Han Dynasty

Under the Han a set of arrangements was made that later Chinese religion never entirely got out from under. Confucian learning was made the basis of appointment to office and of the state's ritual programme, which turned a school of thought into an establishment with careers attached. The correlative cosmology of yin and yang and the five phases was worked into an official synthesis in which the seasons, the directions, the colours, the organs of the body and the affairs of government were all read as parts of one system, so that a flood or an eclipse could be interpreted as a comment on the conduct of the court.

Derk Bodde's study of the Han festival year shows how thoroughly that scheme was built into the calendar of observances the state maintained. The great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth took the form the Han gave them, and the ruler's role in performing them was fixed then. Sources of Chinese Tradition collects the texts in which the synthesis was argued. What matters for the atlas is that nearly every later Chinese religious development, Daoist, Buddhist or Neo Confucian, positioned itself with respect to this settlement, accepting parts of it and contesting others, and that the vocabulary of the debate was fixed in the Han as much as its conclusions were.

The Han period is where two of the largest developments in Chinese religious history begin, and both begin quietly. Buddhism entered along the routes through Central Asia, carried by traders and by monks from Parthian, Sogdian and Indian backgrounds, and the earliest translations into Chinese were made in the second century of the Common Era.

Erik Zurcher's study of the process shows how slow and how partial it was: the first Chinese Buddhists were a small foreign and court connected group, the vocabulary had to be built out of existing Daoist terms that fitted badly, and several centuries passed before Buddhism became a mass Chinese religion. At the other end of the same period the Celestial Masters movement appeared in the west of the empire, organising communities under a hierarchy of officials, collecting a contribution of rice, and treating illness as a consequence of fault to be dealt with by confession and petition to a bureaucracy of spirits. That is the first organised Daoist church, with a priesthood, a territory and a liturgy, and it descends in a traceable line to Daoist practice today. Both movements grew as the Han state failed, and both outlasted it by a very long way. Neither was planned by anyone at court, which is a useful corrective to a period usually described through its official synthesis.