"Traditional Chinese religion is different. This is why pollsters have a hard time figuring out if Chinese people are religious. Asking 'what faith do you believe in?' seems like a simple question for people who define religion according to monotheistic norms. They expect a clear-cut answer, like 'I am a Buddhist' or 'I am a Daoist.' But for most of Chinese history, this sort of question would have been strange. Religion was part of belonging to your community. A village had its temples, its gods, and they were honored on certain holy days. Choice was not really a factor. China did have three separate teachings, or jiao – Confucianism (rujiao), Buddhist (fojiao), and Daoism (daojiao) – but they did not function as separate institutions with their own followers. Primarily, they provided services: a community might invite a priest or monk to perform rituals at temples, for example, and each of the three offered its own special techniques – Buddhist Chan meditation or devotional Pure Land spiritual exercises, Daoist meditative exercises, or Confucian moral self-cultivation. But they were not considered separate. For most of Chinese history, people believe in an amalgam of these faiths that is best described as 'Chinese Religion.'
"In fact, the concept of thinking of oneself as part of a discrete and clearly definable religious system was so foreign to Chinese that when modernizers wanted to reorganize society using Western norms one hundred years ago, they had to import the vocabulary from the West. Turning to Japan, which had started a similar discussion a generation earlier, they imported words like zongjiao (religion) and mixin (superstition). Before that, there was little idea of religion being separate from society or government. It was all one and the same. It was how you lived. It was what you did.
"This is reflected in theology's small role. In religions like Christianity, theologians argue passionately over issues like the Trinity or original sin, using tools provided by Greek logic and metaphysics. The same goes for Judaism or Islam, where scholars argue over doctrines or ways of behaving, engaging in epic debates. China has a long history, so it is possible to find exceptions – such as a famous debate in the court of a sixth-century emperor between proponents of Buddhism and Daoism (the Daoists lost, and the Buddhists wrote a book called Xiaodaolun, or 'Laughing at the Daoists'). By and large, however, these kinds of discussions were rare. Most people saw them as pointless.
"What did interest Chinese were rituals – in other words, the pragmatic but profound issue of how to behave. As the historian David Johnson puts it in his book Spectacle and Sacrifice,
" 'Chinese culture was a performance culture . . . Chinese philosophers were concerned more with how people should act, and what counted as good actions, than with using logic to prove propositions. Ritual was the highest form of action or performances; every significant life event, social, political, or religious, was embedded in and expressed through ritual.' "
