Asian Religions, page 3
Second, the definition of religion as “supernaturalism” is proven unhelpful when we look deeply at the immense variety of “gods” and conceptions of “divinity” that we find in the world's religions. It is not only the case that some religions deny the existence of gods altogether (this is true of Confucianism, and also of more intellectual forms of Buddhism and Hinduism), but also that some religions, while recognizing the existence of gods, still deny their importance: the Buddha readily admitted that gods “exist,” but he minimized their importance – he denied that gods had the power to heal the spiritual ills of his followers. To give another example, Taoist priests acknowledge that gods and spirits “exist” (and liturgically interact with them), but they claim their own powers to be far greater than those of the gods. If gods are “irrelevant” or “inferior,” then it would seem to be unhelpful to define religion in purely supernaturalistic terms.
If religion is not “supernaturalism,” then what is it? Scholars of comparative religion began to discuss the general concept of “religion” in the late nineteenth century, and the history of the discipline is fascinating in itself. I will not repeat that discussion here, but draw upon two or three definitions that strike me as especially useful; indeed my own definition (and the operational definition for this book) is syncretic, and I am grateful to these scholars for shaping my own identity as a student of religion through their inclusive and insightful analysis. We will see that all of the traditions covered in this book can be understood with the help of an overarching definition:
Humans are religious by nature. They seek patterns of meaning and action that are ultimately transformative. As such, religion is a model of and a model for reality, as experienced by individuals in the context of social, natural, and cosmic existence.
Let's look briefly at the three statements contained in this definition:
1 “Humans are religious by nature.” What does it mean to say that people are religious by nature? Religion is fundamental, and it is universal. No society has existed without religion, that is, without some conception of super-mundane reality (however we might describe it) and ritual and behavioral norms directed toward personal and social transformation. Recently neurobiologists have even tried to identify a “religious gene,” and some have claimed to have found it. My own appreciation for this point follows Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), who, in his book The Sacred and the Profane, describes the human being as homo religiosus – “religious man” – not based on any particular beliefs or practices (and certainly not on the basis of “the belief in God or gods”), but rather based on a sense of reality having two dimensions, the sacred and the profane.4 These dimensions are profoundly distinct from each other, but they interact and interpenetrate in what Eliade calls “irruptions” of the sacred, moments in time and points in space where the sacred is experienced within the world of everyday life. By “sacred reality” or the experiential “sense of the sacred,” Eliade understands all of the dimensions of religious experience that we would expect (encounters with divine beings, practices of prayer or meditation, places of gathering and worship), but also other kinds of extraordinary consciousness – occasions when our normal sense of space and time are suspended, such as when we are seeing a movie or reading a book, recalling a first kiss, being moved by nature, and so on. These too are “religious” experiences. From this point of view, it is difficult to imagine any human being who lacks a religious sensitivity.
2 “They seek patterns of meaning and action that are ultimately transformative.” This part of our definition is derived from the work of another important scholar of the comparative study of religion, Frederick Streng (1933–1993). Streng was a student of Buddhism, especially the “doctrine of emptiness” of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) School. His translation of Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way) was a path-breaking study of this concept, further developed in his book Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning.5 Partly on the basis of his studies of Buddhism and of his personal engagement as a devout Lutheran Christian, Streng formulated a general definition of religion as “ultimate transformation.”6 For Streng, religion is fundamentally “active”; it promises change, and it delivers on that promise. Religious change (personal, social/political, and cosmic transformation) goes to our very core – it is “ultimate.”
3 “As such, religion is a model of and a model for reality, as experienced by individuals in the context of social, natural, and cosmic existence.” The elaboration on “ultimate transformation” expressed in this part of the definition is borrowed from Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), an anthropologist whose work on culture and symbolism brings together theories of meaning (symbol systems and semiotics), aesthetics and literary theory, political expression, economics, and social organization. It was Geertz who defined religion as “a model of and a model for reality.” As a model of reality, religion gives meaning and structure to the world of experience, taking what is inchoate (indescribable and confused) and making it meaningful and manageable. That is to say, religion gives people an accurate understanding of what reality “really is.” As a model for reality, religion gives people a blueprint or set of instructions and norms to create a “new” reality, to achieve Streng's “ultimate transformation.” Taken together, as “model of” and “model for,” religion is both descriptive (telling us the true nature of the world) and prescriptive (instructing us on how to transform it).7
We might reframe Geertz's definition in terms of Eliade's categories of the sacred and the profane. To describe religion as a “model of” reality suggests that, prior to religion or without it, our ordinary or “profane” understanding of reality is fundamentally mistaken. We are blind to reality as it really is, and we are lost in ignorance (in fact many religious traditions – including Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, to name only three – describe the basic problem of humankind as ignorance); only religion can transform ignorance into knowledge. Then religion also gives us the tools to move from ignorance to knowledge – it provides a “model for” thought and action that is ultimately transformative.
Dimensions of religion that fit into the “model of”/descriptive category would include belief systems and creedal commitments, myth, cosmology (theories of the structure of the universe – the existence of the afterlife, of places equivalent to our Western “heaven” and “hell,” and so on), cosmogony (theories of the origins of the cosmos, creation stories), hagiography (stories of religious heroes), and theories about human nature as well as about the nature of supernatural realities (gods and spirits, ghosts and demons, souls and spirits of the dead).
Dimensions of religion that fit into the “model for”/prescriptive category would include behavioral norms (morality and ethics), liturgical norms (ritual, worship, meditation, prayer), and practical ways of living (renunciation; mendicancy; ordination as a priest, rabbi, imam, monk, or nun; and other religious lifestyles or avocations) – all directed toward the “ultimate transformation” that envisions a perfected self, society, and cosmos.
Although we cannot explore every aspect of every tradition studied in this book, we can use this definition as a template for what to include when studying the religious dimensions of Asian cultures. No doubt, the definition seems broad – this is intentional: religion permeates culture and is, in many profound ways, the basis for a wide variety of cultural systems, from government and politics to family structures, medicine, labor, even sports and entertainment. For the entire history of humankind, religion has functioned to inspire and sustain virtually every dimension of human social existence. Religion is not simply “belief,” nor is it simply “ritual” – it is the cultural spring and foundation of the needs, motivations, thoughts, and behaviors that make up the totality of human experience.
Notes
1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, trans. Peter R. Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin Books, 2002).
2 Buddhist-Christian Studies was founded in 1981 and published its thirty-second volume in 2012.
3 Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
4 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987).
5 Frederick Streng, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1967).
6 Some years ago, shortly after Streng died, I published an article on the influence of Buddhism on his general theory of religion: “Frederick Streng, Mādhyamika, and the Comparative Study of Religion,” Buddhist-Christian Studies, 16 (1996), pp. 65–76. His own theory is most completely developed in his book Ways of Being Religious (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1973).
7 Geertz developed this definition in two essays. They can be found in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973): “Religion as a Cultural System” (pp. 87–125) and “Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols” (pp. 126–141).
2
Language
There is one other preliminary step we should take before we begin our investigation of Asian religions, and that is a discussion of language. In this book we will examine, in their respective languages – Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese – a number of terms relating to both belief and practice. Why do I favor using these terms rather than their English translations (or approximations)? And why is language so important to begin with?
Clifford Geertz, one of the authors of our definition of religion in Chapter 1, defined “culture” as a “system of symbols.” This definition highlights how closely culture is related to language – after all, what is “language” if not also a “system of symbols”? Languages employ words (nouns) to refer to things, by symbolizing those objects in letter or sound, or evoke descriptors (adjectives and verbs) to describe their shape, movement, appearance, form, orientation, attitude, and so on. By virtue of language we communicate with one another, and thus we set our culture (our language) apart from those of others. If you have traveled abroad, you know that one of the first and most significant obstacles to cross-cultural understanding is simply the language barrier. They are different from me: they speak a different language, one that I cannot understand. And any professor of modern languages will tell you that the first and only way to truly understand another culture is by mastering its language. It is important, even crucial, that our educational system encourages fluency in numerous languages, for all of our citizens; only then can we be citizens of the world and not just a narrow slice of it.
But language is not merely a tool for understanding a culture. In a very real sense, a language is a culture. Or, to put it another way, the highest form and expression of culture is language. In Chinese the earliest character (word/symbol) for “culture” was wen (文) – a character that also means “language” or “writing.” The mythical inventor of writing, Cang Jie (倉頡), “culture minister” to the legendary Yellow Emperor, did not “invent” writing so much as he discovered it – in the prints of birds and the striations of jade. Chinese language and culture are thus inextricably tied to the very landscape of the Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo (中國) – the Chinese name for China. Indeed the phrase meaning “Chinese language” is exactly this: Zhongwen (中文), the culture of the Middle Kingdom. And what is true of China is true of all people: our language is our mother tongue, related to birth, childhood, and home. It is what I talk with and think with, and it forms the very basis of my self-identity. It is as deep as my soul (to use a religious term), and thus language is not only culture, but religion as well.
We will examine the religious dimensions of language throughout this book, but let's begin by comparing the impact of oral and written languages on the cultures of India, China, and Japan in terms of these countries' social and political histories. In many ways, language has been determinative of culture in each one, with widely divergent results.
We can start from the obvious fact that people in India, China, and Japan speak different languages. In fact the languages spoken in these countries belong to completely different language groups. The languages of India belong to the Indo-European (or, more narrowly, Indo-Aryan) language group; the languages of China belong to the Sino-Tibetan language group; and the languages of Japan belong to the Japonic language group. Such classifications indicate that these peoples speak languages that are radically “foreign,” with strikingly different linguistic and phonetic patterns. This is why it is extraordinarily difficult for the Japanese, for example, to learn Chinese: Chinese is as linguistically foreign to native Japanese speakers as it is to native English speakers.
Why is this important? Because India, China, and Japan have such long histories of cultural interaction, especially in terms of religion. From India, Buddhism spread to Tibet and to China, and eventually to Korea and to Japan. Translation teams consisting of monks from India, China, and Central Asia met in the first centuries of the Common Era to render Sanskrit Buddhist texts into Chinese, a task that proved extraordinarily difficult because of linguistic barriers. Even today, when Chinese people practice the liturgical recitation of sacred Buddhist texts (sūtras), one can hear the curious (that is, foreign-sounding) admixture of Sanskrit phonemes, which are ritually powerful but make “no sense” to most Chinese. Similarly, when the Japanese adopted Chinese characters in the fourth century ce, they were making use of a writing system that had no linguistic connection to their own indigenous language. The result was a writing system in which the same “word” (Japanese kanji or “Chinese character”) could be read in either of two different ways: the native kun or “Japanese” reading; and the foreign on or “Chinese” reading. The long history of cultural interaction among these three countries has certainly been complicated by their vastly different language systems.
An accurate census of languages and dialects is difficult to substantiate, but, according to Ethnologue: Languages of the World, the number of mutually unintelligible languages spoken within each of these three countries differs enormously between them:
India: 461 languages;
China: 299 languages, with 14 major dialects of Chinese;
Japan: 15 languages.
Examples of the 461 languages spoken in India include Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Urdu, and Punjabi (all spoken by at least 50 million native speakers). Ethnologue categorizes Chinese as a “macrolanguage” with 14 major dialects. These dialects are so different that they are mutually unintelligible. Among the most widely spoken are Mandarin, Hakka, Cantonese, and Taiwanese (a variant of the Southern Min language). The most widely spoken languages of Japan are Japanese and Ryukyuan (a language confined to a tiny population on the island of Ryukyu).1
Ethnologue's “diversity index” is even more telling; this index shows the likelihood that any two individuals within a country will speak a different language:
India: 0.916;
China: 0.510;
Japan: 0.027.
That is, in India there is a 92 percent likelihood that any two individuals, surveyed at random, will speak different languages; in China, a 51 percent likelihood; in Japan, only a 2.7 percent likelihood. Among the 10 countries in the world with populations over 100 million, India has the highest diversity index, Japan the lowest. Ethnologue reports that 21 percent of the population of India are fluent speakers of its official language (Hindi); 70 percent of Chinese are fluent speakers of Mandarin; while over 98 percent of Japanese are fluent speakers of Japanese.
One can easily imagine the immense social and political impact of these differences. How easy it must be to imagine oneself as part of a single cultural whole when nearly everyone in the country (in the case of Japan) speaks the same language! And how difficult it must be to unify or govern a nation when only a small number of people (as in the case of India) speak the official language (or they speak it only as an acquired or second language). Chinese governments are intensely concerned with this problem, which is why they have imposed Mandarin as the “common” language (普通話, putonghua) in China (the People's Republic of China), Taiwan (the Republic of China), and Singapore.2 For more than half of Chinese, however, Mandarin is an acquired language. The sensitivity of this issue is one reason why Chinese linguists refuse to categorize the languages of China as “languages” (語言, yuyan), labeling them as “dialects” (放言, fangyan) instead. But, no matter how they are labeled, the fact is that Cantonese (the language or dialect spoken in the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong/Canton and Hong Kong) and Mandarin (originally a northern language or dialect native to central China, including the capital of Beijing) are mutually unintelligible. Cantonese speakers and Mandarin speakers simply cannot understand one another, unless they happen to have acquired the other language as a second language. The same could be said of any other Chinese language.
Language preservation is a political issue going to the heart of cultural unity and diversity. In Hong Kong most people have adopted Mandarin since the Handover (from British to Chinese sovereignty) in 1997, but some stubbornly resist the change and will insist on speaking Cantonese – or feign ignorance of Mandarin – when confronting Chinese visitors. Similarly, a major platform of the Independence Movement as supported by the Democratic Progressive Party (民進黨, minjindang) on the island of Taiwan is the preservation of the Southern Min or Taiwanese language – though Mandarin has been the language of instruction in Taiwan public schools since the late 1940s.
Turning to written forms of these languages, the cultural contrasts between East Asia (China and Japan) and South Asia (the Indian subcontinent) are sharpened. Chinese characters – employed in China and Japan – are pictographic; they have the same meaning regardless of what language or dialect is used to read or pronounce them. Chinese characters appeal to the eyes; they are visual, and aesthetic in form. One of the most recognized of the visual arts is calligraphy, and virtually any two-dimensional art (for instance landscape painting or woodblock printing, such as the one seen in Figure 2.1) contains written characters and owners' seals, which represent a central aspect of the completed work.
