eliminated from the South Asian mainland at this time.
It has continued to maintain a presence in peripheral
regions in the Himalayas, mostly dominated by the cul-
ture and Buddhism of Tibet. To a limited extent, Bud-
dhism also retained a presence until the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in other pockets, including
port areas on the southeast coast, where people traded
with THERAVADAcountries.
Premodern East and Central Asia
In regions often regarded as the strongholds of Bud-
dhism beyond India, namely Tibet, China, Korea, and
Japan, periods of flourishing patronage of Buddhism
have nevertheless often given way to (sometimes se-
vere) persecution.
The first diffusion of Buddhism to Tibet ended with
the ninth-century civil war between factions loyal to
the indigenous BONreligion on the one side and Bud-
dhism on the other, an episode remembered in Bud-
dhist histories as the beginning of two centuries of
persecution.
In China, arguments against Buddhism almost al-
ways related to its status as a foreign religion that there-
fore undermined Confucian values, the emperor, and
the state. The golden era of longevity of pre-Buddhist
emperors is adduced as testimony to Buddhism’s in-
trinsic threat to stability. The first recorded Chinese
persecution took place under Emperor Wu or Taizi (r.
423–452) of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534).
During the suppression of a rebellion in 446, a cache
of arms was discovered at a Buddhist monastery, and
Buddhism was seen as loyal to the rebels. Further dis-
coveries indicative of lax monastic practices, including
wealth banked at the monastery by locals, were cited
as additional reasons for subsequent persecution in
which monks and nuns were executed, as was any per-
son who harbored them. Buddhist images were
smashed, and monasteries, pagodas, and books were
burnt. Although a gradual relaxation took place, Bud-
dhism was proscribed again during the Northern Zhou
dynasty (557–588).
State domination of Buddhism continued under
the Tang dynasty (618–907) and ORDINATIONwas for-
bidden in 845 during the so-called Huichang perse-
cution. Over 260,000 monks and nuns were forcibly
returned to lay life and hundreds of monasteries were
destroyed. After this time, restrictions controlled the
number of ordinations allowed and set age limits, pro-
hibiting adult males under the age of forty from be-
ing ordained. Periodic crackdowns on monasteries
and ordinations occurred during the twelfth century
under the Song dynasty (960–1279). The leaders of the
Ming dynasty (1368–1644), which imposed hard la-
bor for unauthorized ordinations in the fifteenth cen-
tury, also persecuted Tibetan Buddhists in Chinese
territories. Successive Chinese governments from the
fourteenth to the eighteenth century suppressed, of-
ten brutally, intermittent rebellions led by the White
Lotus Society, a secret millenarian religious group that
appealed to the poor and predicted the advent of the
future buddha Maitreya.Mongol invasions of Korea in the thirteenth cen-
tury devastated the country, destroying Buddhist
monasteries, art, and the famous Koryo ̆ Buddhist
canon. Because the wealth accumulated by the monas-
teries during centuries of state support gave them too
strong an influence in national affairs, the Cho ̆son dy-
nasty (1392–1910) officially promoted Confucianism.
The dynasty’s anti-Buddhist sentiment developed into
full-scale persecution in the fifteenth century. Bud-
dhism suffered again, as did other aspects of Korea’s
culture and economy, after the Japanese invasions in
the sixteenth century. Further persecution occurred
during the Japanese occupation beginning in 1910,
during which Japanese forms of Buddhism were ad-
vanced to supplant Korean forms, especially in urban
centers.In Japan, the militarization of monasteries and their
participation in feudal power structures led to compe-
tition between schools. By the eleventh century, rival-
ries among Tendai and Nara monasteries frequently
resulted in armed conflicts. Buddhist figures that were
regarded as threats to national stability, including
HONEN(1133–1212) and NICHIREN(1222–1282), were
suppressed or sent into exile. In further reaction to its
militarization and political involvement, Buddhism
was suppressed in the sixteenth to seventeenth cen-
turies, particularly under the warlord Oda Nobunaga
(1534–1582), who destroyed thousands of temples and
massacred their inhabitants.The founding of the Tokugawa military government
in 1603 brought stability to the Buddhist establishment
in Japan. All families had to register with a Buddhist
temple; affiliation became fixed and the temples ad-
ministered taxes. This development came at the ex-
pense of Christian missionaries who were associated
with European political ambitions and were thus per-
secuted as a first step in Japan’s two hundred years of
isolationism. When the Meiji regime assumed power
in 1868, its first act was to disestablish Buddhism andPERSECUTIONS