Xiao Yan took the throne in 502 as a competent general and administrator, and within a few years had issued a public declaration renouncing Daoism and committing himself to Buddhism. What followed was not private devotion but a programme. He took the bodhisattva precepts in a public ceremony, adopted the style of a bodhisattva emperor, lectured on scripture himself, wrote commentaries, and convened assemblies at which hundreds of thousands were said to have gathered. Monasteries were built and endowed across the south on a scale that later critics blamed for the exhaustion of the treasury.
Four times, in 527, 529, 546 and 547, he went to the Tongtai monastery and gave himself to it as a servant of the community. On each occasion the court had to buy him back, at a price fixed in the hundreds of millions of cash. The gesture had a precise theological point: the emperor made himself property of the sangha, and the state then redeemed him, which converted the imperial treasury into merit and dramatized the subordination of the throne to the order. It also, unavoidably, converted the imperial treasury into cash for a particular monastery.
The end was grim. A defecting northern general, Hou Jing, was accepted at the Liang court, rebelled, and besieged the capital. The city fell in 549 and the emperor, in his mid-eighties, died of starvation and neglect while the rebel held his palace. Chinese historiography of the following centuries treated him as the standing example of a ruler whose piety cost him his state, and hostile commentators cited him for generations as the argument against imperial patronage of Buddhism.