Hello, I am John Lagerwey. I'm a research professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before that I've studied at Harvard for my PhD and spent about thirty, thirty-five years teaching Chinese Studies in France. And today we're embarking on a great adventure together called "A Critical Cultural History of China." Lest there be any misunderstanding about the meaning of that title, we're going to look at each word—key word—in that title right now. So, first of all, "Critical": It does not mean to criticize; it means to analyze. So it's an analytic approach to Chinese history Chinese cultural history. It's focused above all, as we will be talking about in more detail in a moment, on the logic of historical change in China—the logic of historical change in China. "Cultural"—what do we mean by cultural? Sir Edward Tylor one of the founders of the discipline of anthropology gave this definition back in 1871. He said, "Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a human as a member of society." So what this means for us is that each period that we are going to be looking at is going to be addressed in a multidisciplinary way. Because as you just heard culture is far more than just say law or just say habits or customs or religion, it's much more than these—it's all of the above. " History": It is not a complete history. We're not starting in 1250 BC or BCE when writing first appears in China and then just going straight on through down to the year 2015. No, we're going to be looking at periods of what I call paradigm shift four of them—four periods of paradigm shift— that is to say of massive, fundamental, radical change in Chinese cultural history And finally, "China": the first thing of course we have to know is that China as we think of it today is a very very different place from it was back in 1250 BC or back 1000 AD. Okay? So precisely because this is about an ongoing changing place which we cannot identify with so-called Han ethnicity today or with anything else virtually. But we do want to see in the midst of change how there is indeed continuity that helps us to understand today's China. As religion will be playing a very major part in our story we'll start by defining religion and again we'll have recourse to E.B. Tylor, and And he gives a very very simple definition: "Belief in spiritual beings." that's not my definition that definition in my view is marked by its own history As we just saw, he's a late 19th century figure and the and the idea that religion equals belief was very widespread at the time. And of course what that often came to mean was belief, well, in spiritual beings, but if you don't believe in them then all of religion is poppycock, okay? So this is a huge problem, a stumbling block for the study of religion. If people have the idea that it's belief in spiritual beings, end of story, well, then, we're going to have a hard time seeing why we would be interested in talking about all these crazy beliefs from the past. So I give a completely different definition I call it "the practice of structuring values." The first reason that I don't even talk about spiritual beings or gods in this definition is because I want to avoid anthropomorphism, that is to say thinking about the gods automatically as though they're sort of human beings writ large, okay? Why? Because, while anthropomorphism as we will see plays a major role in Chinese religious history as well, even more important—especially to elite religion— is cosmology, that is to say a vision of the cosmos, and we'll be talking about that in much more detail later on. But the cosmological approach to religion that is characteristic of elite philosophy and religious practice and thought in China is often at odds very explicitly, with an anthropomorphic vision of religion as about spiritual beings, okay? The other is to underline that all humans are religious. How so? Well, do you know anybody who doesn't have structuring values values that he tries to run his life or her life by? I've never encountered such a person. Or, if we do occasionally encounter such people they're deeply unhappy because they have no values, they have no compass without these values. These values are what give structuring meaning to our life and if we say, then it's belief in those structuring values then we would immediately of course add, well, practice what you preach If you believe in those values, then you should practice them. And that's why rather than putting the emphasis on believing— which may mean just something mental— I put the emphasis on practice. The values are there, you believe in them so there is a belief component But above all, you try to put them into practice. So my definition I repeat: religion is "the practice of structuring values." What this means is that gods, in addition to whatever else they may be, are also ideas. For example, Plato is associated with the idea that God is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, that is to say what we call the disciplines of ethics, metaphysics, and aesthetics are all about God. Or in the traditional Christian way of putting it, or Biblical, say "God is love," so a Christian who "believes" in God but does not practice charity is not a Christian. It's not just beliefs, or ideas, it's practice. So this brings us back to something that everybody listening to this will have perhaps wrestled with, thought about. In any case, it's in the environment, a kind of idea that we have a "materialistic" science versus "spirituality." And this brings us back to Tylor. Is religion, as he thought, a matter of "survivals" from a "primitive" past? Or is it a permanent part of the human psyche and of society As I am suggesting? I would suggest it's a permanent part at least for the following two reasons, because in order to speak that way or to think that way about matter vs spirit, we have to think about a duality of matter and spirit, which is also often commingled with—or confused with—a duality of nature and culture. And now I would suggest that these dualities, which are universal so far as I know, have two basic roots: the first is the difference between a living person and a corpse. We say in English, "she breathed her last" or, "he gave up the ghost," whence Tylor's conviction that the original religion was "animism." He thought this animation was done by "anima," that is to say spirits so belief in spirits, belief in anima, the Latin word for spirits or souls, okay? So animation, everything is animated by souls, not just human beings but plants, animals, and so on. Okay, so that's what he thought: animism was the most ancient primitive religion. The ancient Hebrews thought it was by the "breath" of God, that God breathes his breath into the nostrils of Adam and so the first human becomes alive, okay? The breath of God. The Chinese thought life came from Qi, or breath. So here we find a very interesting convergence that we will talk more about. The The idea that breath and breathing as opposed to no longer breathing leads people to think there's a difference—yes—between the living and the dead and that difference is that they are no longer breathing. Phew, phew. So, breath, the living person and the corpse —this radical contrast that every human being lives through as they stand by while their loved ones die—breathe their last— this is a universal observation of human life and leads to the conclusion that there is a difference between matter—the corpse—and spirit, which is breath. The second difference— nature and culture —is simply because we speak. There are two orders of things for human beings: there are words and there are things. Increasingly we understand that we in fact share language with the animal and perhaps even with the plant world that communicates through smells and that, but the qualitative leap—even from the cleverest animal whether it's chimps or dolphins— the qualitative leap in terms of language is absolutely obvious. So what this means is all human beings are religious by which I mean that they look for an order of things and self that gives meaning and structure to what they do, to what we do. Again: we have values and our value systems— we have to add immediately—are radically— that means from the root— they're historical, cultural, social, and political. Does this mean there are no universal values? No, that's not what it means. But it means that insofar as we may think that universal values do indeed exist— for example, valuing life as opposed to death, accompanying the dead at that critical moment that we just referred to—insofar as these values may indeed be universal, that does not change the fact that they are also radically historical, cultural, social, and political. So we always have to pay attention to the context, the historical context, so that we can understand the changing value systems. So having settled the issue of my definition of religion— what we're actually going to be talking about— the next question is of course, in China, what religion or religions? And traditionally, if you open up any book on Chinese religion what you will immediately encounter is the notion of the "three teachings," <i>sanjiao</i> 三教, and those are Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. But in fact what we're going to be showing in the course of this entire period is that in fact there is a fourth religion that is constantly forgotten. And we'll see very quickly why it was forgotten because the first period of paradigm shift is characterized by a massive attack on that religion by the elite: by the elite. And so, the fourth religion that I will call shamanism— no, we're not talking about Siberian shamanism we're not talking about Latin American shamanism, and we will not get involved in the big discussion as to what we mean by "shamanism" and whether or not the Chinese religious practice is a form of shamanism— the word "shamanism" here refers to a Chinese term <i>wu</i> 巫, which we will talk more about later on and so we can call it <i>wujiao</i> 巫教, just like Confucianism is called rujiao the teaching of the <i>ru</i> 儒, or <i>daojiao</i>, the teaching about the Dao 道, <i>fojiao</i>, the teaching about the <i>fo</i> 佛, about the Buddha or Buddhism, okay? We're going to call it <i>wujiao</i>, the teaching that goes together with a group of people called <i>wu</i> who are sometimes called "spirit mediums," who could be possessed by the gods. And this, all the way through Chinese religious history, right down to the present day, is a core element of Chinese religious practice, okay? So the other thing we have to say immediately of course is that Buddhism won't figure at all in the whole first period of paradigm shift, because it hasn't yet arrived in China. And in fact Daoism, whether or not it can be said to have existed in the first period of paradigm shift, is also a question that is still hotly debated. So, the idea of the <i>sanjiao</i> or "three teachings" in fact will only emerge in the second period of paradigm shift. But right from the beginning, we have to see that there is— as everywhere in the world —a clear and massive difference between the religion as understood and practiced by the elite— the literate elite—and by the massively illiterate population.
