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

II. Religious Action in the World Religions

p a r t i i Religious Action in the World Religions There is no agreement among scholars over what constitutes a world religion, and there is necessarily some degree of arbitrariness in the choice of cases to compare. This work follows Max Weber in his focus on six of the world religions, but my choice of cases has been determined in part by the availability of sufficient information to permit the delineation of patterns of religious action of both elites and masses. The summary of Weber’s work on the world religions in the previous chapter made no attempt to “correct” his descriptions and interpretations in the light of new material and scholarship. Weber’s scholarly achievements were phenomenal given the material available to him, but there have been extensive revisions of many of his characterizations, especially of the Asian religions, as well as criticisms of his interpretations. In the following chapters, the differences between contemporary interpretations and those of Weber are only occasionally made explicit, and an attempt is made to build on Weber’s considerable achievements, especially with respect to the description and analyses of popular religion. What we have now is a substantial accumulation of studies on popular religion —anthropological, historical, or both—among rural populations in China, India, Southeast Asia, and Catholic Europe, with a somewhat more limited number of studies on other Christian streams, Islam, and Judaism. The availability of source data on popular religion has been a major determinant of the relative foci on the past or the present in individual chapters . Since the Communist Revolution in China, Western anthropologists have had few opportunities to conduct research on popular religion in mainland China, but we do have many historical studies of popular religion in late imperial China. A comparison of the data from the historical studies with the data gathered by anthropologists in contemporary Taiwan show 67 remarkable continuities in Chinese popular religion. There are relatively few historical studies of the popular forms of religion in Hindu India and Buddhist Southeast Asia, but we do have a considerable accumulation of anthropological studies that provide much of the data in the chapters on Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism. With respect to popular religion in European Catholic countries, we have the advantage of a considerable number of both historical and anthropological studies. This enables us to point to both change and continuities in popular religion over a considerable time frame. The chapters on China, Hinduism in India, Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and “traditional” Catholic Europe have a common framework: the characteristic patterns of elite and popular religion are described; their interrelationships are analyzed; and the data are then contextualized by reference to religious values, religious institutions, and the wider sociopolitical environment. The cases here include one, China, where an emphasis is placed on the total complex of religions (Confucianism, Taoism , Buddhism) that constitute “Chinese religion.” In the other cases, the focus is on a single religion within a geocultural unit (Hinduism in India, Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia, Catholicism in Europe). Japanese religion is similar to Chinese in its syncretism of a number of religious traditions, but in a brief section appended to the chapter on Buddhism , I have, for comparative purposes, chosen to focus on the place of Buddhism in Japanese popular religion. The focus on a particular religious tradition in most of the chapters is not intended to suggest that what we call the world religions are single, monolithic traditions or that we can understand the development of religion in a particular area or country by focusing exclusively on the dominant tradition. It is evident, for example, that what we call Hinduism today developed in interaction with other religious traditions, especially Jainism and Buddhism in ancient times and Sikhism and Islam in later times. The understanding of the total religious scene of a particular society , such as India, or the historical development of a particular tradition are not, however, the major concerns here. This work is an attempt to compare and analyze the interactions of elite and popular forms of religion , and for this purpose an analytical differentiation of the religious traditions appears justified. The short chapter on Islam and Judaism does not attempt to provide a comprehensive review of elite and popular religion or follow strictly the framework of the preceding chapters. Instead, the dynamics of popular 68 | Part II religion are demonstrated by focusing on popular communal religion and popular...