Part III - The Chinese Jesus

Summary

With respect to religion, China is viewed as a melting pot of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Since the seventh century Christianity has also played a small role here and Christians appear to have seen parallels with Jesus in the Buddhist bodhisattvas especially. Now that China is opening up religiously, there is a tendency to link Christianity with religious motifs that have always played a role in China. One can think here of the story about the emperor who, according to a famous passage in Confucius' Analectica, takes the place of his people before the god, Heaven, because of their sins. Or one could think of the way in which “word” and “path,” which remind us of John's gospel, can mean the same in Taoism and represent the connection between ethics and mysticism. The same practical slant that characterizes Confucianism and Taoism can be detected in the Chinese variant of Buddhism, Ch'an Buddhism, which is strikingly similar to Japanese Zen Buddhism. In China, religion appears to have to do with very common everyday things, and it is only with difficulty that it displays the detachment so strongly present in Buddhism elsewhere. With the exception of a few forms of Tao Christology, up until now China has not really developed a contextual theology in which new meanings of Jesus are sought candidly against the background of its own rich religious tradition.