For some time Western sinologists have acknowledged the importance of the Buddhist monasteries as a social and economic force in medieval China. However, the historians have been understandably reluctant to embark on extensive reading in Buddhist sources, with their never-ending problems of technical language, while the Buddhologists have for the most part remained preoccupied with philosophical and doctrinal questions. Thus very little has been done to clarify the situation. In recent years a beginning has been made by a number of scholars, but anyone wishing to pursue the matter in a systematic way was forced to depend in the main upon the researches of the Japanese historians of Buddhism, who have built up an extensive secondary literature on the social and economic aspects of Buddhism in the last three decades. Even in Japanese, however, there exists no general survey of the whole problem of the monasteries in the broad context of their external relationships, and these studies have tended to be piecemeal, and over-concerned with points of detail.