T'ang dynasty

T'ang dynasty. A period of Chinese history spanning the years 618 to 907 when the T'ang ruling house held imperial power. This period, which followed upon the reunification of the empire by the short-lived Sui dynasty (581–618), is regarded as one of the ‘golden ages’ of Chinese history, when the nation enjoyed a prolonged period of unity and prosperity. It is also frequently referred to as the ‘golden age’ of Chinese Buddhism, for it was a period of unprecedented creativity that saw the establishment and/or consolidation of virtually all the major schools of the religion: Ch'an, T'ien-t'ai, Hua-yen, and Fa-hsiang, all of which, at various times, enjoyed lavish imperial and aristocratic patronage.

However, this picture must be tempered somewhat by a realization that the T'ang period also saw many calamities and hardships, both for the empire and for Buddhism. The dynasty itself suffered the usurpation of the throne by the infamous Empress Wu Tze-t'ien (whose enthusiasm for Buddhism made her reign a particularly prosperous one from the religious perspective) and the An Lu-shan rebellion of 755, the large scale of which required the expenditure of vast amounts of imperial resources to quell it, and from which the dynasty never completely recovered. On the Buddhist side, in addition to lavish patronage and intellectual ferment, the period also saw the disastrous suppression of Buddhism in 845, in which scores of major monasteries and centres of learning were razed along with their libraries and objects of art, and thousands of monks and nuns forcibly laicized or killed, and event that altered the character of Buddhism in China thereafter.