A World in Miniature: Three Recent Introductions to Chinese Religions

Review Essays 59 Journal of Chinese Religions 38 (2010) A World in Miniature: Three Recent Introductions to Chinese Religions BAREND J. TER HAAR Leiden University Die Religionen Chinas PHILIP CLART. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht Verlag, 2009. 224 pages. ISBN 978-3-8252-3260-3. €16.90, paper. This book comes with an additional digital reader with translations of important texts: Die Religionen Chinas: Reader. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht Verlag, 2009. 224 pages. ISBN 978-3-525-03919-9. Introducing Chinese Religions MARIO POCESKI. London: Routledge, 2009. 304 pages. ISBN 978-0-41543406 -5. £17.99, paper. Chinese Religion: A Contextual Approach XINZHONG YAO and YANXIA ZHAO. London: Continuum, 2010. xvii, 226 pages. ISBN 978-1-84706-476-9. £22.99, paper. Recently, three new introductions to Chinese religion or religions have appeared, each of them with its own characteristics. All three books include Confucian traditions as part of the religious phenomenon. They also provide the kind of detailed bibliographies and indexes that one would expect in introductory books. Writing such ambitious books, in which the tremendously rich religious culture of several thousand years must be covered in only a few hundreds pages is a daunting task. It is nigh impossible to cover the entire secondary literature and very few scholars will have read in the primary sources beyond those that cover their personal research interests. Poceski has worked primarily on Chinese Buddhism (Chan 禪). Clart has worked on new religious movements, Daoist inner alchemy, and popular Confucianism. He also has extensive fieldwork experience on Taiwan, which is more than just travelling around and visiting religious sites like most of us do. Yao has worked extensively on Confucianism, whereas both Yao and Zhao have worked on Christianity and Chinese 60 Journal of Chinese Religions philosophy from a Chinese comparative perspective. Thus, all of these scholars bring very different perspectives and expertise to their books. In order to do justice to the richness of these books, but also show how they differ from each other, I have decided to select several topics and then look critically at the ways in which the three books deal with them. My selection undoubtedly reflects my own interests and limitations, but at least this will enable me to gain some perspective on these fascinating surveys. The first difference that I wish to note is that Clart includes only a few drawings (a real weakness in a book on such a visual topic), while Poceski and Yao and Zhao do include illustrations. The reproductions in the book by Yao and Zhao are rather poor and not very insightful. The only one of the three with decent illustrations is the book by Poceski. These could be criticized for reflecting mostly southern religious culture, but that is not my main qualm. I was instead struck by the deadness of most photographs. For instance, none of the core pictures on popular religion (7.1. 7.4, 7.6, and 7.7 to Chapter 7) show any actual worship. No sacrifice, no incense burning, no fireworks, no renao 熱鬧 (“hot and noisy”) at all. I know the Xiahai City God Temple 霞海城隍廟 in Taipei (7.4.) from several visits and some minor fieldwork, and I have always seen the tables full of offerings with incense burning richly. In this picture they are empty and no worshippers are in sight. Luckily, Poceski does pay much written attention to the forms of worship (pp. 180-183 and passim), but more lively pictures would have enormously enriched his text. After all, it is bad enough that a book cannot include smell (of incense and sacrifices, for instance) and that including sound (of ritual and other forms of practice) is cumbersome, but at least an introduction to Chinese religions should help us and our students with good visual support of what religious life looks/ed like. Hopefully, new editions of these three works will provide visual material as well, perhaps on a central website or on a DVD. Clart presents all information organized per dynasty, followed by a topical discussion of the interactions between different religious traditions, the relationship between religion and social structure, forms of religious communication, and religion in art and literature. Every period...