Chinese Religion

Chinese religion consists in the beliefs and practices of both the folk religious traditions and the great religious traditions of China (including Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism).

Nature and types
Chinese religion may be regarded as essentially an expression of Chinese culture, rather than as several systems of dogma. The Chinese generally did not separate the religious from other aspects of their lives. Exceptions to this were the professional religious, and lay people who joined together in cult societies of religious and quasi-religious character: it is convenient to distinguish between two currents, or levels, of Chinese religion – a folk or popular level and an elite or philosophic one. A single preoccupation, however, dominates Chinese religion: the ancestral cult.

(Spirits of the family dead being honored with offerings of food and incense in a Chinese graveside ceremony in Malaya.)

Folk religion: … The fact that China was always predominantly a peasant society assumed that its folk religion would remain vital. The folk religion absorbed many elements from the more sophisticated systems, such as Confucian and Taoist philosophy and Buddhism, transforming these in the process to suit the level of the common people.

Religion and the literati
The Chinese themselves distinguished between the cults (chiao) whose religious inspiration derives from the philosophical sources and the philosophical schools as such (chia). The scholarly class prided itself not only upon its literary attainments but upon a rational outlook that set it far above the vulgar masses. The Confucian tradition, which dominated the education of literati from the 2nd century BC on, was humanistic, rationalistic, often overtly agnostic. The classical works of Taoism (Lao-tzu or Tao-te Ching, and Chuang-tzu) were philosophical and poetic. Even many of the texts by Buddhist writers were devoted to philosophical problems underlying religion. Although the literati may not have shared in the grosser superstitions of the illiterate populace, they too were religious. At the minimum they carried on the ancestral cult, as officials they had many religious duties, and as intelligentsia they formulated the basic concepts as well as the refinements of the Chinese world view.

- From the New Encyclopedia Britannica in 30 volumes, Macropedia volume 4, Knowledge in Depth, 15th edition.