Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia

Bryan Turner, Oscar Salemink, Bryan Turner, Oscar Salemink, Bryan S. Turner, Oscar Salemink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415635035
• eBook ISBN: 9781317636458
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of religion in contemporary Asia. Compiled and introduced by Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink, the Handbook contains specially written chapters by experts in their respective fields.

The wide-ranging introduction discusses issues surrounding Orientalism and the historical development of the discipline of Religious Studies. It conveys how there have been many centuries of interaction between different religious traditions in Asia and discusses the problem of world religions and the range of concepts, such as high and low traditions, folk and formal religions, popular and orthodox developments.

Individual chapters are presented in the following five sections:

• Asian Origins: religious formations
• Missions, States and Religious Competition
• Reform Movements and Modernity
• Popular Religions
• Religion and Globalization: social dimensions

Striking a balance between offering basic information about religious cultures in Asia and addressing the complexity of employing a western terminology in societies with radically different traditions, this advanced level reference work will be essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of Asian Religions, Sociology, Anthropology, Asian Studies and Religious Studies.

Religion and globalization: social dimensions

19

Reading gender and religion in East Asia

Family formations and cultural transformations

Fang-Long Shih

This chapter explores how gender, family and religion are articulated in the contexts of Confucian Northeast Asia and Islamic Southeast Asia. The study of ‘Women and/in Religions’(Sharma 1987; Holm with Bowker 1994) has been dominated by a phenomenological approach to religious texts, which present Confucianism (Kelleher 1987; McFarlane 1994) and Islam (Smith 1987; Badawi 1994) as separate realms of beliefs and practice, but with the ‘common feature of being patriarchal’(Young 1987: 3). This phenomenological method, however, failed to capture the complexity of formulations and transformations of gender and/in religion. The current chapter takes a different approach. My framework is macro- and micro-social: a macro examination of religious ideology relating to the formations of the family institution and gender relationalities is complemented with a micro exploration of embodied religious practices as crucial sites for the political, economic and social negotiation and transformation of family structure and gender roles. It addresses intersections that define the axes for understanding the change or resilience of gender norms in complex and shifting contexts: of women and men, religion and culture, doctrines and practices, the past and the present, the rural and the urban, and the local and the global.

Religion in Northeast Asia is not, as in the West, a separate and distinct entity. Rather it is essentially social and deeply involved in shifting structures of family life, which in turn are mutually implicated in gender norms, values and relationalities. Northeast Asia includes China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, where societies are conditioned to various degrees by Confucian ideas and practices fundamental to the formation and operation of family ‘systems’(Lang 1946: 12–23). However, within these societies, Confucianism exists alongside Daoism and Buddhism, and these three traditions have influenced each other about 2,000 years (for further details, see Lopez 1996). Indeed, although there have been instances of conflict, a combined religious culture is a distinctive feature of Northeast Asian societies. Further, there are also revisionist or purifying movements: neo-Confucianism developed in medieval China, while in the contemporary period a renaissance movement called ‘Buddhism in the Human Realm’(Renjian Fojiao 人間佛教) has emerged in urban areas of Taiwan.

In Southeast Asia, we see an even more complex meeting ground of religions. The region is characterized by extraordinary cultural and linguistic variety, with hundreds of ethnic groups, a similar variety of languages, and numerous indigenous and localized traditions, while interaction with the wider world over 1,500 years has left a religious legacy that includes Buddhism, Hinduism (in Indonesia it is adapted together as Hindu-Buddhism), Christianity, Confucianism and Islam (for further details, see SarDesai 2006). Again, these religious traditions should not necessarily be apprehended, as in the West, as distinct and discrete entities. Describing the religion of the region’s complex civilizations in any one simple unitary view is certain to be inadequate, and it would be problematic to characterize such cultural complexity under a dominant religious theme (Geertz 1960: 7).

However, although bearing this in mind, Islam is the most widely practiced religion in Southeast Asia, with majorities in Brunei, Indonesia (which has the largest Muslim population in the world) and Malaysia, as well as significant minorities in Burma, Thailand and the Philippines. Islam arrived in the region in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from the Middle East, mainly via traders and Sufi missionaries, and from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries it spread rapidly as resource extraction driven by colonialism drew the region increasingly into complex relations of trade (for further details, see Reid 1988). Islam in Southeast Asia may not sacralize family structures in the way that we find with Confucianism in Northeast Asia, but it remains deeply implicated in plural cultures and is interwoven with other religious traditions. However, Islam has also been a vehicle for revitalizing and/or purifying tendencies within its own traditions. In the late eighteenth century there was the neo-Wahhabi Padri movement, and from the 1970s the Islamic resurgence represented by the Dawah movement has been particularly influential among the urban middle-class.

Western scholars, privileging literature and law, for a long time placed Southeast Asia at the intellectual periphery of Islamic civilization and the study of Islam. There was no systematic understanding of Islam in the region among Western scholars until the 1960s, when Clifford Geertz (1960) explored ‘everyday’ or ‘practical Islam’ in Java, namely the activities and meanings through which ordinary Muslims experienced their religion. With the benefit of hindsight, Geertz’s work has accumulated considerable criticism. It failed to capture the complexity and diversity of Islam, as Geertz lacked familiarity with historical and literary scholarship on the religion, and his perspective was reinforced by that of his urban informants. Thus, in identifying particular practices as ‘invariably “animist” or, “Hindu-Buddhist”, Geertz may have conveyed a view of Islam consistent with that of his reform-minded informants’(Hefner 1997: 16). Nevertheless, Geertz’s insight into religio-cultural blending was an original contribution that continues to be a pertinent point of departure for the study of religion more broadly in Southeast Asia and that is also applicable to Northeast Asia.

Indeed, Geertz’s work has inspired a recent turn in religious studies and the sociology of religion known as lived religion (Orsi 2002; McGuire 2008). Religious practices-as-lived is an approach that emphasizes both the creative character of religious engagement and the mutual porosity of religions and cultures. Hereafter, it is adopted to explore how religion is involved or implicated in family structures and gendered practices in cultural transformation. Across the case studies, a key meta-theoretical point plays out: namely that religion in East Asia is ‘an ever-changing, multifaceted, often messy – even contradictory – amalgam of beliefs and practices’(McGuire 2008: 4), that cannot be reduced to patriarchy, or any other single explanatory code.

Confucian Northeast Asia

In Northeast Asia, the family was ideologically articulated through Confucianism as the principal institution in the constitution of society and the state. However, Confucianism was not regarded as a ‘religion’ as the word is understood in the West. Northeast Asia did not have a word for religion until ‘zongjiao (宗教) was coined in Japan around the late nineteenth century. In Chinese, the first character ‘宗’ refers to a house in which an ancestral tablet is enshrined, while the second character ‘教’ means ‘teaching’. Indeed, the worship of dead ancestors is indicative of a Chinese conception of the cosmos that stands in sharp contrast to the other-worldly religions of the West (Shih 2009: 16–17). This conception envisions the dead and the living existing in an ordered continuum of obligation and reciprocity, and is expressed through what has been understood as the three Northeast-Asian religions of Confucianism, Daoism and Mahayana Buddhism.

Daoism never made the family as central as did Confucianism, but it complements Confucian family morality, and the involvement of Daoist specialists in death rituals and spirit mediation makes their ritual expertise an integral part of local religious activities (for further details see Ching 1993: 102–118; Fowler and Fowler 2008: 140–66). Mahayana Buddhism, meanwhile, refers to the ‘Great Vehicle’ through which anyone can embark on the bodhisattva path for the benefit of sentient beings. Although the tradition, which was introduced from India, retains a core belief in nirvana and ending the wheel of birth–death–rebirth, it has accommodated itself to the Northeast Asian context and provides complementary services that relate to the worship and care of the dead (for further details see Ching 1993: 121–152; Thompson 1996: 101–114).

Given this background, reading gender in Confucian Northeast Asia requires: first, a sketch of the Confucian family order in terms of gender norms; second, an understanding of ancestor worship and gendered death practices performed by Daoist specialists; and finally, an appreciation of practices corrective to maiden death at the local level in a maiden goddess temple and in relation to a Buddhist reformist death business.

Confucian family order and gender norms

The teachings of Confucius (c. 551–479 BCE) have their origins in China, and emphasize shuer-buzuo (述而不作); rather than creating a new order, Confucius formulated a framework that transformed the older Shang dynasty (c. 1766–1123 BCE) shamanic ritual order into a moral structure of human relations and socio-politics. Shang oracle texts recorded communications between this world and the spirit world as mediated by diviners (wu 巫) (Eno 1996: 41–45). This cosmological order was extended into the social order by Confucius in a way that transformed the rituals into doctrinal prescriptions for ‘proper behaviour’ in family, society and the state. Confucianism has been understood as Li Jiao (禮教) (li refers to a sacrificial vessel denoting ritual and propriety; jiao means ‘teaching’), also known as ‘Ritual Religion’ or ‘Religious Humanism’(Ching 1993: 51–67).

According to Confucianism, the human order parallels and reflects the cosmic order, with its root in the family and its fullest expression in the state. Human relationships were established as a moral structure in terms of the Five Moral Relationships (wulun 五倫, formulated by Mencius in the fourth century BCE): ruler–subject, father–son, husband–wife, elder brother–younger brother and friend–friend. Filial piety was the root of all virtues. It was believed that if one was brought up to respect authority within the family, one would accordingly respect authority in society and the state: ‘If everybody is filial and brotherly’, according to Confucian logic, ‘nobody will oppose the law’(Lang 1946: 18).

Confucian society indeed regarded itself as a large family, within which domination and subordination defined all relationships in a moral structure of filial piety founded on the twin principles of obligation and reciprocity. Within this hierarchy, husbands were defined as superior to their wives. Accordingly, some Confucian texts express discriminatory views about women, and one from the Lun Yu (論語 Analects, compiled in the fifth century BCE from sayings attributed to Confucius) in particular has been a focus of disapproval: ‘The Master [Confucius] said, Women and little people are hard to handle. If you let them get close, they presume; if you keep them at a distance, they resent it’(trans. Brooks and Brooks 1998: 166). However, such patriarchal attitudes predate Confucius. An example of ancient Chinese misogyny from the Shi Ching (詩經 Book of Songs, 800 BCE) states: ‘A clever man completes a city; a clever woman overturns a city … Women have long tongues. They are the foundation of cruelty. Disorder does not descend from Heaven. It is born of woman’(translated by Goldin 2000: 133).

Women were defined in terms of their subordinate position in human relationships, which reflected the cosmic order. According to the I Ching (易經 Book of Changes, c. 1000 BCE), the feminine is identified as the yin force in the cosmic order, associated with earth, darkness, passivity and inferiority, while the masculine yang force is associated with heaven, light, action and superiority (Wilhelm 1967: 386–388). In the human order, women were regarded as inferior and yielding and to be confined within the family, while men were seen as superior and active in the wider socio-political order. However, being complementary opposites, they also need each other. As such, most moral teachings in Confucianism were directed to those in inferior positions, while those in superior positions were obliged to use their power and resources to ensure the well-being of the other.

This is evident in many Confucian texts that teach women how to behave properly to ensure the smooth running of their lives; according to the Li Ji (禮記 Book of Rites, c. 200 BCE): ‘The woman follows (and obeys) the man: in her youth, she follows her father and elder brother; when married, she follows her husband; when her husband is dead, she follows her son’(trans. Legge 1967: [I] 441). The Chinese character for wife, ‘fu’ (婦), presents a woman with a broom, signifying the domestic sphere as her proper place. Marriage was the crucial stage of a woman’s life; one instruction from the Li Ji is as follows:

The ceremony of marriage was intended to be a bond of love between two (families of different) surnames, with a view, in its retrospective character, to secure the services in the ancestral temple, and in its prospective character, to secure the continuance of the family line.

(trans. Legge 1967: [II] 428)

Marriage was indeed seen as a sacred event, registered not only in the human order but also in the cosmic order with the ancestors. The verb for ‘a woman to marry’ is ‘gui’ (歸), implying ‘to return home’, meaning that her ‘rightful’ place is wherever her husband’s family is. The verb for ‘a man to marry’ is ‘qu’ (娶), meaning ‘to go out to fetch’ a woman. The meani...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: constructing religion and religions in Asia
• Asian origins: religious formations
• Missions, states and religious competition
• Reform movements and modernity
• Popular religions
• Religion and globalization: social dimensions
• Conclusion
• Index