Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia (New Approaches to Asian History)
Cambridge University Press, 4/25/2011
EAN 9781107008090, ISBN10: 1107008093
Hardcover, 264 pages, 23.6 x 16 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Religious ideas and actors have shaped Asian cultural practices for millennia and have played a decisive role in charting the course of its history. In this engaging and informative book, Thomas David DuBois sets out to explain how religion has influenced the political, social, and economic transformation of Asia from the fourteenth century to the present. Crossing a broad terrain from Tokyo to Tibet, the book highlights long-term trends and key moments, such as the expulsion of Catholic missionaries from Japan, or the Taiping Rebellion in China, when religion dramatically transformed the political fate of a nation. Contemporary chapters reflect on the wartime deification of the Japanese emperor, Marxism as religion, the persecution of the Dalai Lama, and the fate of Asian religion in a globalized world.
1. In the beginning
religion and history
2. Ming China
the fourteenth-century's new world order
3. The Buddha and the shogun in sixteenth-century Japan
4. Opportunities lost
the failure of Christianity, 1550–1750
5. Buddhism
incarnations and reincarnations
6. Apocalypse now
7. Out of the twilight
religion and the late nineteenth century
8. Into the abyss
religion and the road to disaster during the early twentieth century
9. Brave new world
religion in the reinvention of postwar Asia
10. The globalization of Asian religion.