Late Ming Dynasty: So what if Emperor Chongzhen was inactive?!

Chapter 305 Clay sculptures are easy to knock down, but the Buddha in one's heart is hard to extinguish.

Outside the City God Temple, imperial guards stood watch. Inside, Zhu Youjian was pulling the royal high priest Zhang Weixian along as they offered incense to the City God.

The City God Temple can still be preserved. It's not that Zhu Youjian rejects foreign religions and advocates local beliefs; he rejects all superstitious and monstrous things. Of course, he also understands that atheism has no market in the Ming Dynasty at present. He cannot expect the people to have such a high level of awareness. If the people insist on worshipping gods, then he hopes there will be no middlemen taking a cut.

"Duke of England, according to etiquette, should I bow to the City God?!" Zhu Youjian asked curiously.

"The Book of Rites says: 'The Son of Heaven sacrifices to Heaven and Earth, the feudal lords sacrifice to mountains and rivers, and the high officials sacrifice to the Five Sacrifices.' This City God was bestowed the title by the Yongle Emperor; he is the City God of the entire realm, with the same rank as the City God of Nanjing. All the righteous gods of the realm are appointed by the Son of Heaven. Your Majesty, as the Son of Heaven, naturally does not need to bow down to the City God of the capital!"

"You even know the Book of Rites?!"

Zhang Weixian was both amused and exasperated. His voice was filled with grievance: "I am also a man of both literary and martial talents, well-versed in the Four Books and Five Classics!"

He said with a worried expression, "What does Your Majesty intend to do with these monks outside? If they are not properly settled, I fear they may cause trouble!"

"Don't worry about that. I won't let them freeze to death. They have hands and feet. As long as they're not too lazy, I'm willing to give them a meal!" With that, Zhu Youjian sat cross-legged on a futon and began to flip through the account books.

Fayuan Temple owned 230,000 mu of temple land. Two hundred and sixty-three years' worth of land taxes were recovered, amounting to 4.5 million shi of grain, roughly three million taels of silver. Gold, silver, and other valuables were confiscated from the temple, valued at approximately 200,000 taels. Real estate, including land and houses, was valued at approximately 400,000 taels of silver. Therefore, Fayuan Temple was insolvent and declared bankruptcy.

However, Zhu Youjian was kind-hearted and couldn't bear to let these monks starve and freeze to death, so he planned to find a way out for them.

Once a legally ordained monk has his ordination certificate revoked, he becomes an ordinary citizen or a free person with more options; while monks who are ordained privately without a certificate, or even worse, monks who forge certificates, will be punished.

According to the laws of the Ming Dynasty, ordaining a monk privately was a serious crime, punishable by eighty strokes of the cane, and his master by one hundred strokes. After the punishment, they would be sent back to their place of origin. After the eighty strokes were completed, the man was already dead. Zhu Youjian changed the corporal punishment to exile and forced labor, sending him to Liaodong to farm.

The purge lasted three days, with officials from the Six Ministries working in three shifts. The final count in Beijing showed over 6,000 monks, of whom only 2,000 were officially ordained; the remaining 4,000 were illegal. Those who were legally ordained were released, while those who were illegal were detained. There were over 2,000 Taoist priests, roughly half with and half without ordination certificates; 700 Lama monks; and 300 monks from mosques.

A total of three million mu of temple lands were investigated, with two million mu converted into public lands and one million mu auctioned off, yielding two million eight hundred thousand taels of silver. This was merely the harvest from the city of Beijing; the enormous profits left the officials speechless!
In fact, what Zhu Youjian did, stripped of all its legal veneers, was essentially plunder and extortion, which is why most of the court officials opposed it.

Zhu Youjian knew he was in the wrong, so he didn't expect to push the matter through the normal process. But now the huge profits had made the court officials greedy, and different voices began to emerge in the court.

Confiscating property was indeed the fastest way to make money. When Zhu Youjian threw the more than two million taels of silver obtained from the auction into the imperial warehouse, all the voices of doubt seemed so powerless!

Zhu Youjian announced that starting this month, the salaries of all officials in the Ming Dynasty would increase by 30%, and at the end of the year, an additional two months' salary would be paid as a year-end bonus! Everyone with eyes could see that the emperor was bribing his officials, but no one dared to stand up and say that the emperor was doing the wrong thing. If they did so, they would be drowned in the spittle of their colleagues without even having to ask the emperor to intervene!

Zhu Youjian seemed to have realized something. Was it possible that the three major cases of the Hongwu Emperor and the Yongle Emperor's "grain smearing" were actually due to a lack of money?
Zhu Youjian categorized the fixed assets and gave them to the imperial court, while the ill-gotten gains went into the imperial treasury. He took a small share, and the imperial court took the larger share. He actually had little interest in money.

More than 10,000 monks and Taoists were placed under centralized management in several large temples in the capital, where they were sheltered from the wind and snow and given food every day until the spring of next year. Other vacant temples were temporarily used to house poor people whose thatched huts had collapsed under the weight of the snow and who were homeless. There were no large-scale refugees in the capital region this year, but it is hard to say what will happen in a few years.

Many emperors attempted to suppress Buddhism, but none truly succeeded in eradicating it. Zhu Youjian was a very pragmatic man. He knew that monks were easy to bully, and Buddha statues were merely clay sculptures that could be easily toppled. However, the Buddha in the hearts of the people was eternal and indestructible, and he had no interest in challenging the faith of tens of millions of people.

All the temples were preserved, and the monks were not exterminated; some ordination certificates were still not revoked.

Since the assets of these temples are only enough to pay off a portion of their outstanding taxes, these temples belong to the state until their debts are paid off.

This is a system similar to public land. The concept of public ownership and the ownership system of the Ming Dynasty was created by Zhu Youjian to distinguish it from concepts such as the imperial court and official ownership.

This wasn't him making trouble for no reason; he was forced into it by the civil officials. They were the ones who first separated the court from the emperor, the empire from the royal family, forcing Zhu Youjian to reconstruct these concepts.

In the past, government-owned land was considered state-owned land, and government-owned land was state-owned land. In the early days of the Ming Dynasty, government-owned land even exceeded private land! However, for some reason, state-owned assets were inexplicably lost, and this money did not end up in the homes of ordinary people. Both the country and the people lost, and it is unclear who won.

After the temples were confiscated, the monks were no longer the owners of the temples; they were merely employees who could receive wages, live in the temples, and conduct their religious activities, but all profits had to be turned over to the public. Monks also no longer enjoyed the privileges of reduced land taxes and exemption from corvée labor.

Having accomplished such a major task, we certainly cannot allow public opinion to fester. If the government doesn't seize the high ground of public opinion, someone else will. Simply silencing the issue won't work either.

From the moment he began confiscating the temple's property, Zhu Youjian posted notices at the nine gates of the capital, clearly explaining why he was taking action against the monks and Taoists.

The incident naturally stemmed from the Twin Pagodas Temple incident. Zhu Youjian could not allow the soldiers of the Ming Dynasty to die in such a cowardly manner; in a sense, it was revenge against the monks. Furthermore, monks and Taoist priests themselves had many problems, such as breaking the law, harboring criminals, and practicing ordination illegally.

Zhu Youjian rejected the legitimacy of their reduction of land taxes and exemption from corvée labor, believing that monks and Taoists had no merit and therefore were not entitled to enjoy special privileges.

(End of this chapter)