What Could Religion and Culture Do for a Ruler?

LECTURE LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Describe the religious, social, and economic roles of Buddhist monasteries in Tang society, and explain why their wealth attracted both patronage and suspicion.
2. Explain how Buddhism adapted to Chinese life through stories such as Mulian's, pilgrimage networks, and the Chan school.
3. Analyze how Empress Wu combined court politics, Confucian ritual, Buddhist prophecy, and new officials to claim a throne no woman had held.
4. Evaluate the hostile sources on Wu and separate documented actions from later caricature.
5. Explain how Xuanzong both patronized and regulated religion, and how court patronage and poetry connected culture to political power.

Introductory Framing

In 690 a woman in her sixties declared herself emperor of a new Zhou dynasty. Her supporters circulated a Buddhist scripture that seemed to prophesy a female ruler, and she ordered a temple in every prefecture to spread its message. She had also performed Confucian state sacrifices, built a grand ritual hall, and filled government offices with men who owed their careers to her. Empress Wu is the clearest example of a pattern that runs through the whole Tang: rulers used religion, ritual, and culture to show that their power was rightful.

The central problem of the lecture is therefore not whether Tang rulers were personally devout, though many were. It is what religious and cultural patronage could do for a ruler, and what it could not. Patronage built temples, sponsored scholarship, and brought painters and poets to court. It gave rulers a public language for their authority. But it also created wealthy institutions, rival claims, and new political conflicts. The same monasteries that emperors endowed became targets in 845, when the state closed thousands of them. The lecture follows three cases: Buddhism in society, Empress Wu, and the court of Xuanzong.

Historians have reshaped each case. Stanley Weinstein's study of Buddhism under the Tang traced how imperial policy swung between support and control. Stephen Teiser showed how the Ghost Festival joined Buddhist ideas to Chinese family duty. Antonino Forte's work on the Great Cloud commentary, and N. Harry Rothschild's two books on Wu Zhao, recovered the ideas behind her rule instead of repeating the hostile tradition. Stephen Owen's studies of Tang poetry, including his complete translation of Du Fu, explain why poetry was both an art and an elite skill. The lecture should keep belief, institutions, and power in the same frame.

I. Buddhism Woven into Tang Society

What Monasteries Did

By the Tang, Buddhism had been in China for about five centuries, and monasteries did far more than host worship. They ran schools that taught children to read, lodged travelers, ran infirmaries, and cared for the aged. They owned land worked by tenants and dependents, operated mills and oil presses, lent money at interest, served as pawnshops, and held goods for safekeeping; in these ways the larger houses worked as credit institutions. Britannica notes that temple schools taught a “comparatively large proportion of the male population” to read, though not to the standard of the Confucian elite.

The state used Buddhism too. In 629 Taizong ordered temples built at the sites of the founding wars' major battles, where monks prayed for the dead of both sides. Later rulers directed prefectures to maintain official temples to recite scriptures and pray for the protection of the state. Monasteries were woven into family life, local economies, and state ritual at once, which explains both their popularity and the attention they drew from officials worried about revenue.

Buddhism Adapted to Chinese Life

Buddhism spread in part because it spoke to values already important in Chinese society. The story of Mulian, a monk who travels to the underworld to rescue his suffering mother, was told and illustrated by monks for audiences who could not read. Popular versions joined Buddhist aid for the dead to filial devotion, the duty children owed parents. Teiser's work connects these stories with the Ghost Festival of the seventh month, when Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike made offerings for the hungry dead. Adaptation did not mean Buddhism simply replaced Chinese traditions; the two changed each other.

A sacred geography also linked Tang China to a wider Buddhist world. Mount Wutai, associated with the bodhisattva Manjusri, drew pilgrims from India and beyond. The Japanese monk Ennin, who lived in China from 838 to 847, visited the mountain and kept a diary that is one of the best eyewitness records of late Tang religious life. Meanwhile the Chan school (known in Japan as Zen) grew popular among the educated elite. It taught that insight could pass directly from teacher to student, "mind to mind," and some Chan lineages stressed sudden enlightenment over long study of scripture. The story of Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch, who is said to have reached enlightenment while still illiterate, made that point. It should be presented as the tradition's account of its own authority, not as neutral biography.

Primary Evidence: The Suppression of 845

The passage explains the motive in its own wording. Every item turns religious people, land, and dependents into taxpayers. Opposition to Buddhism had resurfaced in the late Tang largely because monasteries' tax-exempt status worsened the state's fiscal problems, and Emperor Wuzong, a devoted Daoist, also had religious reasons. The record should be read critically, though. The land figure cannot be taken literally; it is far larger than any plausible estimate of monastic holdings, a reminder that official numbers can be inflated for effect. The ban was lifted after Wuzong's death in 846, but the monastic establishment never fully recovered. Lay Buddhism and basic beliefs such as karma and rebirth persisted.

Analytical Significance

II. Empress Wu's Rise inside Tang Court Politics

From Lesser Consort to Empress

Wu entered the palace of Emperor Gaozong, Taizong's son, as a lesser consort around 651. Within a few years Gaozong demoted his empress, Empress Wang, and in 655 made Wu empress instead. In 660 Gaozong suffered a stroke and remained in poor health for the rest of his reign, and Wu increasingly made decisions for the court, at first following the convention of listening to state business from behind a screen. In 674 Gaozong took the title "Heavenly Emperor" and Wu became "Heavenly Empress."

After Gaozong died in 683, his son Zhongzong took the throne, but Wu, now empress dowager, deposed him within months and installed another son, Ruizong, whom she kept in seclusion while she governed. In 690 Ruizong abdicated, and Wu declared herself emperor of a new Zhou dynasty. She is the only woman in Chinese history to rule as emperor in her own right. Keep her roles distinct: consort, empress, empress dowager, and finally sovereign.

A New Political Base

Wu's power rested on more than palace intrigue. She moved the court for long periods to Luoyang, which had been made a second capital in 657 and was far from the home region of the northwestern aristocracy. She used the civil service examinations to bring new men into government, many of whom had felt shut out while the early Tang court was dominated by the northwestern military elite. A new genealogy compiled in 659 ranked families by official position. The bureaucracy grew, examination graduates began to reach the highest offices, and lower officials gained posts, promotions, and salary increases. These officials owed their careers to her, and they formed a constituency.

Her rule was also coercive. She purged rivals, including senior statesmen of Taizong's era, and after a rebellion in 684 she used informers and terror against Tang princes and officials. Those purges were real. What historians now question is the moral portrait built around them.

Analytical Significance

III. Ritual, Prophecy, and the Vocabulary of Female Sovereignty

Mount Tai, 666

The feng and shan sacrifices at Mount Tai, offerings to Heaven and Earth that announced a dynasty's success, had not been performed for centuries. Gaozong and Wu traveled to the mountain late in 665, and the rites took place in the first month of 666. Wu argued that the emperor should perform the sacrifice to Heaven at the summit, associated with yang, while she and the palace women performed the sacrifice to Earth at the base, associated with yin. The ceremony did not erase the gendered structure of political life. Wu used the complementary yin–yang framework to claim a formal public role within it.

The Great Cloud Sutra

Wu was personally drawn to Buddhism and was a major patron of the Longmen cave temples near Luoyang, where she contributed to the colossal Vairocana Buddha completed in 675. As she moved toward the throne, her supporters turned to the Great Cloud Sutra, which foretold a female monarch who would rule the world. A committee of monks prepared a commentary identifying that ruler with Wu and linking her to Maitreya, the future Buddha. Forte dated the commentary to 689–690; it was presented to the court in 690, just before she took the throne, and a copy survives among the Dunhuang manuscripts. After 690 she ordered a Great Cloud temple established in every prefecture to spread the message.

Many Vocabularies at Once

Wu did not abandon Confucian political language. She performed state rituals and in 688 erected a Mingtang, the "Hall of Light" described in the classics as the supreme ritual hall of ancient sage-kings. She named her dynasty Zhou after the ancient dynasty Confucius admired. Rothschild's most recent book argues that she assembled a whole "pantheon" of female authorities: Buddhist goddesses, Daoist immortals, Confucian model mothers, and mythic figures. Legitimacy for a claim with no precedent had to be built from every available tradition.

That legitimacy had limits. Wu had to manage succession, opposition from Tang princes, and the loyalty of officials and armies. Frontier crises in the late 690s forced her to abandon any plan to keep the throne in her own family, and she recalled Zhongzong as heir. In 705, when she was about eighty and seriously ill, senior officials and palace guards forced her to abdicate. The Tang was restored, and she died later that year.

Analytical Significance

IV. Xuanzong: Patron and Regulator

Taking Power

Wu's abdication did not end women's influence at court. Zhongzong's wife, Empress Wei, and Wu's daughter, the Taiping Princess, were major political players. When Zhongzong died in 710, Empress Wei tried to follow Wu's path. Li Longji, the future Xuanzong, entered the palace with a small group of followers and the palace army and destroyed her faction, restoring his father Ruizong. In 712 Ruizong abdicated in his favor, and after a second coup in 713, which ended with the Taiping Princess's suicide, Xuanzong held full power. He reigned until 756, the longest reign of the Tang.

Support and Control Together

Xuanzong began as an activist ruler, and one of his early aims was to curb the power of monasteries, whose numbers and wealth had grown under Wu. He ordered improperly ordained monks and nuns back to lay life and restricted new temple building. At the same time he supported more than one tradition. Because the Tang imperial house shared the surname Li with Laozi, the court honored Laozi as its ancestor. Xuanzong wrote a commentary on the Laozi (the Daodejing) and established schools and an examination in Daoist scriptures. He also invited Buddhist clerics to court, including masters of Tantric Buddhism, a ritual tradition whose ceremonies were used to pray for rain and military victory.

This combination was not inconsistent. Rulers could support religious traditions and regulate their institutions as part of the same project of governing. Religious policy also changed from ruler to ruler: Wu's lavish Buddhist patronage, Xuanzong's balance of support and regulation, and Wuzong's suppression in 845 show that there was no straight line of ever-increasing favor.

A Brilliant Court

Xuanzong's court became a center for painting, music, and poetry. The horse painter Han Gan worked there, and the painter Wu Daozi served at court. Xuanzong founded the Pear Garden, a training school for court musicians and performers, and he was himself a musician. The poet Li Bai had a brief, celebrated connection to the court in the early 740s. Patronage brought artists and writers into the political center, and literary and artistic reputations depended on court access, education, and networks of support. Court culture reflected political life as well as individual talent.

Analytical Significance

V. Poetry, Patronage, and the World beyond the Court

An Age of Poetry

The Complete Tang Poems, a collection compiled in the early eighteenth century, contains more than 48,000 poems by about 2,200 poets. Poetry was a major art and also a practical marker of elite education. Men who hoped to be recognized as members of the educated elite were expected to know earlier verse and to compose polished poems at banquets, farewells, and other social occasions. The jinshi examination tested poetry too. The size of the surviving collection shows how widely poetry was written, but the textbook also stresses the achievement of a smaller group of poets, among them Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu, who raised the art to new levels.

Du Fu

Du Fu (712–770) is now celebrated as one of China's greatest poets, but his career shows that literary talent did not guarantee political success. He hoped to follow his grandfather into government service and repeatedly failed to obtain office through the examinations; a special examination of 747, which he is traditionally said to have taken, passed no candidates at all, reportedly because the chief minister Li Linfu wanted to show that no talent had been overlooked. He spent much of his adult life traveling. After the An Lushan rebellion broke out in 755, he held only brief, minor posts before leaving official service in 759, and he devoted his remaining years to poetry written while moving through western and southern China.

His poems record political disorder and human suffering: soldiers drafted from villages, families separated, a capital occupied. They offer a path from the literary culture of Xuanzong's court into the lived consequences of the crisis that ended that court. Lecture 5 takes up the rebellion itself.

Analytical Significance

Closing Synthesis

Tang rulers made authority visible through religion and culture. Buddhist monasteries became deeply embedded in society as schools, lodgings, lenders, landlords, and places of prayer for the state, and Buddhism adapted to Chinese family values and a Chinese school of thought. Empress Wu combined Confucian ritual, Buddhist prophecy, new officials, and a second capital to claim an unprecedented throne. Xuanzong both patronized and regulated religious institutions while presiding over a brilliant court of painters, musicians, and poets. None of this removed political conflict. Wu's rule depended on coalitions and ended in forced abdication; the wealth of the monasteries led to the suppression of 845; and the poetry of Xuanzong's age became, in Du Fu's hands, a record of catastrophe.

The central historiographical shift is from moral judgment to the study of legitimacy. Traditional histories condemned Wu as a usurper and saw imperial Buddhism as superstition or extravagance. Weinstein reconstructed the changing politics of Tang Buddhism; Teiser showed how Buddhism entered family ritual; Forte and Rothschild recovered the ideas behind Wu's rule and exposed the bias of the sources about her; and Owen made the social world of Tang poetry visible. This scholarship takes belief seriously while asking what it did politically.

For the lecture, the most important distinction is between patronage as expression and patronage as a tool of governing. Rulers really did believe, and they also calculated. The question to leave open is whether religious and cultural legitimacy could ever make a ruler secure without armies, officials, and revenue behind it, a question the An Lushan rebellion would answer harshly.

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Stanley Weinstein, Buddhism under the T'ang (1987). The standard account of imperial policy toward Buddhism from the founding to the suppression of 845. Essential for showing that support and regulation went together.

Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (1988). Explains the Mulian story and the seventh-month festival as meeting points of Buddhist ideas and Chinese family obligation.

N. Harry Rothschild, Wu Zhao: China's Only Woman Emperor (2008), and Emperor Wu Zhao and Her Pantheon of Devis, Divinities, and Dynastic Mothers (2015). A readable biography and a deeper study of the symbols Wu used to claim sovereignty. Both examine the hostile sources critically.

Antonino Forte, Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End of the Seventh Century (1976; 2nd ed. 2005). The fundamental study of the Great Cloud commentary, with a translation of the Dunhuang manuscript. Use for dates and for the logic of Buddhist legitimation.

Edwin O. Reischauer, Ennin's Travels in T'ang China (1955). A companion to Reischauer's translation of Ennin's diary. Vivid for pilgrimage, monastic life, and the suppression of 845 as Ennin witnessed it.

Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T'ang (1981), and The Poetry of Du Fu (2016). The first explains poetry's place in court and elite life; the second is a complete, open-access translation of Du Fu with notes.

Mark Edward Lewis, China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (2009). Chapters on religion and writing connect the lecture's cases to the wider social history of the Tang.