ABSTRACT
The prehistory, emergence, and disappearance of religious studies in China
PREHISTORY. THE CHINESE WORD FOR ‘religion’ is made from twocharacters, zong ( ) and jiao ( ). Zong refers to ‘(reverence for) ancestry(’s temple)’ in Confucianism and ‘sect’ in Buddhism, while jiao means ‘superior conduct and inferior imitation’, hence ‘teaching’. Although the two Chinese characters have long been used as two different words, they were not combined to form the new word, zongjiao, ‘religion’, until the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Japanese adopted the two characters in combination to translate the Western term ‘religion’. So, before the importation of the new word from Japan at that time, the Chinese did not have a term such as ‘religion’.
