Prasenjit Duara is one of the most original thinkers on culture and religion in Asia.
A 66-year-old historian of China, he was born in Assam, India, and educated at the University of Delhi, the University of Chicago and Harvard. He later taught at the University of Chicago, Stanford and the National University of Singapore and now teaches at Duke.
Professor Duara began his career with a pioneering study of Chinese religion: “Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942.” This work, published in 1988, helped redefine how many people thought of Chinese religion, showing it to be one of the most powerful forces in traditional Chinese society. His subsequent books reflect a broadening of interests to include topics such as nationalism and imperialism. His latest work, “The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future,” brings many of these strands together, along with issues such as climate change.
In a recent interview in Beijing, Professor Duara discussed Buddhist environmentalism, what aspect of religion most alarms the Chinese government and the South Manchuria Railway Company.
We need the NGOs and the U.N., and we also need bioengineering and market mechanisms. But one of the most important factors that has emerged in the past 10 or 20 years - slowly, but catching on - is that the most effective communities are in some ways the most traditional, too. They have integrated ideas about nature and community that are faith-based.
In Taiwan, for example, I’ve been very interested in “fojiao huanbao” - Buddhist environmentalism. I was there this summer, and there are large-scale Buddhist groups that have taken to saving the environment.
China is more difficult in some ways. But there are efforts at Taoist environmentalism, like at Maoshan [a sacred mountain in Jiangsu Province]. They depict Laozi as a green god. Some villagers seek to protect their local ecology through revived temple communities.
The painted faces are of people who live in the Prey Lang forest in Cambodia. The forest faces destruction by massive logging. These people hold demonstrations, painting themselves and staging ritual dramas using traditional ideas of avatars as well as from the movie “Avatar” to publicize their cause. They have organized surveillance systems of the forest and links to NGOs.
It is a little more hopeful because it is a functioning democracy. While India has a hierarchical society, democracy is good for allowing differences. You had movements like the Chipko women tree-hugging movement of the early 1970s. This then bloomed into a huge environmental movement.
But India now faces the problem of the strong man that we have in other states with the rise of leaders like [Russian President Vladimir V.] Putin and [Chinese President] Xi Jinping. It’s interesting what they’re going after: environmental movements. They are banning foreign NGOs and closing these groups down.
In fact, it’s the social element of religion that most scares the Chinese government. Although it starts with personal salvation, it’s about social relationships. Religions in China have been the basis of social communities - temple-centered communities. The state has tried but hasn’t been able to prevent groups that challenge injustice. The Chinese state sees the social organizational impact of religion much more clearly than any other state.
I intended to write a book on revolution in north China. Instead I stumbled on how religion held society together. My research showed a network between people and villages linked by temple fairs and rituals that brought people into contact with each other. This was the beginning of my interest in this topic.
It was as much of a railway company as the British East India Company was a shipping company. The South Manchuria Railway Company - Mantetsu - was a vast colonial enterprise spread across the Japanese Empire with a research wing staffed by many people who fled Japan during the rise of the militarists and wanted to do something for China. They employed researchers to survey this new territory. It was the biggest modern research organization in the world at the time. I also used the archives in Tokyo for a year.
They had millions of members, so they were hardly secret. Instead, I thought it better to find a term that describes what they were doing. They were trying to save Chinese society in the early part of the 20th century. Some people said “redemptive” sounded too Christian, but Buddhism has this idea, too.
The idea originated with Karl Jaspers’s theory of the Axial Age, which refers to the rise of key religions or thinkers among Jews, Hindus, Chinese and Greeks in the sixth century B.C. Before that, religion was mainly based on worldly exchanges with ancestors or gods. They might be apart from the physical world, but they played a role in your everyday life: I will sacrifice, so you will give me a son, or I’ll say this prayer 1,000 times and you give me a first class in the exam.
The transcendent idea says there’s something beyond that in another realm. It might not help you immediately in the here and now, but it gives you moral authority to do what is right. This was a time when big states and empires were forming and you needed a view that is larger than your own community. Transcendence is an idea of something beyond the here and now.
It refers to the idea of a dialogue. It is the idea that you can accept other notions of how to achieve that transcendental state. So there are transcendental ideas, but not just one path to get there.
Yes. The problem with the Abrahamic faiths is they come to be formed like nation-states: us versus them. We believe this, they believe that. We have to convert them. It doesn’t easily allow for a dialogue.
Of course, some have moved away from this, but under certain conditions, these ideas pushed the formation of the nation-state and colonialism. We celebrate the nation-state in large part because it is the engine of competitive capitalist success and modernity.
As the nation gradually dropped the religious dimension, it also removed the barrier to the conquest of nature and global resources. It does not know where and how to stop. It’s bringing about the dystopia of modernity.
The problem with the Abrahamic faiths is their idea of an absolute truth. Buddhism or these other pluralistic religions don’t have as much confidence in a substantive, transcendental truth, which comes with the idea of an absolute god. An absolute truth brings about reform movements that are very radical because they always want to get back to the pure and the true - such as in fundamentalist Islam, or early Protestantism. This leads to the idea of expanding your nation, or your prosperity, even if at the expense of others.
I do tend to the idea that these concepts, be they in India or China, were dialogical. They repressed others, of course, but ultimately they didn’t have that doctrinaire dimension of excluding other truths. They linked ideas of personal cultivation with universal goals. To the extent they survive, they could be transported to other places.
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Photo: A view of Maoshan, a sacred mountain in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu. Credit Visual China Group, via Getty Images