I want to begin this evening by recalling my immediate predecessor as AAS president from the South Asian field, Barbara Stoler Miller, whose untimely death in 1992 took from us a distinguished Sanskritist, a gifted teacher, and a generous colleague whose absence we mourn. In my address I continue themes taken up by Barbara Miller four years ago (Miller 1991) as well as by Stanley Tambiah, as president from the Southeast Asian field, the year before (Tambiah 1990). Then, as now, scholars across the disciplines—whether, like Barbara Miller, a scholar of classical texts; or like Stanley Tambiah, an anthropologist; or myself, a historian of British India—have struggled to understand the religious nationalism of South Asia, one of whose most tragic outcomes has been an accelerating violence against the Muslim minority.

On june 15, 1936, 120 fresh cadets assembled at Manila's Tutuban Station to board a train for the Philippine Military Academy (PMA), recently established in the mountain city of Baguio. At the end of the line, the cadets changed to Benguet Auto Line buses for the 4,000-foot climb up the zig-zag road to Baguio. As the buses pulled into the campus, some forty upperclassmen, all transfers from the superseded Constabulary Academy, were waiting to greet the new arrivals with a ritual called “hazing.” Even fifty years later, these cadets would recall their reception as traumatic (J. Mendoza 1986, 16).

In The Early Twentieth Century, Shanghai Promised Opportunities that attracted people from all over China and, indeed, from around the world. To all who arrived—the wealthy banker from Ningbo looking to multiply the family fortune, the young British diplomat fresh from a desk job at the Foreign Office, the unwilling daughter from Suzhou sold into prostitution, the shop apprentice whose family connections brought another kind of indentured service, or the Chinese and foreign sailors “shanghaied” into service on one of the thousands of shipping vessels docked every year in Shanghai's harbor—Shanghai offered both great risks and real opportunities.

In the first millennium A.D. mainland Southeast Asia's first great states arise, but then in the span of a few centuries these Indianized realms collapse and their Pyu, Mon, Khmer, and Cham peoples decline. In their place Burmese, Tai, and Vietnamese states arise and go on to rule the mainland as their peoples come to dominate the second millennium. Case by case these shifts appear to be ethnic and political successions wherein the strong displace the weak, but seen together regionally the similarities suggest an agricultural change whereby an irrigated wet rice specialization from upland valleys displaced gardening and farming complexes native to the lowlands.

There is no easy answer to the question: What is the status of Chinese philosophy? On the Chinese side, philosophy is much more than a professional commentary on and the extension of a canonical tradition constituted by philosophical systems and theories. Chinese philosophers have traditionally been scholar-officials whose theoretical reflections have been tempered by practical responsibilities—fully, the daily workings of government and society. “Philosophy” in the contemporary Chinese context, then, despite the avowedly Marxist orientation of the state, continues to range over the relationship between cultural values and the social and political life of the people. Philosophers have been and still are the intellectual leaders of society. Hence, a “state-of-the-art” reflection on Chinese philosophy from an internal Chinese perspective would be primarily practical: a survey of the intellectual discourse as it has driven and shaped recent social, political, and cultural developments.

The first part of this project was published in the February 1995 issue of this journal, with the title “Early Religious Traditions from the Neolithic through the Han (circa. 4000 b.c.e.-220 c.e.).” It included essays by Constance A. Cook, Donald Harper, David N. Keightley and Edward L. Shaughnessy. The introduction to Part I noted the rapid growth of studies of Chinese religious traditions and discussed some of the continuities between earlier and later practices and beliefs. It emphasized the importance of a knowledge of religious activities for our understanding of Chinese culture. Part II continues the story with surveys of recent studies of traditions that are still active today. As was the case for Part I, the present essays are focussed primarily on Western language studies, though some work by Chinese and Japanese scholars is also discussed. The reason for this focus is that this project is intended to introduce this broad field of study to nonspecialists in the West, taking into account recent materials published through 1994.

Shanghai has often been called the Paris of the Orient. This is only half true. Shanghai has all the vices of Paris and more but boasts of none of its cultural influences. The municipal orchestra is uncertain of its future, and the removal of the city library to its new premises has only shattered our hopes for better reading facilities. The Royal Asiatic Society has been denied all support from the Council for the maintenance of its library, which is the only center for research in this metropolis. It is therefore no wonder that men and women, old or young, poor or rich, turn their minds to mischief and lowly pursuits of pleasure, and the laxity of police regulations has aggravated the situation.

Circumscribing the place of taoists in Chinese society is not straightforward for any period: honored by emperors and members of the nobility, they were scorned, as a rule, by literati-officials and treated with a mixture of reverence and familiarity by ordinary people. The paradoxical strength of passivity, the power of compliance, and the endurance of the peripheral already form a central theme in the mystical writings gathered in the fourth and third century b.c.Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. The Taoism of these ancient texts advanced a doctrine of liberation through submission, of control by means of noninterference, and of transcendence as a result of physiological and mental regimens. The ideal of liberation from the physical, epistemological, and social constraints of the human condition in time translated into a quest for immortality which, by the Ch'in unification of the empire, became quite explicit. Huang-Lao thought, named for the Yellow Emperor and patron of the immortals (Huang-ti) and Lao-tzu, dominated court politics from this period through the middle of the second century b.c.

[Languages] determine the unique, often ambiguous tenor of human consciousness and make the relations of that consciousness to 'reality' creative…. To a greater or lesser degree, every language offers its own reading of life.

A specter is haunting europe and, indeed, the rest of the world: not, of course the specter of Communism, but of that other big C—Culture. At the 1991 Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Prof. Ying-Shih Yu of Princeton University argued in his keynote address that the most important current trend in historical studies was the recognition of “culture as a relatively autonomous force in history” (Yu 1991, 21). For too long, he suggested, historians have looked at the past through a narrow window shaped by the values of the west, and particularly by the all-powerful western notion of history as the pursuit of “scientific truth.” To break through this constricting frame we need to recognize “that the history of every society or people deserves to be studied not only as a part of world history but also on account of its intrinsic values” (Yu 1991, 26); we need, in other words, to accept Watanabe Hiroshi's notion that every society or region may be “‘particular’ in its own way like an individual” (quoted in Yu 1991, 23).

On April 22, 1903, the qing court ordered zai-zhen, a Manchu prince; Yuan Shikai, the most powerful Chinese Governor-General of the realm; and Dr. Wu Tingfang, the former Chinese minister to the United States, to compile a commercial code. The edict charging them with this responsibility noted that “of the many government functions, the most important is to facilitate commerce and help industries” (Li 1974a:210). On January 21, 1904, the newly created Ministry of Commerce (Shangbu) issued China's first Company Law (Gongsilü)

The Company Law was the first modern law drafted by the Imperial Law Codification Commission, whose work was part of the Qing government's reformist “new policies” in the wake of China's recent humiliations at the hands of Japan and the Western powers. In giving highest priority to enacting a law governing the organization of commercial companies, the Qing government had several interlocking objectives.

Study of the confucian tradition is dominated by historical and philosophical approaches. Religion and spirituality have been neglected with a consistency that would be admirable if it had been used to better ends—one need only remember James Legge's comment on the amount of religious material contained in the Records of Ritual (c. 4th–1st century b.c.), and then reflect on how little work has been done on this material since he published what remains the only English translation of the Records since the late 19th century. Because the accepted frame for the portrait of the Master and his disciples has long been defined in intellectual, or at most ethical, terms, anything that fell outside that frame has been left to gather dust in outer darkness. Confucius, his teachings, and his followers were characterized as agnostic; and once their religious beliefs had been defined as undefined, they could in good conscience be left unresearched.

The complex relationship that developed between Du Yuesheng's Shanghai Green Gang group and the Guomindang regime in the mid-1930s provides useful insights into the nature of the Nanjing government's rule and, in particular, into the manner it exercised power in its Jiangnan bailiwick. Although the Shanghai Green Gang bosses, in particular Du Yuesheng, were coopted by the new Guomindang State, their full integration into the regime's power structure in Shanghai did not occur until after 1932. Despite their participation in Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist coup of 1927, they enjoyed a somewhat unstable relationship with the Guomindang regime in the period 1927–31. The context of their incorporation into the Guomindang's system of power in Shanghai was the new accommodation between the Nanjing Government and the leadership of the Shanghai bourgeoisie following the political and economic crisis of 1932. In other words, the cooption of the Green Gang bosses was part of the new structures of state corporatism that were forged by the Guomindang regime in the wake of the Shanghai Incident.

Sinologists have long agreed that many aspects of Chinese culture vary widely from region to region and even from valley to valley and town to town. The question for contemporary scholars is why and with what consequences. The problem we face is that while evidence from widely scattered communities is adequate to demonstrate the fact of regional diversity, it is not adequate to test hypotheses concerning its causes and consequences. What we need are detailed maps of the distribution and frequency of such practices as male adoption, uxorilocal marriage, cash bride-price, double burial, and foot binding. The only chance we have of discovering why Chinese culture varies is to see how that variation relates to the location of such likely causes as relations with non-Han peoples, the strength of state control, and the balance of forces in local modes of production.

The profound disdain with which most governments—Qing, Republican, Communist, or, in the case of Southeast Asia, colonial—have treated Chinese secret societies, as well as the undeniable involvement of many of these societies in violent and criminal activities, have obscured the religious elements at the core of the early Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui), the most widespread and well-known of Chinese secret societies. The vast historiography treating Chinese secret societies, often grounded in documents produced by hostile governments, has in large measure reproduced the image of secret societies contained in these documents, even if not all scholars have embraced the moral and legal assumptions of their sources. Consequently, society practices and symbols which would be treated as religious in other contexts are frequently dismissed as epiphenomenal or “esoteric” (Stanton 1900, 9; Morgan I960, 5), or as functional means of unifying “dissident” groups (Yang 1961, 61–64).