All Persecution of Buddhists

Buddhist communities have repeatedly faced state-directed persecution across different eras and regions, including property confiscation, forced laicization of monks and nuns, and destruction of temples and monasteries. In Tang dynasty China, Emperor Wuzong launched a sweeping persecution beginning in the Huichang era of the 840s, closing thousands of monasteries, confiscating their tax-exempt landholdings to relieve a state financial crisis, and forcing monks and nuns back into lay life, a campaign that also targeted Zoroastrian and Manichaean communities as part of a broader assertion of Taoist state ideology. In Meiji-era Japan, reformers sought to dismantle Buddhism's parish network and elevate State Shinto as the unifying national religion, confiscating temple property, forcing monks to laicize, and destroying Buddhist images and bells in a movement known as haibutsu kishaku. Under the People's Republic of China, Tibetan Buddhist monasteries were destroyed on a large scale during the Cultural Revolution, and monks and nuns have continued to face incarceration and restriction under Chinese government administration of Tibetan religious institutions since. Each episode combined religious and political motives specific to its own state.