Religious Studies: A Global View

China

The prehistory, emergence, and disappearance of religious studies in

China

P

REHISTORY. THE CHINESE WORD FOR ‘religion’ is made from two

characters, zong( ) and jiao ( ). Zong refers to ‘(reverence for)

ancestry(’s temple)’ in Confucianism and ‘sect’ in Buddhism, while jiaomeans

‘superior conduct and inferior imitation’, hence ‘teaching’. Although the two

Chinese characters have long been used as two different words, they were not

combined to form the new word, zongjiao, ‘religion’, until the turn of the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Japanese adopted the two

characters in combination to translate the Western term ‘religion’. So, before

the importation of the new word from Japan at that time, the Chinese did not

have a term such as ‘religion’.

The Chinese did, however, have a concept which was similar to ‘religion’,

and that is the common expression san-jiao, ‘three teachings’ or ‘three religions’,

denoting Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism.^1 Pursuits analogous to

religious studies in ancient or pre-modern China can be classified into three

types:

a. interpretations and commentaries on the classic teachings or theories of

one of the three religions;

b. critiques of or attacks upon a religion, e.g. Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty

(618–907 CE) and Christianity in the Qing Dynasty (1616–1911 CE) from

the position of one of the three;

c. synthetic study of the three from the point of view of one of them.

As all the three types displayed neither signs of a descriptive methodology nor

interest in a value-free approach, they cannot be counted as religious studies

in the sense that the word has had since Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900).

It follows that religious studies in China did not arise until the turn of the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when some Chinese scholars began to apply

Western academic methodologies in their own study of religions.

Emergence. The Western invasion in the second half of the nineteenth

century brought two changes to China: the brook of Enlightenment thought

which sprang from thinkers such as Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) and Gu Yanwu

(1613–1682) and was drained from time to time, suddenly became a great

river; and the side door to Western learning which was opened by Jesuits such

as Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and J. A. Schall von Bell (1591–1666) and was

closed from time to time surprisingly became a noisy entrance hall.

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HE GUANGHU, CHUNG CHIN-HONG, AND LEE CHANG-YICK