| With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, during fall of 1988 the editors of this volume organized a weekly symposium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to investigate some of the interactions between religion and society during the T'ang and Sung dynasties. Our larger goal was to work toward a more holistic and integrated understanding of Chinese culture. Diversity and variation we knew existed, but we wanted to learn more about how diverse ideas and practices coexisted and worked together to create, maintain, and reproduce the larger whole. Participants were asked to look especially for evidence of interconnections: links between social and religious changes, between political or economic developments and religious ideas or practices, between folk religion and institutional religion, between Confucian philosophy and changes in the social and religious landscape, between the ways religious and secular groups were organized. They were also asked to think about how power of various sorts shaped these interconnections. In October 1989 we reassembled many of the symposium participants for a conference at Hsi-lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California. All of the chapters in this volume were first presented at that conference. |
| In preparing the work presented in this volume, the authors and editors have incurred many debts. The support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Office of International Programs and Studies of the University of Illinois made it possible for us to invite many highly knowledgeable scholars to participate in the symposium or conference in addition to those represented in this volume. These include Timothy Barrett, Carl Bielefeldt, Raoul Birnbaum, Peter Bol, Beverly Bossler, Kaiwing Chow, Edward Davis, Ruth Dunnell, Bernard Faure, Robert Gimello, Robert Hymes, Lionel Jensen, Miriam Levering, Wai-yi Li, Victor Mair, John McRae, Daniel Overmyer, William Powell, Gregory Schopen, Gary Seaman, Lynn Struve, and Richard von Glahn. Each of the chapters that makes up this volume owes much to the insights, analyses, and critiques these scholars contributed to our intense and wide-ranging discussions of religion and society in the T'ang and the Sung. The two reviewers for the University of Hawaii Press made a number of helpful suggestions that have improved the volume as a whole. We also |
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