were required
to be melted down and delivered to the government, even those in private
possession. Two hundred and sixty thousand, five hundred monks were to
become ordinary citizens once more. Until then monks had been free of
taxation, as had millions of acres of land belonging to the temples and
leased to tenants or some 150,000 temple slaves.

Thus the edict of 843 must not be described as concerned with religion:
it was a measure of compulsion aimed at filling the government coffers.
All the property of foreigners and a large part of the property of the
Buddhist Church came into the hands of the government. The law was not
applied to Taoism, because the ruling gentry of the time were, as so
often before, Confucianist and at the same time Taoist. As early as 846
there came a reaction: with the new emperor, Confucians came into power
who were at the same time Buddhists and who now evicted some of the
Taoists. From this time one may observe closer co-operation between
Confucianism and Buddhism; not only with meditative Buddhism (Dhyana) as
at the beginning of the T'ang epoch and earlier, but with the main
branch of Buddhism, monastery Buddhism (Vinaya). From now onward the
Buddhist doctrines of transmigration and retribution, which had been
really directed against the gentry and in favour of the common people,
were turned into an instrument serving the gentry: everyone who was
unfortunate in this life must show such amenability to the government
and the gentry that he would have a chance of a better existence at
least in the next life. Thus the revolutionary Buddhist doctrine of
retribution became a reactionary doctrine that was of great service to
the gentry. One of the Buddhist Confucians in whose works this revised
version makes its appearance most clearly was Niu Seng-yu, who was at
once summoned back to court in 846 by the new emperor. Three new large
Buddhist sects came into existence in the T'ang period. One of them, the
school of the Pure Land (_Ching-t'u tsung_, since 641) required of its
mainly lower class adherents only the permanent invocation of the Buddha
Amithabha who would secure them a place in the "Western Paradise"--a
place without social classes and economic troubles. The cult of
Maitreya, which was always more revolutionary, receded for a while.

8 _First successful peasant revolt. Collapse of the empire_

The chief sufferers from the continual warfare of the military
governors, the sanguinary