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The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Chinese Religions
Randall L. Nadeau, Randall L. Nadeau
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eBook - ePub
The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Chinese Religions
Randall L. Nadeau, Randall L. Nadeau
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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
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Chinese Dynastic History
Mythic and Prehistorical Period | |
Xia | c. 2200âc. 1600 BCE |
Shang | c. 1600âc. 1100 BCE |
Classical Period | |
Zhou Western Zhou Eastern Zhou Spring and Autumn period Warring States period | c. 1100â249 BCE |
Imperial Period | |
Qin | 221â207 BCE |
Han | 206 BCEâ220 CE |
Three Kingdoms Period of NorthâSouth Division Six Dynasties | 220â589 |
Sui | 581â618 |
Tang | 618â907 |
Song | 960â1279 |
Yuan | 1271â1368 |
Ming | 1368â1643 |
Qing | 1644â1911 |
Modern Period | |
Republic of China | 1911â |
Peopleâs Republic of China | 1949â |
The Study of Chinese Religion
The Western encounter with Chinese religion began with the Jesuit âconquestâ 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 religionâarguably all religion, but we will limit our discussion to religion in Chinaâis indistinguishable from wider cultural elements, and its conceptual isolation is a relatively recent (and peculiarly Western) phenomenon.
The first Western missionaries saw âChinese religionâ 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 âgreat religionsâ). 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 âthree religions.â 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 MĂŒllerâs âSacred Books of the Eastâ project (fifty volumes published between 1879 and 1910). Four of these volumes were dedicated to âthe texts of Confucianism,â all translated by the Victorian missionary scholar James Legge (1815â1897):
- Vol. 3. The ShĂ» King [Shujing: Book of History]. The religious portions of the Shih King [Shijing: Book of Odes]. The HsiĂąo King [Xiaojing: Classic of Filial Piety].
- Vol. 16. The Yi King [Yijing: Book of Changes].
- Vol. 27. The LĂź KĂź [Liji: Book of History], part 1 of 2.
- Vol. 28. The LĂź KĂź, part 2 of 2.
Some ten years earlier (1865), Legge had already translated The Chinese Classics in Five Volumes, including LunyuĂŒ (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 âeditedâ by Confucius.
Legge was also the translator of two volumes of âthe sacred books of the Eastâ dedicated to âthe texts of Taoismâ:
- Vol. 39. The TĂąo the king [Daode jing]. The writings of Kwang-tze [Zhuangzi], books IâXVII.
- Vol. 40. The Writings of Kwang Tse, books XVIIâXXXIII, The ThĂąi-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 (1825â1889) 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 âfour books and five classicsâ 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 Chinaâs âthree religionsâ:
- Herbert Giles (1845â1935)
- Henri DorĂ© (1859â1931)
- Lionel Giles (1875â1958)
- Paul Pelliot (1878â1945)
- Henri Maspero (1883â1945)
- Marcel Granet (1884â1940)
- Arthur Waley (1889â1966)
- Homer Dubs (1892â1969)
- Paul DemiĂ©ville (1894â1979)
- Wolfram Eberhard (1909â1989)
- Holmes Welch (1924â1981)
Representing a more anthropological approach to the study of Chinese religion in Chinaâs late Imperial period was J. J. M. de Groot (1854â1921), professor of sino-logy at the University of Leiden. Though certainly well-versed in Chinaâs 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 (1892â1910) 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 âuniversalistic animism,â âspecters,â and âancestral worship,â 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 HsĂŒ (Under the Ancestorsâ Shadow, 1948) and C. K. Yang (Religion in Chinese Society, 1961). HsĂŒ, 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 Peopleâs Republic of China from 1948 to 1951. Their two works, on the ancestral cult and on âdiffused religion versus institutional religion,â 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 âmicro-historiesâ 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 âreligionsâ 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 âworld religions,â 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 âthree religionsâ (Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism) and, more recently, âpopular religion.â Certainly, Chinese themselvesâespecially at the most elite institutional levelsâhave 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 âbelieversâ 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.
âConfucianismâ
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 âConfucianismâ suggests a tradition that was âfoundedâ by Confucius, who lived 2500 years ago. Westerners think of âDaoismâ as having been founded by Laozi, and of âauthentic Buddhismâ as having been founded by the Buddha. This emphasis on founders is especially problematic in the study of Chinese religion. âConfucianism,â 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 âConfucianismâ actually predated Confucius by at least a thousand years.
The English word âConfucianismâ 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 âConfucianism.â
Interestingly, the word âConfucianismâ does not exist in the Chinese language. This is largely because âConfucianâ values and behaviors pre-date Confucius himself; Confuciusâ contribution was to collect, organize, and highlight the beliefs and practices that were definitive of his culture. Confucius is recorded as saying, âI transmit but do not create. I place my trust in the teachings of antiquity.â As a âtransmitterâ or âsystematizerâ of values, Confucius was certainly important, but the values and behaviors of âConfucianismâ 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 âGrand Masterâ to be a religious âfounder.â
The terms that are equivalent to âConfucianismâ in Chinese are Ru jia, Ru jiao, and Ru xueâthe Ru school, the Ru tradition, and Ru studies. In Confuciusâ time, the Ru were âscholars,â but at a much earlier time (1000 BCE or before), the Chinese character Ru referred to religious priests or shamans who were ritual expertsâmasters of religious music and danceâespecially 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, âConfucianismâ refers to all of the values and practices of the âRu tradition,â and does not refer simply to the âreligion of Confucius.â
Since the Rites Controversy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Western missionaries and scholars have debated the âreligiousâ status ...