The first part of this project was published in the February 1995 issue of this journal, with the title “Early Religious Traditions from the Neolithic through the Han (circa. 4000 b.c.e.-220 c.e.).” It included essays by Constance A. Cook, Donald Harper, David N. Keightley and Edward L. Shaughnessy. The introduction to Part I noted the rapid growth of studies of Chinese religious traditions and discussed some of the continuities between earlier and later practices and beliefs. It emphasized the importance of a knowledge of religious activities for our understanding of Chinese culture. Part II continues the story with surveys of recent studies of traditions that are still active today. As was the case for Part I, the present essays are focussed primarily on Western language studies, though some work by Chinese and Japanese scholars is also discussed. The reason for this focus is that this project is intended to introduce this broad field of study to nonspecialists in the West, taking into account recent materials published through 1994.

Circumscribing the place of taoists in Chinese society is not straightforward for any period: honored by emperors and members of the nobility, they were scorned, as a rule, by literati-officials and treated with a mixture of reverence and familiarity by ordinary people. The paradoxical strength of passivity, the power of compliance, and the endurance of the peripheral already form a central theme in the mystical writings gathered in the fourth and third century b.c.Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. The Taoism of these ancient texts advanced a doctrine of liberation through submission, of control by means of noninterference, and of transcendence as a result of physiological and mental regimens. The ideal of liberation from the physical, epistemological, and social constraints of the human condition in time translated into a quest for immortality which, by the Ch'in unification of the empire, became quite explicit. Huang-Lao thought, named for the Yellow Emperor and patron of the immortals (Huang-ti) and Lao-tzu, dominated court politics from this period through the middle of the second century b.c.

Study of the confucian tradition is dominated by historical and philosophical approaches. Religion and spirituality have been neglected with a consistency that would be admirable if it had been used to better ends—one need only remember James Legge's comment on the amount of religious material contained in the Records of Ritual (c. 4th–1st century b.c.), and then reflect on how little work has been done on this material since he published what remains the only English translation of the Records since the late 19th century. Because the accepted frame for the portrait of the Master and his disciples has long been defined in intellectual, or at most ethical, terms, anything that fell outside that frame has been left to gather dust in outer darkness. Confucius, his teachings, and his followers were characterized as agnostic; and once their religious beliefs had been defined as undefined, they could in good conscience be left unresearched.

In comparison with other forms of Chinese religions, the study of Chinese Buddhism benefits from several factors. First, the international range of Buddhism allows for fruitful comparison with developments in other neighboring cultures such as India and Japan, and the contemporary identity of Buddhism as a missionary—or at least adoptable—religion provides a continuing audience and community of scholars. Second, the maturity of Buddhist studies as a field of scholarly inquiry, especially in Japan and Europe, has allowed for synergistic cooperation with colleagues having different educational backgrounds and points of view. And, third, the recent emphasis on the study of nonmainstream or popular religious practices has presented challenges that have led the field in new and exciting directions. An attempt to bring together scholars working in these different areas is reported in McRae and Armijo-Hussein et al. 1989.

The study of islam in china has been strongly influenced by what Lila Abu-Lughod (1989:269) termed “zones of theory” in the general Western scholarship of Islam, in which studies of the Middle Eastern “core” have been privileged over Islam on the so-called periphery. Muslims in China, relegated to the distant margins of both Sinological and Islamic scholarship, have rarely received much academic attention. This summary attempts a brief overview of past scholarship on Islam in China and recent contributions to the field. It is concerned primarily with Islam among the people known as the “Hui,” as they are the “Muslim Chinese” proper, whereas the other nine Muslim nationalities identified by the Prc government do not speak Chinese as their native languages and belong more properly to Central Asian studies. The 1990 census revealed that there are a total of 17.6 million members of the ten mainly Muslim nationalities, with the Hui numbering 8.4 million. Like the U.S. census, religion is not a category on the Chinese census, so this figure includes some members of these nationalities who may not believe in or practice the Islamic religion, as well as excluding Han and other minority nationalities who might believe in Islam. Though some Muslims, especially Uygur, complain of underreporting of their populations, this is a fairly good initial estimate of the number of Muslims in China, indicating an increase of 1.2 million over the 1982 figure, a 13 percent increase (Gladney 1991:20).

The population of traditional china, from government officials to artisans and farmers, shared a wide range of religious practice and belief, including ancestor veneration, annual festivals, funeral rituals, exorcism of harmful forces, and procedures for the auspicious siting of graves and residences. The definition of popular religion is a contested issue in the current state of the field.

No longer does the state in vietnam require that farm land be aggregated, consolidated, and farmed collectively by work teams under the direction of rural cooperatives. Instead, the state is open to diverse production arrangements. In particular, family farming, which for decades was officially discouraged and outlawed, is now officially celebrated. Households may work their own fields, to which they have use rights (leaseholds) for several years. This is a major policy change, comparable to the shift that occurred in northern Vietnam when the extensive land redistribution of the mid-1950s was followed almost immediately by the collectivizing of that land.

As a way of opening this critique of historical writing on early Southeast Asia, I ask, What interest do today's historians have in studying early Southeast Asia? What are they looking for in the early past? An essay by F. R. Ankersmit, in which he talks about what the modern reader brings to evidence from the past, serves as a point of departure for my answer. Rather than labor at accumulating more and more evidence about the past, historians should reflect on the difference between our own mentality and that of an earlier period. The past acquires point and meaning “only through confrontation with the mentality of the later period in which the historian lives and writes.” The experience of confronting this mentality Ankersmit calls “the historical sensation,” “which is accompanied by the complete conviction of genuineness, truth” (Ankersmit 1989:146). “A phase in historiography has perhaps now begun,” he says, “in which meaning is more important than reconstruction and genesis.”

Two tamil mahābhārata folk cults that I have studied recreate the Indian epic's “sacrifice of battle” in their festivals, and rethematize, in the symbolic registers of south Indian village goddesses and regional kingdoms, its meditations on death and regeneration (Hiltebeitel {1976} 1990:245–360; 1988a:394–435). One is the cult of Draupadī (the epic's chief heroine); the other that of Kuttantavar, son of Arjuna (the epic's chief hero) and the serpent-woman UlupT. I will focus here primarily on the latter. Kuttantavar is a Tamil deity whose myths and rituals orchestrate multiple, multiform deaths. The enormity of death that is incorporated in either cult's performance of the Mahābhārata war is, in the Kūttāṇṭavar cult, condensed into the reiterated deaths and revivals of this one hero, and expressed metaphorically through mythic and ritual forms of body-building—involving icons, effigies, and persons—that construct, transform, dismantle, and reconstruct bodies and heads. Although the metaphor could also apply to Draupadī cult rituals, it is especially appropriate for Kūttāṇṭavar, who is built up like Kirilov in Dostoievsky's The Possessed. What is surprising in his cult, and or moment for this paper, is that this primarily martial metaphor has been appropriated by Alis, Tamil transsexuals or “eunuchs.”

With some exaggeration, one could claim that these three biographies, despite their disparate subjects—a seventeenth-century aristocratic lady of the Mughal court, an eighteenth-century French adventurer, and a twentieth-century Muslim intellectual and political figure—all tell the same story. In each case, a figure is born (as it happens, outside the Indian subcontinent) in relatively humble circumstances and emerges as a singular figure in some combination of the political, economic, intellectual life of the day. Each account proceeds chronologically, with the life presented as an unfolding, linear story, the fruit of “developments” and “influences,” in which the protagonist independently takes action. These accounts fit, in short, the genre of biography or autobiography known to us Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Malcolm X, of rags to riches—and, typically, lessons to impart (Ohmann 1970). Each is an example of the canonical form of male biography and autobiography that emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century.