Read RELIGION Historical

See A Short Brief of RELIGION: Broadly, way of life or belief based on a person's ultimate relation to the universe or God. In this sense such diverse systems as Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Shinto may be considered religions. In a narrower sense, the term religion often implies faith in a divinely created order of the world, agreement with which is the means of salvation for a community and thus for each individual who has a role in that community. In this sense the term especially applies to such systems as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which involve faith in a creed, obedience to a moral code set down in sacred Scriptures, and participation in a cult. In a more narrow and less common sense the term is sometimes applied to the way of life of a monastic or religious order in which persons are bound by vows.

In truth, it is difficult to formulate a completely satisfactory definition of religion or way of classifying the various kinds of religion, given the differences of function among the various systems known. It happened that the earliest European students of foreign or primitive cultures used the term religion for phenomena of which they had only a rudimentary knowledge. They jumped to the conclusion that other cultures must have institutions of the same type and function as Christianity or Judaism in their own culture. This premature assumption is at the root of much confusion.

For the purpose of this article, we will begin by applying the term religion to those institutions for which it has most customarily been used in Western culture—Judaism and its descendants, Christianity and Islam. If this restriction is somewhat arbitrary, it nevertheless has the merit of giving the word a clearer meaning by confining it to institutions that have much in common.

This article will examine religions found in other cultures, noting the degree to which they correspond to the term in its restricted sense and employing new ways of classifying them when no correspondence is to be found. Such correspondence is not a matter of doctrinal agreement or disagreement, for example, as to ideas of God or of moral conduct. It is a matter of deciding whether institutions that have been called religions have the same function in their various cultural contexts that such an institution as Christianity has in the West.

Another difficulty that appears in attempting a survey of religions from the historical standpoint is the customary notion of so-called primitive religion as the earliest and most undeveloped form of human religious feeling and practice. It is not safe, however, to assume that non-Western forms of culture lacking technological development are necessarily representative of the first gropings of the human race toward spiritual insights. The more that is known about different types of culture, the more difficult it becomes to fit them into any simple evolutionary scheme or even into any clear system of types.

For present purposes the treatment of religion will be concerned with a comparative account of three principal forms of consciousness about the human relationship to the universe or God, one found in the primitive religions, one in the religions as commonly defined, and the third in the various Oriental systems of belief and practice that may be termed “ways of liberation.” Social and moral rituals lie outside the scope of this article.

Primitive Religions.

The varieties of feeling and behavior known as primitive religion constitute a type of consciousness that Western civilization has lost.

Internal and external world.

The main feature of primitive religious consciousness, as studied among peoples such as the Polynesians, African blacks, or Native Americans, is the absence of any sharp boundary between the spiritual and the natural world, and thus between the human mind or ego and the surrounding world. The French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) called this absence of boundary participation mystique (“mystical participation”), denoting a sense of fusion between the human organism and its environment. This feeling may be described as corresponding on its own level with the modern intellectual grasp of humanity's interrelationship with nature in the science of ecology. A similar absence of boundary prevails also between the worlds of waking experience and dream, and between the individual will and the spontaneous emotions and drives of the psyche. As a result the whole external world is charged with powers that may be called mental or spiritual. Material objects, as stable and comprehensible features of the external world, do not exist, for everything seems to behave as whimsically as the events in dreams. Uncontrolled as the contents of experience may be in this state of mind, they would appear to be so lively, mysterious, and fascinating, as well as terrifying, that the whole of nature is suffused with an atmosphere of the awesome and uncanny. The German religious historian Rudolf Otto referred to such an atmosphere as the “numinous.” See Animism; Nature Worship.

Numinous atmosphere.

Basically, the numinous atmosphere is attached to the entire natural world and every object within it. A good example may be seen in Shinto, a present-day “primitive” religion practiced in the sophisticated civilization of Japan. The Japanese term shinto (Jap. shin, “spirit”) means “the way of the gods” or “the way of spirit.” In the view of Shinto, every rock, tree, animal, and stream has its own shin or kami (Jap., “god” or “goddess”). It is, however, misleading to call the kami a god in any Western sense of the word; similarly, the term shin means “spirit” only in an extremely vague sense, for it is used often simply as an exclamation similar to “Wonderful!” Shinto has no system of doctrine, no creed, and no formulated religious ideas; it is fundamentally concerned with expressing wonder, respect, and awe for everything that exists. This concern involves treating everything as if it were a person, not always in the sense that it is inhabited by some humanlike ghost or spirit, but in the sense of having a mysterious and independent life of its own that may not be taken for granted.

Obviously some things such as the sun, the moon, the ocean, and certain mountains and places of peculiar strangeness or beauty seem more highly charged with the numinous atmosphere than others. As the intensity of the numinous at particular spots differs, so the qualities or aspects of the atmosphere itself differ. Anthropologists commonly use the Polynesian words mana and taboo to typify the positive and negative aspects of the numinous. When it appears as mana, it is potent and useful, but when as taboo, it is fearsome and forbidden. See Taboo.

In primitive religions not only external things and places but also human beings are, on occasion, felt to be charged with the numinous in a peculiar way. The type of person gifted with special access to the mana or power aspect of the world in such religions is the shaman or medicine man or woman. This role is significantly different from that of the priest or minister of such a religion as Christianity, for the power of the shaman is not traditional but personal in origin. It is his or her own peculiar discovery, brought forth in solitude from commerce with dreams.

The numinous is more than the sensation of awe and mystery in the presence of an uncanny world. The absence of a clear boundary between the human mind and its environment, in a world in which both inner and outer events seem merely to happen, brings ecstasies as well as fears. Among the Navajo, for example, this enthralling aspect of the numinous is called hozon, a term referring to a sensation of intense beauty and peace that may be evoked by rituals of chanting, dancing, and sand painting. Such rituals of sympathetic magic, whether for evoking hozon, rain, or fertile crops, have their origin in the same sense of fusion between the human and the natural world and between the events of the mind and the events of the outside world.

Ritual.

Ritual plays a major part in primitive cultures, although it is not recognizable to them as in any way different from so-called practical activity. It is rather an attempt to influence or harmonize oneself with the course of nature by dramatized or symbolic enactment of such fundamental events as the daily rising and setting of the sun, the alternation of the seasons, the changing phases of the moon, and the annual planting and harvesting of crops. Moreover, ritual is the acting out of the great mythical themes that, in these cultures, take the place of religious doctrines. Ritual, as found in primitive religions, might therefore be described as an art form expressing and celebrating humanity's meaningful participation in the affairs of the universe and the gods.

In cultures in which this type of feeling about the world prevails, no department of life is specifically recognizable as religion. Everything is permeated by religion; indeed, religion is so involved with everyday life that it is impossible to distinguish the sacred from the secular. Only greater and lesser degrees of the sacred exist. Religion as a specific activity does not exist, and members of such cultures would have the greatest difficulty in talking about their religion. They would have no way of distinguishing the rituals for successful hunting from what Western culture would call the pure technique of hunting. Symbolic forms on spears, boats, and household utensils are not for them unessential decorations but functional parts of the object, evoking mana for their effective use.

Myth.

Similarly, such cultures have no religious doctrine or abstract concepts about the nature of the numinous and its difference from everything else. Spirit is a feeling rather than an idea; the language most appropriate to it consists not of concepts but of images. Thus, instead of religious doctrine there is myth, or an unsystematic complex of stories handed down from generation to generation because such tales are felt in some undefined way to represent the meaning of the world. According to the earliest anthropological interpretations of myth, such as that of the Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer, the mythical gods and heroes personify the heavenly bodies, the elements, and the so-called spirits of the crops and herds, and myths are naive explanations of the ways of nature. A later interpretation is that of the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl G. Jung, who suggested that myths are based on dreams and fantasies giving concrete expression to unconscious psychological processes. According to Jung, the psychological unconscious, like the human body, has more or less the same structure among all peoples; this uniformity accounts for the astonishing resemblances between mythological themes in unconnected cultures throughout the world. He felt further that these unconscious processes shape people's mental and spiritual growth and that for this reason mythological imagery and its enactment in ritual is a kind of wisdom for the direction of life. Thus, when a tribal dance is believed to assist the rising of the sun, the enactment of the rite gives the members of the tribe a sense of meaning, that is, of playing a significant part in the life of the total universe.

A somewhat similar explanation of myth was offered in his studies of Indian and Indonesian culture by the Sri Lankan scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), who felt that the great mythical themes are parables of a timeless philosophy, an intuitive knowledge of human nature and destiny that has always been available to those who truly wish to plumb the depths of the human mind. The American philosopher Susanne K. Langer holds that myth affords the earliest example of general ideas and therefore of metaphysical thinking (see Metaphysics). According to Langer, language is better fitted to express new ideas by metaphorical than by literal means. The assumption that solar and fertility myths are rudimentary attempts to explain natural forces, as science explains them, must probably be abandoned. Just as the myth-making cultures do not distinguish between spirit and nature, or religion and life, neither do they demark symbolic truth or fantasy from literal truth or fact. It is not a matter of confusing myth with fact, for the idea of the literal fact has not yet arisen. See Mythology. See also Druidism; Fetishism; Fire Worship.

The Religions.

Religions, as understood in this article, arise in cultures in which people have acquired a strong sense of differentiating the human mind from the natural environment, subjective consciousness from objective fact, and thus spirit from matter. This sense of differentiation accompanies the development of settled agricultural civilizations in which the division of labor requires that individuals play different roles in the community. In hunting cultures, each individual male is master of all the skills required for survival, but in farming cultures a much higher degree of cooperation is required between individuals with differing skills and functions. Such cooperation necessitates in turn more precise forms of communication between people and thus of convention, or common agreement, as to the symbols of communication, especially language and role.

Language, convention, and roles.

A language becomes more effective as its vocabulary increases. Large numbers of words also indicate a high degree of awareness of distinctions among various things and events. Every word is a label for a class of experiences, and the essence of classification is that it divides things from one another. The necessity for playing different roles in the community also divides individuals from one another, and, to avoid confusion, requires individuals to identify themselves with their roles. Many names, such as Smith, Baker, Priest, Taylor, Carpenter, and Fuller, originally denoted roles performed in society. The word person (Lat. persona) comes from the word for masks worn by actors in Greco-Roman drama, the different masks identifying the roles to be played by the actors. People develop an awareness of their uniqueness and separateness from others based, in part, on their acceptance of particular roles in society.

The division of individuals by role and the increased perception of divisions in the world by language come about through convention, which is both divisive and cohesive. Conventions are complex and learned with some difficulty, however. Because of this, the differences agreed on by society have to be enforced, just as children must be disciplined to learn a language and to master the rules of games or of etiquette and morals. The very life of the community depends upon observing the conventions of communication. The function of a religion is precisely to guarantee the whole system of convention, or the rules of thought and language, conduct, and role. For Judaism and Christianity, the idea of salvation is inseparable from the idea of belonging to a community of so-called chosen people, that is, the church, considered as a body of members, or an assembly (Lat. ecclesia), whether it be Israel or the communion of saints.

The connection between a system of social convention and a system of beliefs about the universe requires further explanation. Social convention includes such means as grammars, vocabularies, numbers, and signs, without which a person can feel but cannot think about the world. The American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) suggested that the structure of language, that is, of a person's thinking instrument, determines that person's view of the structure of nature. Thus, it is understandable that both the Semitic and the Indo-Aryan religious traditions conceive of the universe as having been created by the word of God. If the world is explained, managed, and described by thinking, it is therefore natural to suppose that it is created by thinking and that the laws of nature that thought discovers are the word or law of God underlying the world as its primordial pattern.

As a culture develops a coherent and orderly picture of the world, it is natural for its members to believe that the numinous power behind the world is itself coherent and orderly, and that it has unity. Their gradual realization that the natural order of the world has an intelligent pattern is accompanied by a feeling that they did not invent, but discovered this pattern, which someone must know entirely. They therefore attribute it to an intelligence other than their own. The more people appreciate the complexity of the pattern, the more they marvel at the intelligence behind it and so begin to formulate a mature conception of God as a being who excels in wisdom and power and is immeasurably greater than a mere mortal. Thus, contemplating the wonder of his own bodily structure, the psalmist in the Bible wrote, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it” (Ps. 139:6).

Theism.

Religion, in this sense, is invariably theistic (see Theism). Various forms of theism exist, however. The Old Testament of the Bible shows a progress from henotheism (belief that the community must be loyal to one god only) to monotheism (belief that this god is the one and only God). Other forms of theism are polytheism, belief in many gods, which includes usually at least a vague apprehension that the many are aspects of one; pantheism, the belief that God is simply all things in the universe (although this type of belief is historically a philosophical idea rather than a religious belief); and panentheism, the belief that every creature is an appearance or manifestation of God, who is conceived of as the divine actor playing at once the innumerable parts of humans, animals, plants, stars, and natural forces. See also Immanence.

Religion is therefore communal faith in and conformity to the pattern that thought discovers, or has revealed to it, as the will or commandment of the intelligence behind the world. The community binds itself to this pattern as its rule of life consisting of three elements—the creed, the code, and the cult. Creed is faith in the revealed pattern and in the divine intelligence that gave it. Code is the divinely sanctioned and authorized system of human laws and morals comprising the rules of active participation in society. Cult is the ritual of worship, or symbolic acts, whereby the community brings its mind into accord with the mind of God, either by ceremonial dances or dramatic reenactments of the deeds of God, or by sacrificial meals held in common between God and his people. It is from this last-mentioned type of cult that, for example, the Christian Mass or communion service is derived (see Eucharist; Mass).

Salvation.

Religious salvation is basically the idea of incorporation in a divine community through conformity to the will of God. In the later phases of the Semitic tradition, salvation began to include the idea of survival beyond death, first through miraculous resurrection of the body and later, as a result of Greek influences, by virtue of the inherent immortality of the soul. Salvation, however, remained subordinate to and conditional upon membership in the divine community. After death, those who remain unincorporated are spiritual outcasts consigned, for example, to the Judaic Gehenna, the Christian hell, or the Islamic Iblis. On the other hand, salvation beyond death is conceived of as being a state of the most intimate union with God, in which, however, the distinct personality of each member is preserved (see Eschatology) .

Although salvation is considered to rest upon observance of a rule of life, religious traditions generally recognize that, of their own powers, people cannot fulfill perfectly the conditions of salvation. The Hebrew Scriptures, which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam hold to be divinely revealed, contain the idea of a primordial Fall, or original sin, committed by the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, as a result of which the human will is basically perverted by self-love and pride. Salvation is therefore impossible without divine assistance. The three religions teach in common that God is, above all, loving and merciful and that his final purpose is the salvation of all humanity. Whenever individuals repent of their shortcomings, God freely offers his grace, that is, salvation considered as a gift to the undeserving. In the Christian religion, Jesus Christ, who is held to be the incarnate Son of God, is regarded as the redeemer—through his death and resurrection—of all humanity. See also Gospels.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have as their ideal the incorporation of the whole human race. Some religions are more closely bound to definite patterns of culture. These faiths include Sikhism (see Sikhs) in India and Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Parsis (or Parsees), in Iran, India, and Pakistan. (The sacred book of Zoroastrianism is the Avesta.) Among certain forms of religion no longer practiced are the cults of Ra (see Egyptian Mythology) and Osiris of ancient Egypt and the classic mysteries of the Greco-Roman world.

The Ways of Liberation.

In Asia are certain clearly recognized types of spiritual experience that occur in the West only incidentally and with a minimum of recognition by the official religious traditions. These types of experience should not always be identified with mysticism, or the sense of union with God, which may occur often in a theistic and religious context. It therefore seems best to use the term “ways of liberation” to describe these forms of spiritual experience, for all are concerned with liberating human consciousness from ideas and feelings brought about by social conditioning, that is, by the very systems of convention that a religion, in the usual sense of the term, guarantees. These ways should not be considered antireligious, however, for they seek not so much to destroy religion and convention as to use them without being bound by them. They endeavor to go beyond the view of the world acquired through the use of thought and language; they consider that this view overemphasizes the divisions and differences of things and tends to make people neglect their inseparability from the total universe. Among the principal ways of liberation are those found in Hinduism (notably Vedanta and Yoga), Buddhism, and Taoism.

Hinduism.

Within the cultural complex of Hinduism, which may be considered panentheistic, are a number of equally legitimate darshana, or points of view, which the individual may adopt. The most notable are Vedanta, based on the teachings of the Upanishads, a body of poetic scriptures; and Yoga, a way of meditation believed indigenous to India. Both Vedanta and Yoga are concerned with liberation from the world, which is considered an illusion of reality.

Ordinarily, neither Vedanta nor Yoga is studied until a man has reached the middle of life, has established himself in his caste, which may be considered his role or vocation, and is ready to transmit his social duties to his sons. Thus, Vedanta and Yoga usually are not taught to children, as are the Scriptures and beliefs of such a religion as Christianity, but only to mature adults fully disciplined in the ways of society. These ways involve precisely giving up one's role and person and leaving the task of maintaining one's social obligations in order to prepare for death. The reason is that death is held to be a calamity when it comes to a person who still believes that he or she is a separate individual.

According to Vedanta, the idea that the world is a multiplicity of distinct things is considered maya, or an illusion, resulting from the conventional way of thinking. Because maya has the original meaning of “to measure,” the world is thought to be measured or marked out by those divisions and classifications of human experience that words and ideas make possible. To describe a complicated curve, one must measure it as if it were a series of distinct points. Similarly, to describe and think about nature, one must break it up into manageable units or terms, that is, things and events. This procedure, however useful, gives the strong impression that events are separable from one another, that one could happen without another, and that pleasure could exist without pain or life without death. A similar impression prevails concerning the separability of things.

Vedanta maintains that all distinctions are relative to each other and that opposites such as the knower and the known, the subject and the object, are distinctions as inseparable as the two faces of a coin. In other words, the world can be separated into independent things only in thought. In concrete fact the world is an inseparable unity or, more exactly, a nonduality, for unity is also a thought or idea existing only in relation to the idea of diversity. The true state of the world is neither unity nor multiplicity. The state of the world is rather immeasurable, indescribable, and indefinable.

A man may therefore recognize that in his deepest consciousness (Atman, in Hinduism) he is not this separate individual but Brahman, or the indefinable totality. He has been led, however, to consider himself as a separate being by the necessarily divisive character of thinking. It cannot be said what Brahman is, because the basic reality of the world does not belong in any class to which a word can be attached. Even though Brahman cannot be grasped in words and ideas, it can, however, be experienced, and the realization of this experience is the function of Yoga. This realization consists in the so-called unification of consciousness, that is, in the temporary renunciation of all divisive thinking and in the abandonment of all ideas and concepts about life. The world then may be experienced in its original, real, and inseparable state.

This type of experience is not, as might be supposed, sheer blank-mindedness, just as the concrete fact of nature is neither the collection of separate things that thought conceives nor mere empty space. If the student of comparative religions were to ask a Christian and a Vedantist for their ideas of what is ultimately real, the Vedantist would either be silent or say what is not, whereas the Christian would describe the positive attributes of God such as his love, wisdom, and intelligence. The student might therefore assume that the latter acknowledges a God who exists positively and the former a God who is almost nothing at all. He or she could conclude that Vedanta is a religion with an impoverished idea of God, failing to see that because it does not use the language of religion it cannot be a religion.

Two distinct ways of talking are used to characterize spiritual experiences. The religious way resembles trying to describe color to a blind person by saying what color may be compared to, for example, to variations of temperature. The way of liberation resembles trying to describe to the blind person what color is not. Both ways of speaking would be valid. A religion expresses the ultimate reality in particular terms such as those of human thought and imagination, and thus its view of God is determined and definite. A way of liberation sets thought aside in favor of direct experiencing and feeling, and thus its view is indeterminate and indefinite.

Buddhism.

Buddhism, the doctrine of Gautama Buddha (see Buddha), arose as a clarification and reform movement of Hinduism.

In many ways the objectives of Buddhism are the same as those of Vedanta and Yoga. Gautama Buddha avoided, however, giving even the barest name to that which is ultimately real, both in its universal aspect as Brahman and in its human aspect as the deepest self, or Atman. He felt that such terms were too easily turned into ideas and forms of thought that would detract from direct experience. His teaching was that people suffer because of avidya, or ignorance, of the total relativity of the world of things and events. Thought is avidya because it is a process of ignoring; that is, it cannot focus on any one aspect of experience without ignoring everything else. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit instead of totally and leads in turn to grasping (trishna, in Buddhism), or trying to wrest the desirable bits of experience away from the whole; however, because the good is always relative to the bad, this separation can never be accomplished. Similarly, one can never experience a solid without a surrounding space, space and solid being relative to each other. Giving up grasping leads to the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana, which Gautama Buddha refused to define except in negative terms, as the Vedantist defines liberation.

Gautama Buddha's teaching led to a misunderstanding to which Vedanta is likewise prone, namely, that liberation may be sought as an escape from suffering, or as a permanent state of bliss. Later Buddhist leaders, especially those of the Mahayana school, corrected this misunderstanding by pointing out that seeking Nirvana as an escape was still grasping. Thus, their ideal of the wise individual went beyond the older Hindu view of leaving the world, that is, the social world, to prepare for death. It comprised returning into the full activity of society once liberated so that, free from fear, one could devote oneself to acts of compassion for those still in the bondage of maya. Buddhist teaching urges, however, morality and compassion not as a commandment but as voluntary action to which the free person commits himself or herself without hope of reward or fear of punishment. No thought is found in Buddhism of moral conduct as conformity to a divine pattern, for it considers moral standards like rules of grammar, that is, human conventions necessary for social existence but without any absolute authority.

Although Buddha gave no name to what he considered ultimate reality, later Buddhist teachers spoke of the true state of the world as sunyata, or “emptiness,” meaning more exactly, “empty of any definable characteristic” or “unclassifiable.” This philosophical attitude is in no sense equivalent to Western atheism or nihilism, for what is empty is not reality itself but every idea in which the human mind attempts to grasp it. See also Zen.

Taoism.

Attributed to the Chinese philosophers Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu (fl. 4th cent. bc), Taoism is the specifically Chinese form of a way of liberation. In certain respects it resembles Buddhism, and Taoist terms were used liberally in translating Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese. Like Vedanta and Yoga, Taoism was adopted ordinarily by older men who had played their part in society according to the basic patterns of convention provided by Confucianism in China. In common with Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism allows for the return of the liberated sage into worldly affairs. Its principal text, the Tao Tê Ching (Teaching of Tao), attributed to Lao-tzu, was written as a manual of advice for rulers.

Taoism proper, as found in the teachings of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, must be distinguished carefully from the so-called Taoist cult of divination, alchemy, and magic that is Taoist in nothing but name. Pure Taoism has never been organized and has remained the pursuit of independent scholars and philosophers both in China and Japan for more than 2000 years. It regards the natural universe as the operation of the Tao (“way”), which eludes all verbal and intellectual comprehension. Experience of the Tao is to be realized through kuan (“silent contemplation of nature”) and wu-wei (“the absence of mental and physical strain”), which is equivalent to the Buddhist attitude of not grasping. Taoism emphasizes strongly the union of the individual and nature, suggesting that one controls the environment not by fighting it but by cooperating with it as a sailor uses the wind when tacking against it. Taoism is the philosophy underlying jujitsu, the so-called gentle way of defending oneself against an opponent by using the opponent's own strength to defeat him or her. Similarly, it teaches that one should control oneself by trusting rather than opposing one's natural feelings and instincts, by channeling them in the directions in which one wants them to go rather than resisting them.

Comparative Religion.

The study of the world's religious traditions is coincident with the political and economic expansion of Western Europe.

Early Western scholars.

The Jesuit missionaries of the 17th century included, especially, the Italians Matteo Ricci in China and Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656) in India, and the Spaniard St. Francis Xavier in Japan. During the 18th century great interest was aroused among Western scholars and philosophers by the first Latin translations of Confucian and Taoist texts by the Jesuits. For a time Chinese culture was idealized, especially by the Deists, who found in it proof of their thesis that morality could flourish without dogmatic religion (see Deism). Pioneers in this field included the German philosophers Johann Gottfried von Herder and G. W. F. Hegel and the British philologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900). Their work was followed by that of the British philosopher Edward Caird (1835–1908) in The Evolution of Religion (1894), the Dutch theologian Cornelius Petrus Tiele (1830–1902) in Elements of the Science of Religion (1897–99), and the American philosopher and psychologist William James in Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the first serious study of the psychology of religion.

19th and 20th centuries.

In the 19th and 20th centuries notable specialized contributions to the study of comparative religion were made in Chinese studies by the French scholar Noël Julien, called Stanislas Julien (1799–1873), and the Jesuit missionary Leon Wieger (1856–1933); in Buddhist studies by the Dutch Indologist and philologist Jan Hendrik Kern (1833–1917) and the British Orientalist Thomas William Rhys Davids (1843–1922); in the study of the Vedanta by the German philosopher and Sanskrit scholar Paul Deussen (1845–1919); in Taoist and Confucian studies by the British missionary and Sinologist James Legge (1815–97); and in studies pertaining to India by the British Sanskrit scholar Sir Monier Monier-Williams (1819–99).

Much of the early work in comparative religions was undertaken by missionaries seeking points of agreement between alien faiths and Christianity, and also ways of demonstrating the superiority of Christianity. Other work was accomplished by philologists whose interest lay in the linguistic form rather than the content of the sacred writings of other cultures. The growing conflict between religion and science in the Western world during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, however, resulted in widespread dissatisfaction with fundamentalist types of Christian belief (see Fundamentalism). This dissatisfaction led in turn to a more sympathetic attitude to other faiths. In the present century, study of the ways of liberation in particular has made enormous strides, greatly assisted by the work of such outstanding Asian scholars as the Indians Surendra Nath Dasgupta (1887–1952) and Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the Japanese Daisetz Teitraro Suzuki (1870–1966) and Junjiro Takakusu (1865?–1945), the Chinese Fung Yu-lan (1895–1990), and the Sri Lankan Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947).

In the three decades before his death in 1986, the name of the Romanian-born American historian of religions Mircea Eliade became almost synonymous with comparative studies. He investigated the “sacred” in beliefs, rites, and religious experiences of all peoples and cultures. A.W.W., ALAN WILSON WATTS, S.T.M., D.D.