Translating Religion: Evidential Scholarship, Han Learning, and the Production of a Global Concept, 1864–1902

This paper explores the translation of the modern concept of religion into late Qing China as mediated through the paradigms and methodologies of evidential scholarship and Han studies. Specifically, it examines how Confucian scholars—trained in various schools of learning, including the New and Old Text traditions—interpreted the concept of religion through their own scholarly dispositions and intellectual-political concerns. In doing so, these scholars made this concept both comprehensible and politically serviceable in China, with some eventually using it to re-theorize the intellectual and social history of China. This study begins by elucidating how, from the 1860s to late 1880s, classically trained scholars, in addition to new-styled intellectuals, encountered and first translated the concept of religion according to various Confucian paradigms. Next, it demonstrates how their intellectual heirs in the 1890s used the concept of religion—as modified and adapted through the translation process—to begin revising and critiquing the very epistemological assumptions and methodologies of evidential scholarship and Han learning. As religion was increasingly rendered separable from the category of philosophy, the counter positioning of these concepts played a crucial role in reformers’ attempts to construct a new historical framework capable of explaining what they perceived as China’s sociopolitical weaknesses and lack of intellectual dynamism. Concomitant to this line of historical inquiry, this paper elucidates the uneven, complicated process through which modern concepts and categories of thought and life were mediated and utilized through classical Chinese procedures of thinking that were themselves constantly evolving.