Short Essay #3: China/Japan

In China, major religions such as Taoism, Buddhism, and state religion, or Confucianism, were never powerful or popular enough to displace the communal religion of the people. They have had to be satisfied with sharing the spiritual loyalties of the people with community and family-based religious observances. There is no question that they have been successful in infusing the communal religion with certain of their doctrines and traditions. The Buddhist vision of Hell and the afterlife, for example, became the commonly accepted vision among all Chinese. Confucian morality became the morality of the common people.

The Taoist pantheon fused with the pantheon of communal religion, and Taoist priests were able to establish themselves as the ritual specialists of choice for both the common people and the state. But the masses of the Chinese people, the vast majority of whom lived in small rural villages, always remained faithful to their local gods. Only under the most dire circumstances, when famine, military unrest, or natural disaster destroyed their villages and livelihoods, did they voluntarily throw their support behind charismatic religious leaders who promised to lead them out of their misery and into some divine utopia.

Because China is such a vast country with many regional variations, it is extremely difficult to give an accurate account of the general characteristics of the communal religion. Only the fact that Chinese culture was remarkably integrated despite regional differences makes it reasonable to even attempt to do so. Ironically, the fact that the major religious traditions worked hard to infiltrate the religion of the people also means that many unifying features exist from one region to another.

Another god found in many Chinese communities is the City God (Chenghuang). City God temples are still found in Chinese cities where traditional religion is still practiced. Often one city will have several city gods who are distributed among its different wards. Cults of the City God are not as old as those of the God of the Soil. They begin to appear more and more widely in the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) and Song dynasty (960-1279). It is natural to assume that their popularity was related to the increased urbanization of those periods, but the cult is quite probably of Indian origin. City gods have a somewhat different role to play in the community than do gods of the soil.

While they too have an important function in ...