate (Feng-shui); but the confiscated lands and goods were not restored. The legislation of later dynasties imposed onerous restrictions on Buddhism, limiting the number of monasteries, confining the right of ordination to a few of them, requiring a government licence to enter the order, and establishing a registration of ecclesiastical persons. Under one such law, in 955 A. D., 3,336 religious houses were demolished because they could not pro

duce an imperial charter; 2,694 were left standing. The number of registered monks and nuns was returned at 61,200.

Under the Mongol rule of Kublai Khan and his successors (1280-1368), Buddhism was freed from external restraints, and the number of monasteries rapidly increased, while the foreign priests, chiefly from Tibet, who came in the wake of the Mongols, did something to revive Chinese Buddhism from the low estate into which it had sunk in the preceding centuries. The restoration of native supremacy under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) was accompanied by a national reaction, in which Buddhism had to pay the penalty for Mongol favour. The first of the line, T'ai Tsu, though he had himself been a Buddhist monk, was hardly seated on the throne when he renewed the restrictive laws, and in the following years made them more and more stringent. The same policy was followed by his successors, one of whom decreed that ordinations should only be held once in three years, and that only a limited number of persons in any department or district might receive consecration; another, in the fifteenth century, allowed ordination to be administered only once in ten years. Severe penalties were prescribed for violations or evasions of the law. The later Ming emperors treated all heretical sects with great severity; Buddhism and Lamaism were subjected with the rest to a persecution which in 1566 provoked a formidable rebellion.

The Manchu chiefs who profited by these internal dissensions to make themselves masters of the northern provinces and eventually (in 1644) of the empire were not more favourably disposed toward Buddhism. The statutes of that dynasty, agreeing substantially with the Ming code, made the building or rebuilding of monasteries and the admission of members to the order very difficult. As a result, the number who have actually received the tonsure is comparatively small. The much larger class of so-called Buddhist priests, who, though unconsecrated, constitute a kind of secular clergy, wearing a distinctive dress and performing

religious rites, particularly for the benefit of the souls of the dead, live among the people, marry, and possess property, eat meat and fish, and are consequently, from the point of view of the Buddhist discipline, mere laymen. They exert all the greater influence, however, through their intimate association with their neighbours, and to them the amalgamation of Buddhist ideas and practices with the old religion of the Chinese people is largely due.

In its antipathy to the sects, the government has repeatedly taken measures to restrict or reduce the number of this irregular clergy by forbidding them to take pupils, or more than a single pupil, and requiring them to register and obtain certificates from the authorities. More radical edicts were issued in the eighteenth century, by which they were to be compelled either to procure ordination, if the government would grant them leave, and retire to the monasteries, or to abandon their clerical pretensions altogether; but this law was soon relaxed.

In its prosperous times Chinese Buddhism was divided into many sects, representing various Indian schools or native offshoots from them. In the decadence of Buddhism under the Manchu dynasty the distinctions between the schools have been mainly obliterated; regular Buddhism in modern China is the result of a fusion of the various Mahayanist sects, in which the Vinaya and Dhyana elements are dominant; while the secular clergy, if they may be so called, who attend funerals and read sutras for the souls of the dead represent the Pure Land school, with its Western Paradise to be gained by calling on the name of Amitabha, and this doctrine has also, more than any other, influenced the salvationist sects.

To avoid repetition the history and distinctive tenets of various schools of Chinese Buddhism are reserved for discussion in a later chapter on Buddhism in Japan.1 Here we shall confine ourselves to a brief survey of the present state of Buddhism in China.

1See below, pp. 119 f., 122 f., 125 ff.

Mahayana Buddhism is a universal religion in the largest meaning of the name; its aim is the salvation not merely of mankind, but of all sentient beings. The chief agents in this great salvation are the Buddhas; the goal of the Mahayanist is therefore Buddhahood. The monasteries are institutions in which men are in training for this high mission, and at the same time endeavouring to promote the spiritual and temporal welfare of others by pious exercises. The methods employed to attain this end are manifold, and adapted to the varied capacities or predilections of the seekers. The mendicant friar of the early days of Buddhism has, however, disappeared, and the eremite ascetic in his solitary cell or cave is rare. The monks live in their simple fashion from the revenues of the monastery, from pious donations, or from collections made under the direction of the abbot.

Members are received into the order and advanced to the successive degrees of postulant, novice, monk, saint, and Bodhisattva, or Buddha-candidate, by a series of ordinations which were formerly separated by considerable intervals of time, but are now completed within a few days. The earlier steps in the candidate's progress correspond to the old Buddhist rule, and are therefore found in all branches of the church; the last is distinctively Mahayanist. The novices bind themselves to observe the Buddhist decalogue; the monks promise obedience to the discipline of the order as set forth in the Pratimoksha. The Vinaya in Four Chapters, originally the recension of the school of Dharmagupta, is now universally accepted in China, though it is, in fact, little studied. At the final stage, the aspirants vow that they will conform their lives in all respects to the fiftyeight precepts for Bodhisattvas contained in the Sutra called "Brahma's Net." This, as the higher law, is the actual guide of the Chinese monks in the path of Buddhahood. No Sanskrit text of this sutra is known, and no reference to it has been discovered in China before the eighth century.