Religions, Secularism, and Modernity in Asia
Speakers' Abstracts
Amira Bennison: Transcendentalism, the categorization of religion, and the conversion of rulers in Early Modern Asia.
In the Islamic world, the concept of 'religion' (din) was quite different prior to the creation of separate secular and religious spheres in the 19th to 20th centuries. Although it appeared to infuse all spheres of activity, it did not necessarily dictate social or political actions but rather provided an explanatory framework for them. This was intimately linked to the Muslim experience of revelation conjoined to empire. This paper will explore the pre-modern Muslim notion of 'religion' and then contrast it with the more conflictual modern framework which emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries as some reformers strove to make Islam 'modern' and others sought to relegate it to the private realm and secularise the public and political spheres.
Adam Chau: The impact of secularism and modernity on the five modalities of doing religion in China
Because of the wide variety of ways the Chinese were engaged in religious practices on the eve of the great transition from the traditional dynastic period to the modern period, it is often very difficult to make blanket statements about the exact impact of secularism and modernity on Chinese religious practices. Did religion decline generally? Did Buddhism suffer as much as Daoism? To what extent was Chinese Buddhism ‘Protestantised’? Why did all attempts to ‘congregationalise’ Chinese religious communities fail? Was the Communist party-state atheist or simply intolerant of rival social organisations (which religious organisations invariably were)? My paper examines programmatically the impact of secularism and modernity on the five modalities of doing religion (scriptural/discursive, self-cultivational, liturgical, immediate-practical and social-relational) that prevailed in late imperial China to see how differently each modality fared throughout the 20th century.
In the Islamic world, the concept of 'religion' (din) was quite different prior to the creation of separate secular and religious spheres in the 19th to 20th centuries. Although it appeared to infuse all spheres of activity, it did not necessarily dictate social or political actions but rather provided an explanatory framework for them. This was intimately linked to the Muslim experience of revelation conjoined to empire. This paper will explore the pre-modern Muslim notion of 'religion' and then contrast it with the more conflictual modern framework which emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries as some reformers strove to make Islam 'modern' and others sought to relegate it to the private realm and secularise the public and political spheres.
Adam Chau: The impact of secularism and modernity on the five modalities of doing religion in China
Because of the wide variety of ways the Chinese were engaged in religious practices on the eve of the great transition from the traditional dynastic period to the modern period, it is often very difficult to make blanket statements about the exact impact of secularism and modernity on Chinese religious practices. Did religion decline generally? Did Buddhism suffer as much as Daoism? To what extent was Chinese Buddhism ‘Protestantised’? Why did all attempts to ‘congregationalise’ Chinese religious communities fail? Was the Communist party-state atheist or simply intolerant of rival social organisations (which religious organisations invariably were)? My paper examines programmatically the impact of secularism and modernity on the five modalities of doing religion (scriptural/discursive, self-cultivational, liturgical, immediate-practical and social-relational) that prevailed in late imperial China to see how differently each modality fared throughout the 20th century.
Christopher Clark (TBA)
Hildegard Diemberger: Tibetan Buddhism (TBA)
George Mak: Bible Translation in 19th Century China (TBA)
Alan Strathern: Transcendentalism, the categorization of religion, and the conversion of rulers in Early Modern Asia.
Why is it that the rulers of some societies could convert to monotheism and retain or even enhance their authority, while elsewhere rulers knew that conversion would spell the end of their political legitimacy? In Sub-Saharan Africa, Island Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, there was often the potential for rulers to convert and oversee the conversion of their subjects. In mainland Eurasia, by contrast, such projects of 'top-down conversion' were doomed to fail. I have suggested that this reflects the way in which the mainland Asian societies had deeply rooted 'transcendentalist' traditions. 'Transcendentalist' traditions are those which have as their objective an ultimate ineffable state of being; religious life thus revolves around the concepts of truth, salvation and ethics. These traditions seem to wind themselves so tightly around conceptions of political legitimacy that exclusivist conversion becomes profoundly problematic. Elsewhere, relationships with the supernatural sphere were conducted on a quite different basis , such that the term 'religion' loses some of its value - while conversion became a real possibility. I shall try to flesh this out a little with regard to South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. It is more difficult to apply this schema to East Asia. Here, I think it may turn out to be crucial that China had an 'Axial Age' moment of philosophical revolution (generating a 'great tradition' of literacy, second-order thinking, and explicit ethics), which was yet not allowed to fundamentally re-structure religious life.
Why is it that the rulers of some societies could convert to monotheism and retain or even enhance their authority, while elsewhere rulers knew that conversion would spell the end of their political legitimacy? In Sub-Saharan Africa, Island Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, there was often the potential for rulers to convert and oversee the conversion of their subjects. In mainland Eurasia, by contrast, such projects of 'top-down conversion' were doomed to fail. I have suggested that this reflects the way in which the mainland Asian societies had deeply rooted 'transcendentalist' traditions. 'Transcendentalist' traditions are those which have as their objective an ultimate ineffable state of being; religious life thus revolves around the concepts of truth, salvation and ethics. These traditions seem to wind themselves so tightly around conceptions of political legitimacy that exclusivist conversion becomes profoundly problematic. Elsewhere, relationships with the supernatural sphere were conducted on a quite different basis , such that the term 'religion' loses some of its value - while conversion became a real possibility. I shall try to flesh this out a little with regard to South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. It is more difficult to apply this schema to East Asia. Here, I think it may turn out to be crucial that China had an 'Axial Age' moment of philosophical revolution (generating a 'great tradition' of literacy, second-order thinking, and explicit ethics), which was yet not allowed to fundamentally re-structure religious life.
