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Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences. By Yong Chen. Religion in Chinese Societies, vol. 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. Pp. ix + 207. Hardcover $133.00, ISBN 978-90-04-24373-6.
In Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences, Yong Chen takes an interesting approach to the subject of Confucian religiosity: he concentrates on analyzing the intellectual and academic debate about the question of whether Confucianism is a religion and highlights its cultural as well as socio-political implications for contemporary China, assuming that this debate coincided with a transition from the predominance of Confucian paradigms to those of modernity. Without this paradigmatic shift, argues Chen, the past and ongoing controversy about Confucian religiosity could not be fully appreciated.
To verify his assumption, the author first examines the Chinese reception of the Western concept of religion and relates it to the most common Chinese terms associated with the Confucian tradition (rujia ... rujiao ... , and ruxue ... - remaining untranslated throughout). In China at the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, the necessity to acknowledge and adapt to a new and modern world manifested itself in (among other things) attempts to reconcile the Confucian tradition with the notion of religion. Yet, as Chen shows, the Chinese interest in such a reinterpretation of Confucianism was not epistemological in nature. The real question was whether Chinese culture fit these modern times and could contribute to them. According to the author, the answer to either question - the religiosity of Confucianism and its suitability for modernity - is complicated by the "ambiguity of terms" (p. 29) with which to label the Confucian tradition in the Chinese language, either as rujia, rujiao, or ruxue. While the generic Western term "Confucianism" epitomizes the feature of holism striven for by proponents of a Confucian religion, the respective Chinese terms are characterized by slightly differing and limiting connotations that tend to emphasize either the religious (rujiao) or...