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5-2014
Review of Confucianism as a World Religion by
Anna Sun
Thomas A. Wilson
Hamilton College, [email protected]
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Wilson, Thomas A., "Review of Confucianism as a World Religion by Anna Sun" (2014). Hamilton Digital Commons.
http://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/articles/10
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Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013. xix, 244 pp. US$35, £24·95 (hb). ISBN 978-0691-15557-9
The meaning of Confucianism has been subject to controversy, it would seem, from time
immemorial. Disciples of the Master differed on the meaning of his teachings in records of
conversations with him. Exegetes transmitted conflicting versions of the Confucian Canon along
distinct textual lineages. His Way was lost for 1500 years, his later followers would say,
retrieved by a select few and corrupted by the rest. In the late sixteenth century, Christian
missionaries introduced their God into controversies over Confucianism, shifting the terms and
context of debate. Contested meanings of Confucianism continue to the present, as Anna Sun’s
book so compellingly demonstrates.
I focus on two of several controversies that Anna Sun discusses and consider her own position
in these contested histories. Sun traces the first of these to nineteenth-century debates among
Protestant missionaries on how to translate the term “God” into Chinese. Orientalist and
missionary James Legge had argued in favor of employing the indigenous Chinese
term, Shangdi 上帝, on grounds that it referred to a lost monotheism, for him a defining
characteristic of Religion. Most of those who attended a missionary conference in Shanghai in
1877 denounced Legge’s position, but he had already left the missionary arena to assume a
position at Oxford. He brought with him the “contested idea of Confucianism as an ancient
Chinese religion into the new intellectual arena,” Sun says, and “became one of the founding
architects of the world religions discourse” (p. 50). At Oxford Legge met another disenchanted
Orientalist, Max Müller, who played a central role in the formation of the then emerging
Science of Religion through the production of the book series Sacred Books of the East. The
impact of this series on the study of World Religions in Anglophone higher education is perhaps
literally immeasurable. Its inclusion of Legge’s translations of the Five Classics and Four Books,
Sun argues, nonetheless affected the categorization of Confucianism as a World Religion. Sun
shows that Legge invoked Müller’s claims as a Sanskritist to justify his own contention that the
Chinese character for Heaven was “recognized as the name of God” (p. 60); Müller evidently
made his claims on the basis of Legge’s argument to that same effect. Sun then surveys the
widespread incorporation of Confucianism in World Religions courses in higher education
today. Most World Religions courses have, one suspects, moved beyond Legge’s monotheistic
assumptions, which raises the question of how exactly do such courses treat Confucianism as a
World Religion?
The second and more recent controversy on Confucianism as a religion in the PRC that Sun
discusses began as a reaction to the views of the influential Marxist historian Ren Jiyu 任繼愈
(1916–2009) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who regarded all religions as
oppressive and who played an instrumental role in the formation of the PRC’s policy toward
religion in the 1950s. In a collection of essays on Confucianism as a religion, 1. Ren wrote,
according to Sun’s summary, that “because of its emphasis on ‘feudal rituals and restrictions,’
Confucianism as a religion ‘tortured the Chinese people’ in the same way the Inquisition made
people suffer in the Middle Ages. He further argued that ‘Confucian religion limited the
development of modern ideas [and] restricted the growth of technology and science in China’”
(p. 81). A storm of controversy largely conducted on the website Confucius2000.com proved
Ren Jiyu’s views were premature, as those committed to rehabilitating Confucianism in general
and as a religion in particular took issue with the once official line articulated by Ren Jiyu. The
question of Confucianism as a religion in China has shifted dramatically. For Ren Jiyu the
question had been: what prevented China from becoming modern? On the Confucius2000.com
website the question has become: How can China regain a moral compass in the post-socialist
order?
Anna Sun scrutinizes these controversies with a keen eye for their institutional structures and
historical contexts. She shows that the question of Confucian religiousness has rarely been
posed without strings attached to other concerns. “Confucianism” has been a byproduct of
other discourses concerning monotheism, the secular state, modernity, socialism, etc. Many of
those who pose the question are less interested in a scholarly inquiry into the elements that
made—or did not make—Confucianism religious, but rather how Confucianism may or may not
have constituted a vehicle for something else. Attempts to prescribe a definition of
Confucianism have proved futile in part because such attempts themselves are burdened by
questionable ulterior motives.
Sun advances her own innovative approach to these questions by arguing that Confucianism is
a matter of what people actually do. One does not think of oneself as a Confucian, nor does one
convert to Confucianism, Sun avers, rather one becomes Confucian based on how one behaves,
how one lives one’s life. She maps out three sets of criteria of Confucian behavior, each of
which revolves around specific behaviors, including what she calls “minimal” forms of worship
in a Confucius temple, such as praying or offering incense before a statue or spirit tablet of
Confucius; an “inclusive criterion,” including rites at an ancestral temple or grave site; and an
“extended criterion,” including practicing Confucian virtues or reading the Classics. Some
scholars may contest these claims, though few if any in the academy are in any position to
dictate to practitioners what is or is not real Confucianism.
Sun mentions the view of Confucianism as a secular philosophy of China’s ruling elite, which
arguably predominates post-WWII Sinology, particularly in the Social Sciences and among many
historians. What are the institutional structures and historical contexts that have secured for
this secularized view of Confucianism the status of widely accepted fact? A single book cannot
cover all of the contested histories of Confucianism, yet one wonders what insights into such
claims a sociology of knowledge might yield. Anna Sun’s book makes an important contribution
to the analysis of the contested claims about the meaning of Confucianism by boldly moving
the site of this debate to actual conditions on the ground in contemporary China. Written in
accessible, elegant prose, this book is well suited for courses on Chinese religion, Confucianism,
or the emergence of World Religions as a discourse.
Thomas Wilson
Hamilton College
1 Rujiao wenti zhenglun ji 儒教問題爭論集 [Confucianism as a religion debate] (Beijing:
Religion and Culture Press, 2000).