Chinese Philosophy and Religion in the Imperial Era: From Confucius to the Syncretic Traditions of Late Imperial China

For more than two thousand years, the philosophical and religious traditions of imperial China shaped the way the Chinese understood the cosmos, the state, the family, and the self. A peasant in a Han village, a scholar-official in a Song academy, a Ming empress, and a Qing merchant all inhabited a world in which Confucian ethics governed social life, Daoist cosmology explained the rhythms of nature, Buddhist soteriology addressed the problem of suffering and death, and a vast inherited world of gods, ghosts, and ancestors received offerings at the local temple and the household altar. None of these traditions existed in isolation. What distinguished Chinese religious culture from the monotheistic Abrahamic traditions was precisely the willingness to hold them all together — to read the Confucian classics in a Daoist idiom, to chant Buddhist sutras at a Daoist altar, to consult a diviner about the date of a Confucian funeral.

This page surveys philosophy and religion in imperial China, from the consolidation of the empire under the Qin in 221 BCE to the crisis of the late Qing in the nineteenth century and the revolutionary rupture of the early twentieth. The first section introduces the three teachings (sanjiao): Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, the three great literate traditions that defined elite religious discourse; the second examines imperial ideology and the state cult, the doctrines and rituals through which the throne claimed cosmic legitimacy; the third turns to folk religion and everyday practice: the ancestor tablets, the city gods, the Mazu temples, the divination blocks, and the great festival calendar that ordered rural and urban life; a final section traces the long process by which these traditions were gradually reconfigured by contact with the West and the pressures of the modern nation-state. Focused treatments of Confucianism as state orthodoxy, the Mandate of Heaven, the life of Confucius, Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching, and ancestor worship in China are linked at the foot of the page.

The Three Teachings: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism

The phrase “three teachings” (sanjiao 三教) was already current by the sixth century CE and captures the basic framework within which educated Chinese classified their inherited traditions. Confucianism, named for the sage Kongzi, or Confucius (551–479 BCE), was a tradition of ethical self-cultivation, social order, and classical learning. It grounded itself in the inherited rites, music, and political institutions of the early Zhou and was transmitted through a canon of classical texts (jing) that by the Han had been edited into the canonical form that all later students memorized. Daoism (dao jiao), the second of the three, traced its legendary origins to Lao Tzu, a figure of the sixth century BCE credited with the Tao Te Ching, and to the Zhuangzi, a richly literary philosophical work of the late Warring States. Buddhism (fo jiao), the third, was an import from India and Central Asia, arriving in China in the first century CE and over the next millennium producing a vast and distinctively Chinese religious culture of monasteries, scriptures, and salvation practices.

None of these three traditions was internally unified. Confucianism fractured into classical, medieval, and Neo-Confucian schools, and it absorbed substantial Daoist and Buddhist content over the centuries. Daoism split into a philosophical tradition of the Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi, sometimes called “philosophical Daoism,” and a religious movement of organized churches, priests, talismans, and rituals. Buddhism, which entered China as a foreign religion, became thoroughly sinicized over many centuries, producing the major schools of Tiantai, Huayan, Chan (the Chinese ancestor of Zen), Pure Land, and the later movements of the Song and Ming. The Chinese philosophical and religious world was not three sealed boxes; it was a porous, contested, and continually recombining field.

The Classical Foundations: From Confucius to the Hundred Schools

The intellectual genealogy of imperial Chinese thought begins in the chaotic final centuries of the Zhou, when the old feudal order was breaking down and a great variety of thinkers offered competing visions of how to restore it or replace it. Confucius, born in the small state of Lu in 551 BCE, was the most influential of these. He presented himself not as an innovator but as a transmitter of the rites (li) and moral order of the early Zhou, and he taught that the rectification of the self was the foundation of good government, of social harmony, and of the well-ordered cosmos. His disciples preserved his sayings in the Lunyu, or Analects, and his ideas were developed in the commentaries of Mencius (Mengzi, c. 372–289 BCE) and Xunzi (c. 313–238 BCE).

The other major currents of the Warring States period are conventionally grouped as the “Hundred Schools.” The most important for the history of philosophy and religion were Daoism, in the figures of Lao Tzu, Zhuangzi, and the early Daodejing tradition; Mohism, an activist and consequentialist school founded by Mozi (c. 470–c. 391 BCE) that emphasized universal love (jian ai) and opposed the wasteful funerals of the Confucians; Legalism (fa jia), a state-centered, technocratic, and often ruthlessly managerial tradition best represented by the Qin ministers Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE), Shen Buhai (d. 337 BCE), and Han Fei (d. 233 BCE); the School of Yin-Yang (yinyang jia), which systematized correlative cosmology in the late Warring States; and the School of Names (ming jia), whose logical paradoxes so charmed Zhuangzi. There were also the Agriculturalists, the Logicians, the Diplomats, and the early specialists in military strategy, divination, and yin-yang cosmology whose practical expertise the Confucians never quite absorbed.

Of these, Legalism had the most immediate political impact. The Qin state under the Legalist minister Li Si (c. 280–208 BCE) adopted Legalist methods as state policy, and the Qin unification of 221 BCE marked the first time that all of China had been brought under a single bureaucratic administration. The Qin fell within a generation, in part because of the brutalities of its Legalist regime, but the bureaucratic, technocratic, and legalist features of imperial government — the registration of households, the standardization of weights and measures, the equal-field land system, the codification of criminal law — endured for two millennia.

Confucianism in the Han and the Making of an Imperial Orthodoxy

After the Qin collapse, the victorious Han under its early emperors tried a more eclectic mix of policies, drawing on Confucian ritual propriety, Legalist administrative practice, and the cosmological ideas of the Yin-Yang school. The decisive turn came in 136 BCE, when the Han emperor Wu accepted the recommendation of the court scholar Dong Zhongshu (c. 179–c. 104 BCE) and proclaimed Confucianism the official ideology of the state, banishing the other schools from the Imperial Academy (the taixue). The shift was not absolute. Han emperors also patronized Daoist immortality seekers and the Yin-Yang cosmology that justified imperial rule, and the Confucian tradition itself incorporated substantial elements of the Yin-Yang school. But the basic formula was set: the educated official of the imperial Chinese state would be a Confucian, trained in the Five Classics, and the moral order of the dynasty would be expressed in Confucian categories.

This formula, with revisions, endured for more than two thousand years. The later Han saw the rise of the first great schools of classical commentary: the Old Text school (guwen jia), which held that several of the canonical classics had been recovered in older versions; and the New Text school (jinwen jia), which held that the official versions transmitted from the Qin and early Han were the genuine articles. The rivalry between these schools persisted for two millennia. The Eastern Han (25–220 CE) also saw the rise of the qixue or “study of the strange” — a heterodox movement that mixed cosmological speculation, portents, prophecies, and Daoist techniques of immortality and was repeatedly suppressed by the throne.

Buddhism Enters China

Buddhism, by contrast, was a foreign religion, and it entered China over the centuries-long process of contact between China and the wider Buddhist world of Central and South Asia. The earliest documented Buddhist communities in China date from the first century CE, and Buddhist texts, images, and monks arrived over the Silk Road and the sea lanes throughout the early centuries CE. The religion was at first treated as a strange foreign cult, identified by some with the immortality seekers of the Daoists, and it was the object of periodic persecution: in 166 CE under the Han, in 446 CE under the Northern Wei, and most spectacularly in 845 CE under the Tang emperor Wuzong, who destroyed thousands of monasteries and forced hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns to return to lay life.

Between and around these persecutions, Chinese Buddhism grew into one of the great religious civilizations of the world. The translation of Indian Buddhist scriptures into Chinese was, by some counts, the largest sustained translation project in pre-modern history, employing thousands of scholar-monks over many centuries and producing a Chinese Buddhist canon (the Da zang jing, or “Great Treasury”) of more than 2,000 individual texts. Chinese Buddhists did not just translate: they commented, systematized, and developed the religion in distinctive ways. The Tiantai school, founded by Zhiyi (538–597), systematized a single comprehensive teaching around the Lotus Sutra and the practice of chan (Chan) or samatha-vipasyana meditation. The Huayan school, with its sophisticated philosophy of interpenetrating particulars, was systematized by Fazang (643–712). The Chan school, with its anti-textual, anti-ritual iconoclasm, its emphasis on direct mind-to-mind transmission, and its literary art of the gong an (in Japanese, koan), became the most distinctive Chinese contribution to world Buddhism and was the ancestor of the Zen tradition in Japan and Korea. Pure Land Buddhism, with its devotional practice of calling on the Buddha Amitabha (Emituofo), grew in parallel with Chan and was, by the late Tang, the most popular form of Buddhism among the laity.

Daoism: From the Daodejing to the Celestial Masters

Daoism had a different trajectory. There is no evidence of a “Daoist religion” in the Warring States period; the early Daoist texts, the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi, are philosophical and literary works that have more in common with the Greek philosophers and the Indian Upanishads than with a religious institution. The Daoist religion (dao jiao) emerged in the second century CE, in the wake of the collapse of the Han, as a movement of popular religious organization, messianic prophecy, and healing ritual. The first Daoist church, the Celestial Masters (Tianshi) movement, was founded by Zhang Daoling in Sichuan around 142 CE. It promised salvation through the confession of sins, the reception of talismans (fu) and registers (lu), and submission to a celestial bureaucracy modeled on the imperial administration. Over the next several centuries, the Celestial Masters and their rivals organized into a complex network of clergy, ritual, and scripture.

The Daoist religion produced its own canon, the Dao zang (Treasury of the Dao), which was edited into its modern form during the Ming and contains hundreds of texts ranging from philosophical treatises and meditation manuals to liturgical prescriptions for healing, exorcism, and the ritual salvation of the dead. Daoist priests performed rituals in temples and at altars in private homes, diagnosed illness and misfortune by reading the body and the stars, and wrote talismans to be pasted on walls and doors. They were also closely involved with the imperial court: the emperors of the Tang claimed Daoist ancestors (Lao Tzu was, in an official genealogy, a great-grandfather of the imperial house) and patronized Daoist ritual as part of the imperial cult.

The Daoist tradition is also, along with the Confucians, the great Chinese school of nature. The Dao De Jing’s praise of the feminine, the soft, the uncarved block, and the water that yields and so overcomes the hard was an extraordinarily fertile text, drawn on by poets, painters, gardeners, doctors, and political theorists for two thousand years. Zhuangzi’s parables of the butterfly, the fish, and the death of his own wife established a kind of philosophical lightness that has no real parallel in the Western tradition. The Daoist sensibility is not, of course, the whole of Chinese culture — the bureaucratic and agrarian state needed Confucians, the Chinese peasant needed the Buddha — but no account of Chinese culture can do without it.

Imperial Ideology and the State Cult

The political theology of the imperial Chinese state was built on a small set of doctrines and rituals that were repeated, with variations, by every dynasty from the Zhou to the end of the Qing. The first of these was the Mandate of Heaven (tianming 天命), the doctrine that Heaven (tian) granted the right to rule to a virtuous dynasty and withdrew it when the dynasty became corrupt. The doctrine was articulated in the Book of Documents (Shang shu) and the Book of Odes (Shi jing) and was used by the founders of the Zhou in the eleventh century BCE to justify the overthrow of the Shang. It was the basic grammar of dynastic legitimacy for the next three thousand years. Every new dynasty claimed to have received the Mandate; every fallen dynasty was explained, in the histories written by its successors, as having lost it.

The second was the role of the emperor as mediator between Heaven and Earth. The emperor, the tianzi (Son of Heaven), occupied the center of the world. He performed the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth at the round and square altars at the southern suburbs of the capital; he offered the first fruits at the Altar of Land and Grain; he plowed the ceremonial furrows at the start of the planting season; he performed the sacrifices to his ancestors at the imperial temple; and he led the ritual mourning for the dead. These were not mere ceremonies; they were the central act of government, the demonstration that the dynasty possessed the cosmic legitimacy to rule.

The third was Confucianism as state orthodoxy. The decision of the Han emperor Wu to make Confucianism the basis of state ideology had consequences that lasted two millennia. The Confucian classics became the curriculum of the imperial examinations, the basis for the selection of officials, and the moral vocabulary of imperial government. The Confucian temple (wenmiao) in every county and prefecture city enshrined the tablets of Confucius and his main disciples, and the state cult of Confucius — performed by the emperor at the imperial Confucian temple in the capital and by local officials at the prefectural level — was a regular, regularized ritual. The most radical reinvention of this Confucian state ideology came under the Song, when the Neo-Confucian philosophers Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and his predecessors and rivals produced a comprehensive synthesis of Confucian ethics, Buddhist and Daoist metaphysics, and the inherited classical tradition, and this synthesis was in turn made the basis of the state orthodoxy in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing.

The Imperial Sacrifices

The state cult of the imperial Chinese dynasty was a complex and regularized system of sacrifices. At the center was the annual round of sacrifices performed by the emperor himself. The most important was the winter solstice sacrifice to Heaven at the Round Mound (qi nian tan) in the southern suburbs of the capital, and the summer solstice sacrifice to Earth at the Square Mound (fang ze tan) in the northern suburbs. These were performed by the emperor personally, in the robes and cap of the supreme sacrificial role, in a ritual that combined elements of the Zhou ritual code, the Han tradition, and the more recent Tang and Song codifications. The emperor also performed the sacrifices at the Altar of Land and Grain, the Altar of the Sun in the east, the Altar of the Moon in the west, and the Altar of the Gods of the Soil in the capital.

Equally important were the sacrifices at the imperial ancestral temple (taimiao), where the tablets of the dynasty’s ancestors received offerings at the new year, on the emperor’s birthday, and on the major festival days. The imperial cult of ancestors was a magnified version of the household cult performed by every family in the empire, and it served to demonstrate the continuity of the dynasty and the connection between the ruling house, the founding ancestors, and Heaven. Over the course of imperial history, the imperial cult was repeatedly modified, simplified, and rationalized. The Sui and Tang attempted to revive the Zhou round of sacrifices; the Song established an elaborate and increasingly refined system of ritual texts; the Ming, after some experiments with simplification, restored many of the Song forms; the Qing, drawing on both the Ming tradition and the Manchu ritual tradition, developed a distinctive imperial ritual that combined Confucian, Manchu, and Buddhist elements.

Cosmology, Divination, and Statecraft

The imperial state drew on a rich inherited tradition of cosmology and divination. The Yin-Yang school, which had systematized the doctrine of the five phases (wuxing), the ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches, the portents and prodigies, and the elaborate calendar that governed all state ritual, was a permanent feature of the Han state and of every later dynasty. The court employed specialists in astronomy, calendrics, hemerology (the choice of auspicious days), portents, and divination, and the official histories of every dynasty contained long sections on the omens recorded during the reign.

The cosmological system was not separate from politics; it was constitutive of it. The emperor’s virtue produced cosmic harmony; cosmic disorder, signaled by eclipses, comets, earthquakes, floods, and famines, was a sign of imperial failing. A serious omen was the occasion for a public expression of remorse, an edict of self-criticism, a change of reign-title, or the dismissal of offending ministers. The same cosmological system informed personal life: a marriage, a journey, the founding of a house, the burial of a parent, the opening of a business — all were timed by the specialists in the almanac and the day-book.

The Imperial Examination and the Confucian State

The imperial examination system, which selected officials on the basis of their knowledge of the Confucian classics and their ability to compose essays in the prescribed forms, was the most distinctive institution of the Confucian state. The system, which developed through the Han and Sui and reached its mature form under the Song, linked the political order to the moral order, the administrative class to the literary tradition, and the empire to a single written language. The examination essay (bagu wen, or “eight-legged essay”) of the late imperial system, in particular, was a literary form of extraordinary rigidity and great internal complexity, designed to test the candidate’s mastery of the canonical texts, his ability to apply them to the question at hand, and his stylistic control of a very demanding form.

The examination system, more than any other single institution, gave the Confucian tradition its hold on the imperial state. By the Song, success in the examination was the recognized path to social advancement, and the families that produced successful candidates accumulated the land, the connections, and the cultural capital of the local elite. By the Ming, the examination had become the only recognized path to office, and the jinshi (presented scholar) degree was the most prestigious title in the empire. The system was abolished in 1905, in the last years of the Qing, as part of the broader program of modernization.

Folk Religion and Everyday Practice

Beneath the literate traditions of the Confucians, the Daoists, and the Buddhists, the vast majority of Chinese practiced a religion that was in some sense all of them and none of them. The religion of the village, the neighborhood, the household, and the lineage hall was the religion of the gods, the ancestors, and the ghosts. It was a religion of locality, of festival, of divination, of healing, of exorcism, and of offerings. It had no canonical creed, no single founder, and no unified body of doctrine; it had, instead, an inherited repertoire of rituals, deities, sacred sites, and stories that varied by region but shared a common structure.

The Gods and the Ancestors

The Chinese pantheon was enormous. There were gods of the city, the village, the mountain, the river, the sea, the hearth, the door, the granary, the well, and the latrine. There were gods of the civil service and gods of the military. There were gods of wealth (Caishen), of longevity (Shoulao), of medicine (the Yaowang), of smallpox (the Doumu and a family of goddesses), of childbirth (Zigong and Songzi Niangniang), and of the dangerous transition of the newborn. There were the great mother goddesses, the Tianhou and the Mazu, who protected sailors and fishermen; the Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, who became in China a goddess of mercy and childbirth; the City Gods (Chenghuang), the territorial protectors of every city and county town; the Earth Gods (Tudigong), who watched over the village; and the kitchen god (Zaojun), who reported the conduct of the household to Heaven at the end of the year.

These gods and goddesses were not the objects of a systematic theology. They were worshipped at local temples, on family altars, and at neighborhood shrines, by a community that knew the local stories and ritual procedures. Some had been imported from Buddhism (Guanyin), some from Daoism (the Tudi and many of the immortals), some from the state cult (the City Gods), some from popular legend (the Eight Immortals, the dragon kings, the goddess Mazu). The religious system was syncretic in practice and largely uninterested in drawing the doctrinal lines that preoccupied the literati.

The ancestors stood in a category of their own. Every household kept tablets of recent ancestors on the family altar; every lineage maintained a hall where the tablets of more distant ancestors received offerings at the major festivals. The cult of the ancestors was the foundation of filial piety (xiao), the cardinal Confucian virtue, and the household ritual of offering food, wine, and incense at the family altar was the most fundamental religious act of Chinese life. The state cult of the imperial ancestors was, in this sense, a magnified version of the household cult, and the filial relationship between the living and the dead was the model for many other relationships in Chinese social and political thought.

Festivals and the Ritual Calendar

The Chinese ritual year was a cycle of festivals, observed by the state, by the lineages, and by the households. The two great festival clusters were the New Year period, anchored by the lunar new year and running through the first month of the year, and the harvest period in the autumn. The winter solstice and the summer solstice were the two great ritual occasions of the state cult. The New Year and the harvest festivals structured the economic and social life of the Chinese village: the New Year was the time of the year’s accounting, the visit to the ancestral hall, the renewal of contracts, the gift-giving, and the new clothes; the harvest was the time of the in-gathering, the sacrifice to the ancestors and the local gods, the celebration of the year’s labor, and the preparation for the new agricultural cycle.

Among the most important folk festivals were the Lantern Festival (Yuanxiao jie) on the fifteenth day of the first month, the Cold Food Festival (Hanshi jie) and the Qingming Festival on the third day of the third month, the Dragon Boat Festival (Duanwu jie) on the fifth day of the fifth month, the Double Seventh (Qixi jie) on the seventh day of the seventh month, the Mid-Autumn Festival (Zhongqiu jie) on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, the Double Ninth (Chongyang jie) on the ninth day of the ninth month, the Winter Solstice (Dongzhi) in the eleventh month, and the New Year (Nian) at the end of the twelfth month. Most of these had multiple meanings and were tied to particular stories, foods, and ritual acts: the Cold Food and Qingming festivals to ancestor veneration and the spring visit to the graves, the Dragon Boat to the drowned official Qu Yuan, the Mid-Autumn to the harvest and the family reunion, the New Year to the cosmic renewal and the expulsion of the spirit of the old year.

Divination, Healing, and the Boundary with the Elite Traditions

The folk religious system was concerned above all with practical life: health, fertility, wealth, longevity, and the proper ordering of human relations with the natural and the supernatural world. The great majority of Chinese, including the educated and the elite, made use of the services of specialists in divination and healing: the Daoist priests who wrote talismans and read the I Ching; the Buddhist monks and nuns who performed the yuji, or ritual of healing and salvation; the spirit mediums (wu, tongji) who were possessed by gods and gave oracles; the geomancers (fangshi) who chose the site and orientation of houses, graves, and temples according to the principles of feng shui; the physiognomists who read the face and the body; the astrologers who cast horoscopes and chose auspicious days; and the herbalists, the acupuncturists, and the pharmacists who treated the body.

The boundary between folk religion and the elite traditions was porous. The Daoist priests, who were educated in the Daoist canon, performed rituals that drew on the inherited philosophical Daoist tradition; the Buddhist monks, who were educated in the Buddhist canon, performed rituals that drew on the inherited philosophical Buddhist tradition; and the Confucian officials, who were trained in the classics, performed the sacrifices at the state temples. The three teachings met in the local religious life of the Chinese village, and the village temple typically housed statues of the Buddha, the Laozi, the City God, the Earth God, the God of Wealth, and the Goddess of Mercy, with the family tablets of the lineages on the back wall.

The Syncretic World of Imperial China

The picture that emerges is of a religious culture that was both layered and syncretic. At the top, the imperial cult performed by the emperor at the round and square altars of the capital was a specifically political and cosmological religion, expressed in the inherited Zhou ritual codes and modified by each dynasty in its own way. Just below, the Confucian official class performed the sacrifices at the state temples of Confucius and the city gods, and presided over the regularized ritual life of the local community. Below them, the Buddhist and Daoist clergy maintained their monasteries, performed their rituals, and served the religious needs of the laity. At the bottom, the household and the lineage hall performed the cult of the ancestors, and the village temple served the cult of the local gods.

These layers were not separate institutions with clear boundaries. The same family might have a son in the civil service, a daughter married to a Buddhist monk, a grandmother who frequented the local Daoist temple, and a grandfather who made offerings at the family altar. The same person might perform a Daoist ritual at the new year, a Buddhist funeral at the death of a parent, a Confucian sacrifice at the ancestral hall, and a popular festival at the village temple in the course of a single year. The syncretic quality of Chinese religious life was, in the end, what made it Chinese.

The Medieval Synthesis: Tang, Song, and Yuan

The most important period for the formation of the syncretic tradition was the medieval era, from the seventh to the fourteenth century. The Tang saw the consolidation of the Daoist religion as a state-supported church, with the emperor claiming descent from Lao Tzu and the state maintaining a network of Daoist monasteries. It saw also the maturation of Chinese Buddhism, with the great schools of Tiantai, Huayan, Chan, and Pure Land, and the integration of Buddhism into the religious and intellectual life of the elite. The Tang period ended with the great persecution of Buddhism in 845, but the religion soon recovered, and the late Tang and Five Dynasties period saw a remarkable efflorescence of printing, painting, and Chan Buddhist literature.

The Song saw a major intellectual transformation. The great Neo-Confucian philosophers Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073), the brothers Cheng Hao (1032–1085) and Cheng Yi (1033–1107), Zhu Xi (1130–1200), and Lu Jiuyuan (1139–1193) produced a new synthesis of the Confucian tradition, drawing on the Chan Buddhist and Daoist philosophical traditions for the metaphysical framework that the classical Confucians had lacked. Zhu Xi’s commentary on the Great Learning (Daxue), the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), the Analects (Lunyu), and the Mencius (Mengzi) became the official interpretation of the Confucian canon for the next seven hundred years, and his synthesis was made the basis of the state orthodoxy in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing.

The Yuan, the Mongol dynasty that ruled China from 1279 to 1368, was a period of remarkable religious diversity. The Mongol court patronized Tibetan Buddhism, Daoist and Confucian ritual, and the various non-Chinese religions of Central Asia. The Daoist church suffered a serious setback in 1255 and 1281, when the Yuan rulers, persuaded by Buddhist polemicists, banned certain Daoist texts and forced the Daoist clergy to give up some of their most important scriptures. The Confucian tradition, by contrast, was established as the basis of the civil administration, and the Neo-Confucian synthesis of Zhu Xi was made the basis of the official examinations in 1313.

The Late Imperial Synthesis: Ming and Qing

The Ming and Qing saw the final consolidation of the syncretic tradition. The Ming founder, the Hongwu emperor (r. 1368–1398), was a fierce defender of the Confucian state, an opponent of the Buddhist and Daoist clergy, and a legislator of extraordinary detail. His successors presided over a long, generally prosperous, and culturally very productive dynasty. The late Ming saw the rise of the Wang Yangming school of Neo-Confucianism, which emphasized the innate moral knowledge of the mind and the unity of knowledge and action; the development of a syncretic current that sought to combine the three teachings under a single moral and metaphysical umbrella; the spread of popular religion in new forms, including the Buddhist-Daoist sectarian movements of the White Lotus and the Luo Teaching; and the growth of a market for printed books, almanacs, and religious literature that brought the literate religious traditions into the homes of the gentry and the cities.

The Qing, the Manchu dynasty that ruled from 1644 to 1912, took over the Ming institutional system and made the Neo-Confucian synthesis of Zhu Xi the basis of the official ideology. The Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796), in particular, presided over a great program of textual compilation, including the Siku Quanshu (“Complete Library of the Four Treasuries”), the largest editorial project of the imperial era, and a series of grand imperial sacrifices. The late Qing saw the beginning of the crisis that would eventually bring the imperial system to an end: the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, the Self-Strengthening Movement, the abolition of the examination system in 1905, and the founding of the Republic in 1912.

Religious Change in the Late Imperial Period

The late imperial period, especially the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, was a time of important changes in the religious and philosophical life of China. Some of these changes were internal to the inherited traditions; others were a response to the growing contact with the West.

Popular Sects, Secret Societies, and the Boundaries of Orthodoxy

The late imperial period saw the proliferation of religious sects (hui dao, “teaching associations”) that combined elements of Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian thought with messianic expectations, healing rituals, and communal practices. The White Lotus (bailian) sect, the Luo Teaching (luo jiao), and a number of related movements were particularly important. Some of these movements were persecuted by the state, on the grounds that they were heterodox (xie jiao) and politically subversive; others were tolerated as popular religious associations. The state drew a sharp distinction between the “three teachings and the sectarians” (sanjiao ji jiujiao), and the suppression of heterodox sects was a recurrent feature of late imperial religious policy.

Some of these sectarian movements were at the center of major political upheavals. The Red Turban Rebellion of the 1350s and 1360s, which helped bring down the Yuan, drew on the White Lotus tradition. The Eight Trigrams Rebellion of 1813, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–1864, and a long series of smaller uprisings through the late Qing all had religious components. The Taiping Rebellion in particular, led by the Hakka visionary Hong Xiuquan, drew on a heterodox Christian-Protestant tradition, established the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, and produced the bloodiest civil war of the nineteenth century.

The Encounter with the West

The arrival of the Jesuit missionaries at the end of the sixteenth century, and the translation of a substantial body of Catholic theology and Latin classical literature into Chinese, marked the beginning of a long engagement between the Chinese philosophical and religious traditions and the Christian and modern Western traditions. The Jesuits, in particular, attempted to present Christianity in terms that would be intelligible to the Confucian elite: they used the term tian zhu (Lord of Heaven) for the Christian God, presented Confucius and the ancestors as compatible with Christian doctrine, and made extensive use of Neo-Confucian and Buddhist philosophical vocabulary. The Jesuit accommodation was eventually condemned by the Vatican, in the Chinese Rites controversy of the early eighteenth century, and the Catholic mission in China was effectively closed for a century.

The nineteenth century saw a new wave of missionary activity, this time dominated by Protestant denominations, and a slow, contested, and sometimes violent engagement between the inherited Chinese traditions and the Christian mission. The Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), the unequal treaties that followed, and the Taiping Rebellion all shaped the environment in which Christianity was received in China. The late Qing reformers, in their turn, attempted to draw selectively on Western religious and philosophical ideas: Kang Youwei (1858–1927) presented Confucius as a reformer and a kind of constitutionalist; Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Tan Sitong (1865–1898) attempted to combine Buddhist, Christian, and Confucian ideas in a new synthesis; and the revolutionary thinkers of the early twentieth century — most prominently Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) and Hu Shi (1891–1962) — rejected the Confucian tradition in favor of a thoroughgoing Westernization.

The Republican Revolution and the New Culture Movement

The fall of the imperial system in 1912, the failure of the early Republic, and the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and 1920s produced a comprehensive rejection of the inherited Chinese philosophical and religious traditions. The Confucian tradition, in particular, was attacked as feudal, hierarchical, anti-scientific, and incompatible with the democratic, scientific, and modern values that the reformers wanted to install. The May Fourth Movement of 1919 was the high point of this critique, and the Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, made the destruction of “the four olds” — old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas — a central part of its program after 1949. The Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 was the most radical expression of this commitment, with the systematic destruction of temples, monasteries, and religious institutions, and the persecution of religious believers of all kinds.

The post-Mao reform period, beginning in 1978, has seen a partial revival of the inherited religious traditions. The Buddhist and Daoist clergy have been reconstituted, the Confucian temple in Qufu has been restored, and the folk religious practices of the Chinese New Year, the Qingming Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Mid-Autumn Festival have resumed on a vast scale. The state has re-established a supervisory relationship with the five recognized religions — Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism — and Confucianism has been revived, in various forms, as a source of social ethics and national identity. The question of what Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and the folk tradition can mean for a modern, urbanized, technologically advanced, and globally engaged China is one of the great questions of the contemporary period.