A Comparative Sociology of World Religions: Virtuosi, Priests, and Popular Religion

Notes

Notes n ot e s to c h a p t e r 1 1. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953); S. N. Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age Breakthroughs—Their Characteristics and Origins,” in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 1–25. 2. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 301–2, 363. 3. Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” American Sociological Review 29 (1964):358–74. 4. Benjamin I. Schwartz, “Wisdom, Revelation and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium BC,” Daedalus 104 (Spring 1975):1. 5. Jaspers, Origin and Goal of History, p. 1. 6. Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (London: Collins Harvill, 1988), p. 91. 7. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949), p. 52. 8. Max Weber,“The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), p. 267. 9. Ibid. 10. See, for example, Chaturvedi Badrinath, “Max Weber’s Wrong Understanding of Indian Civilization,” in Detlef Kantowsky, ed., Recent Research on Max Weber’s Studies of Hinduism (Munich: Weltforum Verlag, 1986), pp. 45–58. 11. Max Weber, Economy and Society (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), pp. 407–19, 437–38, 519–21; Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Gerth and Mills, eds., pp. 148–49; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), pp. 117–18. 12. The term supramundane to refer to beings such as deities, spirits, saints, demons, etc. and to cosmic processes such as the Tao and karma is preferred here to supernatural. Such beings and processes are not necessarily viewed by people as above or apart from nature. 263 13. Bellah,“Religious Evolution.” 14. Eisenstadt,“Axial Age Breakthroughs,” pp. 2–3. 15. Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 34–35, 113–18. 16. Steven Collins, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 104, 176–77. 17. Bellah, “Religious Evolution”; Gananath Obeyesekere, “Theodicy, Sin and Salvation in a Sociology of Buddhism,” in E. R. Leach, ed., Dialectic in Practical Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 12–18; S. N. Eisenstadt , “The Axial Age: The Emergence of Transcendental Visions and the Rise of Clerics,” Archives Europeennes de Sociologie 23 (1982):294–314. 18. Eisenstadt has distinguished the types of salvation in the world religions as this-worldly, as in Confucianism; other-worldly, as in Hinduism and Buddhism ; and a combination of this- and other-worldly themes, as in the monotheistic religions. Eisenstadt, “Axial Age Breakthroughs,” p. 16. A this-worldly salvation may be seen as a contradiction in terms, and Weber, for one, denied that Confucianism was a salvationist religion. Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 156, 228. Most contemporary scholars of Confucianism argue that Confucianism included transcendental elements. 19. Obeyesekere,“Theodicy, Sin and Salvation,” pp. 14–18. 20. Timothy Fitzgerald, “Hinduism and the ‘World Religion’ Fallacy,” Religion 20 (1990):101–18. 21. These definitions are modifications of those made by Vilfredo Pareto, the classical theorist of elites. See T. B. Bottomore, Elites and Society (London: C. A. Watts, 1964), pp. 1–3; Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1973), pp. 119–20. 22. Weber,“Social Psychology of the World Religions,” pp. 287–88. 23. Weber, Economy and Society, pp. 1166–73. 24. Ibid., pp. 54, 56. 25. Ibid., pp. 560, 1166–68. 26. Ibid., pp. 472, 479, 481–82, 1160, 1177–78, 1180–81. 27. R. W. Scribner, “Interpreting Religion in Early Modern Europe,” European Studies Review 13 (1983):89–105; H. C. Erik Midelfort, “Sin, Melancholy, Obsession : Insanity and Culture in Sixteenth Century Germany,” in Steven L. Kaplan, ed., Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), p. 113; Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), pp. 38–39; Ellen Badone, “Introduction,” in Ellen Badone, ed., Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 4–8; C. Scott Dixon, “Popular Beliefs and the Reformation in BrandenburgAnsbach ,” in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson, eds., Popular...