The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China by Ying-shih Yü

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China by Ying-shih Yü Gilbert Z. Chen (bio) Ying-shih Yü. The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China. Translated by Yim-tze Kwong. Edited by Hoyt Cleveland Tillman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 328 pp. Paperback $34.99, isbn 978-023-155-360-5. Ying-shih Yü's 1987 study of the impact of Chinese religions on the economic behavior of the merchant class during the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1912), Zhongguo jinshi zongjiao lunli yu shangren jingshen, translated here as The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China, is an indisputable classic in early modern Chinese history. Although it has exerted tremendous influence since its original release more than three decades ago, the book hitherto has been inaccessible to the English-language reader. This translation thus represents a welcome, albeit belated, effort to introduce this work to the Western scholarly community. The central agenda of Yü's book is to investigate the relationship between the traditional religious ethic and the indigenously developed commercial activities prior to the importation of modern Western capitalism into China since the late nineteenth century. In the process of addressing the inquiry, Yü tackles head-on two then-dominant theories. The first is Marxist historiography, which insists that capitalism is an essential stage of Chinese historical development and that the underlying economic infrastructure determines political and cultural superstructures, not vice versa. This theory rules out a priori that any cultural factor such as religious teachings could exert any influence over economic development. In contrast to the rigid economic determinist theory of Marxism, Weberian-influenced historians do not assume that the development of Chinese history mirrored the West's. In addition, they propose a more nuanced interpretation by arguing that the rise of modern capitalism in the West cannot be explained solely by a set of economic factors as Marxist scholars have insisted. Max Weber maintains that cultural factors played an intrinsic role in propelling (or thwarting) such transformation. Given that modern capitalism first developed in the West, Weber insists that indigenous cultural elements in non-Western societies such as early modern China were responsible for the failure to develop a capitalist economy in those societies. As a prominent intellectual historian, Yü unsurprisingly finds the Weberian approach more convincing than the Marxist one. Nevertheless, he disagrees with Weber's conclusion that traditional Chinese culture was always antithetical to capitalism. Instead, Yü argues that early modern China witnessed the emergence of a new "inter-worldly" religious ethos, which facilitated, rather than undermined, commercial activities. In this regard, this line of intellectual development was akin [End Page 153] to the Protestant ethic identified by Weber. But what distinguishes Yü's book as a masterpiece is that it is not only concerned with the development of new ideas among a selected group of intellectuals, but also with the impact these ideas had on the collective behavior of a specific group of people in real life. In this regard, Yü's work represents a valuable attempt at connecting intellectual history with social history. Yü traces the origin of the new religious ethic to Chan Buddhism, which first emerged during the Tang dynasty (618-906). This newborn school of Buddhism embodied paradigmatic shifts that would transform Chinese intellectual and social landscapes in the following centuries. It first redirected Buddhism from world renunciation to inner-worldly asceticism, emphasizing the positive contribution of this world to one's obtainment of enlightenment. Yü maintains that Chan Buddhism was thus comparable to Protestantism in the sense that both recognized the possibility of achieving transcendence through engaging in this world. This inner-worldly direction, furthermore, inspired, or even galvanized, its long-time competitor Daoism to reconfigure its teachings in a similar vein. Various schools of new religious Daoism emerged during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as the Complete Truth sect (Quanzhen jiao), which not only departed considerably from the older forms of religious Daoism which placed great emphasis on occult arts, but also advanced a step further than Chan Buddhism to promote the ideal that fulfilling one's duties in this world was the only guaranteed...