Introduction to the Handbook on Religion in China

Abstract

As you read this Handbook you will see that many expectations raised by the word ‘religion’ are misleading. You may be led in directions you may not expect. Did you expect a set of distinct institutions and an organizational hierarchy with an ultimate authority and its representatives on earth, such as a church? Well, there are schools of Daoism and of Buddhism, the passing down of the teachings of masters and their followers, the mystery and wonder (of the Dao as distinct from Creation), the training of devotees in what you can call monasteries and seminaries, whose residents have accepted precepts including that of celibacy. But these textual traditions and their claims to immanence and transcendence do not usually claim congregational flocks of the faithful, as do denominations and sects of the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Now, under the influence first of Christianity and imperialism, then under the influence of a conception of religion and superstition written into the Constitution and the policy of republican Chinese governments, Buddhism in particular has developed institutions that can seem like a church. And there were reformers who wanted to turn Confucianism into a religion of China to combat the supremacy of the Christian powers. But the teacher–student, master–disciple relationship is still prevalent in the transmission of Buddhist and Daoist religious and ritual traditions even as they transform themselves. The monotheistic religions do exist in China, as such and in Chinese reinventions too. But the ritual marking of the phases of life, birth, marriage and death, for the vast majority of people living in China, does not occur in such institutions. Performances of these and other rituals conform to their own transmission, not to any doctrine or to any one textual tradition. There is a more Chinese way of approaching them, namely the idea of rites (li) and the ideal of being governed by propriety, manners and the correct performance of the honouring of elders, of ancestors and of exemplary historical figures. But these do not include the rituals for which Daoist ritual experts, most of whom are lay and in families that