Max Weber: Selections in Translation by Max Weber

Author:Max Weber [Weber, Max]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1978-03-30T05:00:00+00:00

9 · The Religions of Asia

We may summarise what has been said in this survey of Asian civilisation (extremely superficial as it has been in view of the richness of the structures considered) in the following way:

For Asia as a whole, China has played much the same role as France has done in the modern Western world. From China has stemmed all gentlemanly ‘polish’, from Tibet to Japan and Indo-China. India, on the other hand, has come to have something of the significance that ancient Greece has had in the West. There is little thought about anything beyond purely practical concerns in Asia whose sources are not ultimately to be sought in India. Above all, the Indian salvation religions, both orthodox and heterodox, have had some claim to be considered as playing roughly the role, for the whole of Asia, that Christianity has played in the West. With one big difference: apart from local, and usually short-lived, exceptions, none of them has been elevated for any length of time to the position of the single dominant ‘church’ in the sense in which this was the case in the West in the Middle Ages and indeed right up to the Peace of Westphalia. Asia was, and remained, in principle the land of free competition between religions, of ‘tolerance’ in the sense of late Classical antiquity – subject, that is, to due reservations for the limits imposed by reasons of state, which, it should not be forgotten, continue even in the modern world to set bounds to all forms of religious toleration, albeit taking effect in a different direction. Where these political interests were in any way involved, there was no lack, even in Asia, of religious persecution in the grand manner. This was most markedly true in China, but it was also found in Japan and parts of India. As in Athens at the time of Socrates, so in Asia too, superstition could claim its victims at any time. And finally, in Asia too, right up into the nineteenth century, religious wars between the sects and the militarised monastic orders played their part. On the whole, however, we observe otherwise the same kind of co-existence between cults, schools, sects and orders of all kinds which was characteristic of ancient civilisation in the West.

Admittedly, this did not mean that all the competing tendencies were in any way equivalent in the eyes of most members of the ruling strata at any given time, or often in the eyes of the political authorities. There were orthodox and heterodox, and among the orthodox more or less classical, schools, orders and sects. Above all – and this is especially important for us – there were also social distinctions between them. On the one hand (and to a lesser extent), they were distinguished by the social strata to which they were indigenous. On the other hand (and principally), they were distinguished by the nature of the salvation which they bestowed on the different strata of their adherents. The first phenomenon was found in different forms.

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