some of the Taoists.  From this time one may observe closer co-operation between Confucianism and Buddhism; not only with meditative Buddhism (Dhyana) as at the beginning of the T’ang epoch and earlier, but with the main branch of Buddhism, monastery Buddhism (Vinaya).  From now onward the Buddhist doctrines of transmigration and retribution, which had been really directed against the gentry and in favour of the common people, were turned into an instrument serving the gentry:  everyone who was unfortunate in this life must show such amenability to the government and the gentry that he would have a chance of a better existence at least in the next life.  Thus the revolutionary Buddhist doctrine of retribution became a reactionary doctrine that was of great service to the gentry.  One of the Buddhist Confucians in whose works this revised version makes its appearance most clearly was Niu Seng-yu, who was at once summoned back to court in 846 by the new emperor.  Three new large Buddhist sects came into existence in the T’ang period.  One of them, the school of the Pure Land (Ching-t’u tsung, since 641) required of its mainly lower class adherents only the permanent invocation of the Buddha Amithabha who would secure them a place in the “Western Paradise”—­a place without social classes and economic troubles.  The cult of Maitreya, which was always more revolutionary, receded for a while.

8 First successful peasant revolt.  Collapse of the empire

The chief sufferers from the continual warfare of the military governors, the sanguinary struggles between the cliques, and the universal impoverishment which all this fighting produced, were, of course, the common people.  The Chinese annals are filled with records of popular risings, but not one of these had attained any wide extent, for want of organization.  In 860 began the first great popular rising, a revolt caused by famine in the province of Chekiang.  Government troops suppressed it with bloodshed.  Further popular risings followed.  In 874 began a great rising in the south of the present province of Hopei, the chief agrarian region.

The rising was led by a peasant, Wang Hsien-chih, together with Huang Ch’ao, a salt merchant, who had fallen into poverty and had joined the hungry peasants, forming a fighting group of his own.  It is important to note that Huang was well educated.  It is said that he failed in the state examination.  Huang is not the first merchant who became rebel.  An Lu-shan, too, had been a businessman for a while.  It was pointed out that trade had greatly developed in the T’ang period; of the lower Yangtze region people it was said that “they were so much interested in business that they paid no attention to agriculture”.  Yet merchants were subject to many humiliating conditions.  They could not enter the examinations, except by illegal means.  In various periods, from the Han time on, they had to wear special dress.  Thus, a law