"The visitor to modern China will find few obvious indications of the traditional beliefs which underpinned the country's civilization for three thousand years. Certainly, the remains of religious buildings litter the cities and the countryside, yet they appear sadly incongruous amid the furious pace of change all around them. The restored temples - now ""cultural relics"" with photo booths, concession stands, special foreign tourist shops and cheerful throngs of young Chinese on outings - are garish and evoke few mysteries. This apparent lack of religion is hardly surprising, however: for decades, the old beliefs have been derided by the authorities as superstition, and the oldest and most firmly rooted of them all, Confucianism, has been criticized and repudiated for nearly a century. For any student of Chinese culture one of the most striking aspects of modern China is the degree to which, on the surface at least, the ancient (""feudal"") beliefs have been eradicated.
Although this may sound disappointing for travellers seeking the Tao (""Way"") in China, it should be pointed out that the neglect of the outward forms of religion is by no means a sure indicator of the state of mind of the Chinese people. The resilience of old ideas in China, and the ability of the Chinese people to absorb new streams of thought and eventually to dominate them, has been demonstrated again and again over the centuries. The philosophies which unified China and defined the very idea of what it is to be Chinese for millennia are not likely to be forgotten in a mere half century of communism.
The product of the oldest continuous civilization on earth, Chinese religion actually comprises a number of disparate and sometimes contradictory elements. But at the heart of it all, three basic philosophies lie intermingled: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The way in which a harmonious balance has been created among these three is expressed in the often quoted maxim San Jiao Fa Yi - ""Three Teachings Flow into One"".
Both Confucianism and Taoism are belief systems rooted in the Chinese soil, and they form as much a part of the Chinese collective unconscious as Platonic and Aristotelian thought does in the West. Buddhism , though, was a foreign import, brought to China from India along the Silk Road by itinerant monks and missionaries from about the first century AD onwards. As such, it was the first organized religion to penetrate China and enjoyed a glorious, if brief, period of ascendancy under the Tang in the eighth century. Just as the mutual contradictions of Confucianism and Taoism had been accommodated by the Chinese, however, so Buddhism did not long eclipse other beliefs - as it established itself, its tenets were gradually integrated into the existing structure of thought and in turn transformed by them, into something very different from what had originally come out of India. Buddhism may have been the only foreign religion to have left a substantial mark on China, though it was not, incidentally, the only religion to enter China via the Silk Road. Both Islam and Christianity also trickled into the country this way, and to this day a significant minority of Chinese, numbering possibly in the tens of millions, are Muslims. Unlike most of the rest of Asia, however, China did not yield wholesale to the tide of Islam - the rigid, all-embracing doctrines of the Koran never stood much of a chance with the choosy, flexible Chinese.
Similarly, China may have been periodically dominated by foreign powers, but her belief systems have never been overwhelmed. Instead, conquering invaders such as the Mongolians in the thirteenth and the Manchus in the seventeenth centuries, have found themselves inexorably sinicized. On this strength rests the understandable Chinese confidence in the ultimate superiority of their beliefs , a confidence that survived through the lowest periods in Chinese history.
Confucianism
China's oldest and greatest philosopher, Kong Zi, known in the West by his Latinized name Confucius , was an obscure and unsuccessful scholar. Born in 551 BC, during the so-called Warring States Period, he lived in an age of petty kingdoms...
Taoism
The second of the three major teachings which form the roots of Chinese beliefs is Taoism . The Tao translates literally as the ""Way"" and, in its purest form, Taoism is the study and pursuit of this ineffable Way, as...
Buddhism
The Tang dynasty (618-906 AD) was a period of unprecedented openness and prosperity for the Chinese court and it was then that Buddhism , originally imported from India through Central Asia around the first century AD, gained acceptance and...
Popular religion
When Jesuit missionaries first arrived in China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they were astounded and dismayed by the Chinese flexibility of belief . One frustrated Jesuit put it: ""In China, the educated believe nothing and...
Modern China
One of the reasons why modern China appears to lack the outward manifestations of her ancient beliefs is that they are not really essential. You will see the traditions more clearly expressed in how the Chinese think and act than in the symbols andĄ"
|
China Vacations 