The volumes under review form part of a trilogy, together with a third collection that has not reached me, which will be devoted to key concepts in practice. But it is clear from what I have seen so far that all these compilations will come to play an important role in the field that they delineate. It is, furthermore, a field that is both lively and relatively new, just ripe for the very useful type of concerted overview that these volumes provide. One can predict that the ample bibliographies and discussion of current issues will soon form an essential first step beyond the shorter works that may alert the general reader to the importance of the field, and so move the student beyond the fine array of introductory studies from the reportage of Ian Johnson to the anthropological insights of Adam Yuet Chau towards further researches. The wide range of phenomena covered, from the expected descriptions of contemporary Buddhism, Daoism and so forth to essays on Islam, Christianity, and Tibetan Buddhism in its Chinese environment, commendably encourages a breadth of vision across different areas of religious discourse. True, the theme of interaction between different traditions is only occasionally treated, though the first essay of the second volume, by Yuan-lin Tsai, involves an excellent example of one such case, and the potential for further explorations of this topic are touched upon in several places. The focus throughout is on the “greater China” of the People's Republic, Taiwan, and Hong Kong: Macao attracts a couple of glancing references, and the wider Chinese diaspora is not within the scope of the project. But one cannot complain about omissions; rather, the trilogy will plainly provide enough food for thought to be getting on with.

This is not, however, to say that additional essays would not have been welcome. Although individual historiographies for the different traditions deemed to make up “Chinese Religions” are well enough covered in the first volume, still some historical treatment of the emergence of a concept of Chinese religion as an academic field would not have gone amiss. The very idea of studying religions as a worthwhile enterprise upon which to expend full academic salaries, rather than as an element in anthropology or a minor addendum to theology is, after all, relatively recent. A former colleague recalls that one of my most distinguished contemporaries dismissed the whole undertaking as “theology lite”, and even those who did help establish the subject in universities in the United Kingdom were perforce obliged to concentrate on those Asian religions represented in the immigrant population, which in the 1960s included some Buddhists as well as Muslims and Hindus, but which did not at that point include more than a handful who practised the types of religious activity treated in these surveys. The literature in Western languages and in Chinese from earlier in the twentieth century often hid that activity under rubrics that now belong to the past, but that might have been delineated at some point. I am thinking of “superstitions”, not as an evaluative terminology, a usage that is indeed treated here, but as the loose label for a ragbag of unclassifiable bits and pieces that did not fit the rather clumsy analysis of the facts then in vogue, as well as terms such as “customs” or lisu 礼俗, implying unreflective conduct that had been inherited since time immemorial and that was generally deemed unlikely to survive the twentieth century. There is certainly an excellent piece in the second volume by Ya-pei Kuo on the differing responses to the arrival of the strange new notion of “religion”, zongjiao 宗教, in the Chinese language, but this intrusion was but part of a wider picture, and not necessarily a very helpful part either.

Where all the editors involved in this project are to be unreservedly congratulated is in eschewing completely the misleading language of “modernity”. Doubtless a good number of the persons whose names find mention on the pages of these two collections will have been troubled by the need to present themselves as modern, and a fair number too have consequently attracted the attention of historians eager to chart the processes of change that rocked the twentieth-century Chinese world. But plainly at least some of them were not thereby discouraged from reaching back in time within the traditions to which they adhered. A twentieth-century Chinese thinker was no more or less reluctant to argue a case on the basis of a medieval Yogacara treatise or even a pre-imperial Chinese text than a mid-twentieth-century French Catholic would have felt it out of place to develop ideas found in Aquinas, or earlier. It is immensely reassuring to see from these publications the abundance of very promising scholars from a number of countries who have now been attracted to studying this field, with for example Canadian influences as strong as any, and even England for all its insular tendencies proves to have been able to import three experts to cover the growing need to understand this aspect of Chinese civilization. Let us hope that universities in this country see also the need to support scholarship in the weighty heritage that the Chinese past has bequeathed to this lively and complex contemporary milieu, for to attempt to make sense of even what is before our eyes without the perspectives that such scholarship can provide is as pointless as trying to understand contemporary Christianity while ignoring the existence of Bibles.