ABSTRACT
The gentleman-scholar of imperial China was commonly said to be a Confucian in his office, a Taoist in his garden, and a Buddhist when contemplating death. Most of the other cases discussed in this volume concern religions which exhibit rather clear boundaries: they have supreme deities who created the world and who impose upon their faithful a set of well-defined beliefs and practices, including in most cases a prohibition on worshipping the gods of other religions. This was not the case in China.
