Chinese Religion

Chinese religion is not a subject that can be approached in any straightforward or uncontroversial manner. Chinese society and culture were rarely if at all dominated by any state religion or an associated order of church and priesthood worshiping a supreme godhead. Yet its religious orders have generally been dominated by the state, and the state has been operated in accordance with religious precepts. The social order of the Chinese people has long been permeated by ritual practices with clear su- pernatural overtones, giving propitiatory ritual offerings to ancestors or idols, but Chinese have seldom belonged to organized religious bodies. Scholars can therefore alternatively maintain that the Chinese are not a very religious people at all and that they are permeated with superstition of a magical “prereligious” kind. Chinese scholars of a New Confucian bent retort that Chinese culture is verily “beyond belief,” with spiritual reaches and depths that cannot be contained within the usual institutional or intel- lectual frameworks of religions. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, the missionary scholar Arthur Smith still characterized the religious life of the Chinese people as simultaneously “pantheistic, polytheistic, and athe- istic”