Chapter 773: The Final Preparations

Zhang Zhao had still not left Chengde Prefecture. There were simply too many matters to deal with. What he faced was a rebellion, and although it was one he had deliberately "fished out," handling it was still quite difficult, for it involved far too many entanglements.

And here in this Great Zhaoming Temple, a crowd of eminent monks with all sorts of expressions and bearing were precisely the group that was hardest to deal with in this rebellion.

Strictly speaking, these men could not really be considered monks, for many of them were not even very familiar with the scriptures; what they were familiar with was playing the finance business, engaging in real estate, logistics, and trade.

Those monks who were truly religious, Zhang Zhao had long since pacified.

Under the joint mediation of the Dharma Master Cixian and the Dharma Master Wenyi, patriarch of the Fayan school, Zhang Zhao personally appeared and reached an agreement with them.

From this day forward, Buddhist establishments throughout the realm would begin the full restoration of the ordination certificate system, and the number of monks in any locality could not exceed one-thousandth of the local taxpaying population.

That is to say, in a superior county of six thousand households and thirty-five to forty thousand people, the number of monks holding ordination certificates could not exceed forty.

Of course, as for monks without ordination certificates, you may take in as many as you like, but they cannot have their heads shaved, cannot be exempted from corvée labor, and must pay taxes. So long as your temple can afford to keep them, it is entirely up to you.

And as for the issuance of ordination certificates, strict regulations also began to be imposed, with an examination required once every three years; those who failed would have their ordination certificates directly revoked.

At the same time, the practice of self-mutilation as almsgiving was strictly restrained, and it was placed under the supervision of the government.

In any temple, if even a single case of accepting self-mutilation as almsgiving were discovered, the punishment would range from closing the temple gates for thirty days all the way up to revoking its ordination certificates.

In response to the Buddhist establishment's tradition of collecting precious metals to cast Buddha statues, Zhang Zhao also provided a concrete solution.

That was for the court to use grain and cloth, paid over ten years, to purchase the bronze statues of the great temples; as for the remaining half, naturally the great temples would be willing to donate it.

From then on, among bronze statues cast by previous dynasties, only especially exquisite works of art could be preserved; henceforth, Buddha statues, except those bestowed by the imperial house, were only permitted to be of clay sculpture or wood carving decorated with gold powder.

The conditions had been put forward. Whether the great temples and the great sects agreed or not was, in truth, already of no consequence.

If they agreed, Zhang Zhao would give them dignity; if they did not agree, Zhang Zhao would help them be dignified.

At last, after a standoff of two or three days, through the persuasion of the Dharma Masters Cixian and Wenyi, these several articles of Zhang Zhao's reform of the Buddhist establishment were passed.

In fact, within the Buddhist establishment itself, there were also those who opposed such corrupt practices as casting Buddha statues from gold and bronze and self-mutilation as almsgiving.

The moment they agreed, Zhang Zhao did not even wait for these men to return and make arrangements, but immediately issued orders to Feng Dao, the Recorder of Affairs of the Masters of Writing in the Eastern Capital, and Pei Yuan, Right Vice Director of the Secretariat and Vice Director of the Luan Terrace, to act at once according to this law.

Because of the earlier campaign to root out the criminal forces attached to the Buddhist establishment, the situation of the great Buddhist temples had long since been thoroughly mapped out.

In just one month, Feng Dao and Pei Yuan, in the six provinces of Henan (the Metropolitan Province), Hebei, Hedong, Guanzhong, Hubei, and Jiaodong alone, shut down more than forty-eight thousand two hundred illegal Buddhist temples and forced more than one hundred ten thousand monks and nuns to return to lay life.

The land seized by the temples and confiscated exceeded three million mu, the concealed households numbered a terrifying more than fifty thousand, the population exceeded three hundred thousand, and the gold (red copper) obtained from melting down Buddha statues could cast more than one million seven hundred thousand strings of copper coins.

Do not underestimate this one million seven hundred thousand strings of copper; this is copper that can be used to cast coins, which does not necessarily mean it must be cast.

The court could mix this high-quality copper with ordinary copper and other minerals to mint coins, producing revenue of more than three million strings, and it could also give a tremendous boost to a market desperately short of metal currency for transactions.

At this point, this relatively mild suppression of Buddhism — perhaps it should be called a reform of Buddhism — had reached a relatively satisfactory conclusion.

Although Zhang Zhao did not adopt the violent actions of the Three Wus, who even smashed places like the Great Xingshan Temple and the White Horse Temple to rubble, he still dealt a heavy blow to the Buddhist establishment of this time.

The Buddhist establishment's privileges of tax exemption and corvée exemption were preserved, but its numbers were restricted to the utmost.

Moreover, unlike during the Three Wus' suppression of Buddhism, when the Buddhist establishment destroyed most of the wealth it had extorted rather than let the court obtain it, in Zhang Zhao's reform of Buddhism this time, the Buddhist establishment basically handed over more than eighty percent of its property.

At the same time, it also, to a certain extent, avoided the destruction of all kinds of precious cultural relics.

In Great Zhaoming Temple, Zhang Zhao held the joint report sent up by Feng Dao and Pei Yuan and could not help sucking in a breath. When it came to raking in money, he still had to hand it to you fellows!

And this was not even all of the Buddhist establishment's property, because the temples that paid over the aforementioned goods and wealth did not include these eminent monks seated here.

Compared with these eminent monks who engaged in finance, international trade, and real estate, the monks in all those other temples — aside from controlling more people — could not even begin to match the wealth of these hundred-odd monks whom Zhang Zhao had forcibly summoned.

The matter of the silver note was, in fact, a cognitive error on Zhang Zhao's part.

He had always thought that since paper money first appeared as the jiaozi in the Sichuan region during the Northern Song period, then this "silver note" he had created, which lay somewhere between a check and a banknote, was a kind of innovation.

But in reality it was nothing of the sort. These Buddhist establishments, at least as early as the Northern and Southern Dynasties period, had already begun using similar methods to resolve the inconveniences brought by large-sum transactions and long-distance trade.

This was also the reason why the money houses had been able to spread so quickly through the Central Plains without Zhang Zhao's personal management.

It was simply that they lacked the ability to extend the silver note to Guanzhong, Hexi, and Longyou; they were not great fools who did not understand the operating mechanism of the silver note.

The reason Zhang Zhao had summoned them together was, in fact, because after he took back the Money House Association, he was on the verge of being unable to keep it going.

In the more than two years since the great temples had been removed, both the deposit and lending figures of the Money House Association had fallen by more than sixty percent.

The reason was also very simple. In this age, regardless of whether Zhang Zhao was striving to build the image of a sage ruler and enlightened lord, from the meritorious officials and nobles at court above, down to merchants great and small and even the common people below, there was a natural distrust of imperial power.

After Zhang Zhao used the Hexi Merchant Association to take over the Money House Association, the thought of the vast majority of people was: who knows whether this is the Emperor looking for an excuse to extort wealth?

Once I deposit my money, who knows when it might be requisitioned by the Emperor?

If I borrow money from the Money House Association, might the Emperor drastically raise the interest once the money is lent out?

Many people had never even borrowed money from the Money House Association, yet directly suspected that the Emperor was going to pull a "nine out, thirteen back."

But if the temples undertook this work, there would be no such worry. First of all, Buddhist temples naturally carried a certain intimacy with their religious flavor.

Whether depositing or borrowing, people would not feel in their hearts that a Buddhist temple would have the nerve to swallow their money.

And compared with the Money House Association having only a few offices, these Buddhist temples that could serve as money houses were almost always the great temples of the great cities.

Not only did they occupy vast tracts of land, they were also situated in the prime locations of the cities, and within the temples there were all kinds of statues, paintings, gold and silver objects, and precious scriptures worth ten thousand in gold to serve as collateral.

The saying "the monk may run, but the temple cannot," or similar sayings of that sort, did not appear at all during the Ming and Qing periods; in fact, it originally described just how safe it was to deposit money and lend money at Buddhist temples.

Moreover, after the great corruption incident in the Hexi Merchant Association, Zhang Zhao had also come to understand one thing.

Even in the state-owned enterprises of later ages, corruption was a great problem; in this era, there was even less hope of solving it, and even just controlling it within a certain degree was unrealistic.

So rather than keeping a great crowd of corrupt elements, it would be better to truly release the power of the Money House Association — release it to these monks.

Even in the worst case, if these monks swallowed the wealth that rightfully belonged to me, Sage Zhang, and the court, then killing them would be far more convenient than killing the people in an institution like the Hexi Merchant Association.

And so, to their surprise and delight, these trembling, fearful eminent monks of the great temples who had been summoned discovered that the Emperor had returned the Money House Association to them.

Although the Emperor had issued a death order requiring them to deposit large amounts of gold and silver as some kind of security fund into the great inner treasury the Emperor had established, they calculated it over and found it was still worthwhile.

At the end of the talks, Zhang Zhao even chanted the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra once together with the eminent monks, and ate a vegetarian meal prepared by the imperial kitchens.

Zhang Zhao was also very satisfied with the eminent monks' tact, and he also knew the reason for their tact.

It was that Zhang Zhao had wiped out the mountain bandits, bandits, and scar-faced monks they had taken in; the martial-monk force that the great temples had relied on most had been utterly destroyed, so they were only fit to eat the meager rations Zhang Zhao allowed them.

In the fourth year of Shaoming, on the first day of the fifth month, Zhang Zhao finally brought all the matters of this great rebellion to a complete conclusion.

The migration of the tens of thousands of people from Wuning Garrison in Xuzhou was already on the road, and all the mountain bandits, bandits, local tyrants, and wandering swordsmen with burned faces who had been taken in by the Buddhist establishment had been exiled to the Andong Province, to be prepared as vanguard troops for the attack on Wang's Goryeo.

In Hexi, the old Guiyi Army families contributed more than five hundred thousand strings of cash in goods and wealth, and the great majority of them were also ordered by Zhang Zhao to relocate to Chang'an, Luoyang, and Kaifeng for resettlement. These road-blocking tigers along the Silk Road were finally moved aside.

The Hexi Trading Company had completely vanished, its functions absorbed into government departments such as the Brocade Guard, the Zhangtai, the Ministry of Revenue, and the Transport Commissioner's office.

Mi Guozhi, who had been in Beiting, was transferred back to the Central Plains. Kang Jinshan, after surrendering most of his family fortune, went home to live as a wealthy man.

Zhang Liecheng, under Zhang Zhao's arrangement, went to Guilin Prefecture at the southernmost edge of Hunan Province, where he assisted Zhang Zhaojun (Ma Shacai) in dredging and repairing the Ling Canal, gathering intelligence on the Southern Han, and preparing for the coming attack on the Southern Han.

This was by no means a good job. It was dangerous, difficult, and he would also face the risk of failing to adapt to the local climate. Only after returning with great merit would Zhang Zhao forgive him again.

As for that tactless Cao Wanjin, Zhang Zhao ordered him beheaded, and his family property was confiscated and turned over to the state, totaling around two million two hundred thousand strings of cash. He was the greatest corrupt official, by far, since the founding of the Zhang Zhou dynasty.

The money he had skimmed from the Hexi Trading Company was second only to Zhang Zhao's own, exceeding nearly thirty percent of the Hexi Trading Company's total profits over the past twelve years.

However, given Cao Wanjin's entanglements on all sides, part of the confiscated property was also Cao Wanjin's legitimate income. Zhang Zhao therefore pursued only him and a group of his trusted henchmen. As for Cao Wanjin's family members, as long as they were innocent, not many of them were implicated.

In short, this fishing-style law-enforcement operation ended in Zhang Zhao's complete victory.

He purged the country of a large number of opposition figures, the decadent faction, and the hard-to-drive old Guiyi Army faction. Enemies within and without were almost entirely eliminated, and the atmosphere in both the army and the court was cleansed.

The process of unifying the realm could now be set in motion at full power.

(End of Chapter)

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