Ruism and the Category of Religion: Or, what to do about the Confucians?

In this chapter, the authors explore questions concerning categorization, beginning by thinking about the category of ‘religion’ and its construction and application in a European context, and then considering the unique concerns of the tradition known as Confucianism or Ruism. Contemporary scholar Jonathan Z. Smith, in problematizing how the category of ‘religion’ is used by different groups, distinguishes four important characteristics of the term ‘religion’ through his study of sixteenth-century Spanish colonizers. However, common binaries in Western notions of religion such as faith vs. reason are largely absent from the tradition. To a significant extent, the faith/reason binary was not part of the environing conditions of Ruism prior to major cultural exchange with Enlightenment Europeans. Treating Ruism as religion may also reveal interesting controversies over particular interpretive issues like the presence and nature of gods/ancestral heroes, transcendence, afterlife, ancestors, and so on.