Wu-ti died in 290, and was succeeded by his son Hweiti, a simpleton "who could not distinguish pulse from wheat," and who was entirely in the hands of an unprincipled wife. The country was immediately a blaze of rebellion from one end to another, and the Tartars on the frontier set up a rival kingdom in Shansi, with a pretender on the throne who claimed descent from the great family of the Han. The Han had not yet been forgotten, and the great Wu-ti had after all only been a successful usurper. The feeble Hweiti was poisoned in 306, his successor was killed in battle against the Tartars in 311. Mingti, who succeeded him, was compelled to remove his

capital from Loyang to Singanfu, and in 317 Mingti's successor, Yuanti, was obliged to make another remove, and to bring his capital to Nanking. From 317 to its extinction in 420, the dynasty was known as the Eastern Tsin. Thus China, remaining united in name, was divided into two portions, the line of division being the Yangtze river. In the south the Chinese ruled, in the north the Tartars. India had its own troubles, and concerned itself very little about its missions to China.

It will easily be understood that the sympathies of the Buddhists would be more with the Buddhist principalities on the north and west than with the Confucianist Chinese State of Tsin. The "Bibliothecal catastrophe," or "burning of the books," instituted by Hweiti in A.D. 306, must have been directed against the Buddhists and their importations, and appears to have been well deserved. It also possibly affected the Taoists. It would almost seem as though something had for a while driven Taoists and Buddhists into a common camp. About the year A.D. 240, Taoist sectaries began to live as Buddhist monks in bamboo-groves and caves, and to cultivate the philosophy of the Void, as did many of the Buddhists: nay, even the Confucianists were tempted to follow suit by erecting images of "the Five Rulers" in the Temples of the God of Heaven. The literati saved Confucianism from this stupid imitation of the Five Dhyani Buddhas; shortly after Hweiti's "bibliothecal catastrophe," the votaries of the Void were forcibly put down, on the ground that their doctrines and practices were subversive of public order. But it is evident that these measures

were limited to the dominions of Hweiti and his Tsin successors.