Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences by Yong Chen (review)

Overall, the quality of the essays in both volumes is quite good. Yet, having to purchase two volumes instead of just one, in an era when even scholars do not buy many books, is less than optimal. The editors might have done better by omitting the weaker essays and publishing the stronger ones in a single, slightly larger tome. Similarly, the editors could have winnowed the contents of the volumes by articulating a more focused framing argument. In the present format, with the exception of the essays about Xuanxue, the pieces seem disconnected from each other. Since many of the essays concern ethics, the editors could have made that a central theme for one united volume. Another weakness is that the volumes fall short of doing full justice to the diversity of early medieval thought. We hear much about the advocates and ideas of Xuanxue, but almost nothing about the people they were debating—Confucian scholars who devoted much of their intellectual energy to writing commentaries, teaching students, editing histories, compiling ritual manuals, and annotating law books. The language of government, law, family ethics, and historiography was increasingly Confucian in tone. Thus, although their ideas were much less original and striking than their Xuanxue counterparts, Confucians were expressing the assumptions and concerns of a far greater number of people. Nonetheless, these volumes make a significant contribution to the study of early medieval Chinese thought and religion. There are more essays dedicated to analyzing the ideas of Xuanxue than in any other conference volume; moreover, these chapters plainly demonstrate that this intellectual movement did attend to political and ethical issues. Overall, the volumes’ essays indicate that even though the early medieval period is often associated with excess and wild abandon, whether they were erudite philosophers arguing in the salons, or Daoist priests dealing with the daily concerns of local people, early medieval educated men devoted a substantial amount of attention to moral issues and finding ways to set aright their topsy-turvy world. KEITH N. KNAPP The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina YONG CHEN, Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences. Religion in Chinese Societies, vol.5. Leiden: Brill, 2013. 207 pp. e96, US$133 (hb). ISBN 978-90-04-24373-6 With his book Yong Chen sets out to discuss the question of whether Confucianism is a religion, according to his introduction “one of the most controversial issues in both Confucian scholarship and the discipline of religious studies.” He tries to describe the major steps of the debate. Although Chen at some places mentions earlier periods chronologically, his study starts with Kang Youwei 康有為 and his state religion campaign and the May Fourth reaction against it (chapter 2). Of great importance for Chen is the position of Ren Jiyu 任繼愈 who in the late 1970s had from a Marxist point of view defined Confucianism as a religion. A so-called Confucian Religion School developed in the 1990s among academics, which in the first decade of the twenty-first century was taken into a new direction by men such as Jiang Qing 蔣慶, who thanks to Daniel Bell is often quoted in the West and whose 94 BOOK REVIEWS aim it is to reconstruct Confucianism as a religion. He is dealt with in the last pages of this book, in chapter 4. The book does not really consist of historical analyses but rather offers short sketches of the developments that took place mixed with some theoretical discussions. Chapter 1 is devoted to the linguistic problems concerning the word religion in Chinese and the different traditional terms used for what has been translated by the Jesuits as “Confucianism.” This chapter, too, is not an exhaustive treatment of the subject. It rather seems to serve the aim of giving the reader an overview over some well-known facts on the basis of Chinese and English literature. Somewhat problematic is the fact that Chen apparently does not read Japanese or languages other than Chinese and English. It is, for example, difficult to take his discussion of “zongjiao” 宗教 too seriously. He does point to the entirely different use of this term in Chan Buddhism and he briefly mentions that the Western term “religion” was translated into Japanese...