About this book:

*Court, Clergy, and Canon: Religion, Ritual, and the State in Chinese History* provides a comprehensive analysis of the symbiotic and often contentious relationship between religious institutions and state power from the Shang dynasty to the post-Mao era. The book argues that Chinese state formation was inherently a sacral project, where the "Mandate of Heaven" and Confucian bureaucracy functioned alongside Buddhist monastic estates and Daoist celestial hierarchies. By examining Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and popular religion as an entangled "Three Teachings" framework, the text demonstrates how ritual acted as a primary technology of governance, social welfare, and moral education.

The middle chapters detail the institutionalization of the sacred through statecraft. The authors explore the development of official cults, the rigorous registration of clergy to manage tax immunities, and the role of monasteries as economic engines and providers of social relief during crises like drought and plague. Significant attention is paid to the "Song Synthesis," where the scholar-official class reworked religious aesthetics and ethics into a Neo-Confucian social order, and the subsequent Ming and Qing efforts to codify orthodoxy through massive scriptural printing projects and legal suppression of "heretical" sects.

The final section addresses the radical transformations of the twentieth century, tracing the shift from imperial patronage to revolutionary secularization. From the Republican era’s "temples-into-schools" campaigns to the systematic destruction of the Cultural Revolution, the state sought to modernize by marginalizing "superstition." However, the book concludes with the post-Mao religious revival, illustrating how traditional practices have reemerged through the lenses of heritage, tourism, and digital innovation. Ultimately, the work suggests that despite radical political shifts, the fundamental grammar of Chinese life remains a negotiation between state authority and the irrepressible human impulse toward the sacred.