Chinese Religion Research Articles (Page 1)

Why C. K. Yang’s classic work Religion in Chinese Societyis considered a “biblical”-level sociological classic in the study of Chinese religion stems mainly from its three core contributions: First, a unique dynamic research perspective.Unlike previous studies that focused on historical textual criticism or philosophical speculation, C. K. Yang viewed religion as a dynamic, functional component within Chinese social life, vividly depicting the complex interactive relationships between religion and secular institutions such as the family, socio-economic groups, and state politics.Second, profound historical consciousness and methodological innovation.Yang's research is permeated with a clear historical awareness, treating tradition and modernity as interconnected wholes rather than ruptures. He creatively employed the conceptual pair of "institutional religion" and "diffused religion" to effectively explain the characteristic integration of Chinese religion into the secular social order, avoiding the barriers and misunderstandings inherent in models based on Western institutional religion.Third, academic practice that actively responds to issues of the era.Set against the historical backdrop of the “impact-response” model in Western Sinology, Yang’s research was not only a scholarly refutation of claims like Liang Qichao’s that “China has no religion”, but also embodied how that generation of intellectuals, amidst epochal changes, used academic research to explore the fundamental question of “Whither China?” It reflects a deep sense of “scholarly concern for the world”. In conclusion, Yang’s work transcends the mere study of religion; its ultimate goal is to use religion as a methodto profoundly understand Chinese society itself. This broad vision ensures the enduring relevance of his academic legacy.

Abstract Lin Yutang (1895–1976) is renowned for bridging the Chinese and Western worlds through his prolific writings, but the vital role of religion in his intercultural endeavors remains underappreciated. This article situates his seminal work of religious reflection, From Pagan to Christian (1959), within the context of World Christianity, defined as both movement and method. Lin’s departure from the Christianity of his youth into Chinese religions—and back again to the church in his later years—presents timely insights for the study of religious change and pluralism in global modernity. Analyzing the text’s decolonizing, dialogical, and polyphonic dimensions, this article brings Lin’s spiritual and intellectual evolution into a critical and constructive dialogue with three key themes in World Christianity: the historiographical embrace of non-Western and trans-institutional accounts of religiosity, the missiological prioritization of intercultural dialogue over proselytization, and the affirmation of interreligious learning as a veritable mode of theological exploration.

This paper is a study of ritual and profession at a temple in a demolished village in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, South China. The study focuses on two ritual service providers (RSPs) who 1) offer services within fortune-telling, divination and feng shui (geomancy) and 2) serve as intermediaries between worshippers and the deities from Daoism and folk religion who are enshrined in the temple. We take an occupational folklore approach to ask how these RSPs’ work, lives and religious practices have been affected by the massive social, economic, political and spatial changes that China has undergone over the past five decades. Bearing in mind the various roles accorded to money, the economy and the market in studies of Chinese religion, we use semi-structured interviews and participant observation to understand the RSPs’ own perceptions of and practices within their profession. We conclude that the RSPs’ professional status is important for continuity of ritual culture and religious life.

This article explores Schipper’s scholarly contributions to the study of dongtian fudi (grotto heavens and blessed lands) and specifically situates this project in its broader intellectual context and Schipper’s own research. While Schipper was not the first to open discussions on this topic, his research in this direction still offers profound insights, such as the coinage of the concept of “Daoist Ecology” and his views on mountain politics. This article argues that Schipper’s work on dongtian fudi is a response to the school of Deep Ecology and its critics, and also a result of critical reflection on the modern dichotomy between nature and culture. In Schipper’s enquiry of dongtian fudi, the “mountain” stands as the central concept: it is not only the essential component of Daoist sacred geography, but a holistic site in which nature and society are interwoven, endowed with both material and sacred significance. Through his analysis of the Daoist practice of abstinence from grain (duangu), Schipper reveals how mountains serve as spaces for retreat from agrarian society and state control, and how they embody “shatter zones” where the reach of centralized power is relatively attenuated. The article also further links Schipper’s project of Beijing as a Holy City to his study of dongtian fudi. For Schipper, the former affirms the universality of the locality (i.e., the unofficial China, the country of people), while the latter envisages the vision of rewriting China from plural localities. Taken together, these efforts point toward a theoretical framework that moves beyond conventional sociological paradigms, one that embraces a total worldly perspective, in which the livelihoods of local societies and their daily lives are truly appreciated as a totality that encompasses both nature and culture. Schipper’s works related to dongtian fudi, though they are rather concise, still significantly broaden the scope of Daoist studies and, moreover, provide novel insights into the complexity of Chinese religion and society.

Western esotericism, Chinese religion, and the supernatural fiction of Gustav Meyrink: Buddhism and Daoism in The Golem and The White Dominican

:<i>In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions</i>

ABSTRACT Taoism is an ancient, indigenous Chinese religion, which has been rooted in Hong Kong for more than a century. The Taoist tradition undergoes constant revision to ensure its persistence and development. Inspired by Raymond Williams, this article examines how Taoism is represented and applied in a school curriculum in three ways: selection and organisation of materials by connecting Taoism with a broader scope of teenagers’ daily lives, such as the environment, mass media, sexuality, a healthy lifestyle and emotion management; selection of pedagogies by blending of Taoist doctrines with Western learning theories to echo the local official curriculum reform; and focusing on cultural nationalism and life education rather than religious preaching, and emphasising Taoism’s vital personal and social contributions, together with modern interpretations and elaborations. The article also discusses the factors that have contributed to the crafting of a living religious tradition for pedagogical uses. This example in Hong Kong highlights the possibility of Taoist religious education and demonstrates how agents of the tradition have re-positioned the learning of religion in a secular world in response to various social changes. It also points to life education and values education as viable options for developing religious education.

Lagerwey, John, Paradigm Shifts in Early and Modern Chinese Religion: A History

Abstract: Social media is transforming "out of the way" – that is, socially, geographically and economically peripheral – places by providing platforms for digital place-making. As a form of territorialisation, in which people transform space into place by giving it specific meanings, placemaking becomes extended into the digital environment through the generation and circulation of representations on social media, which contribute to specific kinds of city-branding. Through engagements with social media, urban residents are making places known to themselves and to others, assigning new meanings and making them relevant beyond narrow geographical confines. In order to elaborate this phenomenon, this paper presents the case of the city of Singkawang, West Kalimantan, which is known throughout Indonesia as the kota seribu klenteng (city of a thousand temples) in recognition of its density of Chinese religion and culture. Focusing on the recent advent of social media accounts of Chinese associations, temples, and spirit-medium cults this paper considers how these representations and discourses on social media are helping to rebrand Singkawang as a harmonious multi-ethnic and multi-religious place, and yet one which is defined by its majority Chinese Indonesian identity. In this process, Singkawang, is shaped into a heritage city for religious tourism, and as the kota tertoleran (most tolerant city) in Indonesia, shifting its position within the national and local imaginary. These social media posts contribute to the ongoing politics of minority ethnic and religious identities in Indonesia, both pushing representational boundaries and reinforcing cultural sensitivity norms. One of the ways this takes place is through the circulating of sanitized, aspirational and celebratory images of the city which highlight positive aspects of the place while obscuring existing tensions, and controversies that arise in the multireligious urban context.

Abstract In October 1700, the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne issued a formal censure of statements concerning Confucius and ancient Chinese religion from recent publications by two French Jesuits. Despite Louis XIV’s desire for silence on this issue, an avalanche of polemics and pamphlets on both sides sought first to influence the Sorbonne’s proceedings, and later to justify or undermine the censure. This article uses three hitherto unknown street songs to examine these debates and open a new perspective on how the broader Parisian population interpreted the issues at stake in the Sorbonne censure and in the Chinese Rites Controversy of which it was a part. In so doing, the article makes the case that street songs were not just vectors for the transmission of news but could be actively used by elites to shape public opinion as part of wider propaganda campaigns.

The impact and influence that a religious tradition can have amongst culturally out-group populations can be quite unexpected and can even “boomerang” back home in equally unpredictable ways. This article explores one example of a Chinese religion’s unexpected cultural influence within the Western psychiatric community using religious Daoism and its appropriation by analytical psychologist Carl Jung. Although elements of religious Daoism, such as Daoist Internal Alchemy or the Yijing, integrated into a system of psychiatric practices, its influence was not straightforward. It will be argued that Jungian ideas such as active imagination, individuation, and synchronicity were directly influenced or inspired by Jung’s exposure to religious Daoism through Richard Wilhelm, Daoist texts, and his own adoption of Daoist Internal Alchemy techniques, an influence which would reverberate through both Western and Chinese popular culture.

Abstract Internet literature emerged in China in the 1990s and became commercialized in the early 2000s, with readers paying an access fee, which is split between literary platforms and their contracted writers, to access popular novels. While the most popular genre is fantasy, a type of imaginative literature devoted to invoking magic beyond the limits of empirical reality and scientific rationality, the primary source of magic for Chinese fantasy is traditional Chinese cosmology and its concrete applications in everyday practices. These ideas and practices, the onto-epistemic-practical foundation of Chinese religion before the twentieth century, were considered superstitious and targeted for elimination in modernizing and secularization processes. However, they have not only survived but taken up a new life in fantasy novels, which depict them as the antecedents of, alternatives to, or more advanced forms than modern scientific endeavors at engineering natural environments and enhancing human bodies. This is why I see online fantasy literature as a palimpsest bearing the traces of Chinese religion, Chinese secularism, and the social conditions of contemporary China. In bearing such traces, this literature exemplifies the postsecular.

[Objective] The purpose of this study is to examine how education on religion was practiced in Ch’ŏndogyo in the 1930s, focusing on the “Religion Course” in Home College Lecture. [Contents] In 1908, Ch’ŏndogyo began to organize a curriculum for catechetical and modern education in earnest. Initially in the form of “Training Center,” they are developed into schools called “Shi-il School” in the 1920s, and in the 1930s they organized a kind of “Home Schooling Curriculum” called “Jasu College”. The Jasu College compiled a textbook, Home College Lecture, and disseminated advanced knowledge on Chinese religion, Western philosophy, politics, economics, and art to the public. In particular, the “Religion Course” shows a Ch’ŏndogyo perspective, defining the concept of religion based on “Humans are Heaven”. [Conclusions] The conclusions of this study are as follows. First, the modern education system and curriculum of Ch’ŏndogyo during the Japanese occupation gradually systematized from “Training Center” to “Shi-il School” and finally to “Home College.” Second, “Religion Course” in Home College Lecture introduces Chinese religion in the form of a modern philosophy on the one hand, and Korean interpretations of Ch’ŏndogyo on the other.

Abstract In Singkawang, West Kalimantan, the local Chinese Indonesian community is currently engaged in a major Chinese religious revival centring around inter-ethnic spirit-medium practices. At the centre of this revival are processes of recreating Chinese Indonesian identities in relation to both highly localized gods, spirits, and territorially grounded senses of belonging and re-Sinicization processes that relate to transnational circulations of Chinese language education and media circulations within a greater Chinese cultural sphere. As China rises as a global superpower, it is manifesting political and economic hegemony through investments in ambitious infrastructural development projects along the territories within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including the Maritime Silk Road (MSR) which runs through Indonesia. Alongside this, members of this socially, culturally, and geographically peripheral diasporic community are realigning themselves symbolically and imaginatively with China as a social-historical force in the world. While the BRI is a multinational, regional infrastructural development programme that consists of both physical infrastructures and corresponding imaginaries of Global China, in this article I develop a case study from the vantage point of what I term the ‘shadow of the BRI’. Existing in this shadow are diasporic Chinese communities with their own networks, connections, and concerns that differ greatly from the state-driven BRI infrastructural development projects. Within this shadow of the BRI, I argue, there is a further shadow—the symbolic infrastructure of Chinese religion, which maintains a figurative connection with China, even when physical connections with China are weak or absent. In this article, I explain how, alongside the material infrastructures of the BRI, the figurative aspects of Chinese religion act as a shadow infrastructure that transports practitioners into a transnational realm of stories, myths, and politics in which divine bureaucrats demonstrate their power (Man. shen and ling) by interacting with and intervening in peoples’ daily lives. Building on existing scholarship that recognizes that the BRI is not merely a composite of infrastructure projects but also an act of the imagination, in which a specific civilizational imaginary of China’s place in the world is being articulated, this article further argues that for diasporic communities who are reorienting their Chinese identities in relation to these civilizational imaginaries, the figurative infrastructure of Chinese religion remains important, despite being in the shadows, as a hidden source of power and structure. In imperial times, political and religious infrastructures were representations of each other and deeply intertwined, forming a yin-yang complementarity. At present the infrastructures connected to the Chinese state and its policies and the figurative infrastructure of Chinese religion are unconnected with each other, comprising two completely distinct worlds that complicate the ambivalent connections to China of the Chinese Indonesian community in Singkawang.

Huaiyu Chen, In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), 271 pp., $34.98 (pbk), ISBN: 9780231202619.

Animals and Plants in Chinese Religions and Science. By Huaiyu Chen. London: Anthem Press, 2023. Pp. vii + 205. $110, £80 (cloth); $35, £25 (ebook).

<i>In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions</i>, By Huaiyu Chen

Abstract The concept of love occupies a central position not only in the Lutheran–Augustinian theology of justification and sanctification, but also in some traditional Chinese religions such as Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. For the Finnish interpretation of Luther's theology, a range of pivotal concepts such as two kinds of love, union (participation), gift, favor, unifying power, as well as the real‐ontic presence in faith act a fundamental role in addressing the doctrine of justification and divinization. As a new research approach, the formulation of unio cum Christo in Spiritu sancto develops Tuomo Mannermaa's interpretation of in ipsa fide Christus adest thus opening a new dialogue with the relational creativity of love in Chinese Tao‐Qi framework. While the ontological presuppositions of these two religious traditions are different, the relational love can be explored as a new conceptual model for deepening the theoretical communications between Lutheran theology and Chinese faith traditions.

Abstract As an indirect response to Galen Watts and Sharday Mosurinjohn’s “Can Critical Religion Play by Its Own Rules?” this article aims to explicate what ‘critical religion’ as a distinct theoretical framework means for the author in terms of how it has provided them a critical framework for understanding the history of China, especially its transition of self-identification from tianxia (天下, all under Heaven) to a secular nation state, and some of its pressing ‘religious’ issues today. Upon the identification of a postcolonial condition in modern China where the indigenous elite have uncritically accepted ‘religion’ and other interdependently arisen modern categories, not only will the differentiation between ‘Chinese religion’ and ‘Chinese politics’ be demonstrated as an illusion, but ‘negotiating religion’ will be proved by means of two case studies as a more adequate approach to understanding the governance by the Chinese Communist Party in contemporary China.

This forum explicates Hong Kong's complex religious and ritual landscape and the ways in which it influences social movements and identity making, in response to large forces of religion and protest around the world today, including in Ukraine and places in Asia such as Iran and Myanmar. Scholars have noted how various forms of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and popular Chinese religions have been diffused into the secular spaces of Hong Kong's governing state structures, formal and informal economies, and ad hoc protest organizations in civil society. Recent work has also emphasized the ways that race, ethnicity, and gender have been shaped not only by institutions with religious ties but also by theological and cosmological narratives that circulate through the public sphere. Religiosity in the Hong Kong protests might also be conceived as polyphonic, layering over familial practices with structures that have colonial baggage and postcolonial aspirations. Religion, in such senses, tends to be unbound by secular attempts to fence it into private spheres; it might be seen as forging a new civil society and civil identity through recent protests and shaping new theoretical frameworks.