THE role of religion ih society seems to have been rather cohasistently over or underestimated. The social science tradition in the early twentieth century was often influenced by Marxism ahd other alati-religious doctrines, which were interpreted as regarding religion as but a superficial expression of deeper-lying economic and social forces, an epiphenomenon to be dealt with rather lightly. Others within social science-most notably perhaps Max Weber-reacted against this estimate and were interpreted by later writers with the result that most people in our disciplines now regard religion as a very fundamental and universal phetiomenohl in human society. Proceeding on the latter assumption, it is most disconcerting to meet people from the East who dispute this point of view. Some years ago, when I had just taken as a revealing new insight the doctrine that religion is a most poteht tool for the understanding of any society, I queried a Chinese colleague on the religion of China. She insisted that the Chinese have no religion except for the few Christian converts. I put this conversation out of my mind as soon as possible, lingering only over a melancholy reflection that the Chinese, even when presumably scholarly and engaged in college teaching, have a difficult time ih understanding the English language. Several years later I had the occasion to teach a course in the sociology of religion. When I began with the usual formula concernihg the universality of religiohi, one of the students of Eastern origin again insisted that his country has no religion. It was at this stage that the importance of a definition of religion dawned upon me, a pursuit which has now convinced me that the conventional claim for a universality of religion is based on an ethnocentric misundersta<nding on our part.