From Idolatry to Religions: the Missionary Discourses on Hinduism and Buddhism and the Invention of Monotheistic Confucianism, 1550-1700

Abstract

Abstract The emergence of a European discourse to distinguish, analyze, and historicize various non-Biblical religious traditions within Asia involved a significant amplification of the concept of idolatry. The Jesuit experience of Japanese Buddhism in the second half of the sixteenth century posed a particular challenge, because of its overt atheism. The patristic models of Christian apologetics, based on distinguishing elite monotheism from popular religion in ancient paganism, had been useful in India, but in Japan had to be replaced by a system where the elite cultivated an atheistic form of esoteric monism. When focusing their dialectical firepower upon the doctrines of double truth and non-theistic monism, the Jesuits, led by Alessandro Valignano, were in fact responding to the doctrinal distinctiveness of East Asian Buddhism, notably the emphasis on provisional teachings, on the one hand, and Buddha-nature, on the other. When in China Ricci decided to classify the Confucian literati as civil philosophers rather than as a religious elite, he also transferred Valignano’s critique of Buddhist pantheism to specifically Neo-Confucian doctrines, distinct from the supposed monotheism of the original Confucians.