The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Chinese Religions

Randall L. Nadeau, Randall L. Nadeau

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781444361971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Asiatische Religionen

Comprising the most up-to-date, interdisciplinary research on the study of Chinese religious beliefs and cultural practices, this volume explores the rich and complex religious and philosophical traditions that have developed and flourished in one of the world's oldest civilizations.

• Covers the main Chinese traditions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism as well as Christianity and Islam
• Features a unique organizational structure, with groups of readings focused on historical, traditions-based, and topical elements of Chinese religion
• Explores a number of contemporary religious topics, including gender, nature, asceticism, material culture, and gods and spirits
• Brings together a team of authors who are experts in their sub-fields, providing readers with the latest research in a rapidly growing discipline

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Randall Nadeau,

Trinity University

Chinese Dynastic History

Mythic and Prehistorical Period
Xia	c. 2200–c. 1600 BCE
Shang	c. 1600–c. 1100 BCE
Classical Period
Zhou Western Zhou Eastern Zhou Spring and Autumn period Warring States period	c. 1100–249 BCE
Imperial Period
Qin	221–207 BCE
Han	206 BCE–220 CE
Three Kingdoms Period of North–South Division Six Dynasties	220–589
Sui	581–618
Tang	618–907
Song	960–1279
Yuan	1271–1368
Ming	1368–1643
Qing	1644–1911
Modern Period
Republic of China	1911–
People’s Republic of China	1949–

The Study of Chinese Religion

The Western encounter with Chinese religion began with the Jesuit “conquest” of China in the sixteenth century. Prior to this, it is difficult to find any references to Chinese religion as a distinct entity, even within China itself. This is because religion—arguably all religion, but we will limit our discussion to religion in China—is indistinguishable from wider cultural elements, and its conceptual isolation is a relatively recent (and peculiarly Western) phenomenon.

The first Western missionaries saw “Chinese religion” in reference to Christianity, and identified particular cultural forms that were already familiar to them: worship practices (offerings and sacrifice), institutional organizations (housed in monasteries and temples), a spirit world (gods, ghosts, and ancestors), ethical values and philosophies (usually identified with Confucianism, Daoism, or Buddhism), and a textual tradition (of scriptures or holy books parallel to the scriptures of all the “great religions”). But in the late imperial and modern periods, when Western missionaries and scholars had very little access to religion as actually practiced in China, Chinese religion was identified more and more with its elite forms, and in particular with the textual traditions of the “three religions.” Consequently, one of the most significant achievements of the modern study of Chinese religion was the translation of the religious classics into English, as part of Max Müller’s “Sacred Books of the East” project (fifty volumes published between 1879 and 1910). Four of these volumes were dedicated to “the texts of Confucianism,” all translated by the Victorian missionary scholar James Legge (1815–1897):

• Vol. 3. The Shû King [Shujing: Book of History]. The religious portions of the Shih King [Shijing: Book of Odes]. The Hsiâo King [Xiaojing: Classic of Filial Piety].
• Vol. 16. The Yi King [Yijing: Book of Changes].
• Vol. 27. The Lî Kî [Liji: Book of History], part 1 of 2.
• Vol. 28. The Lî Kî, part 2 of 2.

Some ten years earlier (1865), Legge had already translated The Chinese Classics in Five Volumes, including Lunyuü (The Analects), Daxue (The Great Learning), and Zhongyong (The Doctrine of the Mean), all attributed to Confucius; Mengzi (The Book of Mencius); and Shijing (the Book of Poetry) and Shujing (the Book of History), said to have been “edited” by Confucius.

Legge was also the translator of two volumes of “the sacred books of the East” dedicated to “the texts of Taoism”:

• Vol. 39. The Tâo the king [Daode jing]. The writings of Kwang-tze [Zhuangzi], books I–XVII.
• Vol. 40. The Writings of Kwang Tse, books XVII–XXXIII, The Thâi-Shang Tractate of Actions and their Retributions [Taishang ganying pian], other Taoist texts, and the index to vols. 39 and 40.

In addition, one volume included translations by Samuel Beal (1825–1889) of Chinese Buddhist texts:

• Vol. 19. The Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king [Foshuo xingcan jing: Sutra on the Footsteps of the Buddha], a Life of Buddha, by Ashvaghosha, Bodhisattva; Translated from Sanskrit into Chinese by Dharmaraksha, A. D. 420.

It is difficult to underestimate the impact of these translations on the Western understanding of Chinese culture and religion, and the scholarly legacy of James Legge in particular has been far-reaching. For one thing, it identified Chinese religion with its texts or scriptures, placing them on a par with the Holy Bible of the Western Abrahamic traditions. In addition, it canonized certain of those texts as foundational for each of the Chinese traditions. For the Confucian tradition, these were the “four books and five classics” that had been identified by the Song Dynasty neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi as the basis for the imperial examinations. For the Daoist tradition, Legge chose the Daode jing and the Zhuangzi, but also included several other scattered works from the Daoist canon, some alchemical and some hagiographic. A whole generation of scholars after Legge saw the Analects, the Daode jing, and the Zhuangzi, in particular, as the holy books of Confucianism and Daoism, and the basis for understanding Confucianism and Daoism as religions. Even a hundred years later, the Western popular imagination equates Daoism with the mystical philosophy of the Daode jing.

The second generation of sinologists (from the 1930s to the Second World War) were also textual scholars. Based on translations of Chinese scriptures, classics, dynastic histories, and other canonical works, these scholars composed the first comprehensive histories of China’s “three religions”:

• Herbert Giles (1845–1935)
• Henri Doré (1859–1931)
• Lionel Giles (1875–1958)
• Paul Pelliot (1878–1945)
• Henri Maspero (1883–1945)
• Marcel Granet (1884–1940)
• Arthur Waley (1889–1966)
• Homer Dubs (1892–1969)
• Paul Demiéville (1894–1979)
• Wolfram Eberhard (1909–1989)
• Holmes Welch (1924–1981)

Representing a more anthropological approach to the study of Chinese religion in China’s late Imperial period was J. J. M. de Groot (1854–1921), professor of sino-logy at the University of Leiden. Though certainly well-versed in China’s classical literature, which he used to contextualize what he observed on the ground, de Groot was primarily an ethnographer, and his six-volume Religious System of China (1892–1910) was based upon fieldwork conducted in Amoy (present-day Xiamen) and the Fujian countryside. In a series of lectures he delivered at Hartford Theological Seminary (around 1907), he began with the religion of the people. His first lectures were on “universalistic animism,” “specters,” and “ancestral worship,” only later turning to Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Even then, his lecture on Confucianism departs significantly from a text-based approach to the tradition, with discussion of the state (or imperial) religion (albeit based partly on the Han Dynasty Book of Rites), of popular temple-based religion, of burial practices and ancestor worship, and of popular religious deities, their images, and their histories.

Among the anthropologists working in China in the pre-Second World War period and immediately thereafter, mention must be made of Francis Hsü (Under the Ancestors’ Shadow, 1948) and C. K. Yang (Religion in Chinese Society, 1961). Hsü, a student of Bronislaw Malinowski, taught at Yunnan University, Cornell University, and Northwestern University, and conducted fieldwork in southwest China from 1940 to 1944. Yang, a professor of sociology at Lingnan University (Guangzhou), Harvard University, and the University of Pittsburgh, based his study on fieldwork conducted in the People’s Republic of China from 1948 to 1951. Their two works, on the ancestral cult and on “diffused religion versus institutional religion,” were landmarks in the social and anthropological study of Chinese religion in the contemporary period.

The third generation of Western-trained anthropologists were severely curtailed in their work by social and political upheaval in China, and were largely forced to conduct their ethnographic research in Taiwan (especially in the 1960s and 1970s), which was heralded as a repository of traditional Chinese culture. Nonetheless, they set the standard for ethnography of Chinese religion, with detailed studies that have now been replicated on the mainland. In addition, a number of scholars, primarily British, conducted fieldwork in Hong Kong and the New Territories during the period between the Second World War and the repatriation of Hong Kong to the mainland.

Today, scholars are trained in both sinology (textual studies) and ethnography, and combine elements of both. Leading lights of this integrated approach are Daniel Overmyer, a scholar of folk religious movements, and Kristopher Schipper, a Daoist scholar who was himself ordained as a Zhengyi Daoist priest. The study of Chinese religion today, especially Daoism, is multidisciplinary and tightly focused, favoring “micro-histories” of particular communities, religious movements, and contemporary religious trends.

The Traditions in the Western Imagination

The paradigm of religious identity that Western scholars have followed for generations is one of distinct beliefs and practices associated with discrete religious institutions. We tend to view “religions” in contrast with one another, such that even Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, despite their common origins, are seen as three distinct, often conflicting, religious traditions. This model has been extended to the “world religions,” often at the peril of failing to recognize multiple religious identities, syncretistic beliefs and practices, and religious borrowing and interpenetration that is in fact more characteristic of religious life as actually practiced throughout the course of human history.

This paradigm dominates the history of Western scholarship on Chinese religion, with its conventional demarcation of “three religions” (Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism) and, more recently, “popular religion.” Certainly, Chinese themselves—especially at the most elite institutional levels—have sometimes seen these traditions as separate entities and we can view them as such as a point of departure, but this has not been the norm for the vast majority of religious practitioners across the centuries, who have not identified themselves as “believers” of one in opposition to the other two. Indeed, if the question were posed to most Chinese, they would respond that their religious beliefs and ritual practices are informed significantly by all three traditions, and would be hard-pressed to distinguish between them. In this introduction, we will first examine how Western scholars have understood the three traditions and provide brief overviews of each; then, we will turn to the more integrative approach of this volume.

“Confucianism”

In the West, we tend to identify religious traditions with their founders. We think of Christianity as having been founded by Jesus of Nazareth, or of Islam as having been founded by the Prophet Mohammed. The word “Confucianism” suggests a tradition that was “founded” by Confucius, who lived 2500 years ago. Westerners think of “Daoism” as having been founded by Laozi, and of “authentic Buddhism” as having been founded by the Buddha. This emphasis on founders is especially problematic in the study of Chinese religion. “Confucianism,” for example, does not refer simply to one man or one collection of scriptures. We now know that the ideals, values, and behaviors that we call “Confucianism” actually predated Confucius by at least a thousand years.

The English word “Confucianism” is a relatively late invention (there was no use of the term before 1687), and Confucius himself was not known in Europe until Jesuit missionaries visited China in the 1600s. The Christian missionaries saw a strong link between the cultural values that they observed among Chinese officials and the classical texts attributed to Confucius and his followers, so they named this tradition “Confucianism.”

Interestingly, the word “Confucianism” does not exist in the Chinese language. This is largely because “Confucian” values and behaviors pre-date Confucius himself; Confucius’ contribution was to collect, organize, and highlight the beliefs and practices that were definitive of his culture. Confucius is recorded as saying, “I transmit but do not create. I place my trust in the teachings of antiquity.” As a “transmitter” or “systematizer” of values, Confucius was certainly important, but the values and behaviors of “Confucianism” were central to Chinese culture even before the beginning of recorded history, some one thousand years before Confucius. Neither Confucius nor his followers considered the “Grand Master” to be a religious “founder.”

The terms that are equivalent to “Confucianism” in Chinese are Ru jia, Ru jiao, and Ru xue—the Ru school, the Ru tradition, and Ru studies. In Confucius’ time, the Ru were “scholars,” but at a much earlier time (1000 BCE or before), the Chinese character Ru referred to religious priests or shamans who were ritual experts—masters of religious music and dance—especially skilled in summoning good spirits, exorcising evil spirits, and bringing rain and other blessings. By the time of Confucius, the Ru were also historians, because the shamanic rituals of the past had fallen into disuse and were known only in the historical records. Confucius was an exemplary Ru scholar as he was especially interested in cultural history (the history of music, dance, and other arts) and in ritual. One of his major contributions was to codify and advance the ritual traditions of the early Zhou. Consequently, “Confucianism” refers to all of the values and practices of the “Ru tradition,” and does not refer simply to the “religion of Confucius.”

Since the Rites Controversy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Western missionaries and scholars have debated the “religious” status ...