Confucianism and Daoism: From Max Weber to the Present

It has been over a century since the 1915 publication of Max Weber’s The Religion of China: Confucianism and Daoism. In the past decades, we have been wrestling with Weber not only over the issue of the rise of the spirit of modern capitalism in China, but also the issue of Confucianism as a religion in China. However, the second half of Weber’s seminal text, which is on Daoism, is often ignored. For Weber, Confucianism as the orthodoxy and Daoism as the heterodoxy are two halves of Chinese society that cannot be separated. Their interdependence creates the very fabric of Chinese social, political, and religious life. In this special issue, we have gathered scholars of Confucianism as well as of Daoism to have an open conversation with one another. These papers originated from the symposium “Confucianism and Daoism: From Max Weber to the Present,” sponsored by the Purdue University Center on Religion and Chinese Society, which took place on March 11, 2018. It does not happen often that scholars of Confucianism and scholars of Daoism come together for discussions of Weber as well as their own respective research projects. We were especially fortunate to have a group of interdisciplinary scholars from fields as diverse as sociology, religious studies, East Asian Studies, history, and philosophy. In “The Last Confucian in the Rice Paddy of Java,” Yong Chen examines the case of Confucianism in contemporary Indonesia through the lens of an anthropology of Confucianism. He asks how “popular Confucianism,” which has components of religious traditions beyond Confucianism, can inform us about the larger sociopolitical and cultural conditions of contemporary Confucianism. By pushing the boundaries of what it means to live a Confucian life, Chen suggests that Confucianism as lived experiences is often far more porous and expansive than what is commonly assumed. In “From Female Daoist Rationality to Kundao Practice,” Robin Wang compares two cases of female Daoist