Changing Relations 41
the tenth century. There is no evidence whether the number of nuns declined
as well.
Monastics were entitled to make testaments in which they could state what
should be left to members of their family, what to their fellow monastics and
what stayed with the monastery they were affiliated to. Land was among the
heritable items.97
There is evidence that the monastics were paid to write for the
administration.98 Monks joined embassies to the surrounding kingdoms and
may have taken part in the commercial side of these journeys as well.
As far as the communication between the clergy of the various oases or their
rulers is concerned, Tibetan was still in use. The same can be said for the com-
munication within Shazhou. Among others a letter written in Tibetan around
910 by a doutou (都頭, Tib. to di’u), a head, called Zhang Dzinsheng to the head
of the clergy (Chin. dusengtong 都僧統, Tib. sing tong ched po), a dignitary of
the clergy (sengzheng 僧政, Tib. sing je) Zhang and the monks of Lingtu tem-
ple proves this.99 As Zhang (Tib. Cang) is a common family name among the
inhabitants of Shazhou and as Dzinsheng is the Tibetan rendering of a Chinese
personal name it is evident that Chinese still communicated in Tibetan in the
10th century.
3.2 People
3.2.1 Worship Clubs
Looking at the extant number of circulars distributed by worship clubs (Chin.
she) in order to call for an assembly, one cannot but state that there must have
been an increase in the already above-mentioned lay worship clubs compared
to the time of Tibetan Rule. Most of the circulars summon their members to
97 P. 3410 and S. 2199. The latter manuscript is wrongly dated by Yamamoto (Yamamoto,
Contracts, text 434) to the time of Tibetan rule as some fields are still measured in dor
(Chin. tu 突)—a measure used by the Tibetans. But as a donation made to somebody
referred to in Chinese as shangshu (尚書) (a title conferred on the local rulers Zhang
Yichao 張議超, Zhang Huaishen 張淮深 and Cao Yijin 曹議金) is listed, it is evident that
it was written under the rule of the Return-to-Allegiance Army. Both texts are transliter-
ated in Yamamoto, Contracts, texts 434 and 436, and translated and discussed in Gernet,
Jacques, Les aspects économiques du buddhisme dans la société chinoise du V a X siècle
(Saigon: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1956), 77–80.
98 Monks received 7 shi (Chin. shi 石) of flour to write a population list for the administra-
tion: P. 3490, Gernet, Aspects économiques, 103.
99 P. tib. 1220: see Takeuchi, Tsuguhito, “A Group of Old Tibetan Letters Written Under Kuei-
i-chün: A Preliminary Study for the Classification of Old Tibetan Letters,” Acta Orientalia
Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae (1990): 185 for detailed research.