ABSTRACT
In the history of medieval China, the personality of Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty stands out as an ambiguous paragon of religious piety and political ineptitude. On 7 May 504, Emperor Wu had announced his conversion to Buddhism, whilst rejecting the Taoist faith of his family. Nevertheless, the mere possibility that a single 'connected history' may account for the processes, and that a tidal wave of religious change may indeed have swept across Eurasia in the wake of Constantine's conversion, is just too potentially meaningful to be dismissed without serious enquiry. At a careful examination of the historical record, rather than the mystical, almost hipsterish idler of the anecdote, the emperor emerges as a sort of 'Great Helmsman' of Chinese Buddhism. Ever since 380, the northern city of Chang'an, then the capital of a proto-Tibetan state, which somewhat ironically had adopted the dynastic title of Qin from the first Chinese empire, had become a leading centre of Buddhist activity.
