Had this Buddha come to our
capital in the flesh, your Majesty might have received him with a few
words of admonition, giving him a banquet and a suit of clothes,
before sending him out of the country with an escort of soldiers.

"But what are the facts? The bone of a man long since dead and
decomposed is to be admitted within the precincts of the Imperial
Palace. Confucius said, 'respect spiritual beings but keep them at a
distance.' And so when princes of old paid visits of condolence, it
was customary to send a magician in advance with a peach-rod in his
hand, to expel all noxious influences before the arrival of his
master. Yet now your Majesty is about to introduce without reason a
disgusting object, personally taking part in the proceedings without
the intervention of the magician or his wand. Of the officials not one
has raised his voice against it: of the Censors[666] not one has
pointed out the enormity of such an act. Therefore your servant,
overwhelmed with shame for the Censors, implores your Majesty that
these bones may be handed over for destruction by fire or water,
whereby the root of this great evil may be exterminated for all time
and the people may know how much the wisdom of your Majesty surpasses
that of ordinary men."[667]

The Emperor became furious when he read the memorial and wished to
execute its author on the spot. But Han-Yu's many friends saved him
and the sentence was commuted to honourable banishment as governor of
a distant town. Shortly afterwards the Emperor died, not of Buddhism,
but of the elixir of immortality which made him so irritable that his
eunuchs put him out of the way. Han-Yu was recalled but died the next
year. Among his numerous works was one called Yuan Tao, much of which
was directed against non-Confucian forms of religion. It is still a
thesaurus of arguments for the opponents of Buddhism and, let it be
added, of Christianity.

It is not surprising that the prosperity of the Buddhist church should
have led to another reaction, but it came not so much from the
literary and sceptical class as from Taoism which continued to enjoy
the favour of the T'ang Emperors, although they died one after another
of drinking the elixir. The Emperor Wu-Tsung was more definitely
Taoist than his predecessors. In 843 he suppressed Manichaeism and in
845, at the instigation of his Taoist advisers, he dealt Buddhism the
severest blow which it had yet received. In a trenchant edict[668] he