Anyone remotely involved in education about China in the Anglophone world needs to up their game, as the modern state looms ever larger in the lives of many whose preparation for appreciating Chinese civilization is usually woefully inadequate. Should, however, one wish to suggest for example that East Asia as a whole was in times past never so isolated and unchanging as to preclude sustained and large-scale cultural influence from South Asia, it is rather hard to do so without contrasting the change in outlook of that epoch with the situation that had prevailed in earlier times. As Edward Slingerland's work would contend, exactly what that situation was has been subject to misunderstandings that have arisen among scholars both Chinese and non-Chinese in the late twentieth century, misunderstandings highlighted in the subtitle of his book. Though the myth of which he writes covers the supposed absence in early China of a whole range of dichotomies, including (p. 1) subject versus object and emotion versus reason, it is the dichotomy given in his main title that forms his chief target. “Early China” too is the clear focus, even if for some the whole of East Asian civilization in pre-modern times is characterized by holistic patterns of thought: life after the intrusion of Buddhism is not considered, and where at least one important source, the Liezi, that awkwardly straddles that divide is consulted, the careful recent doctorate of Wayne Kreger is drawn upon (pp. 84–5) to distinguish its pre- and post-Buddhist elements.

The distinction is important because Buddhism not only implied new constructions of the world unseen but also marked a point at which the influence of non-Chinese, Indo-European languages from South Asia, written in phonetically based scripts, impinged directly or indirectly on China. Some of our Orientalist imaginings of Chinese alterity, as noted at the start of the introductory sketch of the myths targeted (p. 22) go back to the Chinese script and its apparent fulfilment of the Lullian dream, first stimulated by Europe's confrontation with Islam, of a mode of communication transcending the limitations of human language. Others, perhaps, have shallower roots, such as the mid-twentieth-century realization that speakers of Hopi might see the world in a very different way from speakers of English. At about the same time it was noticed that Franz Kuhn described somewhat jocularly the far from irrational organization of Chinese encyclopedias in a way that implied (pp. 25–6) some radically incommensurable way of thinking – in fact the subheadings follow a bibliographical and chronological ordering that merely seems to produce an arbitrary jumble, just as much as any alphabetically ordered encyclopaedia such as that which I was told in my childhood had produced a volume subtitled “How to Hug”. Lastly, one should probably not forget either the rise in North America in the late twentieth century of psychedelic aids to experiences at odds with commonsense mind–body assumptions, to say nothing of the enlightenment experiences offered by Zen training.

The substance of the book lies in two main sections looking at the arguments against the “holistic” analysis of mind and body in early China on qualitative and then quantitative grounds, the latter using approaches now becoming familiar in the digital humanities. The historian looking for a summary of the pre-Buddhist legacy will find plenty of philosophically weighty issues clearly and helpfully expounded in both parts, but plenty that relates also to the Chinese language, and here there are one or two indications that the treatment offered may not turn out to command unqualified assent from scholars of early China. On p. 45 for example we find reference to “the Japanese kokoro (the Japanese pronunciation of xin 心)”, but surely kokoro is a different word in another language that happens to be written with the same character. Checking Chinese–Japanese translations online shows that uniquely Japanese terms using kokoro, such as kokorobosoi 心細い, “narrow-hearted”, meaning “downhearted and feeling insecure”; are sometimes rendered with translations involving xin – in this case xinxu 心虚, “diffident” – but such overlaps are still not to my mind completely reassuring. It is disappointing, too, to find shenming 神明 (e.g. p. 69, p. 87) glossed without comment as “spiritual intelligence”, since this translation is a placeholder, repeating the nineteenth-century rendering of James Legge, whereas the late Edward Machle in Antonio S. Cua (ed.), Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 701–3, concisely laid out no fewer than six different meanings of the expression, and even these do not include its use in the “techniques of the bedchamber” literature explored by Don Harper and Vivienne Lo. Many years ago an old style sinologist suggested to me that the term was actually a ritual term so ancient that it exhibited an inversion of the expected Chinese word order – he compared it to xueshi 血食 – so it would mean the perspicacious gods, who dwell in a world dark to us but pellucid to them, and ritual vessels dedicated to the service of that world are termed mingqi 明器 for that reason, not because they are kept shiny and clean. We should at least understand by “intelligence” not that we share this world in the likely ancient Chinese view with a cohort of invisible Mensa members, but with something more like an unseen CIA.

These are obviously very minor quibbles. As a critique of some recent scholarship this book does have the generosity, as p. 19 shows, to allow a positive role to those whom it targets, and in truth at the very least they cannot be denied some heuristic role in trying to imagine an early China more interesting than that allowed by the Orientalism of times past that found little meriting the appellation of philosophy in ancient Chinese texts at all. Steering more towards “Sinophilia” than “Sinophobia”, to use the terminology of Colin Mackerras, possibly risked the creation of a cult of illuminati understanding Chinese thought in ways denied the average enquirer, but the worst excesses of this tendency have not been in the Anglophone world. In any case Edward Slingerland has boldly nailed his own colours to the mast and plunged ahead between the Scylla and Charybdis of these two extremes, and one wishes him a safe onward journey.

Now he is joined by another traveller, who has already been on an Odyssey that cannot but command respect. A Jewish child in Catholic Baltimore, an immigrant atheist in a Canada predicated upon monotheism, a friend to Buddhists and Daoists in East Asia, and a member by marriage of a Chinese family – there is plenty of autobiography scattered throughout these pages, along with important observations on matters ranging from the role of spirit mediums in Chinese history to the theology of the Chinese Jews. The “six decades of studying Chinese religion” too that are mentioned in the “Prologue” to Jordan Paper's latest collection of essays cover a good half century of teaching experience, ample opportunity to tease out the problems of incomprehension that have dogged the past half millennium. It soon becomes apparent, however, that he is steering a very different line from Edward Slingerland, commenting on whose earlier work and its cultural perspectives he concludes (p. 35) “The problem with cognitive studies of religion in these regards is that many are constructed from databases that are composed of these earlier studies of Chinese and other religions that often have little if any validity. Using these unreliable databases, one can seemingly prove virtually any point one may wish about the nature of religion globally”. His particular concern, as his title indicates, is that very solid rock upon which so many missionary hopes have already come to grief, the practices once subsumed under the terms “ancestor worship” or “filial piety” (meaning xiao 孝) but here designated “familism”, practices so alien to early modern Europe that many expressed doubts as to whether they constituted “religion” at all. This was a question of categorization that was entirely meaningless in imperial China, and that today remains conveniently unresolved, for on p. 111 we read “So as not to embarrass my Chinese friends, I will conclude by accepting that the present government is not a religious institution per se, even though it increasingly resembles one from a comparative perspective”.

But in navigating around this hazard throughout his collection of essays the author more than once appears to veer some way off course. For example in discussing the way in which Chinese Buddhists largely avoided the cultural clashes experienced by Chinese Christians, he writes (p. 137) of the great suppression of Buddhism of the 840s that it was “a suppression of institutions”, targeted (as were and are many such government purges) at buildings rather than people, and further asserts “A Japanese monk traveled extensively throughout China at this time and made no mention of the suppression in his diary (Reischauer 1955); obviously, it had not affected him”. It is indeed difficult to weigh up either from Reischauer's translation or from the original whether this observer was accurately informed about the killings of religious adherents both foreign and Chinese that were reported to him, though at least the allegations of imperial cannibalism that he records do seem intrinsically improbable. Nor does the monk waste words in describing his emotions on hearing these terrifying reports. But it is something of a leap of faith to suppose that he was unaffected.

This tendency is at its strongest in discussion of the aforementioned present government, about which he states “Without multiparty elections, which China does not have (it has a one-party system and has, for the last thousand years, chosen its leaders on merit), there is no role for demagogues” (p. 133). On matters of religion we are told “The Chinese government recognises Tibetan Buddhism under a number of Lamas (who are but abbots of monasteries), especially the Panchen Lama, but not the Dalai Lama, because he is claimed to be the theocratic ruler of most of China” (p. 117). In Tibet the present Chinese government will not “allow the socioeconomic structure to revert to serfdom” (p. 118). More broadly, “All of this suppression has to be understood in the context of Chinese history, since virtually all regime changes have been due to revolts by religious movements” (p. 122). In 1989 some students “apparently headed towards the sound of fighting not far off and were wounded or killed by the crossfire” (p. 127). Even so the Canadian prime minister has said that “the Canadian government cannot sign a trade agreement with China until it apologizes for a massacre that never occurred!” (p. 128). In the South China Sea after other nations are said to have developed islands for military purposes “China was obviously concerned about being left behind and being unable then to secure its maritime trade routes” (p. 130). Somehow we have sailed here into what can only be accounted dangerous and uncertain waters. For all his rich experience, many will think carefully before booking their passage with this highly individual captain.