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The Encyclopedia of Religion: a Critique from the Perspective of the History of the Japanese Religious Traditions*

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The Encyclopedia of Religion: a Critique from the Perspective of the History of the Japanese Religious Traditions* THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION: A CRITIQUE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE HISTORY OF THE JAPANESE RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS* Neil McMullin The Encyclopedia of Religion (henceforth ER) is a product of the well- known “Chicago school” of Religious Studies which is centered, signifi- cantly, at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Under the leadership of Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), the editor in chief of the ER, the “Chicago school” has exerted a powerful influence in the field of Religious Studies for the past few decades. The ER may be seen as an extended enco- mium to “ER” (Eliade Rex) and his way of doing Religious Studies, and part way through its compilation it became his eulogy. To do justice to the task at hand would require much more space than is presently allotted to me, and therefore I shall attempt simply to identify certain problems with the ER by way of some observations on its entries in my area of specialization, the history of the Japanese religious traditions (for other statements of my critique of the field of Japanese Religious Studies see McMullin 1989; forthcoming). Those entries were contributed by a large number of scholars, mostly Americans but some Japanese and Europeans, who presently have eminent reputations in the field of Japanese Religious Studies, and most of the entries are of state-of-the-art quality. And yet, some of the entries, both of a general and a specific nature, on Japanese religions contain certain problems. It is not that those entries are flawed by obvious and blatant errors, but, rather, that they con- tain deepseated and often subtle problems that, mutatis mutandis, they share with the entries on the other religious traditions so far as I am com- petent to judge, and that are endemic to the approach of Mircea Eliade and his “co-religionists” to the study of religions. First, generally the entries analyze the Japanese religious traditions in a from-the-top-down perspective. In other words, they portray the * This is a slightly amended version of a paper that I read at “The Encyclopedia of Religion: A Research Symposium,” which was organized by the Students Society of the Center for Religious Studies, University of Toronto, and held at that University on March 2, 1988. I wish to thank the Students Society for inviting me to participate in that symposium. The work under discussion then and here is Eliade 1986. <UN> <UN> 54 neil mcmullin pre-modern shape of the Japanese religious world as that shape appeared to, and was constructed by, the ruling elite of the successive periods. Given, of course, that the contributors, of necessity, relied largely on classical literary materials for their information, and that, as Mikhail Bhaktin explains, literary language is the oral and written language of a dominant social group (Bhaktin 1981: 289–290), this is no surprise. However, there appears to be little if any recognition on the part of the ER that this is indeed the case. Some attention is paid to “popular religion”—for instance, seven of the thirty-seven pages of the entry on “Japanese Religion” (Vol. 7, 520–557) do so—but as a rule it is the “high traditions” that hold center stage. Second, the focus of the entries is predominantly doctrinal. The vast majority of the entries contain comparatively little information on rituals and lineages, issues of considerably more importance in the Japanese reli- gious traditions, and still less information on religious institutions. Thus, in the case of Buddhism, for instance, one of the three major components of that tradition, the sangha (the community), receives very little atten- tion (see the long entry on “Buddhism,” Vol. 2, 334–439). In his “Forward” to the ER, Joseph Kitagawa tells us that in its early planning stage Eliade and the editors created three categories of articles, the first of which was to include “historical and descriptive essays on particular religious com- munities and traditions,” the second of which “was slated to cover topics in the history of religion (e.g., “afterlife,” “alchemy,” “myth,” “ritual,” “sym- bol,” and so on)”, and the third of which would examine “the relationships between religion and other areas of culture” (Vol. 1, xv). As I see it, it was largely the second category that triumphed at the expense of the other two as the production of the ER proceeded, a category that displays the etherial view of religion held by Eliade and his “co-religionists.” The work- ing assumption appears to have been that religion and the history thereof (as stated by Kitagawa) have to do primarily with beliefs, especially ones having to do with the nether world, and their formulation in doctrinal/ theological language. Third, the entries largely accept the old model according to which the pre-modern Japanese religious landscape (mindscape?) was dotted with a number of autonomous, independent religious traditions, the two main ones being Shinto and Buddhism. This despite the fact that the threads of the pre-modern Japanese religious fabric were so closely interwoven that there was literally no such a thing as a “purely” Buddhist school in the pre- modern eras, and that those institutions that we call Buddhist monaster- ies were in fact Buddhist-Shinto complexes. The entry on “Honjisuijaku” <UN> <UN>.
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