Chinese Poly-Ontology: Rethinking Religious Pluralism through China

Abstract

This intervention aims to question the notion of religious pluralism by confronting it with the case of China, which has never known the monopoly of a single religion, and where the coexistence of a plurality of traditions has for centuries been a principle. official management of religion, both by the state and by religious institutions themselves and local communities. However, this pluralism does not envisage the freedom and mutual tolerance of independent entities, but the interpenetration, even the interweaving of cosmological systems and practices which keep their internal coherence and identity. This logic applies as well to the relationships between the 'three teachings' of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, as, in contemporary times, for the relationship between these traditions and the Marxist atheism of the communist state. However, these traditions and ideologies are often, by their ontological foundations, radically incompatible with each other. Drawing inspiration from the “ontological turn” in anthropology, we will try, through ethnographic examples on popular religion, on new religious movements and on the relations between state and religion, to model different logics of “poly -ontological ”in the Chinese world.