In 1407 the fifth Karmapa, Deshin Shekpa, arrived at Nanjing after a long journey from Tibet, having been invited by an emperor who said he had seen the bodhisattva of compassion in a vision. He performed a great rite of universal deliverance for the souls of the dead emperor and empress, was given the title Great Treasure Prince of Dharma, and received gifts on a spectacular scale. A long painted scroll made at the court records the miraculous signs said to have accompanied the ceremony, with captions in five languages.
The Ming did not follow the Mongol precedent of taking one Tibetan hierarch as imperial preceptor. Yongle granted comparable titles to leaders of several schools, which kept any single order from becoming the imperial church and kept all of them oriented toward the court. The arrangement lasted, in outline, for the rest of the dynasty.
The other two projects were of a different kind but the same ambition. The Yongle Dadian, compiled between 1403 and 1408 by a staff that ran into the thousands, gathered what was intended to be the whole of Chinese writing into a single arranged compilation running to more than eleven thousand volumes. It was never printed, only one manuscript copy survived into modern times, and most of that has been lost, so what remains is a few hundred volumes scattered across the world. The seven fleets sent out under Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 carried the same claim across the ocean. Their commander was a Muslim by birth and a patron of Buddhist and Daoist temples in equal measure, and the stelae his expeditions erected on the coast credit their safe returns to the Celestial Consort, the sea goddess of Fujian.