The measures of 574 dissolved the monastic communities of the Northern Zhou. Clergy were sent back to lay life and to the tax registers, images were broken up, scriptures were destroyed, and the land and buildings passed to the state. The emperor did not attempt to abolish the teachings as such: an academy was established where selected scholars of both traditions were to continue studying under state supervision, which shows that what was being suppressed was the institution rather than the doctrine.
The conquest of Northern Qi in 577 doubled the reach of the policy, and the figures reported by later Buddhist historians for that extension are very large, in the millions of clergy returned to lay life and the tens of thousands of establishments taken. Those numbers come from sources hostile to the emperor and written afterwards, and modern historians treat them as indicating scale rather than as counts.
The reversal was quick. The emperor died in 578 at thirty-six, his successor restored both religions in 579, and within a decade the Sui had unified China under a dynasty that made spectacular Buddhist patronage a founding policy, distributing relics across the empire in a deliberate echo of Ashoka. The lasting effect of the proscription was on Buddhist thinking rather than on Buddhist survival: the destruction was one of the events that gave weight to the idea of the decline of the dharma, the doctrine that the teaching itself degenerates over historical time, and the movement that grew out of that idea in the following decades took the persecution as its evidence.