CHINESE HISTORY AND WRITING ABOUT ‘RELIGION(S)’: REFLECTIONS AT A CROSSROAD

I want to offer some brief reflections on some ways in which the modern Western notion of “religion” shapes our writing of Chinese history and some ways in which Chinese history might impact our use of the notion of “religion”.¹ I will not discuss modern (by which I mean post-1900) Chinese usages of the term zongjiao ⬿㔁, which, as has long been known, was a neologism adopted around that time from the Japanese term shūkyō ⬿㔁 created expressly to translate the generic term “religion”, for which both premodern Chinese and Japanese lacked direct equivalents.² (Usages of zongjiao are more or