Search Results (23)

The text Poxie lun:Daojing shijingfo wen破邪論:道經師敬佛文 (Treatise on Refuting Heresies: On the Respect of Taoist Scriptures for Buddha) records twenty-three items of “miscellaneous ancient records in Taoist scriptures” 道教古經古事雜抄. Half of these entries align with contents found in Dunhuang manuscripts and pertain to the practice of “replacing Buddhism with Taoism”. The Dunhuang manuscripts that involve the content of “replacing Buddhism with Taoism” can be categorized into five situations: First, Taoist scriptures that retain Buddhist terminology which was later replaced by later generations; Second, instances where traces of Buddhist terminology remain, showing signs of having been altered or replaced; Third, cases where the replacement of Buddhist terminology has already been completed in the manuscripts; Fourth, instances where, after replacing Buddhist terminology, the sentence structure was also revised; Fifth, sections that were preserved which, in later generations, were deleted due to their content relating to the blending of Buddhism and Taoism. These instances of “replacing Buddhism with Taoism” may reflect efforts by Taoism to remove Buddhist elements amid criticism or an attempt by Buddhist monks to preserve Buddhism’s sanctity by altering Taoist texts. The Dunhuang Taoist manuscripts offer vibrant historical material for discussing interactions between Buddhism and Taoism in medieval China. Full article

This study focuses on Xizi-belief (惜字信仰) and provides a comparative analysis of the religious philosophies of Tianming (天命) and Tianli (天理), using the Hunan region as a case study. Through anthropological methods and fieldwork, this study explores how Classical Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism shape and guide word-cherishing behaviors based on the conceptual philosophies of Tianming and Tianli. The Tianming conception views characters as revelations of heavenly destiny. Through religious rituals, people cherish words to honor heaven and seek to change their destinies through heavenly forces, reflecting worldly desires and spiritual pursuits and emphasizing heaven with personhood. In contrast, the Tianli conception sees words as carriers of moral and natural laws. Guided by Confucian ethics and the concept of karma and retribution, it influences people’s moral norms and behavioral practices, reflecting the metaphysical moral law of a just and righteous heaven. Both conceptions not only involve the worship and protection of words but also profoundly embody a deep understanding and pursuit of the order of the universe, moral norms, the ethics of life, and the meaning of life. This study reveals three modes of influence: the religious philosophy integration model, the ritual practice model, and the architectural embodiment model. These models emphasize the positive impact of Xizi-belief on ethics and social life, prompting people to demonstrate positive guidance in human behavior through reverence for Tianming (mandate of heaven), adherence to Tianli (principle of heaven), and respect for nature. Under the guidance of classical religious ethical principles, the spread of Xizi-belief and the practice of Xizi religious ceremonies promote the harmonious development of individual virtues and social order, achieving harmony between humans and the universe. Full article

In his work The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, Matteo Ricci not only criticized Buddhism and Taoism but also put forward the viewpoint that “Sanhanjiao is non-orthodox teaching”. The so-called Sanhanjiao actually refers to the three teachings into one established by Lin Zhaoen, so Ricci’s criticism of the three teachings into one, to some extent, is also a criticism of Lin Zhaoen’s “Three-in-One Doctrine”. Ricci used the argument “One Teaching cannot have Three Teachings” to criticize the view of “One Dao, Three Teachings” and also used “it is not possible to forcibly equate the Three Teachings” to criticize the theory of “the Three Teachings are the same”, bringing the perspective of the uniqueness of faith in Western religious culture to China. Ricci’s criticism of the three teachings into one is based on the premise of spreading Catholicism; his argument mainly relies on the logical reasoning of the Western way of thinking, thus ignoring the inherent characteristics of Chinese indigenous culture. However, his viewpoint at least broke the mainstream ideology of “the Unity of the Three Teachings” in the late Ming Dynasty and also provided significant inspiration for the intellectuals of the late Ming Dynasty to reflect on this trend. Ricci’s dialogue with Chinese indigenous religions did not erase the differences between their respective cultures, but actually promoted the integration between Chinese and Western cultures. Therefore, the significance of The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven lies not only in the dissemination of Catholic thought but also implies a dialogue and cultural transformation between different civilizations. Full article

The Zhao Lun, authored by Seng Zhao, elaborates on the Madhyamaka thought. This work has had a significant impact on Chinese Buddhist philosophy, as well as on Confucianism and Taoism. During the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the esteemed monk Wencai from the Huayan school of Buddhism composed a book titled A New Commentary on the Zhao Lun (hereafter New Commentary), which offers annotations and explanations for the text of the Zhao Lun and employs the “One Mind” theory to interpret the Zhao Lun. Text analysis methods are utilized in this article to conduct an in-depth study of the “One Mind” theoretical system constructed by Wencai within the New Commentary. It explores the essential content, integrative characteristics, and theoretical origins of the “One Mind” theory, thereby revealing the theoretical style of the Huayan school during the Yuan dynasty from a novel and unique perspective. Additionally, we analyze how Wencai integrates Tathāgatagarbha thought and Madhyamaka thought into his theory of “One Mind”. This analysis constitutes, to a certain extent, an indirect refutation of the harsh criticisms of Tathāgatagarbha thought of “Critical Buddhism” in Japan and provides new perspectives and reflections for a deeper understanding of Tathāgatagarbha thought. Full article

The Xizi Pagoda (惜字塔) is a form of traditional religious building used for burning “Paper with Characters (字纸)”, worshiping the gods, praying for blessings, revitalzing culture, and it is also an important material embodiment in the process of the development and evolution of religion in China, carrying China’s unique “Scholarly Culture (书香文化)”. This paper is the first study of the philosophy of religion of Xizi Pagodas (a vernacular stone religious architectural landscape). The research of the representative Xizi Pagodas in different parts of Hunan province were carried out to analyze the origin of Xizi Pagodas, cultural rituals, modeling paradigms, decorative art, and to explore the traditional Chinese religious and philosophical thoughts embedded in Xizi Pagodas through relevant literatures. The results show that Xizi Pagodas contain the religious concepts of “Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism (儒释道)”: the emergence of Xizi Pagodas is connected to the development of Confucianism; Xizi Pagodas incorporate Buddhistic thoughts and inherit architectural features of Buddhist Pagodas; and the “Xizi (惜字)” ritual and images of deities on Xizi Pagodas are associated with Taoism. At present, the number of Xizi Pagodas is decreasing, and the remaining ones are in a serious state of dilapidation and disrepair, and the “Xizi” Culture is gradually being forgotten and fading away. This paper enriches the relevant research on the Xizi Pagodas and the “Xizi” Culture. Full article

The Caodong School (曹洞宗) advocates the integration of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism (三教會通) and interprets Chan through the I Ching (以易釋禪). During the transition from the Ming to the Qing Dynasty, there was extensive interaction and mobility between the Ming loyalists (遺民) and Chan monks. This accelerated the secularization of monks and promoted the construction of temple gardens, which were expressed and preserved through literary Chan poetry. This study explores the relationship between Buddhist concepts and garden construction through a specific case, the Changshou Monastery Garden (長壽寺花園) in Canton (now Guangzhou) during the Qing Dynasty. This study examines how the Chan master Shilian Dashan 石濂大汕 (1633–1705), who journeyed to Dang Trong (Cochinchina 廣南) to spread Buddhist teachings, shaped the design and layout of the temple garden, reflecting Buddhist ideals and Caodong principles. This study analyzes the changes in landscape at the Changshou Monastery Garden, according to “the sound of tides” (潮音) from a Buddhist perspective. It also reveals how Dashan, as both a monk and a literati, blended Chan and Chinese philosophy in making the garden. The cultural resonance of tides within religious and literati traditions furnishes novel insights and prospects for the development of garden spaces. Full article

After the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire and the introduction of Buddhism into China, Christianity and Buddhism were both faced with the adjustment of the existing society. In the Roman Empire, faced with some censure, apologists began to write articles to clarify misunderstandings and express their beliefs. At the same time, there are similar argumentative documents on Buddhism in China. Their argumentation ideas also have many similarities, such as, firstly, distinguishing them from the original ideas, then using the existing ideas, and finally, actively integrating them into existing society. However, there are some bigger differences in the background of the debate between the Roman Empire and China—Christianity has strong political independence. The most fundamental difference is the atmosphere of the existing ruling ideology—China has been Confucianized, and the political independence of Confucianism is relatively weak. It is this fundamental difference that finally led to the final difference in the development paths of Christianity in the Roman Empire and Buddhism in China, which then affected their historical paths. Full article

In the minds of ancient people, tombs and burials were where the lives of this world ended and another type of life began. By incorporating the concepts of life found in Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and the widespread belief in ghosts and immortals, burial ceremonies evolved during the Wei and Jin 魏晋 dynasties (220–420) into an integrated and unified notion of burial. The funeral ritual’s imaginative and fanciful depictions of the hereafter express sentimental devotion to life and contemplation of death. The burial ceremony and tomb architecture change in accordance with how the concepts of sacrifice and ghosts develop. The features of people’s belief in ghosts and immortality are reflected in particular burial practices. The popularity of necromancy burials and ghost marriages during the Middle Ages (third to sixth centuries) bring to light the binary antagonism between the soul and the body in burial, as well as the emphasis on spiritual freedom and physical immortality in the life philosophy. Full article

The rise of a patriarchal society has led to a prevalent perception of male superiority over women, which is reflected in the gender-based disparities within the deity system of China. However, in contrast to the situation in the Central Plains, the Lingnan region assigns a significant social status to women, as evidenced by the active worship of female deities. Among them, the Loong Mother stands out as a highly revered goddess in Lingnan’s mythology. This paper investigates the evolution of the Loong Mother’s deification from a mortal woman, and explores the varying religious principles of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, as well as their influence on the veneration of female deities in Lingnan. Additionally, this paper analyzes the Loong Mother’s portrayal within civil society. Despite undergoing continuous transformation to cater to diverse religious traditions and societal needs, the goddess’s actions and functions ultimately reflect her creation and shaping by the community. Full article

The fiction “Quanxiang Pinghua”, published by Jianyang 建陽 Yushi 虞氏 in the Yuan Dynasty, depicts public religious concepts using a set of organized illustrations of etiquette. As a popular cultural reading material of the Yuan Dynasty, the fiction’s illustrations are a mixture of mainstream religious ideas, such as Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, reflecting the Jianyang people’s compromised identification of the three religions and their value of faith. The illustrations shape the religious view of “the impermanence of destiny”. With the help of the spatial narrative of the political and religious order of Confucianism and the public construction of the ritualistic landscapes of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, these images reflect the ethical enlightenment and religious beliefs of the three religions in social life. From the perspective of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, this article adopted interdisciplinary methods to analyze inherent religious ethics in the illustrations of the fiction and explore religious beliefs among the people in the Yuan Dynasty. This article suggested that, by depicting religious rituals, the illustrations in the fiction reflect the comprehensive acceptance of the benevolence and righteousness, filial piety, loyalty, and kindness of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism by the public of the Yuan Dynasty. The illustrations in the fiction manifest Confucian order and moral ethics, of which the extension is interconnected with the concepts of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and living ethics, manifesting the inner interpretation of Confucian ethics in Jianyang popular literature and art and the collective regulation of folk religious beliefs. Full article

This paper examines Carl Dennis’s secularized religious visions in his Pulitzer-winning poetry collection, Practical Gods (2001). Dennis’s secularized religious visions can be quite understandable in the context of the ascending trends of secularization, diversification, and globalization of religion in America, and they demonstrate affinities with literary predecessors such as Wallace Stevens, with his aestheticized religion under the influence of Nietzsche, as well as with the innovative religious thinking of William Blake, Kazantzakis, and Oscar Wilde, and with certain aspects of Taoism and Zen Buddhism. This paper addresses Dennis’s perception of theological controversies, such as the contradiction between the omnipotence of God and the existence of evil, theological determinism vs. human free will, theological view of history vs. New Historicism, divinity in man, aestheticized religion, and earthly paradise through the focused lens of Dennis’s “practical religion”. Despite the breadth of the theses in Dennis’s conceived practical religion as examined in this paper, they are all tied up with the core of the phenomenological study of religion: that religion is important to believers of the religion irrespective of the objective truth of the religion or the actual existence of God. In Dennis’s views, as accorded with the phenomenological study of religions, God maybe an idea and a fiction, but it is a necessary fiction for humans. Thus, Dennis humanizes gods with the flaws and fragility of humanity while deifying ordinary humanity in the contemporary context. Contrasting what he views as theological determinism with its view of linear history and the apocalypse of grand events, Dennis embraces human free will, a non-teleological, aestheticized living with necessary fiction, and a transient paradise on earth. Carl Dennis’s religious vision reveals a poststructuralist (even though he did not brand himself so) abolition of the absoluteness of a transcendent signifier as well as binary opposition (between God and man, good and evil, religious/historical truth and fictionality), and it manifests an affinity with New Historicism and the phenomenological study of religion. Full article

The impact of religion on business has attracted cross-academic attention in recent years. Does the religious atmosphere impact corporate social responsibility (CSR)? This study addressed this question using a sample of Chinese-listed companies from 2010 to 2018. Our findings reveal that firms in regions with a Taoist-dominated religious atmosphere are more charitable and less environmentally invested. In contrast, firms with a Buddhist-dominated religious atmosphere are more ecologically engaged and less charitable. This study extends the literature on the impact of the informal institutional environment on corporate social responsibility by distinguishing the heterogeneity of the impact of Buddhist- and Taoist-dominated religious atmospheres on CSR. It also provides a new perspective for enterprises to formulate corporate social responsibility strategies based on the regional cultural environment. And it also enriches the application of informal institutional theory to the fields of management and religion. Full article

Chinese spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism all emphasize the cultivation of idealistic mentalities (IMs) which are (1) not yet achieved, (2) clear in value judgment, (3) systematic and stable, and (4) cultivated with systematic training. While IMs are of interest to positive psychology, the methodology of positive psychology limits research on IMs. Fundamentally, positive psychology focuses on widely existing positive concepts and emphasizes being value-free, which conflicts with the features of IMs. Positive psychological studies relevant to IMs also suffer from methodological limitations: (1) recruiting samples without a spiritual background (realistic assumption); (2) ignoring qualitative differences between levels of actualization of IMs (linear assumption); (3) dividing systematic mental patterns into separate elements (reductionism); and (4) lacking value clarification during interventions. In summary, this article illustrates the methodological limitations of positive psychology in research on IMs. It encourages further research on IMs and supports the necessity of developing a new idealistic psychology for better research on IMs. Full article

From the Yuan to the mid-Ming period, the people of Huihui (回回人) in mainland China gradually Sinicized in terms of their languages, family names, marriages, costumes, and ethical values. There was close interaction between these Muslims and Confucian scholars in China. Most of the mosque inscriptions in this period were written by Confucian scholars, who were the first to try to interpret Islam in Confucian terms. Around the mid-Ming period, the Chinese language became the lingua franca of Muslims in mainland China, and the teaching of Arabic and Persian classics in Chinese became an urgent need at this time. It was at this time that the Confucian academies were revived with the government’s permission. Thereupon, the Muslim scholar Hu Dengzhou (胡登洲) founded a rejuvenated educational system known as Jingtang education (經堂教育), which produced a group of Muslim scholars who wrote in Chinese. Islam thus entered the historical arena of interaction with traditional Chinese religions. During the middle and late Ming period, changes in political and economic structures led to changes in the general mood of society. The rise of Wang Yangming’s Mind Study (心學) brought a lively academic atmosphere and a relaxed cultural environment to intellectual circles. The concept of “The same mind and the same principle of the sages in the East and the West” advocated by Lu Jiuyuan (陸九淵) and Wang Yangming (王陽明) was taken seriously by Muslim scholars and became a crucial theoretical reference in their writing process. In the late Ming and early Qing periods, the classical learning of the Shandong school and the Jinling school of Jingtang education focused on the study of Xingli (性理學). The theory of Sufism shared many common ideas with the Three Teachings (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism) which showed a tendency towards confluence in the Song, Yuan, and Ming periods. Chinese Muslim scholars, known as Huiru (回儒), drew intellectual resources from all of these traditions to construct their study of Xingli. Full article

In some forms of Zen Buddhism, the aspiring student is given a problem to solve, whether it be a paradoxical koan, a probing question about the self, or some personal dilemma to which there appears to be no answer. This struggle of the student towards enlightenment is described as the creation in the student of a great mass or ball of doubt, called a daigidan. The more and more the student struggles with this problem, the more he or she becomes frustrated, lost, blocked, enmeshed and burdened down by this growing ball of doubt. Every examination of the problem reveals new difficulties; confusion ensnarls the world; the strings and strands of doubt multiply until the point is reached where everything in the universe seems to be entangled and paralyzed—all tied up in knots. Moreover, it is said that the greater the ball of doubt grows, the greater the moment of awakening when at last it finally comes. Into our hands, in our time, has been given a Great Ball of Doubt, perhaps the greatest ball of doubt there could possibly be: the Earth. It is an immense koan, the solution for which we are now, like Zen students, intensely and personally responsible: that is, our lives and futures depend on our being able to unravel the knots of its mysterious burden. The solving of such a mystery is internal to it (unlike a problem that stands outside of us), and the realization that the planet has finite boundaries has caused an “implosion of sensibility”—a vast cultural struggle between those who have internalized this finiteness, and those who still persist in believing in an infinite planet, with infinite resources, occupied by humans with infinite desires. Instead, in order to solve this immense all-engulfing koan, we are being driven into new (and sometimes very old) forms of planetary embeddedness and immanence, and away from flights to some kind of irresponsible imaginary ranscendence. Full article