504 government organization: Asia and the Pacific Dharmasastra and local traditions, ultimately kings took actions based on their own best interests Thus, it was in a community’s best interests to reach a local resolution rather than to have the outcome dictated by a king Gupta imperial patronage of Hinduism (ca 220–ca 650) made the Hindu temple and its priesthood the centers of everyday life In the absence of a strong central government that followed the collapse of Gupta rule, the temples, the temple networks, and their priesthood were the alternative source of societal leadership and set the cultural standards, based on the regulations of the Hindu caste system, for Indian society This system empowered the Brahmin priest as the caretaker of Indian social order and human well-being, in partnership with kings (Kshatriya), who might exercise secular authority but were ultimately subject to the moral authority of the Brahmin priest The Vaishya middle class (artisans and merchants) and Shudra laborers subjected themselves to Brahmin and Kshatriya leadership Perhaps in response to the organizational needs of settlements on the edges of settled agricultural zones, surrounded by hostile tribesmen—a response to the hostile physical and human environments in the development of India in the post-Gupta age—sophisticated village-based governmental institutions developed in the absence of centralized authority In this age dynastic governments were impermanent As one dynasty replaced another, group solidarity at the local level compensated for instability at the imperial level Collective negotiation offered advantages in a village’s relationship with other parallel commercial and religious institutions as well as with imperial regimes Local institutions might evolve into regional governance (nadu in southern India and visaya in northern India), notably when there was a common geography, such as a river valley, or when there was need for cooperation to ensure regional access to water—as in the construction, maintenance, and management of irrigation systems These local institutions collected taxes (normally a share of the local harvest and required labor dues), exercised varying degrees of land control, and assumed judicial powers, all of which contributed to the appearance of local autonomy Against this perceived autonomy, in the distribution of village resources local institutions were in a continuing process of negotiation between the village and the upper levels of governance To ensure their right to regulate their own affairs and to minimize the opportunity for external interventions and to limit external knowledge of and control over local affairs and thereby to retain local resources, village governments went out of their way to convey an image of local solidarity Imperial regimes and kingships seized every opportunity to extend their authority through intervention when a local crisis occurred, for example, a factional split or the local inability to deal with certain types of problems, such as recurrent external threat of raids by armed warriors, whether neighboring tribesmen or competing armies Royal governance in this age was itself subject to sudden expansion and contraction and lacked the institutional or bureaucratic capacity to integrate the local institutions into a continuous system of governance Royal administrations were concentrated in the king’s court; the royal army and a core of royal secretaries and petty officials, who were designated by impressive Sanskrit titles, made regular rounds to remind locals of royal authority and to maintain local submission To negate their governmental weakness, Indian kings patronized clerics and religious institutions Over time these temples and their networks provided a ritual and institutional centrality that the monarchy lacked Temples were independently empowered by their hold over delegated rights to shares of a land’s produce In some cases these were linked transfers that affected undeveloped land, which might be paired with lease rights or reassignments of war captives or bondsmen, but in many cases the land was already occupied and involved a transfer of all or partial income rights to land, paired with specified administrative rights over that land Thereby, temples became more than agents of political centralization and religious well-being owing to their contributions to local economic vitality Directly or indirectly they had an impact on local governance that superceded the rise and demise of dynastic authority The alternative potentials of the temple as partner, opponent, or center of governance were repeated throughout Asia In the case of China, the Tang and subsequent Chinese dynastic regimes consciously monitored the activities and limited the resources of Buddhist and Dao temples to negate their potential for political rivalry China’s Confucian Governance The Tang China state (618–907) was based in a network of administrative cities, centered in the Tang capitals of Luoyang and Ch’angan (now Xi’an), where Tang rulers negated the potential for split loyalties between ritualized courts and Buddhist temple centers Tang Confucian bureaucrats thought of Buddhism as foreign, immoral, and a threat to the Chinese way of life In their minds, Buddhism, which had developed strong roots during the interregnal chaos from the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220 to the rise of the Tang, encouraged individual dedication to the Buddhist Church rather than to the Chinese state To Confucian elite, Buddhism did not honor the traditional Chinese societal hierarchy: gentry, peasants, artisans, and merchants Consequently, twice in the Tang era emperors ordered the closure of monasteries and the confiscation of Buddhist property by the state