1 Introduction
Conceptual terms such as faith, belief, or belief systems appear most natural to both Western and modern Chinese speakers when dealing with religions in a comparative perspective. They are often used as alternative terms, or sometimes even as substitutes for the problematic term “religion.” Famous critics of the term “religion,” such as the prominent scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith, have even chosen to use “faith” and “belief” in its place (denoting different aspects of what commonly is called religion).1 In Smith’s as well as similarly in other theories—following Schleiermacher—personal faith then implies an inner aspect of religion and appears as a universal human capacity in contrast to the historically shaped cumulative traditions.2 Although Masuzawa has strongly criticized such universalisms in the academic field of religions as continuation of Western thought,3 they seem globally accepted today. In present China and Taiwan, the term xin(yang)
In this chapter, I analyze the usages of xin(yang) in the Chinese academic field of religions and its background.7 Following this volume’s history of semantics approach, I do not pursue the critical question of whether the term faith or belief should be translated as xin or xinyang and whether it should be applied to other non-Christian or non-(mono)theistic traditions or not.8 Instead I take the existence of the term xin(yang) for faith/belief as already given in the present situation and therefore as part of interrelated global and local discourses and of an entangled global and local “genealogy of religion.”9 As the present use of the terminology is evident, this study shall go back to a period when the term had only recently been introduced into academia. This leads us to the important transformational period of the late Qing and early Republican periods, especially the 1920s.
In this chapter, I therefore investigate the special contribution that academic research and in particular religious studies (zongjiaoxue
In particular, we will see that the discipline of comparative religion—or history of religion, as it was then called—was closely related to a universalist understanding of faith or of the human capacity of believing. In fact, the very ideas of a “general (universal) history of religions” and of “religious experience” that both historically stood in the center of the discipline11 were—as Masuzawa has shown—not understandable without a nineteenth-century European universalism that was derived from and in a sense continued Christian models of history of salvation and of personal piety.12 But one also has to state that such concepts clearly went beyond Christian dogmatist understandings of “orthodox belief.” Unlike Masuzawa’s critical turn against Western hegemonism, I am interested in the reasons and special conditions of these processes—as well as the ways of adaptation—in order to understand why and how this concept became so attractive. In order to do so, I will seek to understand how the usages in the selected introductory works fit into very specific discursive constellations of power in its time. In order to understand the function of xin in these contexts, I will apply elements from the toolkits of the German representatives of discourse analysis such as Siegfried Jäger and Schwab-Trapp.13 In particular, I will describe the applied rhetoric of faith/belief/xin(yang) as part of the strategic attempt to build new power coalitions (or “discursive alliances”) through rhetorical “maneuvers of dissociation” (Abgrenzungsmanöver) or “linking” (Kopplungsmanöver).14 Accordingly, one basic hypothesis of this article is that a universalized concept of xin(yang) or faith/belief—that had already been decontextualized from its original Christian use in various discourses and therefore had become a floating signifier15—was now used as a strategic means of linking those who shared religious belief (real “believers”) as a “united front” against secular attacks in the specific “scientistic” intellectual climate of their time. Additionally, my analysis involves questions of translation and knowledge transfer, and I examine how terminologies and definitions borrowed from a variety of Western authors were reformulated for a new audience and put into new horizons of understanding.
Finally, I will discuss the fact that the use of xin or xinyang in the examined works was not as natural (and unified) as one could expect at a first glance—it was not merely part and parcel of Western discourse about religion. A closer look will reveal not only differences between the conceptions of various academic authors, but also problems they encountered searching for a specific and fixed systematic place of the concept within zongjiaoxue. This led to various conceptualizing efforts, including semantic shifts and substitutions by other related terminologies.
The main hypotheses of this article are therefore
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1) that religious studies (zongjiaoxue) in the 1920s played a recognizable role in introducing the universalist idea of faith/belief as a general human capacity included in the idea of religion and in the idea of a general (or universal) “history of religions,” hereby opening the concept from “missionary-theological” to “generally religious”;
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2) that the use of the term xin (faith/belief) in these introductory works was not just technical and “part and parcel” of religious studies once the authors had decided to introduce it to the West, but that this concept instead played a strategic role of enabling new power coalitions and uniting “religious believers” against secularist attackers of religion(s) starting from around the 1910s and 1920s;
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3) finally, that the semantics of xin still posed some inherent problems to finding a specific and fixed place for the concept in the field of zongjiaoxue and its inability to clearly delineate “religious” from “non-religious faith,” so that authors like the religious thinkers Xie Fuya
謝扶雅 (1892–1991) preferred a terminological shift from xin to other terms.
In this chapter, I shall first provide a sketch of the basic discursive and power situation from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, i.e., the late Qing until the Republican period (with a special focus on the 1920s). In a second step, I will analyze the introductory works of three authors as case studies asking how, how far, and related to which kind of arguments and definitions these authors used the term xin (faith/belief) in different ways. Finally, I shall contextualize and evaluate the results for their contribution to the modern genealogy of xin.
2 Changing Discursive Settings, Actors, and Milieus from the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1920s
2.1 Changing Discursive Settings
In the last decades of the Qing dynasty, the concept of faith had been made available to Chinese speakers in two main ways: first through missionary use, applied in their churches and in missionary activities,16 and second, for a wider intellectual public, especially around 1900 in the reform movement (Liang Qichao and others) via its earlier use in Japan.17 However, these discursive fields of missionary use and intellectual public use in the reform context appear as rather separated arenas that were only loosely connected by some intellectual figures. This picture changes radically only after the revolution and establishment of the Chinese Republic, when Western-style schools and universities were generally established. Christian schools that had been founded earlier now became an integral part of this new educational landscape. The constitutional debates on freedom of religious belief (xinjiao ziyou
After early contributions to the topic in the late 1910s, a radical group of the Paris section of the Shaonian Zhonguo xuehui
At the same time in the 1920s, a wave of returning students from abroad—in particular from the US, but also from Europe and Japan—brought home a variety of new ideas from their studies. They included students of history of religions or comparative religion, most of them Christians who studied theology with additional courses in history of religions or similar subjects. Among them were Christian intellectuals such as Xie Songgao
The institutional changes of building up a new Western-oriented education system in China led to a demand for textbooks in all fields. The publication of introductory works for the new disciplinary field of religious studies (zongjiao- xue) clearly reflects the public prominence of the topic of “religion” and a demand for academic engagement in this field.24 While some works were simply translations of Western books,25 those that were newly written in the 1920s for the Chinese context were all authored by Chinese Christians. I will therefore first give some examples of general academic interest in the concept of xin(yang) and then concentrate on these newly written works. Afterwards, I shall evaluate the significance of these contributions for semantic shifts. The main background of this time was therefore the radically changed context in Republican China, in particular the combined anti-Christian and anti-religious attacks of the 1920s. In these debates, religion was generally attacked in the name of science and rationality as emotional and irrational faith.26
2.2 Early Appropriations and Adaptations of xin(yang) 信仰 until the 1920s in Academic Writings
As seen in other chapters of this volume, the term xin as a translation of faith/belief was used not just by Christian missionaries, but also by non- Christian and non-religious authors even before the 1920s. An early example of a secularist appropriation is the use of xin—and the binomen xinyang (Jap. shinkō), newly introduced from Japan—by Liang Qichao, for example in his article “Baojiao fei suoyi zun Kong lun
Around the same time, however, the reception of an idea of secular “new belief,” also imported from Western anti-religious discourses,29 broadened the connotational field and challenged traditional ways of using xin as Christian (or other religious) belief. In missionary and inner-church environments, xin may still have been used in a naïve or dogmatic Christian sense. In public and intellectual debates, however, xin had lost its clear bond with Christianity and—as a “floating signifier”—had become open for, but also in need of, new explanations and more precise definitions. On a semantic level, this meant that xin was no longer itself the object of attack by proponents of a secularist scientism, who instead focused semantically on particular characteristics that could be associated with “religious faith,” such as irrationality, emphasis on the supernatural world, or detachment from the real world and society. These observations shall now serve as the background for interpreting its use in the new religious studies textbooks by Christian Chinese authors.
3 Examples from Introductory Works Written by Chinese Christian Authors and Their Strategies by Using xin 信 , 1926–1933
While missionaries had written some earlier introductory works on comparative religion as translations of Western books, they had intended these only for textbook use within missionary schools, not for a broader audience.30 Since I will focus here on the particular context of the 1920s, I have chosen works from three different Chinese Christian authors of this time who all apply slightly different approaches due to their varying background and intellectual influences. I will demonstrate how a universalized use of xin (faith/belief) was taken for granted, but how at the same time the authors struggled to define xin as a more specific concept. Two of the contributors, Xie Songgao and Xie Fuya, had studied in the US and just returned in the early/mid-1920s. The third, Wang Zhixin
3.1 Xie Songgao: Two Introductory Works from 1926 and 1928: Zhujiao de yanjiu 諸教的研究 (Studies about Religions) and Zongjiaoxue 宗教學 ABC (Religious Studies ABC)31
I begin with Xie Songgao’s two works, which are clearly identifiable by their titles as introductions to the new field of religious studies. The first was written in 1926 and clearly designed as a textbook for use in church schools; it enjoyed reprints up to the 14th edition (in 1949).32 This textbook still reflects a Christian missionary school background and was published by the Christian Guangxuehui
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1) as a universal human phenomenon found in the whole “history of religions”: “In whatever nation there is always a religion they believe in … and since the beginnings of history, there has been religion” (wulun zai na[i]ge minzu zhong, jie you tamen suo xiangxin de zongjiao … erqie zi you lishi yilai, ji you zongjiao
無論在那個民族中, 皆有他們所相信的宗教 …而且自有歷史以來, 卽有宗教 ); -
2) as related to being a moral person (using great personalities as examples and role models, such as Confucius, Kant, Spinoza, Roosevelt, Wilson, or Tolstoy) (gujin xuduo daode xueshi de xianzhe, xiangxin zongjiao de hen duo … tamen de renge xuewen, ju ji gaochao; raner tamen dou shi xinyang zongjiao de
古今許多道德學識的賢哲, 相信宗教的很多 …他們人格學問, 俱極高超; 然而他們都是相信宗教的 ); -
3) as a not omittable aspect of personal experience (wuren juede zongjiao de xinyang, shi wei geren jingyan zhong suo bi bukeshaode
吾人覺得宗教的信仰, 實為個人經驗中所必不可少的 ), such as consolation in suffering, solution of problems in life, help in decisions in general views on life (renshengguan人生觀 ), hope for eternal life, and above all the idea that God is love, finally also the idea of forgiveness of sin.
While the concept of faith is here clearly broadened to a universal human characteristic found in the whole of religious history, the last point especially still clearly reflects his personal Christian as well as theological “orthodox” teachings for a Christian school context.
The main part of the book, however, pursues a different path, thereby integrating new ideas from the nineteenth century and from the emerging academic field of research on religions. In its main structure it follows an evolutionist pattern: The final sections of Part One deal with “religion of the primitives” (Chapter Yuanren zhi zongjiao
The 1928 book Zongjiaoxue ABC is a variation of the previous example,39 interestingly now published by a non-Christian publishing house and therefore even more oriented towards a wider non-Christian readership. The more personal remarks from the first work are omitted in this version; however, the use of xin, xinyang, as well as mixin is still widespread. The author portrays Daoism and sects as “cheating with their old tricks.” He characterizes contemporary Daoism and its historical tradition even more strongly as primitive religion (chuji zongjiao
3.2 Xie Fuya’s Zongjiao zhexue: Replacing Faith (xinyang 信仰 ) with Religious Consciousness (zongjiao yishi 宗教意識 )
Our second example is Philosophy of Religion (Zongjiao zhexue
Xie Fuya bases his book’s first chain of arguments—similarly to Xie Songgao, but more precise in detail—on an evolutionist argument. He explains the origins of religion by religious action, followed by a stage of religious feeling (discussing myths, rituals, and religion in relation to magic), then by a stage of “religious belief” (zongjiao xinyang
At the beginning of the section on the stage of “religious thinking,” he takes up the question of belief and explicitly qualifies non-rational, uncritical, and unreflecting belief as “superstitious” (mixin), but then reconstructs a stage of “rationalization.”44 And so this stage is also qualified as the “individual stage of religion” in contrast to the earlier ones that are characterized by collectivism. In the following longer sections, he then focuses on the traditions that he regarded as rational and individualistic religions, including not only Christianity, but also Confucianism, philosophical Daoism, and Buddhism. It is interesting to observe that the term mixin plays a very minor role than in Xie Songgao’s works. However, the comparable evolutionist pattern still reveals a similar strategy of dissociating Christianity from lower forms of religion and associating it with the higher religions that are characterized in positive, modern terms by individuality, rationality, and ethics. One other observation is significant: In general, Xie Fuya applies the term xinyang (faith) less than Xie Songgao does, including to Christianity; instead, a cluster of other terms seem to substitute some of its functions: For Xie “religiosity” (zongjiaoxin
Very clearly, the term “belief” is no longer understood simply as Christian faith or belief. Moreover, it needs to be explained and qualified, even substituted by a better terminology (zongjiaoxin, zongjiao yishi, zongjiao jingyan, taidu). These explanative terms are still within the semantic field of a liberal Protestant concept of “Glaube” (faith, belief) that can be traced back to Schleiermacher, who links it with “religiöses Erlebnis” (religious experience).49 Accordingly, it is described as compatible with rationality and individual religious experience and ascribed a role as a source of morality. Again, similar to Schleiermacher (and somewhat different from Kant), Xie Fuya does not reduce the human capacity of religiosity to either emotions or morality, but defines it as an experience of its own (characterized in its depth as “mystical”, hereby taking up most recent trends in liberal theology of his time that spoke positively about mysticism). This approach differs from an apologetic tendency of reducing religious belief to its (ethical, cultural, or other) functions in a secular world (that is often found with other Chinese Christian thinkers of his time). Instead, Xie wants to keep the domain of “religiosity” as a realm of itself and of value by itself. Finally, in its openness it constitutes an open offer to other traditions beyond Christianity, such as Confucianism or Buddhism, of linking up. The much less frequent use of xin in contrast to Xie Songgao is significant and might indicate a trend away from the usage of xin towards more precise terms.
3.3 Wang Zhixin’s Two Lines of Faith in Chinese Religious History
A third example is Wang Zhixin’s
A first basic idea is that “humankind has a religious faith a priori,”51 which cannot be replaced by rational deduction—the reason why atheists would often suddenly discover their hidden mystical religious nature.52 This idea seems to directly quote the idea of a religious a priori presented by Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), who himself stood in a Schleiermacherian tradition.53 Religious faith therefore appears as a general human capacity and any religious or mystical experience actualizes it. Wang’s main interest is here to conclude that also atheists or philosophers like Confucius or Laozi would have retained traditional religious beliefs even if they undertook speculative and abstract interpretations of heaven at the same time.
The second main idea relates to religious history in China and builds on the first: It is that of two completely different lines of development (wanquan lianglu
4 Interpreting xin 信 in Early Chinese Textbooks for Religious Studies and Beyond
The uses of xin(yang) and mixin in early Chinese textbooks for religious studies must be interpreted in light of the discursive situation. All presented examples were written in the mid- to late 1920s, from 1926 to 1928 (with only the elaborated version of Wang Zhixin’s second work dating to 1933). It is therefore unsurprising that they all reflect the special situation of the 1920s, when secularist intellectuals and political agitators harshly attacked all sorts of religious traditions, including Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, popular religion, and “sects” (“redemptive societies”). This also marks a clear change in frontlines from (1) Christian missionaries vs. Chinese “heathens” via (2) defenders of freedom of belief vs. Confucianists (in the 1910s) to finally (3) a loose coalition of qualified (“non-superstitious”) believers against their secularist attackers in the 1920s.
While all authors apply different strategies in detail, the two Xie mainly use an evolutionist pattern that differentiates higher from primitive or lower religious forms. It allowed to dissociate “higher religions” from superstition as “irrational” and “immoral” wrong or mis-belief (mi-xin), as the mostly attacked form of religions, and, conversely, helped to unite those identified as higher rational, individual, and ethical religions. While the first can be understood as a “maneuver of dissociation,” the second presents a classical example of a “maneuver of linking” (Schwab-Trapp).56 Additionally, Wang Zhixin tried to demonstrate that Christian tradition was not so distant from the national Chinese cultural identity by pointing to many common ideas as possible points of contact. Accordingly, due to the mentioned change of power constellations, these authors used their knowledge from Western religious studies (zongjiaoxue) to consciously distance themselves from earlier missionary conceptions and open the concept of belief (xin or xinyang) from a theologically dogmatic and exclusivist one to a universal (or general anthropological) concept of believing as human capacity that may develop to a stage of “higher religions” (in an evolutionist paradigm).
While the examined works from the 1920s show no strong efforts to interpret xin in indigenous Chinese ways—in line with the strong Westernizing influences at this time—a remarkable work titled Zhongguo de zongiaoguan
These efforts of the 1920s bore fruit in the time of the Anti-Japanese war, when in 1943 various religious leaders, including the famous Buddhist Taixu, the Roman Catholic Archbishop Yu Bin
While it is difficult to measure these works’ real effect beyond the remarkable number of reprints,60 we can observe that the discursive constellations changed in the 1930s and 1940s. The strict secularist and scientistic modernization discourse related to debates on religion of the 1920s lost power, and the question of national and cultural identity gained more influence in their place.
5 Conclusion
In this short analysis of introductory works of zongjiaoxue mainly from the 1920s, I have shown (1) the role of the academic discipline of religious studies in introducing a universalist concept of xin as religious faith into the Chinese intellectual discourse of its time. In particular, these works introduced a concept that went far beyond a previous traditional understanding of believing as earlier introduced by Protestant Neo-Pietist or conservative missionaries. Instead, the concept of xin presented in these writings introduced the idea of believing or xin both as a general human capacity and as a phenomenon that is found in the whole of the history of religions. Both concepts could be understood as interrelated because the idea of such a general human capacity appears to be proved by its historical universality: it is found from the beginnings of humankind until today and in all places. This concept is clearly derived from the understanding of faith that developed in the West, especially in the nineteenth century, building on older ideas of pistis/fides in the ancient and Christian traditions and finally on Schleiermacherian ideas.61 And it was itself closely connected to the development of the new discipline called “history of religions” or “comparative religion.” In this new discipline, the use and function of faith/xin clearly changed as the general approach with its nineteenth-century universalist framework differed from the older theological one. Instead of sticking to Christian orthodoxy, it integrated the idea of evolution and combined it with the idea of a human capacity. Its adopters could thus think of a development from primitive to higher forms of religion. So-called “higher forms” such as Christianity, Buddhism, and Confucianism were qualified as rational, individual, moral, and of positive influence on personality, culture, and society. By adopting this evolutionist pattern of its time, “religious faith” (zongjiao xinyang) needed to be substituted neither by reason nor by a secular “new faith” (xin xinyang).62
(2) However, the use of such a concept of faith or belief did not occur just by chance, or as part and parcel of religious studies in general, but it was adopted and adapted contextually and by particular actors. As the context of the Anti-religious/Anti-Christian Movements of the 1920s suggests, Christian Chinese scholars of religion used the term xin in strategic ways in order to open the concept up from its Christian theological core to a much broader one, negotiating religious Christian and more generalized meanings of xin in the Chinese contemporary context. Thus universalized, the “transreligious” concept of xin/faith was not just Christian-monotheistic, but an assumed general capacity of human beings, allowing its utilizers to build bridges to other non-monotheistic types of religions, or even beyond, and facilitating discursive alliances against the secularist attacks. Similar interpretations had already been developed under similar circumstances in nineteenth-century Europe in the struggles between Christian thinkers and their critics. They were now adopted to China under specific circumstances when Chinese Christians— and other religionists—encountered anti-Christian and anti-religious attacks similar to those Western theology and Christian churches had encountered since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Simultaneously, theories of evolution from lower to higher religions also allowed distance from superstition (mixin). Under the circumstances of anti-superstition campaigns—that were just too closely connected to those against religion—this can be understood as a maneuver of dissociation.
(3) The concept of xin, however, did not prove to be a sharp enough analytical tool within the intellectual frameworks to gain a fixed position in the outlines of religious studies introductions. Instead, it pops up again and again as a general, obviously unavoidable term that needs to be explained by other more precise concepts. In particular, its semantic core content of denoting an inner dimension or “experience” of religion that goes back to Schleiermacher led the well-known religious philosopher Xie Fuya to prefer religious experience (zongjiao jingyan) or religiosity (zongjiaoxin) as better terms, thereby replacing xin semantically in places where authors like Xie Songgao would have used it.
Altogether, I find a significant convergence in the parallel genealogies of faith/belief and xin(yang) in the West and China, while local roots of xin played a rather minor role in the academic field of history of religions or comparative religion in this time period. The direct effect of these works is difficult to measure, but the many reprints of all the examined textbooks show their continued meaningfulness to readers of later periods. Even today, the concept of xin(yang) is still widely applied in Chinese religious studies. This chapter therefore demonstrates a trend away not only from indigenous semantics, but also from an originally heavily Christianity-centered idea of faith in Chinese Christian missions to a more generalized and open concept that constitutes one important layer of modern meanings of xin, laying the ground for its uses in present academic contexts.
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Wang Zhixin 王治心. 1926. Zhongguo lishi de shangdiguan 中國歷史的上帝觀 (The Idea of God in Chinese History). Shanghai: Zhonghua jidujiao wenshe.
Wang Zhixin 王治心. 1927. Sun Wen zhuyi yu Yesu zhuyi 孫文主義與耶穌主義. Shanghai: Qingnian xiehui shubao bu.
Wang Zhixin 王治心. 1933. Zhongguo zongjiao sixiang shi dagang 中國宗教思想史大綱 (Outline of the History of Religious Thought in China). Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju.
Wu Zhihui 吳稚暉. 1998 [1923]. “Yi ge xin xinyang de yuzhou guan ji rensheng guan 一個新信仰的宇宙觀及人生觀” (A New Faith’s View on the Universe and on Philosophy of Life). In Kexue yu renshengguan 科學與人生觀 (Science and View on Life), edited by Zhang Junmai. Shenyang: Liaoning jiaoyu chubanshe [Reprint of Shanghai: Yadong tushuguan, 1923], 306–396.
Xie Fuya 謝扶雅. 1939 [1928]. Zongjiao zhexue 宗教哲學 (Philosophy of Religion). 2nd ed. Shanghai: Qingnian xiehui [Association Press].
Xie Songgao 謝頌羔 and Yu Muren 余牧人. 1926. Zhujiao de yanjiu 諸教的研究 (Studies about religions). Shanghai: Guangxuehui.
Xie Songgao 謝頌羔. 1928. Zongjiaoxue ABC宗教學 ABC. Shanghai: Shijie shuju.
Xue, Yu. 2003. “Buddhist-Christian Encounter in Modern China: Taixu’s Perspective on Christianity.” Ching Feng 4, no. 2: 157–201.
Zhu Xizu 朱希祖. February 1919. “Lun Religion zhi yiming 論 Religion 之義名.” Beijing daxue yuekan 北京大學月刊 1, no. 2 (February 1919): 47–49.
Smith 1963; cf. Smith 1979. Smith differentiates between personal faith on the one hand and belief (as in “belief system”) as the dogmatic aspect of any particular historical religion on the other hand.
Smith 1979, esp. Chap. 7 (i): “Faith as generically human.” For Schleiermacher, see the chapter of Jiang in this volume.
Masuzawa 2005; similarly also Lopez 1998, 33: “Belief appears as a universal category because of the universalist claims of the tradition in which it has become most central, Christianity.”
See Chen Jinguo 2005, who uses xinyang (belief) together with yishi (ritual) prominently in his book title.
For example, the Taiwanese ethnologist Li Yih-yuan (Li 2004 [1998]) discusses belief and culture in a chapter of Zongjiao yu shenhua (“Xinyang yu wenhua
Cf. Clart 2007.
Though I follow Foucault’s emphasis on academia’s importance for shaping knowledge formations in selecting this focus, I would be careful to generalize its relevance for other discursive levels, such as everyday uses or inner-religious contexts. I am therefore humbly adding one chapter to this much bigger and richer genealogy by digging into the specific discursive constellations in the important Republican period.
For example, Goossaert has directly criticized the “use of faith as a criterion of belonging” that “came in with the adoption of the concept of religion, but it too is ill-adapted to the Chinese religious context.” (Goossaert 2005, 16). While there is surely good reason to be cautious about a simplistic use in a Western-Christian sense, the history of semantics approach that is applied here pursues another research interest.
Robertson 1988; cf. similarly Beyer 2006. See also this volume’s introduction.
“Religious studies” (zongjiaoxue) is here understood as a distinct discipline focused on religion(s). At the same time, the academic occupation with religion goes far beyond this explicit discipline, and research on religion has always been much more interdisciplinary. I shall include this interdisciplinary academic context when talking about other contributors and changing frontlines in debates on religion as discursive conditions.
As the English name of the discipline has changed several times in the past from “science of religion,” or later “comparative religion,” to “religious studies” or “academic study of religions,” I have here settled on the conventional name “religious studies” as one unified term in the following text to translate the Chinese zongjiaoxue.
Cf., for example, Kippenberg 2002; for the role of “religious experience,” see esp. Chap. 12 of his book.
For this, cf. again Masuzawa 2005; see esp. her reference to religious experience in the book, e.g., 316, 318 (quoting Troeltsch); cf. Lopez 1998 who refers as non-Western example to Olcott’s theosophic adaptation and reinterpretation of Singhalese Buddhism as a “belief system” that influenced also local self-understandings.
Jäger 2006; Schwab-Trapp 2010.
Schwab-Trapp describes these as discourses in “which discourse participants refer to each other, mutually allot their positions, form alliances or consolidate existing lines of conflict.” Schwab-Trapp 2010, 274.
A “floating” signifier is in Laclau’s view “the one whose emptiness results from the unfixity introduced by a plurality of discourses interrupting each other the floating signifier” (Laclau 2000: 305). For the application of Laclau’s term in a similar constellation of competing secular and religious discourses, see Wielander’s chapter in this volume.
Cf. the chapters by Starr and Jansen in this volume.
Cf. the chapters by Krämer (Japan) and Fröhlich (Liang Qichao) in this volume.
Liu 2012, 247−276.
See, for example, Chao 1986 or Meyer 2015.
Cf. the chapter by Travagnin in this volume.
Cf. Meyer 2015.
See, for example, the detailed study by Shepard 1991.
Dorrien 2001, esp. 58–110; Versluis 1993.
See Meyer 2015.
E.g. Jiang Shaoyuan’s translation of G.F. Moore’s The Birth and Growth of Religion: Being the Morse Lectures of 1922 (printed in 1923). It might be noted that in this work belief or faith are not explicitly highlighted as chapter titles, but the list of contents rather includes topics like “souls and spirits,” “the emergence of gods,” “morals and religion,” “religions of higher civilization,” “after death,” “ways of salvation,” or “salvation: religion and philosophy.” A handful of later translations of other introductory works were also created in the 1930s to 1940s, which I will not treat here (cf. Meyer 2015).
See, for example, Cai Yuanpei’s influential writings (e.g., Cai 1917).
See Jansen’s and Travagnin’s chapters in this volume, cf. Timothy Richard (1907); cf. Tarocco (2008).
Zhu Xizu 1919, 48: “(The acts or feelings which result from a belief in existence of a god, or of gods, having superior control over matter, life, or destiny)” (obviously quoted without source in English).
A prominent and influential example is David Friedrich Strauß’s Der alte und der neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntniß (1872); for Republican China, see, e.g., Ding Wenjiang (1934); for Hu Shi’s secular “belief” in the Great Self (dawo), see Hu 1919 and Fröhlich’s chapter in this volume.
E.g. Hayes’ translation (4th ed. 1919 [1904]) of Kellogg’s A Handbook of Comparative Religion and MacGillivray’s translation of Grant’s The Religions of the World in Relation to Christianity (orig.: [A] Handbook of Comparative Religion [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1899]) (MacGillivray 1910). The concept of “belief” was not used very prominently in these works and often appears related to (mono- or poly)theism, but partly also in the sense of a general human capacity.
Xie Songgao and Yu Muren 1926; Xie Songgao 1928.
Its outline mainly followed Barton’s The Religions of the World (2nd ed.), but it also integrated a number of other introductions and included newly written passages.
Four times altogether by page 1, twice in direct combination with zongjiao (zongjiao de xinyang
Xie Songgao and Yu Muren 1926, 3.
Xie Songgao and Yu Muren 1926, 4–6.
This stands in clear contrast to Frazer’s three stages of religious evolution, from magic through religion to science. He is instead following his main source, Barton (but also not diverging much from Tylor and others).
Xie Songgao and Yu Muren 1926, 182–186. Interestingly, he views Daoism even more negatively than some of his Western sources, such as Moore; cf. Xie Songgao 1928, 65–66.
“… sui you butong; danshi tamen dou xinyang Shangdi shi zhi you yiwei
The outline follows another work, Hume’s The World’s Living Religions.
Nedostup 2001, 90–114.
Cf. my article on Xie Fuya (Meyer 2008–2009).
Xie Fuya 1939 [1928], 56.
Xie Fuya 1939 [1928], 41–42.
Xie Fuya 1939 [1928], 42: “zongjiao sixiang
Xie Fuya 1939 [1928], 35.
Xie Fuya 1939 [1928], 119–153.
E.g. Laozi’s and Confucius’ religious experience, cf. Xie Fuya 1939 [1928], 74–84.
Xie Fuya 1939 [1928], 260.
For Schleiermacher’s concept, see Jiang’s chapter in this volume.
Wang—like many Christians—was also a member of the Guomindang. This is also reflected in his work Sun Wen zhuyi yu Yesu zhuyi
Wang Zhixin 1926, 4: renlei you xiantian de zongjiao xinyang
Wang Zhixin 1926, 4: yincang de shenmi de zongjiao benxing
Unfortunately, Wang generally does not reveal his sources and therefore also does not name Otto explicitly.
Wang 1926; Wang 1933, 28–29. Similar already Liu Shipei (1960 [1905]): 9B: “Kongzi … xin tian
Wang Zhixin 1933, 29.
Schwab-Trapp 2010.
Chen Jinyong 1939, preface (dated February 1937).
Chen Jinyong 1939, 173–177.
Xue 2003, 184–185.
There exist an impressive number of reprints, especially of Xie Songgao’s first book (14th reprint 1949 and at least a 2nd reprint in Hong Kong 1959), but also of Xie Fuya’s Zongjiao zhexue (2nd ed. 1939 and later reprints).
See Jiang’s chapter in this volume.
Cf. Wu Zhihui 1998 [1923].