Introduction to the Special Issue “Religious and Theological Interactions in East Asia: Issues, Channels and Impact”

1. Introduction

The contributions gathered here introduce their readers to the diversity of the resources mobilized by a younger generation of scholars working on religious phenomena, and particularly on interactions among faiths, spiritualities, and communities, in East Asia. Taken as a whole, this volume explores the way East Asian religions and societies harness resources offered by the cross-fertilization occurring between various religious and spiritual traditions. Directly or indirectly, these contributions also raise a question that goes beyond a mere academic endeavor: how do such interactions allow thinkers and actors to dialogically tackle issues related to the care of our common home? How do religious encounters and studies enable their agents to contribute to such pressing challenges as peacebuilding, ecological awareness, social equity, or spiritual empowerment?

We can divide the following eleven contributions into three groups. The first relates to the reading of classics as a vector of religious interactions; the second, spiritual experiences and collective identities; and the third, religious interactions and policies in national and global contexts.

2. The Reading of Classics as a Vector of Religious Interactions

Misha Tadd studied the first Latin translation of the Daodejing, which was penned by a French Jesuit (most probably Jean-François Noëlas, 1669–1740) in the 18th century. He focuses on the way the key metaphysical concepts of Being and Non-Being, on the one hand, and you 有 and wu 無, on the other hand, can be meaningfully compared and approached, exploring the philological and spiritual resources offered by said translation. The focus on the Daodejing is significant; not only has this work decisively inspired thinkers across East Asia, but also, its mystical outlook has helped to foster exchanges on inner experience rather than simply on dogmas and ritual practices.

David Bartosch embarks on a detailed analysis of the Xingli zhenquan tigang 性理眞詮提綱 (Sing lii jen ciyan bithei hešen), written in Chinese and Manchu by the French Jesuit Alexandre de la Charme (1695–1767) and published in Beijing in 1753. Using the format of a Confucian educational dialogue, de la Charme criticizes Neo-Confucian positions from an implicitly Cartesian and Christian perspective while tacitly blending Cartesian views with traditional Chinese concepts. He also alludes to Manchu shamanic views. De la Charme thus triangulates three different cultural and linguistic traditions. The work shows how the Jesuit scholarship of the time reached out into the ethnic and spiritual diversity of the Qing intellectual and political elites. It also testifies to a spiritual and intellectual blending that still takes place today, even if it occurs throughout different hermeneutical strategies and for different motives. In addition, the interaction operated by de la Charme between the Confucian and shamanistic viewpoints is especially relevant for the whole of the geographical area explored by our contributions.

Two other contributions continue the endeavor of fostering a creative interpretation of foundational East Asian Classics that Jesuit translators and commentators engaged in during the 17th and 18th centuries, even if they proceed in a way distinctly different from the one explored by pioneers in comparative classics. Moritz Kuhlmann reads the Biblical narrative of Joseph together with the story of Shun (a most filial son, whose virtue made him distinguished by Emperor Yao and chosen to be his successor) as narrated in the Mencius. By doing so, he examines how these two textual traditions share a common understanding of what “reconciliation” is meant to be. He looks at the succession of the episodes in which the main characters shed tears, secretly or in the open, and he unearths this way the ultimate meaning of the two narratives: expressing and managing emotions is a path through which to achieve inner healing as well as to transform the protagonists’ attitude and overcome hostility. The significance of these stories is renewed by the very fact of reading them together.

Guoqiu Lü engages in a similar operation when reading Latin and Chinese classics—Cicero’s De divinatione on the one hand, and some writings by Dong Zhongshu and Xunzi on the other. The immediate goal is to compare two approaches to divination techniques, and notably their political rationale. The research goes one step further: it shows the tensions at work in both traditions, tensions nurtured by several factors; a tendency towards rationalism that does not exclude a well-anchored belief in spirits and deities (the latter described as having entered into a contractual relationship with humankind); and the constant attention paid by both traditions as to the way ritual practices reinforce or otherwise undermine political stability.

3. Spiritual Experiences and Collective Identities

The second part of this volume examines the set of relationships that insert religious/spiritual motions and insights into a given social and institutional context. Yonghee Bae examines emotions and feelings encapsulated by the terms “mourning” and “melancholy”, selecting a few Korean novels published in the 1990s and 2000s as a basis for his exploration. He stresses the fact that melancholy can be a psychological impetus for spiritual creativity and utopianism, and he draws on those appraisals for examining some religious implications of mourning and melancholy in the novels of Yoon Dae-nyeong and Kim Hoon. If these novels focus on individual characters and trajectories, they eventually narrate the aspiration of the Korean people towards a kind of spiritual utopia. The collective dimension of the various spiritual/religious journeys conducted throughout East Asia remains distinctively alive, even in a time of individualism and social fragmentation.

Linh Thi Thuy Nguyen ponders over the concept of self-transcendence through an exploration of self-transcendent experiences (STEs). She undertakes a qualitative exploration of the topic, phenomenologically analyzing her own STEs within Buddhist and Christian contexts. She enlarges the set of data by including her communications with other persons, notably reports to supervisors, as well as comparative insights drawn from testimonies shared by individuals of various religious backgrounds. If belonging to an institutionalized religion may inhibit its adherents from experiencing STEs, paradoxically, these same structures may serve as a catalyst for such experiences among individuals without a religious affiliation. The article leads its reader to draw an additional conclusion: if STEs are made by “individuals”, the latter progressively find their path through a nexus of interactions as they navigate among several identities and ultimately feel led to promoting communal good and religious understanding. In short, both Bae’s and Nguyen’s articles progress from the individual to the collective.

The article by Yang Li undertakes to sketch out a general model of interpretation when describing the encounters between Shamanism and Christianity in East Asia. Although more centered on the collective dimension than the two preceding ones, it does raise questions linked to the consequences of the individualization of religious beliefs that is taking place on a global scale. In the context of this volume, one of the interests of this article is to explicitly engage in comparisons that cover the whole of the territory of East Asia, including the Greater Mongolia area and the whole of the Sinosphere, and to suggest comparisons with Southeast Asian contexts as well. Yang Li shows the pervasiveness of a diffusionist form of Shamanism all over the region: If Shamanism has been challenged and transformed by other religious forms, its ethos has also permeated neighboring religious expressions, including Christianity. Somehow, today’s East Asian Shamanism is almost nowhere and yet everywhere to be found.

4. Religious Interactions and Policies in National and Global Contexts

The four remaining contributions develop concerns linked to the political and global environment in which religious experiences and practices occur throughout East Asia. Located at the intersection between the second and the third part of this volume, the article penned by Benoît Vermander and Hang Thi Thu Phan discusses the religious rituals that frame the space-time of villagers belonging to the Muong minority in northern Vietnam. The ritual markers that the community under study mobilizes delineate the framework in which communal existence takes shape and meaning, evolving according to the socio-economic, political, and ecological challenges that it encounters. The household, the village, the ethnic territory, and the nation are all subject to symbolic elaborations. At times, these various territorial units are articulated together within the context of one unifying event, such as a large-scale ritual that weaves existential, communal, and political dimensions into a single thread. More generally, Asian rural communities construct and assert their agency by activating the ritual resources at their disposal while submitting to the constraints that the political apparatus imposes on them.

The article by Ziming Wang on the establishment of the “United Church of Christ in Japan” deals with the pattern of interaction between the state and Christianity under a wartime regime, increasingly totalitarian. In April 1939, the Diet passed a bill aimed at strengthening state control over religions, which required Christian denominations to establish religious organizations. Christianity, as a foreign religion, was facing attacks from the nationalist sectors. Facing harsh pressure, Christians sought to project a patriotic image, ultimately leading to the formation of the United Church as a survival strategy amidst a hostile social-political environment. Focusing on a critical historical period, Wang’s article helps one to better understand both the genealogy and the aftermath of the Japanese Christian unification movement. It also highlights unresolved tensions and aporias when it comes to the interaction between state and religion in the historical context and cultural mindset shared by East Asia as a whole.

Subsequently, Katja Wengenmayr’s contribution focuses on today’s China and, precisely, on the current discourse on the Marxist study of religion. In recent years, scholars have responded to state directives on the subject by reframing the discipline. If this strategy allows them to secure a (limited) space for religious studies as an academic field of its own, it also goes with a new focus on atheism as an encompassing guideline and perspective, narrowing the discursive space for other theoretical approaches toward religion. The status of both religion and religious studies remains a sensitive and evolving topic in China, as it is also the case, with some variations, in Vietnam.

Finally, the contribution authored by Beilei Bai works as an excellent conclusion to this volume. It aims at providing a theoretical framework for the study of religious phenomena in a period of (de)globalization, the validity of said framework being submitted to what the author calls “the East Asia Litmus Test.” Bai starts with the following question: faced with the twin challenges of globalization and de-globalization, do religions exercise agency in these trends? In other words, do they give shape to these trends, or are they rather shaped by them? “Globalization” is defined here as a shared vision of the world, a vision that translates into a (secular) global imaginary. The various “deglobalization” narratives remain correlated to the globalist storyline they confront. In fact, the secular imaginary had fostered a homogenous narrative that has caused both ontological and epistemological crises. These crises explain the resurgence of religious discourse within the narratives of deglobalization. Bai then moves from a global outlook to a scrutiny of the trends at work in East Asia, and particularly China. Here also, the globalization and deglobalization narratives intermingle in religious and secular dimensions in a way that reshapes each of them. For instance, Confucianism no longer holds the dominant cultural position it once enjoyed in ancient China. The prevailing cultural framework has been affected by a secular modernity, further reinforced by the atheistic principles embedded in Marxist ideology. However, even in its secularized form, Confucianism continues to shape Chinese social practices and values. More generally, East Asian identity remains rooted in Confucian secular humanism, which has evolved into a modern secular identity. Still, Confucianist secularism and the Western model of secularization are extremely different phenomena, as Confucianist secularism was associated with state-sponsored religious rituals and a social ethos imbued with religiosity. Said otherwise, in Western countries, deglobalization narratives are often fostered by the crisis of secular eschatology, a crisis further complicated by identity politics. In East Asia, the focus shifts to a re-engagement with the specific Confucianist mold of secularism, where cultural elements are rediscovered and reasserted against the homogenizing currents of global modernization.

5. Towards an East Asian Framework for Religious Studies

It is our conviction that the regional framework we privilege here presents many advantages when it comes to renewing the questions and methods proper to religious studies. When the focus is too narrowly national and local, some specificities of the object under study may be overlooked, whereas other features that could be found in other contexts are assumed too rapidly to be particular to the national or local traditions being studied. Conversely, when we privilege a global perspective, methods and concepts can become almost inapplicable to the area under scrutiny. The East Asian focus provides us with the right combination of similarities and differences, a combination that illuminates each of the national or local religious expressions through a manageable comparative perspective. It also provides the researchers with initial hypotheses as to the origin and trajectory of the beliefs, practices, or organizational models that they encounter during their research.

Moreover, as we already noted, a regional focus will foster a new generation of concerned scholars: by displacing perspectives, by helping researchers to go out of their comfort zones, it highlights the need to overcome the misunderstandings and contradictions that shape the current East Asian landscape and to recognize how much the religious traditions active in the region can contribute in the shaping of a more peaceful, more just and more livable region.

To go further into the direction that this set of contributions is sketching, some questions remain to be elucidated. The most obvious one can be simply stated: what does the term “East Asia” exactly cover? For sure, the concept has been discussed and theorized for a long time already. The role historically played by the Chinese writing system, some markers rooted in everyday life such as chopsticks and rice culture, Confucianism as a value system (with notable variants between, say, Vietnam and Korea), the additional influence of Buddhism and local religions, the arrival of Christianity in the region at similar times and through similar channels, constant economic, cultural and military interactions—all these factors define the space of Vietnam, China, Japan and Korea as “East Asia” in the same way as “Europe” can be culturally and geographically circumscribed. The question is now to decide whether this rather traditional approach towards defining East Asia remains valid, or whether new ways of being “East Asian” are currently in the making, whereas other factors are becoming obsolete. The question of the continued relevance of Chinese characters as a unifying factor throughout the region comes immediately to mind. Another question to be investigated has to do with the nature and plasticity of Confucianism: the current significance and cohesiveness of this tradition are doubted by some. Other scholars, however, insist on its pervasiveness: the model it obeys would be the same as the one already analyzed in the case of East Asian Shamanism. For these scholars, one may speak of “Confucian Buddhism”, “Confucian Shamanism” or else “Confucian. Christianity”, a process of religious contamination that would be characteristic of East Asia.

There are other factors that lead one to define the East Asian identity as perpetually evolving. For instance, a certain cultural volatility comes from the fact that the four countries at the center of this set of contributions experience intensive contacts among themselves. Their high degree of integration makes the regional situation sensitive, loaded with more challenges and dangers than it is sometimes recognized.

Scholars working in the field of religious studies will note that religious traditions play no small role when the identity of East Asia is under discussion: as noted below, Confucianism provides the region with much more than a moral code; similarities between Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean and Japanese local religions depend largely upon the shamanistic elements that characterize them; the Buddhist tradition within the region is remarkably constant and unified, shaped by a common history; and the level of religious diversity experienced at the local level or otherwise the role that Christian institutions have played in the shaping of the health and educational system are among the factors that have given and continue to give East Asian societies an often overlooked amount of openness and elasticity as well as a sense of universality. In other words, East Asian religious scholars are not only focused on religions per se; they also contribute to understanding and redefining the space and ethos of East Asia as a multidimensional reality.