Religions Of East Asia Research Paper

1. East Asia In Religious Contexts: An Overview

East Asia represents a problematic area of analysis because of its size, vast and varied population, historical and social complexity, the differing historical and social experiences of each country, and its multiplicity of religious forms. This, and the existence of religious expressions associated with particular countries of the region, raises questions about how far one can talk about the region as a whole in religious or cultural terms. An example here would be Shinto, which is specific to the Japanese cultural sphere and which raises questions about the use of religious ideology in the formation of nation states, about cultural identity, and about the relationship between religion and politics. However, while Shinto provides meaningful examples relating to such questions, it cannot necessarily be considered as an exemplar of the patterns of East Asian religion in general, given that no similarly identifiable national religious traditions exist in other countries in the region. Similarly, the religious responses to rapid social change and modernity, which have seen the formation of new religious movements in different parts of the region, cannot necessarily be considered as indicative of a region-wide commonality. Many of the new movements that have arisen in Korea, e.g., draw heavily on evangelical Christian themes as well as the shamanic beliefs and practices which are central to the Korean tradition, while Japanese new religions have drawn much more heavily on Japanese cultural traditions based on Buddhism, Shinto, and folk religion. Indeed, scholars from the region have been reluctant to draw many parallels between the countries of East Asia. Japanese scholars, e.g., prefer to discuss the Japanese new religions in the comparative context of new religions in the West rather than in the Asian context. Rather than expressing similarities and commonalities, indeed, the academic traditions of each country in the region tend to emphasize concepts of cultural uniqueness and difference and where they have sought a comparative focus have looked outside the region.

2. Religious Traditions Of East Asia: Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism

The East Asian religious spectrum includes historical religions that have influenced the whole region and localized traditions that are influential in some, or one, area but that cannot claim cross-border significance. Three major historical traditions have been influential across boundaries and formed part of the religious constitution of the region as a whole: Buddhism, which although coming from outside, has taken on particular regional characteristics in China, Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, and Taoism and Confucianism, both of which originated in China but have also been influential in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

2.1 Buddhism

Buddhism entered East Asia along the major trade routes, supported by the patronage of ruling elites who saw it as a means of strengthening the ethos and power of the state. This was particularly so in Japan, where it was adopted as an arm and pillar of the state from the seventh century onwards. While its growth and development of an extensive monastic system owed much to its promises, expressed in popular Buddhist texts such as the Lotus Sutra, of spiritual emancipation for all, and while it has developed monastic forms and meditative traditions (most famously Zen in Japan) with a primary orientation towards renunciation and spiritual transcendence, Buddhism’s main orientation in East Asia has been social, familial, and mundane. As elsewhere, it has used magical symbols and rituals for the amelioration of the living, both individually and in social contexts, and operated as a religion dealing with death and the after-life, offering an eschatological framework of other-worldly salvation through a range of memorial and funerary services which aid the dead spirits in their journey to the other world. It has been through Buddhism that the spirits of the dead have been transformed into ancestors who guard over their living kin and in this way it offers solace to the bereaved while reinforcing the solidarity and continuity of the household.

2.2 Confucianism

While the thoughts of Confucius (551–479 BC) may be regarded as the foundations of a moral and philosophical tradition emphasizing filial piety and the moral duties of rulers and subjects, Confucianism has developed into a broader cultural and religious form that has influenced the development of all East Asian societies. While Confucianism has taken on overt religious manifestations in the ritual veneration of Confucius, its primary influences have been ethical and relating to the affirmation of social codes that underpin the existing order of society. Confucianism, besides emphasizing classical learning and the veneration of tradition, affirms the basic goodness of human nature and asserts that the ways individuals conduct themselves affects the basic social order at familial and wider social levels. This notion of individual spiritual responsibility for one’s actions, and of the individual as a microcosm, in spiritual terms, of society at large has been central also to many of the East Asian new religions.

2.3 Taoism

Although originally a mystical tradition of meditation and passive withdrawal from worldly affairs, Taoism became associated with the search for longevity and the overcoming, through ritual and mystical practices, of the physical limitations of the body. Taoist practitioners in China sought, through the study of alchemy, to find the elixir of life, and they formed cults venerating that deities symbolized longevity. Taoism also developed complex systems of divination and fortune telling which were central to its appeal beyond China. Taoist ideas spread across the region in tandem with other Chinese cultural influences, including Confucianism, Buddhism, and the Chinese writing system. In Japan, Taoist influences were subsumed within the broader cultural sweep of continental culture and it never assumed its own distinct religious form there. However, its influences were pervasive, especially in terms of divination and magical practices. The early Japanese Imperial Court, e.g., developed a Bureau of Divination using Taoist techniques to predict and govern state affairs, while popular divination practices derived from Taoism remain widespread in Japan.

3. Indigenous Traditions: The Case Of Shinto

Although Shinto, literally ‘the way of the gods,’ is often termed an indigenous Japanese religion, it is more accurately considered as a localized tradition that developed in conjunction with and in antithesis to the foreign religion of Buddhism which entered Japan from the sixth century onwards. The native religious tradition of Japan prior to the entry of Buddhism centered around the worship of local gods such as clan tutelary deities who were guardians of communities and clan lineages. This loose-knit local tradition acquired a specific identity with the entry of Buddhism. Even the term Shinto first came into existence after the incursion of Buddhism, as a means of differentiating the local from the imported tradition. Shinto is, thus, an example of a tradition that developed in response to (and hence in conjunction with) another, external religion, a point that has been emphasized consistently by influential Japanese scholars such as Kuroda Toshio.

Shinto is based in concepts relating to the kami—a term usually translated as god or deity, but implying a spiritual life-giving force. Kami may be associated with specific natural phenomena or landscape (for in Shinto, the entire world of Japan is considered to be the creation of the kami who give life to and animate it) but they may be spiritual entities that embody particular virtues or capacities and that can, if suitably beseeched and venerated, bestow blessings. The Shinto pantheon contains many thousands of kami from localized deities to ones of national influence. Kami may also be the spirits of humans of note or special accomplishments, such as Sugawara no Michizane, the ninth century scholar whose spirit is venerated as Tenjin, the kami of learning.

3.1 Shinto, Buddhism, And Religious Integration In East Asia

Interaction rather than conflict between Buddhism and Shinto has been a core theme in Japanese religious history. Buddhism’s strategies of assimilation and accommodation have been nowhere more striking than in its dealings with Shinto and its kami. Since the kami were the guardians of the earth and the landscape, Buddhism adopted them as spiritual protectors of Buddhist temples: the striking vermilion Shinto gateway, representing entry to the kami’s sacred area, is rarely absent from Japanese Buddhist temple courtyards and, especially up to the nineteenth century, many religious centers were not so much Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines, but shrine–temple complexes combining both traditions. Many deities are also shared between the traditions, while this complementarity is manifest also in the roles Shinto and Buddhism play in the life cycles of individuals and communities. While Buddhism deals with death rituals and the memorialization of ancestors, Shinto is associated with beginnings and growth. The Shinto gods guard over the beginnings of life and are called upon for protection and support when babies are born and as infants grow: the miyamairi rite in which newly born children are taken to shrines to be placed under the protection of the Shinto gods, remains widely followed in Japan, as is the shichigosan festival in November when children of seven, five, and three are given further ritual blessings.

This functional integration, in which Shinto deals with birth and life and Buddhism with death and the hereafter, has strengthened both traditions in the Japanese system. It is not a pattern limited only to Japan, for a dominant characteristic of the religious structures of the entire region has been that of integration of a number of traditions in the lives of the people. Thus, a state official in premodern China might be involved in Confucian rituals at work, Taoist divination rites and practices in his family life, and Buddhist funerary rituals when someone died, while in Korea, too, similar patterns (Confucian public rituals, the use of shamans and diviners for personal concerns, and Buddhist death rituals) could be discerned. It has only been in recent times, with the emergence of exclusive religious groups, such as the evangelical Korean protestant sects and a number of Japanese new religions that refuse to condone traditional religious practices, that this integrative pattern has been challenged. For the majority, however, it remains dominant.

3.2 Festivals And The Ritual Calendar

Shinto illustrates the close interaction of religion, festivity, and the calendrical cycle—a theme that permeates much of East Asian religion. Its festivals (matsuri, meaning both prayer and celebration) were traditionally a central element in the lives of local communities, and in modern Japan they remain a colorful and vibrant element in the calendar, involving a mixture of sacred ritual and spectacular festive entertainment that may include processions, dances, fairs, tourist attractions, and much celebratory eating and drinking. The most widespread of all such festivals is New Year when people make a first visit of the year to a shrine (hatsumode) to thank the gods for blessings received in the past year and for protection and good fortune in the coming year. Many people also visit Buddhist temples at this time. Hatsumode is highly popular and, since the 1970s, has been performed by a growing number of Japanese: numbers have risen from around 30 million in the late 1950s to around 85 million (out of a population of 120 million) in the 1990s. The growth of hatsumode numbers is not isolated: Japanese scholars have noted a growth in participation in customary religious ritual activities between the 1950s and the early 1990s, and this has led them to question the validity of secularization theories and to show that these do not necessarily have universal validity.

However, such growth masks a shifting pattern within Shinto, in which small, rural shrines have declined due to rural depopulation and because people have preferred to visit better known and more identifiably national shrines further afield. Partially this has been a result of the development of an advanced transportation system but also because, as localized community structures have broken down or been transformed due to changing life patterns, people have sought their primary focus of identification in the national community. Hence, while they once would have performed miyamairi and hatsumode at local shrines, tying themselves to local communities and deities, they now do these at shrines of national significance, an act that confirms their identification with the wider national community and reaffirms, in an age of internationalization in which the primary forms of comparison in terms of identity are across national rather than regional or local lines, their sense of Japanese identity. Many nationally well-known shrines receive many millions of worshippers at festival times: Meiji shrine in Tokyo, for instance, receives around four million visitors at New Year.

3.3 Shinto, Mythology, National Identity, Nationalism, And The State

The connection between Shinto and national identity indicated by recent patterns of shrine visiting points to a deep-seated characteristic of religion in the region: the close connection of religion, state, and identity. Here, again, Shinto is a striking (if particularized) example. Its myths attribute the creation of Japan and the origins of the Japanese people and its Imperial dynasty to the kami. In these myths the Imperial family are ordained divinely to oversee the nation, as they are descended from Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, who is venerated at the great shrines of Ise, the most important shrines in Japan. The kami are the procreators of Japan and its people, who thus exist in a special, unique relationship to their gods and land. This special relationship is central to Japanese concepts of identity and has been associated closely with Japanese nationalism since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Japan developed a modern-style sense of nationhood by using Shinto and its mythological links to the Emperor as a focus of national unity and as a means of emphasizing national uniqueness as a chosen people and land. The association of Shinto and the state helped create a myth of racial superiority which legitimated Japan’s colonization of Taiwan and Korea, involved the suppression of other religions and played a major part in Japan’s fascism and war mongering in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the postwar era, official links between Shinto and the state have been barred under the Constitution, Japan has become a secular state, and Shinto exists predominantly as a shrine-centered tradition based around life cycle and other rituals and festivals. Nevertheless, there remain many people (especially of right-wing persuasion) and many Shinto priests who aspire to a return to a formal association between Shinto and the state. Many of the discussions of Shinto in the modern age thus center around issues of religion, nationalism, and politics.

4. Underlying Structures And Common Themes—Folk Religion

Although the above-mentioned religions are the most visibly identifiable older traditions of the region, they are underpinned by a pervasive folk tradition. It is a common argument of scholars from the region (e.g., Miyake Hitoshi in Japan) that this amorphous folk religion of shared customs, attitudes, beliefs, and practices deeply rooted in everyday lives and concerns of the people, forms the foundational religious structure of the region. Indeed, many of the ideas and themes that are central to the new religions derive directly from these folk religious foundations, while the new religions themselves have been analyzed widely as modern articulations of the folk tradition. The folk tradition has also been the filter through which the historical religions of the region have been adopted by and adapted to local cultures. Those religions that have best developed strategies to accommodate or work with this tradition have been the ones which have transplanted most successfully to or developed in the region: examples include Buddhism, whose strategies and doctrines of accommodation have enabled it to absorb and work with local customs, and (in a reverse case) Christianity, whose inability to accommodate or accept folk religious beliefs and customs, notably relating to the ancestors, has proved a major impediment to its growth in much of the region.

The importance and vitality of this folk tradition is such that it has been a major focus of academic study in the countries of the region. Folk studies (or folk religious studies) are a primary academic discipline in Korea (where shamanism, as the cornerstone of the folk and native religious structure, has received especial attention) and Japan, and is generally accorded greater weight as an academic discipline than in the West. It is not just concerned with the indigenous traditions of folk religion; Japanese scholars such as Sakurai Tokutaro (shamanism), Miyake Hitoshi (mountain religion), and Shinno Toshikazu (pilgrimage and legends) have been concerned to map out and discuss the interactions of folk religion and Buddhism, and to demonstrate that ‘folk religion’ as manifest in Japan should not be discussed solely in Japanese terms but placed in a wider context. Making use also of Western academic studies of religion, scholars such as Miyake have demonstrated the potential universality of folk religious models, as well as broadening the comparative and potentially universalizing dimensions of Japanese scholarship of religion.

4.1 Themes Of East Asian Folk Religion

The varying elements associated with the East Asian folk religious tradition(s) include emphases on calendar and ritual cycles relating to individuals and communities, the prevalence of shamanic beliefs and concepts relating to the role of spirits (including the spirits of the dead), spirit possession, healing, and the analysis of misfortune and provision of healing, the veneration of ancestors, and various this-worldly beliefs and customs relating to seeking assistance and amelioration in this world.

All these exist alongside or interact with the major traditions or are manifest in and expressed by them. Concepts relating to the spirits of the dead and the ancestors are deeply rooted in the folk religious arena, but the ritual services related to death and the ancestors are most commonly performed through the medium of Buddhism, whose success in East Asia has depended greatly on its ability to adapt to and accommodate folk beliefs in this area. The importance of the ritual calendar and the notion of the yearly cycle of festivals and rituals, originally based in the folk tradition and centered around agricultural rites, has already been mentioned in the context of Shinto in Japan, but it extends throughout the region in differing forms.

Perhaps the most predominant beliefs in the folk tradition relate to psychic interpretations of causation (of illness, misfortune, and, indeed, good fortune). Beliefs that this world does not exist in isolation but is influenced by other realms, and that those living in this world can be affected by the actions of spirits, mean that, in folk terms, any problem or event may be seen as having spiritual as well as physical causes. Thus, an illness may have psychic causes (e.g., the actions of an unhappy spirit) as well as physical (e.g., the effects of germs) ones, and hence solutions to problems require spiritual attention (e.g., ritual performances, acts of penance) to deal with its spiritual aspects. A strong shamanic tradition has existed throughout East Asia, in which spiritual healers (very often female, and with claims to be able to either travel between this and the spiritual world, or to make contact with it and find ways of appeasing the spirits who are afflicting the living) play a major role. This shamanic tradition is perhaps the most ubiquitous element in the Korean religious universe, but it also remains important in the rest of the region. Studies of Japanese religious behavior in modern times show that people are far more likely to turn to a local healer or diviner than to a Buddhist priest when they have personal problems. This loose-knit tradition of healers and diviners serves also as a counterbalance to the formal religious systems of Buddhism and Shinto, whose priesthoods are almost entirely male, and provides a mode of religious expression for spiritually inclined females, who have remained marginalized in the formal traditions. By contrast, the vast majority of shamanic spiritual healers in Korea and Japan are female.

5. Millennial Themes In East Asian Religious Culture

An important theme in East Asian religion that shows how religious ideas may be expressed across the various traditions and cultures of the region relates to millennial beliefs and expectations of future worldly salvation. These are found throughout the region, articulated through the folk religious traditions, Taoism, Buddhism, and, more recently, the new religions. Expectations of a new dawn, the arrival of a spiritual kingdom on earth, and/or the appearance of a celestial or spiritual savior who will bring justice, redeem the sick, punish the unworthy, and transform or renew the world have been especially potent in China, sometimes with Taoist influences but often associated with Buddhism, but they have emerged in Korea and Japan as well. In China, various Taoistinspired movements such as the second century CE Way of Great Peace movement have rebelled against the state in the hope of establishing a new paradise on earth, while Buddhist-inspired movements have also been inspired by the concept of imminent salvation on earth, often centered on the future Buddha Maitreya (whose cult also inspired similar millenarian impulses in Japan). In China, too, there have been repeated uprisings of the millennial White Lotus Society, which combined Pure Land Buddhist ideas along with folk, Taoist, and other elements, while the Pai Shan-ti Hui movement, which incorporated Christian ideas and sought to create a heavenly kingdom of eternal peace on earth, caused the bloodiest and most dramatic of all such millennialist uprisings, the Tai Ping rebellion of 1849–64 which claimed millions of lives.

Millennial themes are prevalent in many of the new religions. In Korea, numerous religious movements have fused extreme forms of evangelical Protestantism with dramatic millennial visions. The Tami Church (known also as the Mission for the Coming Days) attracted attention when it announced that the apocalypse would begin on October 28, 1992 and that its members would be raptured up to heaven. While this case of failed prophecy damaged the Tami Church, it has not dampened the emphasis on apocalypticism, which remains a central theme in much of Korean Protestantism, and which forms one of its cardinal attractions for the local populace.

The most striking manifestation of millennialism in Japan has been in the new religions that have arisen since the mid-nineteenth century, initially through the actions of charismatic female religious leaders such as Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) of Tenrikyo and Deguchi Nao (1837–1918) of Omotokyo, but most recently among the ’new’ new religions of the late twentieth century, many of which have emphasized that the world is at a critical turning point in which the old, materialist civilization will be swept away as a new spiritual world dawns. While many of the adherents of earlier millenarian movements were poor and disadvantaged, and the thrust of their movements was initially towards seeking social justice, the beliefs of the latest wave of new religions have been conditioned more by concerns that this world is facing extinction because of nuclear or environmental problems, and that a spiritual revolution is essential in order to avoid destruction. The most dramatic and famous of these later millennial movements was Aum Shinrikyo, which believed that a final war between good and evil was inevitable and in which the vast majority of humanity would be wiped out prior to the advent of a more spiritually oriented world.

6. New Departures: The New Religions

Since the mid-nineteenth century massive economic development, the impact of Western influences, and immense social change and population movement have produced recurrent tensions between traditional social, cultural, and religious structures, and the individualizing patterns of modernity. In religious terms, the most striking sign of such tensions and developments has been the emergence of new religious movements throughout the region. This phenomenon has been most pronounced in Japan but is discernible also in the rest of the region.

The new religions have generally been eclectic, drawing on the primary religious inspirations of the societies in which they have emerged: Korean new religions, e.g., might draw on Buddhism, shamanism, and Confucianism, while Shinto (along with Buddhism and the folk tradition) is a source of inspiration for many Japanese new religions. In very recent times, influences have come from outside the region as well, with evangelical Christian movements especially prominent in Korea and new-age themes appearing in the most recent new religions in Japan.

The new religions have been especially effective in dealing with the tensions between modernity and tradition, through their articulation of many aspects of traditional folk religious belief (e.g., concepts of psychic causation) in ways that fit with the needs of individuals in the modern world. They have flourished mostly in the growing conurbations of East Asia, providing a new sense of belonging and community identity for populations that have moved from rural areas to the cities for work reasons. While providing individual solutions to problems and focusing on understandings and definitions of the self in modern terms, they have equally emphasized tradition, reaffirming many of the social parameters of traditional culture and morality. The solutions they pose to individual problems center around shamanic concepts of spirit possession and magically-charged healing rituals, but combined also with reaffirmations of traditional moral structures and obligations, notably Confucian ethical values of filial piety. A typical example taken from a new religion in Japan might be that a personal misfortune or illness is the result of having neglected to perform appropriate rituals for one’s ancestors and of causing their wrath: this breach of ritual propriety is a moral lapse which needs to be rectified through repentance and self-reflection, as well as participating in healing rituals. As such many of the new religions display a pronounced interweaving of magical practices alongside affirmations of morality; as various Japanese scholars have noted (e.g., Shimazono 1992), rather than magical practices decreasing as ethical and moral considerations become more strongly emphasized, the Japanese new religions show that the two often operate in tandem, the latter increasing and being articulated more pronouncedly as magical practices become more widespread.

The region’s new religions almost invariably owe their origins to the charisma and inspirational leadership of individuals who claim to have direct contacts with other realms or to bring new revealed truths to the world. While serving as a medium for a newly revealed deity, however, a common pattern is that the charismatic leader gradually displaces the deity as a source of inspiration, authority, and worship, often becoming regarded as living deities and venerated accordingly. Their charisma, however, may continue after death, a point often emphasized by Japanese scholars interested in the study of charisma: authority and succession to the leadership generally (following traditional East Asian familial patterns) passes through the family lineage to a son or daughter, suggesting that charisma is in part related to the concept of blood and lineage, and the deceased founder becomes an even more central figure of worship, with their mausoleum often becoming a pilgrimage center for the religion.

6.1 Aum Shinrikyo: New Religions And Violence

In 1995 world attention was directed towards the millennial Japanese new religion Aum Shinrikyo and its blind charismatic leader, Asahara Shoko, because of its nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway. While Aum was not the first or only religious movement in East Asia in modern times to commit acts of violence the sensational nature of the subway attack, Aum’s use of chemical weapons, and the subsequent evidence showing that it had engaged in a protracted series of crimes emanating from its religious activities and beliefs, caught the attention of defense and law agencies as well as scholars world wide.

The Aum affair has special significance for the sociological study of religion for many reasons. It showed similarities with patterns of violence that manifest in other religious movements in the West (e.g., the Peoples Temple, the Rajneesh movement, and the Order of the Solar Temple) and appeared, in an extreme form, to fit into a wider pattern of the production of violence within certain forms of newly formed charismatic, world rejecting millennial movements. It provides a dramatic case study for those interested in the relationship between religion and violence, and several of those who have studied Aum have interpreted it as an example of the violence-producing dimensions of religion (e.g., Shimazono 1997, Reader 2000). As an example of how new religions can produce violence primarily because of their doctrinal orientations and internal dynamics, the case of Aum provides a significant counter-example to the arguments widely held by many scholars of new religions in the West, that movements that engage in violence do so primarily in response to excessive external pressures placed on them by a hostile society.

7. Scholarship On The New Religions And The Problem Of East Asia

Mention has been made of the scholastic traditions in the region, especially of Japan, and some of the analyses and ideas they have transmitted. The new religions of Japan provide a case in point where work done by Japanese scholars has added to the wider understanding of new religions across the globe. Japanese scholarship generally has examined the ‘new’ new religions in the context of late twentieth century urban society and modernity, and as such has thus recognized, either explicitly or implicitly, the parallels that could be drawn between Japan as a first-world, modern, and technological society, and Western countries. Western scholars specializing in new religions have also been drawn to comparative studies of the Japanese new religions because of these recognizably common influences and factors. Much of the best Japanese scholarship on the new religions of Japan has taken account of Western theoretical perspectives, while many of the scholars in Japan have worked closely with Western scholars of new religions, mutually influencing and being influenced by them.

This has placed contemporary Japanese scholarship on the new religions in an international framework, and has made Western scholars more than ever aware of the importance, when seeking to develop comprehensive or universal models and categories in the study of religion, of the Japanese situation. Certainly no sociologist of religion concerned with the rise of new religions in the modern world can ignore the work being done in this field in and relating to Japan, just as no student of religious violence or of millennial movements could afford not to take note of Aum Shinrikyo. However, the corollary of this development has been to separate out Japan from the rest of East Asia in terms of the study of new religions: rather than viewing parallels within the region, e.g., Japanese scholars (and Western scholars working on Japan) have tended to examine Japanese new religions in the comparative context of Western new religions. This, however, means that the (potential) parallels between Japanese new religions and those of the rest of East Asia are focused on less clearly.

In other words, the problematic question raised earlier about how far one can discern or discuss the region in broad terms, is in some areas being answered in practical terms by contemporary scholastic work in and centered on Japan, which associates Japan far more with the industrialized West than, and thereby draws implicit boundaries with, the rest of geographical East Asia. While this does not invalidate the conceptual category or notion of East Asian religions, it does indicate the problematic aspects of talking of the region in any uniform sense. Not only do the traditions themselves take on different guises in the different parts of the region, but the manner in which they may be studied and the lessons that may be drawn from them may also highlight questions of difference rather than commonality. To what extent future studies will further add emphasis to the issue of difference and challenge the viability of treating the region as an entity is a moot question of great interest and significance to the field as a whole.

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