brief tribulation.  Nevertheless, in 852 the Emperor received favourably a memorial complaining of the Buddhist reaction and ordered that all monks and nuns must obtain special permission before taking orders.  He was beginning to fall under Taoist influence and it is hard to repress a smile on reading that seven years later he died of the elixir.  His successor I-Tsung (860-874), who died at the age of 30, was an ostentatious and dissipated Buddhist.  In spite of the remonstrances of his ministers he again sent for the sacred bone from Fa-men and received it with even more respect than his predecessor had shown, for he met it at the Palace gate and bowed before it.

During the remainder of the T’ang dynasty there is little of importance to recount about Buddhism.  It apparently suffered no reverses, but history is occupied with the struggle against the Tartars.  The later T’ang Emperors entered into alliance with various frontier tribes, but found it hard to keep them in the position of vassals.  The history of China from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries is briefly as follows.  The T’ang dynasty collapsed chiefly owing to the incapacity of the later Emperors and was succeeded by a troubled period in which five short dynasties founded by military adventurers, three of whom were of Turkish race, rose and fell in 53 years.[671] In 960 the Sung dynasty united the Chinese elements in the Empire, but had to struggle against the Khitan Tartars in the north-east and against the kingdom of Hsia in the north-west.  With the twelfth century appeared the Kins or Golden Tartars, who demolished the power of the Khitans in alliance with the Chinese but turned against their allies and conquered all China north of the Yang-tze and continually harassed, though they did not capture, the provinces to the south of it which constituted the reduced empire of the Sungs.  But their power waned in its turn before the Mongols, who, under Chinggiz Khan and Ogotai, conquered the greater part of northern Asia and eastern Europe.  In 1232 the Sung Emperor entered into alliance with the Mongols against the Kins, with the ultimate result that though the Kins were swept away, Khubilai, the Khan of the Mongols, became Emperor of all China in 1280.

The dynasties of T’ang and Sung mark two great epochs in the history of Chinese art, literature and thought, but whereas the virtues and vices of the T’ang may be summed up as genius and extravagance, those of the Sung are culture and tameness.  But this summary judgment does not do justice to the painters, particularly the landscape painters, of the Sung and it is noticeable that many of the greatest masters, including Li Lung-Mien,[672] were obviously inspired by Buddhism.  The school which had the greatest influence on art and literature was the Ch’an[673] or contemplative sect better known by its Japanese name Zen.  Though founded by Bodhidharma it did not win the sympathy and esteem of the cultivated classes until the Sung period.  About this time the method of block-printing was popularized and there began a steady output of comprehensive histories, collected works, encyclopaedias and biographies which excelled anything then published in Europe.  Antiquarian research and accessible editions of classical writers were favourable to Confucianism, which had always been the religion of the literati.