On The Very Idea of Religions
On The Very Idea of Religions
On The Very Idea of Religions
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Robert Ford Campany O N T H E V E RY I D E A O F
R E L IGIONS ( I N TH E
MO D E R N W E S T A N D I N
E A R LY M E D I E VA L
C H I NA )
Well into the nineteenth century, there “were” only four religions: Chris-
tianity, Judaism, Islam, and a fourth variously named Paganism, Idolatry,
or Heathenism.1 Today a researcher can claim, “We have identified nine
thousand and nine hundred distinct and separate religions in the world,
Some of the positions taken below to some extent resemble those argued by Stephen R.
Bokenkamp in an as yet unpublished paper, “The Silkworm and the Bodhi Tree: The Ling-
bao Attempt to Replace Buddhism in China and Our Attempt to Place Lingbao Daoism,”
of which I received a copy only at a late phase in the writing of this essay. My remarks here
were first delivered in sketch form at a symposium at Harvard University in May 2000, and
then more elaborately at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Wash-
ington, D.C., in April 2002, and I am grateful for the opportunity to present them in both
venues. I am also grateful to Bokenkamp, John McRae, and Michael Satlow for critical
comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
1
For an overview, see Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” in Critical
Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), pp. 275–80; on the extension of this typology to colonial frontiers, see David
Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), pp. 32, 238– 41; on the mid-Victorian
shift from classification to diffusion and then development as the major tropes—or, as the
Scot John Ferguson McLennan put it in 1863, “the divisions, the movements, and the
progress of mankind”—see George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York:
Free Press, 1987), pp. 165–66. Other early classifications favored types of religion rather than
named religions; e.g., see David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. H. E. Root
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), which deploys a binary “polytheism”/
“monotheism” not very far from what Jonathan Smith has identified as the most basic clas-
sification of religions and groups, “theirs” vs. “ours” (see “Religion, Religions, Religious,”
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288 On the Very Idea of Religions
p. 276, Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions [Leiden: Brill, 1978], pp.
241– 42, “What a Difference a Difference Makes,” in “To See Ourselves as Others See Us”:
Christians, Jews, “Others” in Late Antiquity, ed. Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs
[Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985], pp. 15–16); and Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of
the Science of Religion, trans. Beatrice S. Colyer-Fergusson (London: Longmans, Green,
1981), chaps. 7–8, which deploys and discusses a variety of classification schemes.
2
The statement is attributed to David B. Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclo-
pedia, in Toby Lester, “Oh, Gods!” Atlantic Monthly (February 2002), p. 38.
3
See, e.g., Robert D. Baird, Category Formation and the History of Religions (The
Hague: Mouton, 1971), pp. 134– 42. A refreshing recent exception is Timothy Fitzgerald,
“A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category,” Method and Theory in the Study
of Religion 9, no. 2 (1997) 35– 47, though I do not by any means agree with some of his con-
clusions. On the other hand, Fitzgerald’s “Religious Studies as Cultural Studies: A Philo-
sophical and Anthropological Critique of the Concept of Religion,” Diskus 3 (1995): 35– 47,
criticizes the use of “religion” mainly for its conceptual fuzziness. I would respond that,
while scholarly usage of the term is certainly vague and ambiguous by turns, the discourse
on “religions” is structured according to certain prominent metaphors that are not fuzzy at
all but that may be problematic in other ways, as we will see below.
4
See especially George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and
Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic, 1999); George Lakoff, Women, Fire,
and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987); and Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Mean-
ing, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Also of note
is Earl R. MacCormac, Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion (Durham, N.C.: Duke
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History of Religions 289
University Press, 1976). For an important set of essays that build on metaphor analysis but
also suggest revisions and extensions, see James W. Fernandez, ed., Beyond Metaphor: The
Theory of Tropes in Anthropology (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991). Par-
ticularly important for my purposes here is the essay by Naomi Quinn, “The Cultural Basis
of Metaphor” in Fernandez, ed., pp. 56–93.
5
See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: Mac-
millan, 1963).
6 W. E. Soothill noted as early as 1919 that the modern Chinese term zongjiao [ ]
was a borrowing from Japanese and that the term had been coined recently in Japanese to
translate the Western “religion” (cited in Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, p. 58).
7
Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and
the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 52.
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290 On the Very Idea of Religions
8
Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious,” p. 281.
9
A recent work that, though not on the topic of religion(s), is exemplary in its careful
attention to Chinese metaphors and the differences from Western analogues in their impli-
cations is Jane Geaney, On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought (Ho-
nolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). Edward Slingerland is also doing important
work in this area.
10
Smith, Drudgery Divine, p. 52. Compare this statement in F. J. P. Poole, “Metaphors
and Maps: Towards Comparison in the Anthropology of Religion,” Journal of the Ameri-
can Academy of Religion 54 (1986): 414–15: “Neither phenomenologically whole entities
nor their local meanings are preserved in comparison”—to which I would reply that if their
local meanings (for my purposes read: categories) are not preserved, neither will ours be
if ours are themselves the other member of the comparison rather than being taken as the
inert, fixed “third term.” It may be, as Smith points out, that sound comparisons are triad-
ically structured (see Drudgery Divine, pp. 33, 51, 86–87, 99, 117), but I would insist that
the “third term,” itself a culturally and historically conditioned variable, is itself likewise
liable to critical modification, revision, and possible rejection as a result of the process of
comparison. Perhaps this is what Smith means to allow for in his more recent comment,
“So classify we must—though we can learn from the past to eschew dual classifications
such as that between ‘universal’ and ‘ethnic’ or the host of related dualisms” (“A Matter of
Class: Taxonomies of Religion,” Harvard Theological Review 89 [1996]: 402), to which I
would simply reply that dual classifications may not, on analysis, be the only ones subject
to rejection or revision.
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History of Religions 291
clearly the ways in which it implicitly shapes not only the answers to our
historical and interpretive questions but also the very form of those ques-
tions and, therefore, the form that any possible answer can take.
To raise the issue of the setting of early Christianities [note the plural!] is to
ask at the outset the question of comparison and, thereby, to deny any initial
11
One scholar in the field of Chinese thought and religion who has long been admirably
sensitive to such issues, as well as to the unconsidered use of such categories as “science,”
“magic,” and “religion,” is Nathan Sivin. His classic article “On the Word ‘Taoist’ as a
Source of Perplexity” (History of Religions 17 [1978]: 303–30), questioning the vague use
of the taxa “Taoism” and “Taoist,” was years ahead of its time and has yet to be adequately
heeded or responded to even by scholars specializing in “Daoist” studies. In his recent in-
troduction to an older essay by Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen on the history of Chi-
nese medicine, Sivin returns to the problems posed by such categories, observing, “These
[“isms”] are fixtures in the sorts of history of philosophy that are more interested in dis-
embodied isms than in the activity of particular human beings” (“Editor’s Introduction,” in
Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 6, Biology
and Biological Technology, pt. 6, Medicine, ed. Nathan Sivin [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2000], p. 8).
12
Fitzgerald, “A Critique of ‘Religion,’ ” p. 106.
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292 On the Very Idea of Religions
13
Smith, Drudgery Divine, pp. 117–18.
14
Of which an exemplary study may be found in Devin DeWeese, Islamization and Na-
tive Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and
Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1994).
15
A sensitive study of how dying and death were gradually “Christianized” in medieval
Europe and came to be performed as ritual processes differently than they had been before
“Christianization” may be found in Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation
of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).
16
See Miyakawa Hisayuki, “The Confucianization of South China,” in The Confucian
Persuasion, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1960), pp.
21– 46.
17 Considerations of the “sinification” of “Buddhism” should now take as their starting
point the pertinent reassessment of the shape of this category in Robert H. Sharf, Coming
to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 1–25.
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History of Religions 293
18
As opposed to, e.g., “the Buddhist tradition of celebrating the Buddha’s birthday” or
“the Buddhist system of transference of merit.”
19
Good resources for the study of such processes are to be found, e.g., in works such as
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1992); James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory: New
Perspectives on the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Paul Connerton, How Societies Re-
member (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
20
Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic, 1973), pp. 87–125; the essay was first published in 1966.
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294 On the Very Idea of Religions
21
Note, e.g., the prominent use of “religious system,” with all of the attendant holistic
tendencies, such as “A constitution is necessary in order that the parts or elements of the
religious enterprise might function” (is there an actual “religion,” as opposed to Lease’s
petri dish model, that has anything approximating a working “constitution”?) and “any re-
ligion which advances through the first two stages . . . i.e., through the meeting of the fun-
damental needs for which any religion arises, and through the articulation of its essence or
system—will . . . advance to a final stage, . . . the claim by a religion to be able to provide
a total understanding,” in Gary Lease, “The History of ‘Religious’ Consciousness and the
Diffusion of Culture: Strategies for Surviving Dissolution,” Historical Reflections/Réflex-
ions historiques 20 (1994): 466–69, quoted passages on 463 and 469, respectively.
22 The title of the magisterial history by Isabelle Robinet, trans. Phyllis Brooks (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997); all italics in lists are added.
23 Robinet, p. xv.
24
Erik Zürcher, “A New Look at the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Texts,” in From Benares
to Beijing, ed. Koichi Shinohara and Gregory Schopen (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic, 1991),
p. 293.
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History of Religions 295
When this southern Buddhism in the course of time was blended with that of
the north, we see at least the full maturity of sinicized Buddhism.25
In the East where it [Manichaeism] flourished at a time when there were no
longer any real Manichaeans to be found in the West.26
Christianity itself contained astrological elements; too many traces of the Hel-
lenistic and Oriental religions . . . were intertwined at its very roots for it
to be able to rid itself of them completely.27
At first it [Buddhism] must have lived on among the foreigners who had
brought it with them from their home countries.28
The Chinese Buddhist texts that on the basis of internal and external evidence
may be ascribed to the “embryonic phase” of Chinese Buddhism.29
25
Arthur F. Wright, Studies in Chinese Buddhism, ed. Robert M. Somers (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 39.
26
Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1987), p. 331.
27 Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place
in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1953), p. 43.
28
Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China, 2d ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1972), p. 23.
29
Zürcher, “A New Look at the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Texts,” p. 277.
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296 On the Very Idea of Religions
30
Reading passages based on organic metaphors for religions, one is powerfully re-
minded of the long Western tradition of reflection on the morphology of organic forms,
enshrined in Goethe’s musings on the Urpflanze and perhaps best summarized in E. S.
Russell, Form and Function: A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology (1916;
reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
31
Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late An-
tiquity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 76.
32
Rudolph, p. 332.
33
Kristofer Schipper, “Purity and Strangers: Shifting Boundaries in Medieval Taoism,”
T ’oung Pao 80 (1994): 63.
34
Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 59.
35
Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller, “Introduction: Gods and Society in China,” in Un-
ruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China, ed. Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1996), p. 10.
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History of Religions 297
ism” constructed elaborate bureaucratic hierarchies for the gods; now they
wish to show that “Daoism” harbors anti- or extrabureaucratic types as
well. This sentence is how they resolve the tension. Rather than seeing the
tension between the bureaucratic and antibureaucratic as resulting from
many textual and ritual skirmishes over time by multiple historical agents
with multiple agendas addressing multiple contexts, we are asked to see it
as the work of a single, intentional, but impersonal agent, “Daoism,” that
is teleologically portrayed as doing X only to transcend X by proceeding
to do Y. It is as if “Daoism” is a whimsical child at work on a sand castle
or a painter addressing her canvas. The metaphor utterly obscures the
actual processes that occurred to bring about the presence of such conflict-
ing imagery and figures; it also obscures the interests and agency of the
persons and groups actually responsible for them—and especially in this
case one surmises that struggles over power and status were key contexts
prompting the adoption of one or another idiom, bureaucratic or anti-
bureaucratic, in specific situations.
Philosophic Taoism had lost some of its appeal. . . . Its ideas had been dis-
cussed incessantly for decades and had lost their freshness.36
It [Manichaeism] could hold its ground even more successfully and more per-
manently in the East.37
Buddhism was well entrenched in eastern Iranian areas.38
The Buddhist Conquest of China
The assumption of earlier occasional infiltrations of Buddhist elements into
Tibet is an obvious one to make.39
It [Buddhism] must have slowly infiltrated from the North-West.40
These last two metaphors for “religions” are not much more satisfying
than the ones discussed above, but they have their advantages. The mar-
ketable commodity metaphor at least implies that persuasion is involved
in religious life, that some people are trying to win others over to their
36
Wright, p. 38.
37
Rudolph (n. 26 above), p. 331.
38
Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, Gnosis on the Silk Road: Gnostic Parables, Hymns and
Prayers from Central Asia (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 5.
39
Giuseppe Tucci, The Religions of Tibet, trans. Geoffrey Samuel (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1980), p. 1. This is a secondary metaphor: the use of “infiltrate” to de-
scribe a clandestine military or intelligence-gathering maneuver stems from a primary
metaphor involving liquids and the breakdown of filters designed to exclude foreign agents.
40
Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest (n. 28 above), pp. 22–23.
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298 On the Very Idea of Religions
points of view; by its very structure this metaphor forces us to recall that
there is a human population involved, a clientele of agents making choices,
and that much is at stake in those choices. Indeed, Pierre Bourdieu, in an
exceedingly rare foray into the topic of religion, makes the market meta-
phor the cornerstone of his approach, and the sociologist Rodney Stark
has recently written a deeply market-based analysis of “the rise of Chris-
tianity.”41 The martial metaphor goes further, picturing interreligious or
religious-cultural encounters as pitched battles or guerilla maneuvers.
However, like the metaphors surveyed above, both of these metaphors
hide the agency of actual human beings and the issues at stake in their
struggles, gathering it all up into a vague, collectivized “ism.” What
Bruce Lincoln has recently observed of the treatment of stories classified
under the taxon “myth” applies also to this sort of usage: “Myth is often
treated as an anonymous and collective product, in which questions of
authorship are irrelevant. Lévi-Strauss has done this in a most sophisti-
cated and challenging fashion, treating myth as a logical structure that es-
sentially writes itself, variants being the product of an impersonal process
whereby that structure explores its own variables until exhausting the
available possibilities. Such a view alleviates the frustration of those who
seek authors and ‘original versions’ of mythical texts, but the price for this
is unacceptably high, since it drains agency from the act of narration.”42
There are other key metaphors for religions, which I will mention only
in passing: religions are substances (usually liquid or viscous, with the
common tropes being spread, influence [on which more below], and dif-
fusion); religions are containers (of people, ideas, trends, artifacts, and
values); religions are the contents of cultures, societies, nations, or groups
that are containers (leading to several unhelpful but commonly used
ways of narrating the passage of religions across cultures and societies);
and religions are buildings.
Now, all such usages occur when scholars want to speak at a high level
of generality and abstraction, and at such levels their use is perhaps in-
evitable. Some such constructions, in some contexts, are perhaps quite
harmless or trivial. It is admittedly hard to arrive at alternatives that al-
low one to make generalizations of any kind; metaphors reduce complex,
messy phenomena by analogies to things simpler and more familiar, and
at times we understandably turn to them for the verbal and conceptual
economy they offer. (It is impossible, for example, to imagine writing a
41
Pierre Bourdieu, “Genèse et structure du champ religieux,” Revue française de sociol-
ogie 12 (1971): 295–334; Stark.
42
Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 149. Compare the similar statement about shifts in
the meanings of words on p. 18.
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History of Religions 299
Literally, “the ruination and rejection of Buddha,” but the context clearly re-
quires that we understand fo as gathering up and nominalizing the whole set of
43
See the brief discussion in Robert Ford Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and
Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 6–8.
“[The Duke of ] Zhou and Confucius are identical with the Buddha, the Buddha
with [the Duke of ] Zhou and Confucius. This is merely to name them with re-
spect to outer and inner.”45
Chinese in 2. “way” or “path” (dao [ ] and its compounds)
Level 1s is
scaled to 90% In early medieval Chinese discourse, probably the most ubiquitous way
of nominalizing what we would call “religions” was to speak of one or
multiple “ways” or “paths”—one or more dao [ ]. I begin with the trea-
tise, in dialogue format, known as the Mouzi lihuo lun [ ]
(“Master Mou’s Treatise for the Removal of Doubts”), by an unknown
author.46 When, as rarely in this text, it is a matter of the foreign what-
we-would-call-religion nominalized, and it is uncertain what its particular
practices, values, or scriptures are, the term used in every case is “the
dao—way or path—of Buddha” (fodao [ ]). The term first occurs in
the question: “If the dao of Buddha is so venerable, why did not Yao,
Shun, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius practice (xiu [ ]) it?”47 (John P.
Keenan renders fodao here as “the Way of the Buddha”; Erik Zürcher
simply translates it as “Buddhism,” an understandable choice, but one that
masks the Chinese metaphor and its difference from the Western “ism.”)48
Elsewhere the interlocutor asks why, since the people who constituted
the intellectual and cultural paragons of society at the time—the “forest
of classicists” (rulin [ ], ru being a designation often translated as
“Confucians” [a habit that merits reconsideration])49—did not regard the
44
The Chinese text with Hurvitz’s translation appear in Leon Hurvitz, trans., “Wei Shou,
Treatise on Buddhism and Taoism: An English Translation of the Original Chinese Text of
Wei-shu CXIV and the Japanese Annotation of Tsukamoto Zenryu,” in Mizuno Seiichi and
Nagahiro Toshio, Unko sekkutsu no kenkyu, 16:68–69 (Kyoto: Kyoto University Research
Institute for Humanistic Sciences, 1951–56).
45
Sun Chuo [ ] (ca. 300–380 c.e.), Yudao lum [ ] (“Essay in Clarification
of the Path [or Way]”), T 2102, 52:17a. Here and throughout, texts in the Chinese Buddhist
canon are referred to as follows: the number following the letter T indicates the serial number
assigned to the text in the Taisho edition (Tokyo: Taisho shinshu daizokyo, 1924–35), and
the numbers following the comma indicate the volume and (after the colon) the page, reg-
ister(s), and (in some cases) line numbers of the passage in question.
46
On the uncertain provenance of this text, see Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, pp. 13–15;
for a recent translation and study, see John P. Keenan, How Master Mou Removes Our
Doubts: A Reader-Response Study and Translation of the Mou-tzu Li-huo lun (Albany,
N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994).
47
T 2102, 52:2b26.
48
Keenan, p. 79; Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, p. 265.
49
For a recent and well-informed discussion of the significance of this term in early
texts, see Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2001), pp. 2n., and 364–65.
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History of Religions 301
“dao of Buddha” as venerable during his visit there, Master Mou holds it
in such high esteem.50
The term dao is also used to summarily nominalize multiple “ways” in
the following passage:
“In both the daos it is a single ‘intentionless action.’ Why then do you discrim-
inate and rank them, saying they [the daos] are different?”51
Or, in the modern Western idiom: both Daoism and Buddhism employ
the concept, value, and terminology of “intentionless action” (the famous
wuwei ); why then do you assert that Daoism and Buddhism are different
paths and that the latter is superior? The implied author, Master Mou,
goes on to pose analogies with the uses of the terms “vegetation” and
“metal”: things may belong in common to these genera, but they differ at
the level of species. He then clinches the analogy with this line: “If this
is so of the myriad things, how can daos alone [be different]?” (Keenan
renders dao in the first question above as “teachings,” while rendering
the latter one as “doctrines,” both of which hide the Chinese metaphor
implicit in dao and set up a too-easy equivalence between it and the fa-
miliar Western tendency to reduce religions to “doctrines.”)52
In Wei Shou’s treatise we find such usages as the following:
“This, then, was the modest beginning of the influx of the Way of the Buddha.”53
“In the time of Emperor Huan, [Xiang Kai] spoke of the Way of Buddha, the
Yellow Emperor, and [Laozi].”54
Of course, fodao was also the expression of choice for denoting more
specifically the path to enlightenment established by the Buddha, a set of
teachings and practices more delimited than the more general usage seen
50
T 2102, 52:5c12.
51
T 2102, 52:6b15.
52
Keenan, pp. 157–58.
53
Quoting the translation of Hurvitz (n. 44 above), pp. 26–27.
54
Again quoting ibid., p. 46.
55
Once again quoting ibid., p. 66.
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302 On the Very Idea of Religions
“The myriad quarters differ in their customs; their shendao are hard to distin-
guish.”58
“Moreover, from its first appearance in Han times down to the present, al-
though the Law [see the section below on this metaphor] has alternately flour-
ished and decayed it has not been spoiled by bogus and wanton [practices]. As
a shendao it has lasted longer than any other.”59
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History of Religions 303
...
“At this time, he [Lord Lao] issued the Three Ways to instruct the people of
heaven. . . . At that time, the rule of the Six Heavens flourished and the Three
Ways and Teachings were put into practice.”62
These “Three Ways” are not the “Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism”
familiar from textbooks on Chinese religions over the past century but
“the Great Way of Intentionless Action” (wuwei dadao [ ]),
“the Way of Buddha” (fodao [ ]), and “the Great Way of the Pure
Contract” (qingyue dadao [ ]).
Later, after narrating the Buddha’s birth, the text observes:
Then, in its version of the most common story of how the “way of Bud-
dha” was introduced to China—that of the dream of Han Emperor
Ming—the scripture observes:
“His officials interpreted this dream to mean that this was the perfected form of
the Buddha, so they sent envoys into the Western Kingdoms to copy and bring
back Buddha scriptures. Then [or: because of this] they built Buddha stupas
and temples, and so [the Way of Buddha? Buddha stupas and temples?] cov-
ered and spread across the Central Kingdom, and the Three Ways intermingled
and became confused. As a result, the people became mixed and disordered;
62
HY 11096, 1:3a. Here and throughout, texts in the Zhengtong daozang (the Daoist
canon of the zhengtong reign period [1436– 49]) are cited by their serial number in Wang Tu-
chien, ed., Combined Indices to the Authors and Titles of Books in Two Collections of Taoist
Literature, Harvard-Yenching Sinological Index Series no. 25 (Beijing: Yanjing University,
1925), abbreviated as HY, followed by fascicle and folio page numbers. The translation
given here is that of Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997), p. 209, except that I have capitalized differently to conform with
passages below and have added “and Teachings” in the last phrase. An alternate rendition
of the last clause would be: “and the Three Ways were taught and put into practice.”
63
HY 1196, 1:4b, slightly emending Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, p. 212.
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304 On the Very Idea of Religions
those of the Center mingled with outsiders, and each had his own particular
object of veneration.”64
“Today, though there are some who revere the “Way of Five Pecks of Rice,”
there are others who uphold the “[Way of ] Intentionless Action” and the “Way
of Banners and Flowers,” which follows the Way of Buddha. All of these [de-
viant ways] are old matters of the Six Heavens. All have been abolished!”66
...
“Now the three Ways are but different branches extending from the same
root. . . . These three Ways are equally methods of the Most High Lord Lao,
though they differ in their teachings and transformative effects. All three find
their source in the true Way.”67
What are the implications of the dao metaphor? Although many scrip-
tures of Celestial Master, Shangqing, and Lingbao provenance personify
dao as an ultimate cosmic deity or force with wishes and commandments
for humanity, such is not its sense in the contexts under survey here; it is
used rather to nominalize things that seem analogous to what we would
64
HY 1196, 1:5b, partially quoting but emending Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures,
pp. 214–15, to provide a more literal reading.
65
I note what seems to be an unexpected whiff of Tillichian “ultimate concern” in the
unusual expression youshang [ ] in the last line of the passage—the normal sense of
you being “to concern oneself with” and that of shang being (here) “uppermost.”
66
HY 1196, 1:7a, modifying Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, p. 218, in the direc-
tion of increased literalness.
67
HY 1196, 1:9b, slightly modifying Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, p. 222.
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History of Religions 305
“Hereupon the essence of the Law was greatly manifested in the Middle
Plain.”70
68
For example, the expression midao [ ], meaning “to lose one’s way,” “a mis-
guided way,” “a path taken by those who are misguided,” “a path of confusion,” etc., de-
pending on context, appears almost a hundred times in the Taisho canon.
69
The path metaphor, fundamental to Buddhist discourse, is so richly developed in that
tradition that some have called for its appropriation as a cross-cultural category, in part as
a corrective to the tendency to use Western-derived categories to analyze non-Western so-
cieties but not the reverse. See Robert E. Buswell, Jr., and Robert M. Gimello, “Introduc-
tion,” in Paths to Liberation: The Marga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought, ed.
Robert E. Buswell and Robert M. Gimello (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992),
pp. 1–9.
70
Hurvitz (n. 44 above), p. 50.
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306 On the Very Idea of Religions
“He both loved the Yellow Thearch and Lao[zi] and held highly the Law of
Buddha.”71
“Throughout the time of persecution of the Law it [a stone vihara with an im-
age over the tomb of the monk Huishi] still stood whole.”72
The reader will further recall the statement already extracted above from
the Inner Explanations of the Three Heavens, a reminder that fa was used
not only to nominalize the repertoire of practices and understandings im-
ported from India and Central Asia:
“These three Ways are equally methods [or laws] of the Most High Lord Lao.”
4. “the teachings of x” (x [ ] )
At some point in the modern era, probably (in Chinese) as a back-formation
from a Japanese neologism that, like the Japanese shukyo (Chinese zong-
jiao [ ]), was created to translate “religions” and its equivalents in
other European languages, writers of Japanese and Chinese began to use
expressions of the form “X jiao” to denote what Euro-Americans were
calling “religions.” Thus, dokyo/daojiao [ ], literally “the teaching[s]
of or about the dao,” was used in contexts where “Daoism” would be used
in Western discourses; similarly bukkyo/fojiao [ ] for “Buddhism” and
(less commonly) rujiao [ ] for “Confucianism.” Now, as Cantwell
Smith and others noted long ago, premodern Chinese discourse almost
completely lacks this formulation used in this way. In the Chinese Bud-
dhist canon, for example, one finds over four thousand instances of the
juxtaposition of the terms fo and jiao, but more than ninety-nine percent
71
Modifying ibid., p. 52. We also see “founder synecdoche” here.
72
Ibid., pp. 62–63.
73
Ibid., p. 69.
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History of Religions 307
of these simply mean something like “the Buddha taught” or “the Bud-
dha’s teaching [that].” Only with extreme rarity do such compounds seem
to gather up and nominalize everything that one might mean in Euro-
American discourse by a term such as “Buddhism,” and even when one
does find such cases, the ambiguity of the syntax usually permits other,
nonreifying readings.
One such instance appears in the perhaps early fourth century Treatise
for the Rectification of Unjust Criticism (Zhengwu lun [ ]) by an
unknown author:74
75
74
See Zürcher (n. 28 above), p. 15; Arthur E. Link, “Cheng-wu lun: The Rectification
of Unjustified Criticism,” Oriens Extremis 8 (1961): 136–65; and Tsukamoto (n. 57 above),
pp. 178–79.
75
T 2102, 52:8c17–18.
76
Link, p. 160.
77
On the sense of this term in the early medieval period, see Zürcher, Buddhist Con-
quest, pp. 86–87.
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308 On the Very Idea of Religions
“[The Duke of ] Zhou and Confucius are identical with the Buddha, the Buddha
with [the Duke of ] Zhou and Confucius. This is merely to name them with re-
spect to outer and inner.”78
The language of that which is “outside the realm (or the quarters)” versus
that which is “inside the realm,” fangwai [ ] and fangnei [ ], per-
vaded early medieval polemical discourses, and here it was the outer po-
sition that was conceded to be superior. This dyad is used in Sun Chuo’s
[ ] (ca. 300–380 c.e.) Yudao lun [ ], and we find it sprinkled
throughout the apologetic writings of the Buddhist monk Huiyuan and of
his anticlerical interlocutors.79 This terminology had a pedigree stretch-
ing back to a passage in the “Inner Chapters” of the Zhuangzi (ca. 320
b.c.e.), in which Confucius, here a mouthpiece for Zhuangzi, character-
izes people who pay no attention to proper ritual and custom, freeing
themselves from convention and taking the fashioner of things as their
78
T 2102, 52:17a, emphasis added.
79
On the Yudaolun, see Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, pp. 132–33; Schmidt-Glintzer (n.
57 above), pp. 59 ff.; and Arthur E. Link and Tim Lee, “Sun Cho’s Yü-tao-lun: A Clarifi-
cation of the Way,” Monumenta Serica 25 (1966): 169–96. Examples in Huiyuan’s and his
interlocutors’ discourses include T 2102, 52:30b6 (“One who has gone forth from the
household is a ‘guest from beyond the realm’ ”—cf. 75a20), 34c20, 84a11, and 84b8.
Zürcher (Buddhist Conquest, p. 98) observes that a noted monk was characterized as a
“gentleman from beyond the world” (fangwai zhi shi )—not because he was of foreign ori-
gin (he was not) but because he was in touch with things “from beyond the realm.” The
hierarchical effect is very clear in such statements as “How could matters from beyond the
realm possibly be embodied within the realm?” (79c5).
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History of Religions 309
Despite this clear dichotomy, the same scripture, as we saw above, asserts
that “each path in the end returns without distinction to the True Way.”
80
The passage appears in the sixth chapter; for alternate translations, see Burton Wat-
son, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), p. 83; and
A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters (London: Mandala/HarperCollins, 1991),
p. 89. For a later Buddhist author’s comment on this hierarchical taxonomy, which explic-
itly traces it to the Zhuangzi, see T 2126, 54:247a.
81
T 2102, 52:17a13–14. See also Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest, pp. 91, 133.
82
See Graham, p. 133; and Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth (n. 43
above), p. 201.
83
HY 1196, 1:9b; Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures (n. 62 above), pp. 222–23.
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310 On the Very Idea of Religions
The “way of Buddha,” having been safely classified as inferior yet nec-
essary for softening the tough nature of barbarians in outlying lands, may
be ascribed to the same originating force as this scripture’s own tradition.
, ,
“You slander the divine transcendents, repress the wondrous and anomalous,
and do not believe [or trust] that there is a dao of not dying. Why do you be-
lieve that only by the dao of Buddha can one attain deliverance from the
world? [or, why do you trust exclusively in the way of Buddha as a means for
delivering oneself from the world?]”85
84
An easy way to confirm this statement is to scan the content of the questions posted
to “Master Mou” by his interlocutor in the Mouzi lihuo lun. They include such matters as
these: How can you speak so differently from Confucius and still take our indigenous clas-
sics seriously? Why are the Buddhist scriptures so lengthy when compared with the Chi-
nese classics? Why did the Buddha’s body have thirty-two marks? Why must monks shave
their heads and practice celibacy, practices that go against the value of filiality (in that fil-
iality dictates that one’s body is the legacy of the family and must not be willfully injured
or diminished, as well as that one must produce lineage heirs)? Why must monks wear
such strange clothing and beg for their food? Why must Buddhists value renunciation and
giving over the accumulation of resources and taking pleasure in sumptuousness? Why
does Buddha prohibit the eating of meat while permitting the eating of grain (contrary to
one understanding of longevity regimens at the time)? The only strictly doctrinal question
that I can find in the treatise is the one concerning rebirth.
85
T 2102, 52:6b27–28. In my judgment, Keenan (p. 161) errs in his translation of both
key phrases: “refuse to believe in a way to avoid death [emphasis added]” misses the syn-
tactical force the verb you [ ] (here, “that there exists”) has in the Chinese; “believe that
only the Buddha Tao can save the world” is a possible translation, but in such contexts
dushi [ ] usually indicates not what “the dao of Buddha” will do to the world but what
the practitioner can do for himself by means of “the dao of Buddha.”
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History of Religions 311
86
Even in many Western contexts, one suspects that such a statement would hold true.
Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagi-
nation, trans. Paula Wissig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) exemplifies an
approach to the vexed question of “belief ” that is commensurate with the complexity of
people’s actual relations to the stories and assertions current in their cultures, a welcome
improvement over the on/off toggle-switch approach usually taken.
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312 On the Very Idea of Religions
87
Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (n. 5 above), p. 129.
88
Robert Ford Campany, “Xunzi and Durkheim as Theorists of Ritual Practice,” in Dis-
course and Practice, ed. Frank Reynolds and David Tracy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press,
1992), pp. 197–231; repr. in Readings in Ritual Studies, ed. Ronald L. Grimes (Upper Sad-
dle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1996), pp. 86–103.
89
Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, p. 43.
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History of Religions 313
90
In the sense specified by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Naturalism, 2d ed. (London: Versa, 1991).
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314 On the Very Idea of Religions
of course, involve contestation, and authors’ stances are not neutral, even
when, as we have seen, they assert the ultimate nondistinction of two or
more “paths.”
One other point bears making here, though its development must await
another context: such discourses as these are analogous to the “compara-
tive religion” born in early modern Europe and by now exported around
the globe. As modern scholars go about the work of “comparing reli-
gions,” they ought to ask whether people in the contexts they study en-
gage(d) in any analogous practices—where, once again, “analogous”
will mean not “their version of our X” but “a Y that, in this or that con-
text, performs something like the same function as our X does (or did) in
its own context.” In a surprising number of cases, the answer will turn
out to be in the affirmative. If myth is ideology in narrative form, and
scholarship is myth with footnotes,91 then other people’s myths will bear
being placed on a par with the myths of the writers’ own traditions. It
may even be found that modern Euro-Americans are not the only ones to
have developed writing practices analogous to footnotes.
Cantwell Smith was doubly wrong, then, when he concluded that there
were no analogues to “religions” in premodern China and that the reason
was an actual emphasis, in China and elsewhere, on interiority, on “faith”
(essentially an attitude of mind-heart-soul) rather than mere “religion.”
On the one hand, the Chinese debates were largely about how to do
things, not about the unseen contents of minds and hearts. On the other
hand, there are analogues to Western discourse on “religion(s),” and they
are occasioned, as Cantwell Smith himself might have predicted, by con-
frontations with difference.
Students of the history of Western discourse on “religions” have re-
peatedly noted that it, too, arose in a context of innovation, diversity, and
fresh contact (often in colonial situations) with foreign ways. In the
West, to speak of one “religion” is also to imply its distinction and dif-
ference from (and also partial similarity to) other species in the same ge-
nus. So much could also be said of the Chinese terminology of dao and
jiao, even when these are used in the singular in phrases such as “the dao
of X,” at least weakly implying a distinction from daos of Y, Z, and so
on. But Western discourse on “religions” is strongly contrastive in an-
other sense as well: to name a “religion” in Western discourse is to imply
a strong sense in which it is a “religion” as opposed to other, non-“reli-
gious” kinds of things. This type of contrast is largely absent in China.
The reasons for this profound taxonomic difference are well worth inves-
tigating, but they would take us beyond the scope of this essay, involving
as they do the shape of “religion” as a generic category, the history of the
91
See Lincoln (n. 42 above), p. 209.
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History of Religions 315
92
When the problem of what we could call “religion vs. the state” was debated in early
medieval China—a context in which no such locution was ever developed, since the insti-
tutional context in which it would have made sense did not exist—the debate did take the
form of arguing whether two spheres or realms are involved and whether they should re-
main distinct (fangwai/fangnei ), but the crux of the issue always came down to a specific
set of protocols or practices (should monks be compelled to bow to rulers during court
ceremonies?), and the language does not suggest that practice of the dao is a fundamen-
tally different category of activity than other areas or forms of life. The question was usu-
ally whether one may pursue such self-cultivational activities at court (thus justifying
monks’ refusal to bow to rulers) or only in private settings.
93
It is noteworthy that the modern Chinese expression usually used to translate this
term, mixin [ ], partakes of the path metaphor and essentially means “misguided
trust,” implying that one’s faculty of trust, confidence, or belief has taken a wrong way.
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316 On the Very Idea of Religions
Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they
have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically—as def-
initely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship. Until quite recently, the Jav-
anese language had no word meaning the abstraction “society.”95 We may
today think of the French aristocracy of the ancien régime as a class, but surely
it was imagined this way only very late. To the question “Who is the Comte de
X?” the normal answer would have been, not “a member of the aristocracy,”
but “the lord of X,” “the uncle of the Baronne de Y,” or “a client of the Duc de
Z.”96
Taking our cue from Anderson, we would search our texts for indications
of the imagined communities to which they refer. Such communities
might or might not be as general as “the way of Buddha” (fodao); I sus-
pect that they will often be more particular. They would also vary ac-
cording to situation and interlocutor, just as ethnic identifications are
known to vary according to whom a subject is speaking and what the
topic and context of discussion are.97
Furthermore, the word “refer” as used three sentences ago invites the
misunderstanding that so general an imagined community as fodao
94
Anderson, p. 6. For a recent critique of Anderson’s approach to ethnicity, albeit one that
does not affect my argument here, see Frank Proschan, “Peoples of the Gourd: Imagined Eth-
nicities in Highland Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 60 (2001): 999–1001.
95
But did it have any expressions that operated analogously, in contexts where we, or
where contemporary Javanese, might invoke such a term?
96
Anderson, pp. 6–7.
97
See Michael Moerman, “Ethnic Identification in a Complex Civilization: Who Are
the Lue?” American Anthropologist 67 (1965): 1215–30, and “Being Lue: Uses and
Abuses of Ethnic Identification,” American Ethnological Society, Annual Spring Meeting,
Proceedings (1967), pp. 153–69.
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History of Religions 317
98
See recently the provocative comments in Willi Braun, “Amnesia in the Production of
(Christian) History,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 28
(1999): 3–8, comments on 5.
99
Again, Moerman’s work (“Ethnic Identification,” “Being Lue”) on the relativity of
ethnic-identity claims to the conversational situation and the presence of certain types of
interlocutors with certain interests is quite significant in this regard.
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318 On the Very Idea of Religions
their lives.100 Important questions for research include not only what is
in a given repertoire but also how and in what circumstances any given
piece in the repertoire is performed on some occasions and by some ac-
tors but not others.101 Swidler has found of cultural repertoires—and I
see no reason why the same may not be said of religious repertoires—
that they are organized around certain concrete “scenes or situations of
action,”102 often narrative in nature, and that people avail themselves of
multiple scenes as they negotiate their lives, even when these scenes
carry contradictory implications regarding a particular area of life (such
as, in Swidler’s case, love), because each scene is especially good for de-
ciding or talking about one particular aspect of that area of life and no
one scene suffices for all of it. Swidler finds of cultural repertoires that
they are not accessible to everyone in the same degree and that people
use different amounts of culture even when they have equal access to it;
people use culture more in situations of flux or novelty, when their lives
are uncertain—another statement that could easily be extended to how
people use their religions.103 A repertoire may contain different and in-
deed contradictory models of certain areas or aspects of life because
these models answer different sets of questions; people resort to these
models in their discourse about meanings and values even when they re-
ject certain implications of each model as implausible, in part because
each model describes something about the real constraints of life and in-
stitutions or, rather (more correctly), about the lines of action individuals
pursue in the context of those constraints and institutions.104
All of this runs contrary to the Geertzian emphasis on culture as all-
encompassing ethos and on religions as “cultural systems”; Swidler
shows us agents using culture’s repertoire in complex, varying ways on
various occasions, shifting the cultural framing of a problem in mid-
discourse.105 It also runs counter to the tendency to think of religions as
“conceptual systems” (Émile Durkheim), “systems of symbols” (Geertz),
or “theoretical schemes” (Robin Hortin) outside of which “members” of
said religions cannot think.106 And if we imagine religions as repertoires
100
Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2001).
101
These ideas are introduced in ibid., pp. 24 ff.
102
Ibid., p. 34.
103
See esp., ibid., pp. 52 ff. and 99 ff.
104
See esp., ibid., pp. 132–33.
105
See esp., ibid., p. 79. Compare the post-Geertzian formulations of Robert Hymes,
Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern
China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 5–12. Hymes, too, adopts the
metaphor of repertoire.
106
A tendency helpfully analyzed and criticized by Terry Godlove in his essay, “In
What Sense Are Religions Conceptual Frameworks?” Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 52 (1983): 289–305.
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History of Religions 319
used by people in these ways, we may even begin to deconstruct the gap
posited by the modern study of religion between itself and its objects—
“the difference between those who sufficiently transcend culture and his-
tory [and religion(s)] to perceive the universal (and scientific) in contrast
to those who remain trapped in cultural and historical [and religious] par-
ticularity and are therein so naturally amenable to being the object of
study.”107 If we imagine religions and cultures as repertoires, then every-
one—not merely those who study religions but also those who partici-
pate in them—is potentially in the position of bricoleur, syncretist, and
comparativist.
In sum, my argument is not that we should cease speaking of religions
in cultures that lack an analogous vocabulary because they lack that vo-
cabulary; for, as I have shown, matters are not that simple, and even a
culture as different from the modern West as that of early medieval
China, with its situation of new religious imports and plurality, generated
analogous usages. But, if we are to go on speaking of religions, we
should at least find new metaphors for doing so. If possible, the new
metaphors should avoid picturing religions as really existent things in the
world; as organisms; as hard-sided, clearly demarcated containers of
people and things; and as agents, because picturing them in all these
ways falsifies the actual state of things and skews our research questions
in unfortunate ways. Religions do not exist, at least not in the same way
that people and their textual and visual artifacts and performances do.
And when religions are metaphorically imagined as doing things, it be-
comes harder to see the agents who really and nonmetaphorically do
things: people.
Indiana University
107
Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), p. 259.
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