Chinese religion has been influenced by three great streams oh human thought: Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. Although each has separate origins, all three have been inextricably entwined in popular Chinese religion along with ancient animist beliefs. The founders of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism have been deified. The Chinese worship them and their disciples as fervently as they worship their own ancestors and a pantheon of gods and spirits.

Muslims are believed to be the largest identifiable religious group still active in China today, numbering perhaps 2% to 3% of the nation’s population. The government has not published official figures of the number of Buddhists, but they must be substantial since most Tibetans, Mongolians and Dai people follow Buddhism. There are around three million Catholics and four million Protestants. It’s impossible to determine the number of Taoists, but the number of Taoist priests is very small.

At the end of his life, Laotzu is said to have climbed on a water buffalo and ridden west towards what is now Tibet, in search of solitude for his last few years. On the behind a record of his beliefs. The product was a slim volume of only 5000 characters, the Tao Te Ching or the Way & Its Power. He then rode off on his buffalo. It’s doubtful that Laotzu ever intended his philosophy to become a religion.

Zhuangzi (399-295 BC) picked up where Laotzu left off. Zhuangzi (also called Chuangtzu) is regarded as the greatest of all Taoist writers and his collection of stories, The Book of Zhuangzi, is still required reading for anyone trying to make sense of Taoism. However, like Laotzu, Zhuangzi was a philosopher and was not actually trying to establish a religion.

Credit for turning Taoism into a religion is generally given to Zhang Daoling, who formally established his Celestial Masters movement in 143 BC.

At the center of Taoism is the concept of ‘ dao’, Dao cannot be perceived because it exceeds senses, thoughts and imagination; it can be known only through mystical insight and cannot be expressed with words. The opening lines of Laotzu’s The World and its Power advise ‘Daoke dao fei chang dao’ which roughly means that the dao that can be expressed is not the real dao. Dao is the way of the universe, the driving power in nature, the order behind all life and the spirit that cannot be exhausted. Dao is the way people should order their lives to keep in harmony with the natural order of the universe.

Taoism today has been much embraced in the West by New Agers, parapsychologists and others who offer their own various interpretations of what Laotzu and Chuangtzu wrer really trying to tell us. The martial art of taijiquan takes Taoism as its principle creed.

With the exception of Mao, the one name that has become synonymous with China is Confucius. He was born of a poor family around 551 BC in the state of Lu in modern day Shandong. His ambition was to hold a high government office and to reorder society through the administrative apparatus. At most the seems to have had several insignificant government posts, a few followers and a permanently blocked career.

At the age of 50 he perceived his divine mission, and for the next 13 years tramped from state to state offering unsolicited advice to rulers on how to improve their governing, while looking for an opportunity to put his own idea into practice. That opportunity never came, and he returned to his own state to spend the last five years of his life teaching and editing classical literature. He died in 479 BC, age 72.

The glorification on Confucius began after his death. Mencius, or Mengzi, helped raise Confucian ideals into the national consciousness with the publication of the Book of Mencius.

Eventually, Confucian philosophy permeated every level of Chinese society. To hold government office presupposed knowledge of the Confucian classics, and hos words trickled down to the illiterate masses.

During the Han dynasty Confucianism effectively became the state religion – the teachings wrer made the basic discipline for training government officials and remained to until almost the end of the Qing dynasty in1911.

In the 7 th and 8 th centuries temples and shrines were built in memory of Confucius and his original disciples. During the Song dynasty the Confucian bible, the Analects, became the basis of all education.

It is not hard to see why Confucianism took hold in China. Confucianism defines codes of conduct and patterns of obedience. Women obey and defer to men, younger brothers to elder brothers, sons to fathers. Respect flows upwards, from young to old, from subject to ruler. Certainly, any reigning Chinese emperor would quickly see the merits of encouraging such a system.

All people paid homage to the emperor, who was regarded as the embodiment of Confucian wisdom and virtue – the head of the great family – nation. For centuries administration under the emperor lay in the hands of a small Confucian scholar class. In theory anyone who passed the examinations qualified, but in practice the monopoly of power was held by the educated upper classes.

There has never been a rigid code of law, because Confucianism rejected the idea that conduct could be enforced by some organization; talking legal action implied an incapacity to work things out by negotiation.

The result, however, was arbitrary justice and oppression by those who held power. Dynasties rose and fell, but the Confucian pattern never changed. Indeed, it still holds true in today’s China.

The family retains it central place as the basic unit of society; Confucianism reinforced this idea, but did not invent it. Teaming up with traditional superstition. Confucian reinforced the practice of ancestor worship. The strict codes of obedience were held tighter by these concepts, as well as by the concept of ‘face’ – to let down the family or group is a great shame for Chinese.

In its early years, Confucianism was regarded as radical philosophy, but over the centuries it has come to be seen as conservative and reactionary. Confucius was strongly denounced by the Communists as yet another incorrigible link to the bourgeois past. During the Cultural Revolution, Confucian temples, statues and Confucianists themselves took quite a beating at the hands of rampaging Red Guards. However, in recent years the Chinese government has softened its stance, perhaps recognizing that Confucianism can still be an effective instrument of social control. Confucian temples have been restored.

The story goes that although a prince brought up in luxury, Siddhartha became discontented with the world when he was confronted with the sights of old age, sickness and death. He despaired of finding fulfillment of the physical level, since the body was inescapably subject to these weaknesses.

Around the age 30 Siddhartha broke from the material world and sought ‘enlightenment’ by following various yogic disciplines. After several failed attempts he devoted the final phase pf his search to intensive contemplation. One evening, sitting beneath a banyan tree, he slipped into deep meditation and emerged having achieved enlightenment. His title ‘Buddha’ means ‘the awakened’ or ‘the enlightened one’.

Buddha founded an order of monks and preached his idea for next four decades until his death. To his followers he was known as Sakyamuni, the ‘silent sage of the Sakya clan’, because of the unfathomable mystery that surrounded him. It is said that Gautama Buddha was not the first Buddha, but the fourth, and will not be the last.

The cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy is the view that all life is suffering. Everyone is subject to the traumas of birth, sickness, decrepitude and death; to what they most dread; and to separation from what they love.

They cause of suffering is desire – specifically the desires of the body and the desire for personal fulfillment. Happiness can only be achieved if these desires are overcome, and this requires following the ‘eightfold path. By following thins apth the Buddhist aims to attain nirvana. Volumes have been written in attempts to define nirvana; the sutta simply say that it’s a state of complete freedom from greed, anger, ignorance and the various other fetters of existence.

Buddhism developed in China from the 3 rd to 6 th centuries AD. In the middle of the 1 st century AD the religion gained the interest of the Han emperor Ming. He sent a mission to the west, which returned in AD 67 with Buddhist scriptures, two Indian monks and images of the Buddha.

Centuries later, other Chinese monks such as Xuan Zang journeyed to India and returned with Buddhist scriptures that were then translated from the original Sanakrit. Buddhist monasteries and temples sprang up around China, and played a similar role to the churches and monasteries of medieval Europe – functioning as guesthouses, hospitals and orphanages for travelers and refugees. Gifts from the faithful allowed them to amass considerable wealth and set up money-lending enterprises and pawnshops. There pawnshops functioned as unofficial banks for the poor right up to the mid-20 th century.

The Buddha wrote nothing; the Buddhist writings that have come down to us date from about 150 years after his death. By the time there texts came out, divisions had already appeared with in Buddhism. Some writers tried to emphasize the Buddha’s break with Hinduism, while others tried to minimize it. At some stage Buddhism split into two major schools: Theravada and Mahayana.

The Theravada school holds that the path to nirvana is an individual pursuit. It centers on monks and nuns who make the search for nirvana a full-time profession. This school maintains that people are alone in the world and must tread the path to nirvana on their own; Buddhas can only show they way Theravada is the main school of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.

The Mahayana, or ‘big vehicle’, school holds that since all existence is one, the fate of the individual is linked to the fate of others. The Buddha did not just point the way and float off into his own nirvana, but continues to offer spiritual help to others seeking nirvana. Mahayana is the main school of Buddhism in Vietnam, Japan, Tibet, Korea, Mongolia and China.

Mahayana Buddhism is replete with innumerable heavens, hells and descriptions of nirvana. Prayers are addressed to the Buddha and combined with elaborate ritual. There are deities and Bodhisattvas – a rank of supernatural beings in their last incarnation before nirvana. Temples are filled with images such as the future Buddha, Maiterya and Amitabha. The ritual, tradition and superstition that Buddha rejected came tumbling back in with a vengeance.

In Tibet and areas of Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan, a unique from of the Mahayana school is practiced: Tantric or Lamaist Buddhism. Tantric Buddhism, often called Vajrayana or ‘thunderbolt vehicle’ by its followers, has been practiced since 7 th century AS and is heavily influenced by Tibet’s pre-Buddhist Bon religion, which relied on priests or shamans to placate spirits, gods and demons.

Generally speaking, it is much more mystical than other forms of Buddhism, relying heavily on mudras (ritual postures), mantras (sacred speech), yantras (sacred art) and secret initiation rites. Priests called lamas are believed to be reincarnations of highly evolved beings; the Dalai Lama is the supreme patriarch of Tibetan Buddhism.

The prophet was born around AD570 and came to be called Mohammed, meaning ‘highly praised’. His ancestry is traditionally traced back to Abraham, who had two wives, Hagar and Sarah. Hagar gave birth to Ishmael, and Sarah had a son named Isaac. Sarah demanded that Hagar and Ishmael be banished. According to Islam’s holy book, the Koran, Ishmael went to Mecca, where his line of descendants can be traced down to Mohammed. There have been other true prophets before Mohammed, but he is regarded as the culmination of them and the last.

Mohammed said that there is only one God, Allah. The name derives from joining al, which means ‘the’, with Liah, which means ‘God’. His uncompromising monotheism conflicted with the pantheism and idolatry of the Arabs. His moral teachings and vision of a universal brotherhood conflicted with what he believed was a corrupt social order based on class divisions.

The initial reaction to his teachings was hostile. He and his followers were forced to flee from Mecca to Medina in 662, where Mohammed built a political base and an army that eventually defeated Mecca and brought all of Arabia under his control. He died in 632, two years after taking Mecca. By the time a century had passed the Arab Muslims had built a huge empire that stretched all the way from Persia to Spain. Although the Arabs were eventually supplanted by the Turks, the strength of Islam has continued to the present day.

Islam was brought to China peacefully. Arab traders who landed on the southern coast of China established their mosques in great maritime cities like Guangzhou and Quabzhou, and Muslim merchants traveling the Silk Road to China won converts among the Han Chinese in the north of the country. There are also large populations of Muslim Uyghur people whose ancestors first moved into china’s Xiangjinag region during the Tang dynasty.

The next major Christian groups to arrive in China were the Jesuits. The priests Matteo Ricci and Michael Ruggieri were permitted it to sep up base at Zhaoqing in Guangdong in the 1580s, and eventually made it to the imperial court in Beijing. Large numbers of Catholic and Protestant missionaries established themselves in China following the intrusion into China by the Western powers in the 19 th century. Christians are estimated to comprise about 1% of China population.

Nevertheless in an effort to improve relations with the Muslim, Buddhist and Lamaist minorities, in 1982 the Chinese government amended is constitution to allow freedom of religion. However, only atheists are permitted to be members of the CCP. Since almost all of China’s 55 minority rule precludes most of them from becoming party members.

Traditional Chinese religious beliefs took a battering during the Cultural Revolution when monasteries were disbanded, temples were destroyed and the monks were sometimes killed to send to the fields to labor. While traditional Chinese religion is strong in places like Macau, Hong Kong and Taiwan, in mainland China the temples and monasteries are pale shadows of their former selves.

Since the death of Mao, the Chinese government allowed many temples to reopen as active places of worship. All religious activity is firmly under state control and may of the monks are caretakers, within renovated shells of monasteries, which serve principally as tourist attractions.

Confucius has often been used as a political symbol, his role ‘redefined’ to suit the needs of the time. At the end of the 19 th century he was upheld as a symbol of reform because he had worked from reform in his own day. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, Chinese intellectuals vehemently opposed him as a symbol of a conservative and backward China. In the 1930s he was used by Chiang Kaishek and Kuomintang as guide to proper, traditional values. Today Confucius is back in favour, with the Chinese government seeing much to be admired in the neo-Confucianist authoritarianism espoused by Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.

Christianity is still officially frowned upon by the government as a form of spiritual pollution, but nevertheless you can see new churches being built. What the Chinese government does, however, is make it difficult for Chinese Christians to affiliate with fellow Christians in the West. Churches are placed under the control of the government the Three-Self Patriotic Movement was set up as an umbrella organization for the Protestant churches, and Catholic Patriotic Association was set up to replace Rome as the leader of the Catholic churches.

Proselytizing is forbidden and Western missionaries are routinely denied visas to enter China – those who enter on tourist visas but are caught proselytizing on the sly are unceremoniously booted out.

There is much friction between the government and the Chinese Catholic church because the church refuses to disown the Pope as its leader. For this reason, the Vatican maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan, much to China’s consternation.

Of all people in China, the Tibetan Buddhists felt the brunt of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The Dalai Lama and his entourage fled to India in 1959 when the Tibetan rebellion was put down by Chinese troops. During the Cultural Revolution the monasteries was disbanded and theocracy, which had governed Tibet for centuries, was wiped out overnight. Some Tibetan temples and monasteries have been reopened and the Tibetan religion is still a very powerful force among the people.