Through the thirteenth century, Daoist and Buddhist institutions competed for imperial favor at the Mongol court, a rivalry that came to a head in a series of formal debates staged before the Mongol rulers Mongke Khan in 1258 and Kublai Khan in 1281. At issue was a body of Daoist teaching, associated with the text Laozi Huahu Jing, Scripture of Laozi Converting the Barbarians, which claimed that the Buddha was in fact a later manifestation of Laozi who had traveled west to found Buddhism, a claim that positioned Daoism as senior to, and effectively the true source of, Buddhist teaching.
Buddhist representatives at both debates argued forcefully that the Huahu claim was a fabrication with no genuine scriptural basis, and on both occasions the Mongol court ruled against the Daoist side. Following the 1281 debate, Kublai Khan ordered the destruction of Daoist scriptures across the empire, sparing only the Daodejing itself, which retained recognized philosophical status independent of the disputed claim, while other texts and, significantly, the printing blocks used to reproduce them, were to be burned.
Enforcement of the order varied by region and was not total, and some texts and manuscript copies survived outside official reach, but the burning represented a serious and deliberate state action against the Daoist textual tradition, unusual in scale even by the standards of a Chinese religious history that had already seen earlier, more localized episodes of scripture destruction.