The Era of Division 47
them on their travels and paid their expenses so they could devote their
time and attention to spreading word of the religion.
Despite all of this growing interest in Buddhism, Confucian doc-
trines did not die out or lose their appeal for those who still dreamed
of reuniting the north and the south of China into one large empire.
The same Northern Wei rulers who sponsored the creation of Buddhist
art works at Yungang and Longmen also devoted time and attention
to promoting Confucian social and political values and to building a
strong centralized bureaucratic state with a stable tax base. In 465,
Empress Dowager Feng rose to a powerful position upon the death of
the emperor, her husband. She dominated the new emperor, her young
son, and after his death in 476 controlled the Northern Wei court as
the regent for her young step-grandson. Until her death in 490, she
controlled the court, and she undertook a sweeping set of reforms that
transformed the semitribal organization of the Xianbei court into a full-
blown Chinese-style bureaucratic government. She promoted more Chi-
nese offi cials into infl uential governmental positions, and she increased
the building of Buddhist monasteries.
These massive guardians from the central Fengxian Temple at the Longmen
Buddhist grottoes near today’s Luoyang protect the nearby image of a sitting
female Buddha said to be modeled on Tang Empress Wu. After the Northern Wei
rulers moved their capital to Luoyang in 493 CE, they sponsored more carvings
of Buddhist statues in these cliffs at Longmen, and the carving continued through
the Tang era for the next 400 years, culminating in these naturalistic and graceful
sculptures.Photo by Paul Ropp