We hear that the Mahamegha-sutra[648] was presented to her and circulated among the people with her approval.  About 690 she assumed divine honours and accommodated these pretensions to Buddhism by allowing herself to be styled Maitreya or Kuan-yin.  After her death at the age of 80, there does not appear to have been any religious change, for two monks were appointed to high office and orders were issued that Buddhist and Taoist temples should be built in every Department.  But the earlier part of the reign of Hsuan Tsung[649] marks a temporary reaction.  It was represented to him that rich families wasted their substance on religious edifices and that the inmates were well-to-do persons desirous of escaping the burdens of public service.  He accordingly forbade the building of monasteries, making of images and copying of sutras, and 12,000 monks were ordered to return to the world.  In 725 he ordered a building known as “Hall of the Assembled Spirits” to be renamed “Hall of Assembled Worthies,” because spirits were mere fables.

In the latter part of his life he became devout though addicted to Taoism rather than Buddhism.  But he must have outgrown his anti-Buddhist prejudices, for in 730 the seventh collection of the Tripitaka was made under his auspices.  Many poets of this period such as Su Chin and the somewhat later Liu Tsung Yuan[650] were Buddhists and the paintings of the great Wu Tao-tzu and Wang-wei (painter as well as poet) glowed with the inspiration of the T’ien-t’ai teaching.  In 740 there were in the city of Ch’ang-An alone sixty-four monasteries and twenty-seven nunneries.  A curious light is thrown on the inconsistent and composite character of Chinese religious sentiment—­as noticeable to-day as it was twelve hundred years ago—­by the will of Yao Ch’ung[651] a statesman who presented a celebrated anti-Buddhist memorial to this Emperor.  In his will he warns his children solemnly against the creed which he hated and yet adds the following direction.  “When I am dead, on no account perform for me the ceremonies of that mean religion.  But if you feel unable to follow orthodoxy in every respect, then yield to popular custom and from the first seventh day after my death until the last (i.e. seventh) seventh day, let mass be celebrated by the Buddhist clergy seven times:  and when, as these masses require, you must offer gifts to me, use the clothes which I wore in life and do not use other valuable things.”

In 751 a mission was sent to the king of Ki-pin.[652] The staff included Wu-K’ung,[653] also known as Dharmadhatu, who remained some time in India, took the vows and ultimately returned to China with many books and relics.  It is probable that in this and the following centuries Hindu influence reached the outlying province of Yunnan directly through Burma.[654]