This book is part of an initiative in cooperation with renowned Chinese publishers to make fundamental, formative, and influential Chinese thinkers available to a western readership, providing absorbing insights into Chinese reflections of late, and offering a chance to grasp today’s China. In their influential book Handbook of the History of Religions in China, Zhongjian Mou and Jian Zhang present a panorama of the religions existing in China through time. In their fascinating History, they delineate the emergence and development of Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity and explore the roles they played in Chinese society and the interrelations between them. In China, also due to the encompassing Confucian idea of “living together harmoniously while maintaining differences,” religions—including newly arrived ones—came closer together than anywhere else in the world and reached a unique level of peaceful societal coexistence. Despite many frictions and conflicts, communication and reconciliation were indisputably predominant in China throughout history. Buddhism was peacefully introduced into China and, later on, a harmonious, symbiotic syncretism of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism developed—an exemplary process of how a diverse set of different religions can complement each other and contribute to a better life.

This book is part of an initiative in cooperation with renowned Chinese publishers to make fundamental, formative, and influential Chinese thinkers available to a western readership, providing absorbing insights into Chinese reflections of late, and offering a chance to grasp today's China. In their influential book Handbook of the History of Religions in China, Zhongjian Mu and Jian Zhan present a panorama of the religions existing in China through time. In their fascinating History, they delineate the emergence and development of Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity and explore the roles they played in Chinese society and the interrelations between them. In China, also due to the encompassing Confucian idea of "living together harmoniously while maintaining differences," religions--including newly arrived ones--came closer together than anywhere else in the world and reached a unique level of peaceful societal coexistence. Despite many frictions and conflicts, communication and reconciliation were indisputably predominant in China throughout history. Buddhism was peacefully introduced into China and, later on, a harmonious, symbiotic syncretism of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism developed--an exemplary process of how a diverse set of different religions can complement each other and contribute to a better life.

Informative and eye-opening, the Handbook on Religion in China provides a uniquely broad insight into the contemporary Chinese variations of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity. In turn, China's own religions and transmissions of rites and systems of divination have spread beyond China, a progression that is explored in detail across 19 chapters, written by leading experts in the field.

The second volume on Christianity in China covers the period from 1800 to the present day, dealing with the complexities of both Catholic and Protestant aspects.

The last of four two-volume sets on the key periods of paradigm shift in Chinese religious and cultural history, this book examines the transformation of values in China since 1850, in the “secular” realms of economics, science, medicine, aesthetics, media, and gender, and in each of the major religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity) as well as in Marxist discourse. The nation and science are the values invoked most frequently, with the market and democracy a distant second. As in previous periods of fundamental change in Chinese history, rationalization and secularization have played central roles, but interiorization nearly disappears as a driving force. Also in continuity with the past, the state insists on an exclusive right to define and adjudicate orthodoxy. Contributors include: Daniel H. Bays, Sébastien Billioud, Adam Yuet Chau, Na Chen, Philip Clart, Walter B. Davis, Arif Dirlik, Thomas David DuBois, Lizhu Fan, David Faure, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Ji Zhe, Xiaofei Kang, Eric I. Karchmer, André Laliberté, Angela Ki Che Leung, Xun Liu, Richard Madsen, David Ownby, Ellen Oxfeld, Volker Scheid, Grace Yen Shen, Michael Szonyi, Wang Chien-ch’uan, Xue Yu

After the Warring States, treated in Part One of this set, there is no more fecund era in Chinese religious and cultural history than the period of division (220-589 AD). During it, Buddhism conquered China, Daoism grew into a mature religion with independent institutions, and, together with Confucianism, these three teachings, having each won its share of state recognition and support, formed a united front against shamanism. While all four religions are covered, Buddhism and Daoism receive special attention in a series of parallel chapters on their pantheons, rituals, sacred geography, community organization, canon formation, impact on literature, and recent archaeological discoveries. This multi-disciplinary approach, without ignoring philosophical and theological issues, brings into sharp focus the social and historical matrices of Chinese religion.

Who were the main actors in propagating Christianity in China? Where did Christian communities settle? What discussions were held in China, concerning Christianity? These, and many other, questions are answered in this reference work, which is divided in a systematic part and analytical articles. This handbook represents a true reference guide to the reception of Christianity in pre-1800 China. It presents to the reader, in comprehensive fashion, all current knowledge of Christianity in China, and guides him through the main Chinese and Western sources, bibliographies and archives. The scope of the volume is broad and covers a wide range of topics, such as theology, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, cannon, botany, art, music, and more.

From the fifth century BC to the present and dealing with the Three Teachings (Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism) as well as popular religion, this introduction to the eight-volume Early and Modern Chinese Religion explores key ideas and events in four periods of paradigm shift in the intertwined histories of Chinese religion, politics, and culture. It shows how, in the Chinese church-state, elite processes of rationalization, interiorization, and secularization are at work in every period of major change and how popular religion gradually emerges to a position of dominance by means of a long history of at once resisting, adapting to, and collaborating with elite-driven change. Topics covered include ritual, scripture, philosophy, state policy, medicine, sacred geography, gender, and the economy. It also serves as the basis for an on-line Coursera course.

Recent events—from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe—vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity, from 1898 to the present. Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at different religions in different contexts, but by writing a unified story of how religion has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, modern Chinese society. From Chinese medicine and the martial arts to communal temple cults and revivalist redemptive societies, the authors demonstrate that from the nineteenth century onward, as the Chinese state shifted, the religious landscape consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms. The Religious Question in Modern China integrates historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives in a comprehensive overview of China’s religious history that is certain to become an indispensible reference for specialists and students alike.

A follow-up to Early Chinese Religion (Brill, 2009-10), Modern Chinese Religion focuses on the third period of paradigm shift in Chinese cultural and religious history, from the Song to the Yuan (960-1368 AD). As in the earlier periods, political division gave urgency to the invention of new models that would then remain dominant for six centuries. Defining religion as “value systems in practice”, this multi-disciplinary work shows the processes of rationalization and interiorization at work in the rituals, self-cultivation practices, thought, and iconography of elite forms of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, as well as in medicine. At the same time, lay Buddhism, Daoist exorcism, and medium-based local religion contributed each in its own way to the creation of modern popular religion. With contributions by Juhn Ahn, Bai Bin, Chen Shuguo, Patricia Ebrey, Michael Fuller, Mark Halperin, Susan Huang, Dieter Kuhn, Nap-yin Lau, Fu-shih Lin, Pierre Marsone, Matsumoto Kôichi, Joseph McDermott, Tracy Miller, Julia Murray, Ong Chang Woei, Fabien Simonis, Dan Stevenson, Curie Virag, Michael Walsh, Linda Walton, Yokote Yutaka, Zhang Zong