Emperor Wu of Northern Zhou

The proscription of 574 was not a sudden act, and the process that produced it is better documented than the ban itself. From 567 a former monk, Wei Yuansong, submitted memorials arguing that the true assembly of the Buddha is the whole realm and needs no separate institution to house it, and that monasteries, ordination and clerical exemption should therefore be dissolved into the ordinary population. From 569 the court held a series of assemblies at which the merits of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism were argued before the throne and ranked.

The emperor commissioned assessments. One of them, a report on Daoism, survives as a hostile catalogue of the inconsistencies and borrowings the author found in Daoist scripture; its Buddhist counterpart was produced in the same exercise. The framing question was practical: which of the teachings, if any, should the state sponsor as it prepared to unify the north and then the whole country. The answer arrived at in 574 was neither of them.

The ban was accordingly even-handed in form, striking Daoist establishments alongside Buddhist ones, which distinguishes it from the later Tang persecution that spared Daoism. The reasoning was fiscal and political as much as doctrinal. A monastic population is exempt from tax and from conscription, monastic land is outside the register, and a state preparing for a war of unification wants both. The emperor was also plainly attracted to a Confucian account of the state in which the ruler mediates between Heaven and the people directly, without an independent clergy standing between them.

The measures of 574 dissolved the monastic communities of the Northern Zhou. Clergy were sent back to lay life and to the tax registers, images were broken up, scriptures were destroyed, and the land and buildings passed to the state. The emperor did not attempt to abolish the teachings as such: an academy was established where selected scholars of both traditions were to continue studying under state supervision, which shows that what was being suppressed was the institution rather than the doctrine.

The conquest of Northern Qi in 577 doubled the reach of the policy, and the figures reported by later Buddhist historians for that extension are very large, in the millions of clergy returned to lay life and the tens of thousands of establishments taken. Those numbers come from sources hostile to the emperor and written afterwards, and modern historians treat them as indicating scale rather than as counts.

The reversal was quick. The emperor died in 578 at thirty-six, his successor restored both religions in 579, and within a decade the Sui had unified China under a dynasty that made spectacular Buddhist patronage a founding policy, distributing relics across the empire in a deliberate echo of Ashoka. The lasting effect of the proscription was on Buddhist thinking rather than on Buddhist survival: the destruction was one of the events that gave weight to the idea of the decline of the dharma, the doctrine that the teaching itself degenerates over historical time, and the movement that grew out of that idea in the following decades took the persecution as its evidence.