Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia

Religious ideas and actors have shaped Asian cultural practices for millennia and have played a decisive role in charting the course of its history. In this engaging and informative book, Thomas David DuBois sets out to explain how religion has influenced the political, social, and economic transformation of Asia from the fourteenth century to the present. Crossing a broad terrain from Tokyo to Tibet, the book highlights long-term trends and key moments, such as the expulsion of Catholic missionaries from Japan, or the Taiping Rebellion in China, when religion dramatically transformed the political fate of a nation. Contemporary chapters reflect on the wartime deification of the Japanese emperor, Marxism as religion, the persecution of the Dalai Lama, and the fate of Asian religion in a globalized world.

1. In the beginning: religion and history; 2. Ming China: the fourteenth-century's new world order; 3. The Buddha and the shogun in sixteenth-century Japan; 4. Opportunities lost: the failure of Christianity, 1550–1750; 5. Buddhism: incarnations and reincarnations; 6. Apocalypse now; 7. Out of the twilight: religion and the late nineteenth century; 8. Into the abyss: religion and the road to disaster during the early twentieth century; 9. Brave new world: religion in the reinvention of postwar Asia; 10. The globalization of Asian religion.

Religion and religious ideas have played a fundamental role in the shaping of Asian history. Thomas David DuBois sets out to explain how religious traditions and philosophies in China and Japan have evolved and intersected since the birth of Confucianism in China and the arrival of Buddhism in Japan.

Thomas David DuBois is Associate Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (2005) and the editor of Casting Faiths: Imperialism and the Transformation of Religion in East and Southeast Asia (2009).