The Huichang Edict Suppresses Buddhism and Elevates Taoism in Tang China

Ninety seven years after Tang Emperor Xuanzong ordered the Kaiyuan Daozang copied widely in 748, already recorded here, and two hundred seventy four years before Song Emperor Huizong completed the first printed Daoist canon in 1119, also recorded here, a Tang emperor's personal devotion to Taoism reshaped the empire's religious landscape by force. Emperor Wuzong, a fervent Taoist under the influence of the alchemist priest Zhao Guizhen, issued his edict on the suppression of Buddhism in the eighth month of 845, ordering the destruction of over four thousand Buddhist monasteries and forcing more than two hundred and sixty thousand monks and nuns back into lay taxpaying life, while sparing Taoist institutions and elevating Taoism to formal primacy at court over both Buddhism and Confucianism. Columbia University's Asia for Educators program preserves and translates the edict itself, in which Wuzong names Buddhism a foreign teaching that had grown parasitic on the state while praising the Yellow Emperor and Laozi's own native teaching. Stanley Weinstein's academic history of Buddhism under the Tang dynasty treats the Huichang persecution as the clearest instance of a Tang emperor using state power to establish Taoism's institutional dominance, a dominance that unraveled within a year when Wuzong died from a Taoist elixir his own priests had prepared for him.