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The ReligiousSituation in the Far East IT is extremely presumptuous to try to discuss so complex a subject as the religious situation in East Asia in so short a time. All I can do is raise some general considerations and give a few examples. I will try to give some idea of the order of complexity of the problems, but I cannot hope to give any solutions. In speaking of religion today, I will be using an essentially Tillichian definition—religion as that meaningful structure through which man relates himself to his ultimate concern—and will not be concerned primarily with the largely moribund institutional structure of traditional religion in East Asia. It is the problem of how men in East Asia are attempting to make sense out of the reality in which they find themselves that I will be considering. Actually, in the case of China and Japan there is much in the situation that is the same as that which Paul Tillich discussed last time as being in the situation of contemporary Western man. For in China and Japan, too, people are having to face the human problems of a rapidly expanding rationalization, mechanization, and bureaucratization. I feel that both in the case of our society and East Asian societies, the rapid pace of modernization and industrialization holds enormous promise as well as danger. This new situation confronts us with enormous potentialities as well as constrictions. But even the potentialities are deeply disturbing and raise profound questions of meaning. There is another aspect of the modern situation, however, that we This chapter was first given as a public lecture at the Harvard Divinity School in the jail of 1961, fust after my return from a year in Japan. It was one of a series of lectures, and the preceding one bad been given by Paul Tillich, which explains several references in the chapter to him. This chapter and the following one were my first efforts to characterize the central religious and cultural issues of Japan's modernization. 6 do not share with East Asia. For better or for worse, the modern situation grew up out of our own Western tradition. Whether you consider it a fulfillment or a pervasion of that tradition, or some combination of the two, still you cannot deny that that is where it came from and everywhere the roots are deep in our own past. In East Asia the case is completely different. The modern situation did not arise out of the East Asian past, either as natural growth or as pathological aberration; rather, it came from without. It came often sharply, even brutally, and it had no roots in the past. Now, for a hundred years East Asia has been inundated with modern Western culture, but inevitably, because of the very nature of the modern West, not with our modern culture alone but with the whole Western tradition. The modern East Asian intellectual has to grapple not only with Einstein and Karl Marx, but just as deeply with Aristotle and Jesus Christ. So the modern situation has raised the problem of cultural identity in East Asia as it has in the West, but, I think, in a far more shocking and disturbing way. For a man, in a sense, is his past. When he sees the past radically threatened his reaction may be, and in East Asia has been, extreme. The starting point for any analysis of the ways in which East Asian societies have responded to the problems of meaning that the last hundred years have presented to them is to consider the religious cultural structure that had developed out of the East Asian tradition and that was still functioning as a more or less coherent system when Western impingement began to intensify. We find that that religious cultural structure was defined and limited by a version, or rather several versions, of the cosmological myth through which men in the archaic societies of both East and West have everywhere related themselves to reality. By the cosmological myth I mean that set of symbolizations in which nature, society, and self are seen as fused in a more or less compact unity. The cosmological myth was broken first in the West in the Mosaic revelation at Sinai, which proclaimed the radical transcendence of God. In the symbolization of the radical transcendence of God, a sharp differentiation between God and world and between self and society occurs for the first time, giving rise to the...

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