Han Chinese Culture Essay

However, Buddhism was also attractive to the Mongols. Although reluctant by the high intellectualism of the Ch'an school, the Mongols were attracted to the more magical and symbolic practices of Tibetan Buddhism. Although Tibetan Buddhism was favored under the Mongol Dynasty, Chinese Buddhism generally suffered during this period. In about 1300 the number of monks throughout China was estimated at 500,000, and was probably much greater during the last decades of Mongol rule.

7. Religion in the Ming Dynasty

Among the populace there were strong feelings against the rule of "the foreigners," . By the Ming period, Taoism and Buddhism had become poorly organized popular religions. What little organization they had was controlled by the state.

Chinese religions in general do not place as much emphasis as Christianity or Ismal does on exclusivity and doctrine.

Han Chinese culture is marked by a "harmonious holism" in which religious systems encompass elements that grow, change, and transform but remain within an organic whole. Ritual is another key characteristic, a tendency that scholars see as extending back to Neolithic times, when rituals of sacrifice and burial were adopted as moral, social, and political norms. From earliest times Chinese tended to be all-embracing rather than to treat different religious traditions as separate and independent. The scholar Xinzhong Yao argues that the term "Chinese religion", therefore, does not imply that there is only one religious system, but that the "different ways of believing and practicing... are rooted in and can be defined by culturally common themes and features", and that "different religious streams and strands have formed a culturally unitary single tradition" in which basic concepts and practices are