Confucian Encounters with Religion

Confucian Encounters with Religion is a thoughtful, well-researched, and much needed account of a controversial subject. Untold millions of Chinese both on native soil and in diaspora globally have continued to think on such questions as whether Confucian tenets are the unique or at least, the most distinctive contribution of Chinese civilization to both its own national culture and the world at large, whether they are viable for the modern world, and whether their hold on the Chinese consciousness is its secular or humanistic tendency, or, rather, its religious intensity. Chen examines the complexities in the conceptualization of the Western concept of religion in the course of social, cultural, and political movements from late-Qing to early Republican China. Central to the book is the study of the indeterminacy of meaning in the transition from Chinese traditional discourse on jiao to the Western modern one on religion, and how the collision of these two discourses affected the evaluation by the Chinese elite of their traditions as well as their agenda for the transformation of China.