Religion 40 (2010) 239249

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Religion
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/religion

Mind and mood in the study of religionq

James W. Laine*
Religious Studies Dept., Macalester College, 1600 Grand Avenue, St Paul, Minnesota, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper is a reection on the attempt of authors like E. Valentine Daniel, S.Balagangadhara, Daniel
Accepted 1 September 2010 Dubuisson, Timothy Fitzgerald and Tomoko Masuzawa to argue that the word religion is most
Available online 8 October 2010 appropriately used to describe Christianity but that it tends to distort description and analysis of non-
western traditions. My concern is to correct their tendency to divide the world between east and west by
Keywords: using Daniels (and C.S. Peirces) notions of Mind and Mood to analyze a variety of religious traditions,
Mind
east and west, that fulll different social and cultural functions, and thus relate to denitions of words
Mood
like religion and dharma and shukyo in a variety of ways.
Meta-religion
Dharma 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Shukyo

Heritage as an ontic reality and mythic certainty has been dislodged...E. Valentine Daniel (1996: 70)
.people constantly try, as it were, to gather together elements that they think belong, or should belong, to the notion of religion. People
use particular conceptions of religion in social life...Talal Asad (Shaikh, 2002)

What is religion?

In 1999, I had the honor of responding to a presentation by the anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel (Daniel, 2000; Laine, 2000). His work is
by turns philosophic and anecdotal, solemn and humorous, and in all these moods, studded with insights (Daniel, 1984, 1996). However,
given my employment as a professor of religious studies, a specialist in the religions of India, I was surprised and dismayed when the bulk of
his address was devoted to the proposition that people in pre-colonial India and Sri Lanka did not have a religion, and that they only
invented religions when they adopted that concept from their colonial masters.1 Religion was a Christian thing, an alien import to the
Hindus and Buddhists of South Asia. That proposition is no longer surprising, as over the last decade, a number of scholars have pursued
similar lines of inquiry (Asad, 2001; Dubuisson, 2003; Fitzgerald, 2009; Masuzawa, 2005). I myself have written on various anachronistic
usages of the words religion and Hinduism, and on the shifts of meaning of words like dharma and din (Laine, 1999, 2003: 1318). But I
believe that the issues imbedded in these claims deserve still further reection.
Recently, I went back again to review Daniels lecture, and though I still have quibbles with it, nd myself in profound sympathy with
what he was trying to do. Nonetheless, I will in this essay attempt to show why I believe that although denitions of religion are so hard to
defend, and that although the word religion does not have a precise equivalent in many South Asian (and other non-European) languages,
it is a word we cannot usefully escape, even when working outside the context of Christianity. In my view, the cleavage that Daniel exposes is
not so much a cleavage between the religion of Christianity (taken as a whole) and Asian (especially South Asian) traditions that he argues
are not religions, as it is a cleavage between styles of religious life that have yet to be classied.2 There may be an important cleavage, but

q I delivered a very early version of this paper on April 8, 2003, when I assumed the Arnold H. Lowe Chair in Religious Studies at Macalester College. I am grateful to my
predecessor Calvin Roetzel, and to Mary Lee Dayton and her family for endowing the professorship.
* Corresponding author. Tel.:1 651 696 6789; fax: 651 696 6008
1
Compare Tomoko Masuzawas (2005: 7) comment on the professional disincentive for professors of religious studies to raise critical questions about the very category of
religion.
2
J.Z. Smith (2004: 174) argues: So classify we must though we can learn from the past to eschew dual classications such as that between universal and ethnic or the
host of related dualisms, all of which nally reduce to ours and theirs. I will pursue a dualism in the thought of Daniel, but hope to rescue it from the structure of ours
(South Asian) and yours (Christian).

0048-721X/$ see front matter 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.religion.2010.09.001
240 J.W. Laine / Religion 40 (2010) 239249

the opposing parts are divided neither by geography (Western/Asian), nor by history (post-colonial/pre-colonial). What I will argue is that
characterizing, as Daniel does, the whole of Christianity as a religion meaning that it is a cultural discourse dominated by concern with
doctrine and matters of mind in order to oppose it to the traditions of pre-colonial Asia, which deal in matters of mood, is a misleading
simplication. The categories of mind and mood do, however, prove useful in articulating some of the differences between different reli-
gious practices among a wide variety of pre-modern and contemporary folk, and help us appreciate why for one group, matters of mind may
be the very heart of religion (to be distinguished from popular culture, unexamined tradition and superstition), while for another group,
matters of mood (Daniels heritage as ontic certainty) are a primary locus of things held sacred. As Talal Asad notes, different people nd
different denitions of religion useful for their different projects.3
Nowadays Daniels argument, that traditional South Asian Hindus and Buddhists did not have religions an argument he derives in part
form the work of S.N. Balagangadhara (1994)ddoes not seem so revolutionary, at least to scholars. It follows broad trends of scholarship in
the study of South Asia that, for example, challenge portrayals of Hinduism that reify and homogenize what is clearly a diverse and complex
tradition (von Stietencron, 1989; King, 1999, 96-117), or portrayals of Buddhism that are overly textual and philosophical (King, 1999, 143
160; Almond, 1988). Balagangadhara argues that pioneers in the study of comparative religion were rst convinced that religion was
a universal category of experience, then continually expanded the denition to be more inclusive whenever they came across cultures,
especially Asian cultures, where the traditions did not seem to correspond to an earlier denition of religion (Balagangadhara, 1994, 2327).
Whereas W.C. Smith (1962: 4748) famously argued for an abandonment of the word religion to refer to both traditions of the West and
Asia, Staal (1989: 390) argued that the western denition of the term was narrow and parochial. Balagangadhara will have none of it. If Asian
languages from Sanskrit to Japanese have had to import neologisms to render the word religion, they have had to import the whole idea
(Balagangadhara, 1994, 315). For him and for Daniel, Christianity is a religion par excellence, while the traditions of India are quite something
else. Daniel has argued that a non-believing Christian would be an oxymoron of the rst order and several authors (Balagangadhara, 1994,
260; Burghart and Cantlie 1985, viii; Daniel, 2000:172) have argued that while Christians make proclamations of faith in a creedal way (I
believe in God and His Son Jesus Christ), a similar formula (I believe in Visnu) would be quite bizarre. I would argue, however, that while
the American evangelical Christian might inquire whether one is a Christian and believes in Jesus Christ, a Mexican peasant on pilgrimage
might be living her Christian religious life following folkways far less different to those of the Vaisnava pilgrim than Balagangadhara or
Daniel might suggest.4 It certainly is commonsense to assume that a peasant in Mexico placing owers before a statue of the Virgin Mary is
engaged in a cultural practice rather similar to that of an Indian peasant who places owers before an image of the Goddess. Why is only one
of them religious? Of course, may be neither of them are religious in the sense that religion refers to private, personal articulations that
characterize individualist Protestantism since the late seventeenth century, the position developed by Timothy Fitzgerald (2007: 20 ff; 231
265), but in seeking to distinguish an Indian way of life from that of Christians, Daniel and Balagangadhara have, in other words, essen-
tialized Christianity.5 Daniel analyzes the differences between Augustine and Aquinas but ignores comparable Hindu thinkers like Ramanuja
or Udayana6, preferring to portray the piety of Hindus through thick descriptions of their practices. Oddly enough then, Daniel contrasts an
ethnographically described Hinduism to a purely textual Christianity in an essay where he invokes his teacher Victor Turner, an ethnog-
rapher of both African indigenous traditions and traditional Catholicism. Of course, in linking the Catholicism of Mexico or Ireland with pre-
Christian roots in the practice of pilgrimage, Turner avoids the sharp distinction that one would pose between Christianity as religio and
paganism as traditio (Turner and Turner, 1978). And he erases any sharp divide between Christianity and non-European traditions.
One might argue that, rightly or wrongly, the study of religion emerged as a separate academic discipline and important eld of inquiry
because it was held to be an aspect of human experience misconstrued by reductionist social scientists. It came of age in secular envi-
ronments. Thus religion is named, articulated and analyzed precisely in those environments when its hegemony is gone.7 In such a con-
tested setting, some wondered whether religion was perhaps both reducible to a core of numinous experience, and thus only
comprehensible to those with a cultivated aptitude for understanding that experience? Such a suggestion governs the trajectory of Religious
Studies that runs from Schleiermacher to Otto (1958) to Eliade and it is one that depends on the rather mystical assertion of some core
religious experience, some gnosis that confers a vision not available to ordinary folk. This construal is the primary target of Daniel Dubuisson
(2003: 8788; 2005, passim) and numerous other scholars uncomfortable with pseudo-theology masquerading as a scientic study of
religion. In many ways that trajectory began to be a scholarly quest not for religion as commonly practiced and understood, but some
abstract transcendental mystery. The mystery can be deciphered by the scholar, or by popularizing mystagogues (Joseph Cambell, 195968;
Thomas Moore, 1992; Karen Armstrong, 1993 8), providing a kind of poetic, private religious experience unburdened by history, tradition,
community. Steven Wasserstrom has called the enterprise of Eliade and the colleagues with whom he collaborated at Carl Jungs Eranos
Seminar, the quest for religion after religion (Wasserstrom, 1999), a private spirituality mediated not by institution or culture, but

3
Cf. Talal Asad (1993: 28) and p. 167: .it does not seem to me to make good sense to say that ritual behavior stands universally in opposition to behavior that is ordinary
or pragmatic, any more than religion stands in contrast to reason or to (social) science. In various epochs and societies, the domains of life are variously articulated, and each
of them articulates endeavors that are appropriate to it. How these articulations are constructed and policed, and what happens when they are changed (forcibly or
otherwise), are all questions for anthropological inquiry.
4
Compare Daniels account of South Indian pilgrimage (1994: 245287) with Turner and Turners account of the Irish pilgrimage to Lough Derg (1978: 104139). Both of
these pilgrimages, one Hindu and one Christian, are ascetic in nature and serve to still the mind.
5
See Daniels own critique of essentialism, which he extends to the hidden and ironic essentialist tendencies of constructivist anthropologists (Daniel, 1996: 1314).
6
Cf John B. Carman (1974), Joy Laine (1998) and C. Ram-Prasad (2007) for a brief sample of the growing body of work on the technical aspects of Indian theology and
philosophy. B.K. Matilal was perhaps the most noteworthy scholar of Indian logic and epistemology, which he describes as having an uncomfortable afnity with Aris-
totelian philosophy (Matilal, 1985: 1).
7
Again, Fitzgerald (2007: 2024; 231265) stresses that discourses of religion and secularism frame each other and enable each other after the seventeenth century.
8
See McCutcheons critique of Joseph Campbell (McCutcheon, 2001: 43ff), a critique that he applies similarly to the popular works of Karen Armstrong (1993) (4355).
Armstrongs enormously popular bestseller, A History of God (1993), combines a laymans survey of biblical scholarship and the history of theology in the monotheistic
traditions with a kind of pop-theology based on the mystical rejection of the adequacy of language (xxi, 397) and the condent assumption that fundamentalism is
idolatry (399). McCutcheon sees Armstrong as the popularizer of the ideas of Otto and Eliade, that religion is an utterly unique and fundamental aspect of all human
experience (46). A History of God is also, says McCutcheon, a personal quest for a more adequate conception of deity for the religiously and culturally pluralistic late
twentieth century written by a liberal religious devotee.. (52).
 J.W. Laine / Religion 40 (2010) 239249 241

a timeless treasure hidden within the testimony of historical religions. In assuming that what characterized religion was its relation to the
transcendent, such writers emphasized the extraordinary and thus ignored and subtly denigrated the common religious practices of
everyday life, practices which are often matters of mood. In Wasserstroms portrayal, Eliade et al. might have had political interests, even
insidious ones, but for their readers, they offered simply a spiritual and intellectually satisfying way of drawing from many religions, while
remaining above them all. Given that such a move resulted in increasing abstraction, it is not surprising that Daniel and his fellow
anthropologists have attended to aspects of religious culture that a previous generation of scholars in the study of religion neglected.
If we cannot boil religion down to some common source or primitive origin, or to some transcendental core of mystical experience, we
are left with a tangle of questions about just what post-colonial scholars are searching for in Kyoto or Bali, or for that matter, London or
Waco. Rituals? Divinities? Ideologies? Techniques of ecstasy? What is religion? What is philosophy? What is politics masquerading as
religion? Is the American pledge of allegiance to the ag religious? What is folk tradition? Is Halloween a Holy Day or a holiday?9 Does it
matter? And is there a way beyond asking the question of whether this tradition or that is really a religion by asking less loaded questions
about how they function in society?
In pursuing the moods of everyday life and the meta-religious underpinning of politics and bourgeois intellectual life, I am proposing the
broadest possible context for the study of religion and culture in opposition to projects that would restrict the denition of religion and
narrow the purview of those who study the religious dimensions of culture in all societies, east and west, ancient and modern. It is my
contention that it is only within such a broad context that we avoid facile contrasts, especially egregious in Balagangadhara and Dubuisson,
as well as improper comparisons.

Mind and mood

For several decades, scholars have approached the study of religion from the perspective of identity.10 What is it that shapes a persons
sense of self most profoundly? (And if that is the question, why shouldnt Maoism or feminism be religions as much as Presbyterianism or
Islam).11Here we see a certain split in the way religion is dened, a split that brings us back to Daniel. Daniel contrasts religion to the
cultural acts we are tempted to call religion in traditional India, using for his examples a Hindu wedding in New Jersey where the priest
provided scriptural exegesis for all his actionsdand a wedding in a South Indian village, where the priest is left alone to do his part. In New
Jersey, the religious ritual was an occasion for rapt attention while in South India, the wedding guests concentrated on socializing. He
describes the scene in South India where the guests were
. making alliances, looking for prospective brides and grooms for sons and daughters, gossiping, rehearsing old prejudices and trying
out new ones, testing each others skills and poise, status and grace, taking measure of each others place in an evolving order of things,
transgressing maps of old privileges with stories of new ones. (Daniel, 2000: 179)
In New Jersey something more religious is taking place:
. the priest wanted the recitations and rituals to mean something, and the members of the audience expected them to mean something;
at the weddings in South India, priest and participants considered the recitations and rituals signicant but meaningless..(Daniel, 2000:
1745)
What he is contrasting is a Hindu wedding conducted in a culturally alien environment in which the religious elements begged an
explanation and exegesis, and a wedding in South India, where similar rituals needed no explanation because they had the quality of
timelessness, and were taken-for-granted and seamlessly interwoven with a whole range of cultural interactions. He notes that in New
Jersey, children were few in number, in their places, but out of place whereas in South India, they were ubiquitous, everywhere and in
place (Daniel, 2000: 173). In other words, where the religious elements were articulated and explained, children could neither understand
nor enter in, but where such elements were part of the atmosphere, children were a welcome part of the overall festivities. Developing
a distinction drawn from the semeiotics of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, Daniel portrays the rst wedding as governed by mood, the
second, by mind.12For those readers interested in the philosophical background to Daniels ideas, the following brief excursus on Peirce
may elucidate Daniels distinctions; others may wish to skip the following section.

Peirces triadic phenomenology

Daniel develops a vocabulary of mood, moment and mind to correspond to the triadic phenomenology of experience that Charles
Sanders Peirce refers to as Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, or elsewhere as icon, index, and symbol.13 Peirce seems primarily concerned
with articulating the interdependent aspects of experience. If the icon, characterized by Firstness, is a sign of quality, and the index, a fact or
object that carries that quality, only the symbol is a sign interpreted with respect to the way it refers to an object. Interpretation then, is
added to the monadic and dyadic relations of iconic and indexical signs to form the full triadic sign relation. This triadic relation implies that

9
Note that some reform-minded evangelicals are unhappy with Halloween as a pagan holiday and replace it with more religious practices, especially the visiting of
Hell Houses. The documentary Hell House analyzes the Christian haunted house at Trinity Assembly of God near Dallas, Texas (cf. www.hellhousethemovie.com). For an
example of the unselfconscious use of pagan to describe Halloween, see Kozlowski 2002. Compare the contrasting understandings of Halloween to the following discussion
of two types of Hindu weddings.
10
See, for example, Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism; Hindus and Muslims in India (1994).
11
Dubuisson (2003: 195213) would be happy with a most inclusive program, as long as we avoid the label religion and use instead the technical term of cosmographic
formations. Several critics have wondered whether that linguistic precision changes very much.
12
Daniel (1996: 10434) has a long discussion of the triad mood, moment and mind that is rather more abstract than the descriptions I quote here. I have neglected his
notion of moment, since it does not relate directly to the question of the reication of religion. Mind and mood also correspond to another conceptual pair in Daniel (1996:
4767), the epistemic and the ontic. Cf notes 14 and 19 below.
13
Cf Peirce 1960: 1.2326 (pp. 78); and Carl R. Hausman, 1993: 914.
242 J.W. Laine / Religion 40 (2010) 239249

icons and indexes are not intelligible until they are given place in a system of interpretation (Hausman, 1993, 1314). For my analysis, it is
not necessary to get caught up in the technicalities of Peirces semeiotic. Fundamentally, his concern is to articulate the movement from
signs that bear quality and potentiality, to the brute fact or object, to the fully-edged symbol that relates the indexical sign to a web of
meaning and interpretation. In my reading, only with the completion of the triadic relationship is there a specic instance of meaning,
a moment when a particular fact or object is comprehended in a particular context.
Daniel, however, seems to want to evaluate more normatively the elements of the triad, reversing perhaps the European or Enlight-
enment bias of valuing Thirdness as the fruition of the meaning-making process of coordinating signs. In a spirit that may not correspond to
the Peircian project, Daniel protects Firstness from such a bias: In considering mood as a relative First, then, I think of its connotations of
a state of feeling usually vague, defuse and enduring, a disposition toward the world at any particular time yet with a timeless quality to
it. (Daniel, 1996: 104). Without such qualities, ritual suffers from a surfeit of mind (Daniel, 2000: 180). But more importantly, he wants
to uphold mood as a dimension to human experience that is ontic, and not overly theorized: this entails more than knowing the world
through seeing the world; it calls for knowing the world through a more comprehensive being-in-the-world.. (Daniel, 2000:181-2).
The sort of completion one sees in Peirces analysis of experience, ending in Thirdness or fully interpreted symbol making, involving webs
of signication, is not for Daniel the desired and desirable conclusion. He says of theory:
The very image evoked by the notion of a higher level of analysis privileges the optic. Why would one want to rise to a higher level except
to be able to have wider perspective, a better view? Theory itself has its roots in the Greek thea, which means to see. And what is more,
one always theorizes about something. Aboutness is basic to theory. And aboutness is also basic to religion, especially Christianity.
The scientist and the Christian have this one thing in common. They are committed to a form of knowledge that has to do with knowing
about.(Daniel, 2000: 178)
At this point, it seems to me that Daniel has left Peirce behind. Where Peirce wanted to see the interdependent nature of semeiotic modes
(icon, index, symbol), Daniel wants to develop a language of mind and mood that denigrates the former and glories the latter as a relatively
independent dimension of experience. In what follows, we see that Daniels categories of mind and mood may not be so much technical
terms in a Peircian semeiotic as they are a rich evocation of the differences between religion as theology, and religion/culture as the arena of
ethos: taken-for-granted values, styles, skills and heritage. And that distinction is one articulated by other scholars in vocabularies similar to,
but not identical with, the terminology found in Daniels work.

Overthinking the ritual: Hindus and Catholics

We can now see now why Daniel denes the New Jersey wedding as religionish (infected, presumably, by Christianity) whereas the
South Indian wedding is not about religion, especially since the rst case involves explicit reference to the Hindu Religion whereas the
second makes no such reference. The rst case has a religious ritual clearly marked off in space and time from the party, while the second
sees the ritual as more integrated with the overall festivities. Moreover, it is clear from Daniels tone that he sees the New Jersey wedding as
awkward and inauthentic. It has been tainted by the Christian tendency to load ritual with theory, theology, ideology, to become doctrinaire,
whereas back in the good old village, rituals have mood, ow naturally, and are not burdened by religion.
It is easy to satirize the clumsiness of awkward American rituals, where every act is explained, heightening the self-consciousness of the
participants, and no gesture is allowed to work on its own. Often this is a matter of reform. Reformers view older, engrained acts or ritual
phrases as either empty or as encoding meanings or values to be challenged. Established, practiced, uid acts are now automatic and
mindless, the reformer complains; lets wake everyone up. For the reformer, mind trumps mood, and ritual becomes a sermon in code.14
But Daniels lament that this is a Christian thing puzzles me, for I have seen almost the same complaint in the writings of Catholic critics. I
am thinking particularly of popular writers Garry Wills (Wills, 1972) and Richard Rodriguez (1983), but also of the historian of religion
Robert Orsi and the anthropologist Mary Douglas. Both Wills and Rodriguez describe the Latin Mass in the same nostalgic terms that Daniel
uses to describe the traditional South Indian wedding. The Catholic layman before the reforms of Vatican II, says Wills, came to Mass in order
. to do things witness the miracle, and believe in it; consume the eucharist and believe in that. Belief had been ritualized; it was not
a thing one heard about or held by the intellect, but a rite to be gone through..(Wills, 1972, 71; my italics)
Wills speaks of the change in the Masss choreography (75), shattering many a Catholic laymans faith. Rodriguez holds on, but barely:
Now I go to mass every Sunday. Old habits persist. But it is an English mass I attend, a ritual of words. A ritual that seeks to feed my mind
and would starve my somewhat metaphorical soul. The mass is less ornamental; it has been modernized, tampered with, demythol-
ogized, deated..(Rodriguez, 1983, 101; my italics)
Thus for Wills and Rodriguez, as for Daniel, the older traditions, characterized by assured gesture, choreography and mood, have given
way to something characterized by mind. The latter is intellectual, constructed, self-conscious and awkward. The seamless traditional world
is one populated by skilled players, the new world by stumbling initiates. I would submit, then, that what Daniel calls religion, this Christian
thing, is in fact that style of religion produced by cultural change and cross-cultural encounter. That style might be a product of the Protestant
Reformation, and more especially the dissenting thinkers of the seventeenth century15, and thus a particular type of Christianity16 that in
turn affected religious life in the South Asian diaspora and other places affected by colonialism. But self-conscious, ideological religion surely
shows up in other contexts as well, as we shall see below.

14
Talal Asad (1993: 5579) has traced the way rituals have come to be understood as symbols to be interpreted rather than as abilities to be acquired (62).
15
Cf Fitzgerald 2007: 923.
16
For an example of Dubuissons tendency to assign a very particular and essentialized character to the whole of Christianity, cf. 2003:14: Our idea of religion derives from
this unprecedented division of the real and its ideological valorization.. This is something no other civilization would ever do on its own.
 J.W. Laine / Religion 40 (2010) 239249 243

In his book The Madonna of 115th Street, Robert Orsi writes of Irish clergymen, troubled by the noise and food and emotion in the
presence of the sacred that they saw in the street festival of the Italian-American Catholics in New York City in the 1940s (Orsi, 1985: 231).
Just as Daniel nds an important difference between a New Jersey wedding where party and religious ritual are kept distinct, and a South
Indian wedding where they merge, Orsi notes that Irish reformers tried to ban the outdoor festival associated with the feast day of Our Lady
of Mount Carmel. More broadly, Orsi, like Daniel, wants to reclaim a notion of ritual that bears mood from those who see it as a code of
symbols to be deciphered, a puzzle for the mind:
I wanted to make a contribution to the project of understanding what Catholicism is. Popular devotions . are not very popular among
those who articulate the meanings of Catholicism. Usually such devotions are not even mentioned by theologians in their discussions of
the nature of Catholicism. But I think that in the sensuous, graphic and complicated piety of the people of Italian Harlem we see an
expression of something primitive and essential in Catholicism itself.(Orsi, 1985: xxi-xxii, my italics.)
So the theologically minded Irish priests who disparage popular Italian piety, are at one with the Hindu priest of New Jersey, seeking to
arrogate rituals with articulated theological meaning, above the sensuous and graphic, the embodied piety of mood. And moreover, the
complex piety of the Harlem Italian is one with that of the Tamil villager; both rather ignore their priest and his formalities and give primary
importance to social rituals.
This was the beginning of a twenty-year project for Orsi to capture the spirit (mood?) of popular (especially Italian-American)
Catholicism. In his most recent book, Between Heaven and Earth (2005), he has fully articulated a distinction, not between mind and mood,
but between a religion of presence and a religion of reformist ideas. Echoing Rodriguez, he contrasts the post-Vatican II religion to the
older devotionalism:
Above all, the reformers insisted that popular devotions, if they were to remain a feature of the post-Conciliar American Catholic Church
at all, be surrounded by words: one way of understanding the transitions of the early 1960s, which continue to shape the intellectual
climate of contemporary studies of American Catholicism, is a shift from an ethos of presence and sacred intimacy toward a culture
bounded by and even obsessed with, words..(Orsi, 2005: 157; my italics)
Orsi is not, ostensibly at least, criticizing reformers and praising traditionalists, any more than Daniel is, but as with Daniels project, there
is besides a palpable nostalgia, the call to be clear about just what it is that we study and exclude from study. In the conclusion of Between
Heaven and Earth, he offers a broad prescription for the study of religion that would not ignore the religion of presence, would not, indeed,
exclude it from consideration out of a desire to legitimate good religion from the perverse traditions not represented in academic circles:
Outside the walls of the academy, the winds of religious madness howled (in the view of those inside)dre-baptized people, ghost
dancers, frenzied preachers, and gullible masses, Mormons and Roman Catholics (Orsi, 2005:186). Lets bring them all back into our
purview, says Orsi, not construct a purer, more liberal religion, prescribing while pretending to describe.
If Orsis religion of presence has signicant overlap with what Daniel assigns to the category of mood, he also refers to the putatively
acceptable true religion as emotionally controlled, a reality of mind and spirit not body and matter (Orsi, 2005:188, my emphasis).
One last Roman Catholic example of the piety of mood. Mary Douglas in her essay on The Bog Irish (Douglas, 1996: 37-53) describes the
way the practice of Friday abstinence from eating meat gave Irish immigrants to England a sense of their identity as Irish and Catholic,17 thus
shifting the primary meaning of the practice from the theological sphere, where one abstains as an ascetic act, in solidarity with Christ who
suffered and died on Friday, to one where eating sh is a reminder of ethnic identity. Douglas laments that when reformist Catholic bishops
in the 1960s did away with required abstinence, on the grounds that it had lost its theological meaning (and suggesting instead a donation to
the poor), they deprived their ock of something Daniel would describe as signicant but meaningless (Daniel, 2000:175):
Alas for the child from the personal home who longs for non-verbal forms of relationship but has only been equipped with words and
a contempt for ritual forms. By rejecting ritualized speech he rejects his own faculty for pushing back the boundary between inside and
outside so as to incorporate in himself a patterned social world..(Douglas, 1996:53)
Douglas thus captures the possibility that ritual is not a code for deeper meanings that can be articulated verbally. And like Daniel, she
sees the unreformed ritual as an arena where one is not learning about theology. Daniel echoes her:
I am not saying that there is no learning involved in the weddings I witnessed in South India, but the manner of making ones way in
the world, of making ones environment habitable, wasnt dominated by learning about. Learning through being-in-the-world,
learning ontologically, entails more than a way of seeing the world, or learning epistemically. It is not that the representations were
not involved in the total context of the 1974 Tamil wedding, but that the individual was not a mere observer, one who looked at and,
if adequately educated, looked through the representations . as if they were mirrors that would reect a further reality.(Daniel,
2000: 181)18

Christianity: the Mindful Religion ?

Daniel assumes that the category of religion, appropriate for Christianity, has been misapplied to traditional cultures of South Asia and
elsewhere. In this argument he follows Balagangadhara, who traced the emergence of the category of religion to the Roman world, where
Christianity distinguished itself, as religio, from the traditio of paganism. In claiming their place, Christians asserted the correctness of their

17
As a rejoinder to Daniels assertion that a non-believing Christian would be an oxymoron, we might well nd among Douglass informants Irish who could imagine not
believing in God before they could imagine not being Catholic; or rather, their membership in the Catholic Church has more to do with belonging than believing.
18
Compare Daniels contrast between traditional and modern approaches to the past: From the depths of the onticdbeing-in-the-worldd in which the consciousness of
heritage and history had distinguishable dispositions and orientations toward the past, traditional historic consciousness was goaded by modern history to renounce being
and enter the domain of knowing, of epistemology, of seeing. (Daniel, 1996:47).
244 J.W. Laine / Religion 40 (2010) 239249

doctrine, claiming superiority on the playing eld of theology and philosophy, thus giving priority to mind over mood. He notes that though
pagan thinkers might intellectually have doubts about the existence of the gods, they nonetheless maintained the ancestral practices. Thus
pagans and Christians valued different things. The Christian valued orthodoxy, the pagan, tradition. As Christians excised religio from
traditio, the two talked passed each other.
A pagan could understand the question: Are you faithfully following your ancestral practice? But no pagan could answer the charge that
his ancestral practice itself was false. How could tradition be true or false? (Balagangadhara, 1994 63)
In other words, Balagangadhara wants to see the birth of religion, with its emphasis on theology, as contained in the narrative of the
emergence of Christianity in the Roman world. For him, the Roman world, with its traditional practices, and inclusive pluralism, was like the
South Asian world, a place without religion. Dubuisson, though he does not reference Balagangadhara, makes the same argument: [r]
eligion, in its capacity as a concept designating . a distinct domain . is the exclusive and original product of the rst Christian thinkers
writing in Latin .. (Dubuisson, 2003: 24). But again, as both Balagangadhara and Daniel put theology and belief at the heart of Christianity
in order to contrast it with more praxis-oriented traditions in South Asia, could it not be the case that they are, along with Dubusisson,
essentializing Christianity and overlooking places where Christians themselves de-emphasize belief? I would argue that the experience and
arguments of Christians as a minority sect in Rome, self-conscious about their differences with the mainstream civic culture, cannot be
compared with the life of Christians living in the thoroughly Christian world of medieval Europe. And again, Reformed Christianity might
assume that there must be a renewed emphasis on Christian belief to counter the tendency of the majority culture to take Christianity for
granted, as a matter of ethnic identity and cultural conformity.19
In this context one might note that the word Christian can even come to mean human person as opposed to brutes, as we discover
from investigating the etymology of the word cretin. Cretin, derived from the French word for Christian and meaning idiot today, began as
a Swiss euphemism applied to a class of dwarfed and specially deformed idiots found in certain valleys of the Alps and elsewhere. (Oxford
English Dictionary, 1961, II: 1168). In other words, in an attempt to classify these unfortunate people as human beings, the Swiss called them
Christians, presumably not on the basis of their theological declarations of faith, but as a declaration of their humanity. Oddly enough, Orsi
notes similarly that Italian and Italian-American peasants, beaten down by poverty, longed to attain respectability, a process they described
as becoming Christians (Orsi, 1985: 155, 191).
If medieval Christians, once in the possession of political power and cultural hegemony, could begin to practice their traditions in ways
that de-emphasized belief; if they became, as their Protestant critics would later assert, more like pagans20, what about the other side of the
world? Can we nd outside Europe examples of people for whom religion is self-conscious and ideological, a matter of mind, rather than the
taken-for-granted traditions governed by mood? Let us consider two sites, both Asian, and both pre-colonial, which saw a self-conscious,
ideological religion take its place along side the more taken-for-granted variety. The rst is India and the second, Japan.

India and Japan: contesting dharma and shukyo

We can begin with India, since it is there that Daniel nds a culture without religion and where the words religion and Hinduism
are sometimes claimed to be British additions to the South Asian vocabulary (von Stietencron, 1989). Indeed, as often noted, there is no word
for Hinduism in classical Sanskrit, and it is difcult to ascertain what all the plethora of religious practices and ideas in India have in
common that justies assigning them to a single club (B.K. Smith, 1987).
In ancient and medieval India, there was not really a way to convert to Hinduism, at least there was no considered program to bring
outsiders into the fold. Most Indians considered religion in ascriptive terms: one was born into a caste and a religion. Even if one were
a Muslim, that was more a matter of birth than individual assent to propositions of Islamic theology; and that identity, marked on the bodies
of Muslim men by circumcision21, was seen as almost biological in nature. When one reads of Muslim converts re-converting to Hinduism,
they do so by a rite of purication or expiation (prayascitta). In other words, they return to what they already are (and always have been, by
blood) by simply purifying themselves of the effects of improper acts (Laine, 2007: 331-334).
In modern Indian languages, Hindu dharm is used to translate Hinduism, and dharm translates religion (Hacker, 1995a, 1995b). As
many scholars have pointed out, the word dharma in classical Sanskrit texts refers to natural law; it is the dharma of the sun to rise, and the
dharma of a wife to dine after her husband. In other words, social conventions are justied on the grounds that they are part of a natural
order. The word dharma, used in the modern sense of the word religion is held to be part of a response to British colonialism and the
encounter with Christianity. But was this indeed the critical turning point, or did a shift in meaning occur earlier, a result of the contact with
Islam? Or even earlier, as Buddhists and Jains made their own claims on this word? A recent set of philological studies of the word dharma in
a wide variety of contexts leaves us with one irrefutable conclusion: the word dharma, like the word religion, is one highly contested and
capable of great semantic range.22
Often discussions of the classical meaning of dharma focus on The Laws of Manu (c. 100B.C.). But this text cannot be read in isolation as an
uncontested locus classicus of the Hindu understanding of dharma. Clearly it is a brahmanic response to the challenge of Buddhism, and
mindfully articulates a particular meaning of dharma to a world where vaguer usages, such as those of the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka (.

19
In reviewing Orsi (2005), Ivan Strenski (2007) notes that Orsis religion of presence was not only the kind of religion we see among devotional Catholics in the
mid-twentieth century, but the kind of religion assumed by traditional Catholics in the fteenth century, the kind of religion targeted by both Catholic and protestant
reformers in the 14001700 period. Charles Taylor (2007: 2589) makes a similar point, emphasizing the taken-for-granted aspects of Catholic religion prior to the age of
reform and the creation of the conditions that made a secular outlook possible. Asads work on medieval Christianity also emphasizes the religion of disciplined, educated
bodies as opposed to that of convinced intellects (Asad, 1993: 77 and 125167).
20
Frazer, (1957), (161-2) quotes an interesting sixteenth century English protestant critique of Catholics celebrating May Day.
21
On Muslim circumcision, cf. Mehta 1997: 178213. While doing eldwork among a community of North India weavers, Mehta discovered that the word musalmani refers
primarily to circumcision, and uncircumcised boys are thought of as Hindu.
22
Journal of Indian Philosophy 32 (2004), nos. 56. See especially Patrick Olivelle, The Semantic History of Dharma in the Middle and Late Vedic Periods (pp 491511); and
James L. Fitzgerald, Dharma and its Translation in the Mahabharata, (pp. 67185).
 J.W. Laine / Religion 40 (2010) 239249 245

250B.C.) might reect popular meanings for the word dharma, meanings one might translate in specic ways like righteousness or
piety.23 On this point, two recent translators, Wendy Doniger (1991) and Patrick Olivelle (2005) both agree:
Challenged on the one hand by orthodox renouncers and on the other hand by Buddhists and Jains who were increasingly garnering
political patronage, the text is pivotal in the priestly response to the crisis of traditional Aryan culture. (Doniger, 1991: xxxv)
The very creation of a Brahmanical genre of literature dedicated to dharma was possibly due to the elevation of this word to the level of
imperial ideology by Asoka. Olivelle, 2005:39).
In other words, priestly thinkers like the author of Manu, responded to the cultural threat of the rise of Buddhism, and its use of the word
dharma to mean Buddhist teaching, and even simple righteousness, by articulating an orthodox understanding of dharma. Here it is
clearly not a set of taken-for-granted values. Indeed, when those values had been taken-for-granted, the word itself was rarely used (Olivelle,
2005, 2004: 39 ff: 491). Moreover, while the text is extremely punctilious about the specic requirements of particular acts, there are also
passages which spell out a more abstract, universal ethic, such as 6.92, which lists the elements of a ten-point dharma: patience,
forgiveness, self-control, not-stealing, purication, mastery of sensory powers, wisdom, learning, truth, lack of anger language reminiscent
of Buddhist teaching. Intellectually challenged by Buddhism, but more importantly, by Buddhists with imperial patronage (Asoka, and later,
the Central Asian invader Kaniska), brahmin ritualists could not content themselves with moods evoked non-verbally by their charisma.
Asokas edicts explicitly criticized superstitious ritual (Mukherjee, 1984:59); Manu and his like had to trafc in matters of the mind, the
verbal, theological and philosophical justication for a particular understanding of dharma.
Over a millennium later, in response to the Turkish invasions (beginning about 1000 A.D.), we once again see brahmin scholars compiling
Sanskrit encyclopedias of dharma (dharma nibandhas). Pollock has argued that these texts as well as the revival of Ramayana traditions, were
ways of thinking through a whole way of life, consciously justifying it in response to the challenge of confronting something completely
different, even incommensurate:
. the discernable textual consequences suggest a sense of destabilization among the elites of the period whose intellectual as well as
political dominance was being challenged by an unfamiliar cultural formation, coupled with that kind of self-recognition made possible
by a contrastive Other. It is, for instance, during this period . that the dharma nibandhas, those great encyclopedic constructions of the
Hindu way of life, achieved perhaps their rst and certainly their most grandiose expression...(Pollock, 1993: 286)
Moreover, these texts were clearly authored by brahmins in the employ of royal Hindu courts. In my studies of Shivaji, a seventeenth
century king who saw himself as a restorer of Hindu glory in a period of Islamic and Mughal ascendancy, I came across another type of
courtly text, an epic poem, that uses the word dharma in both the classical way, meaning order or natural law, and in the modern sense of
religion (Laine, 1999; Laine, 2003: 3642). That text, the Sivabharata or The Epic of Shivaji (Laine, 2001) had to respond both to an historical
situation in which Muslims were real historical actors and often allies as well as enemies, and to a literary audience that might respond to
a caricature of Muslims as monstrous opponents. Thus we nd places where Hindus characterize Muslims (at least those Muslim soldiers in
invading armies) as forces of anti-dharma (adharma), that is, demonic representatives of chaos and disorder, while elsewhere in the same
text, Muslims are portrayed as legitimately having their own dharma, a different dharma, the dharma of Islam. The rst use of the word
assumes that there is one world order called dharma, threatened by demonic forces of disorder, adharma. The second assumes that there are
different interpretations of the world order, and each of these interpretations is called a dharma. What was once natural and unselfconscious
is challenged by something wholly different and retreats and responds by articulating a unifying ideology (Laine, 1999).
I would argue then that rather than assuming a univocal meaning for the word dharma as natural law, replaced in a rather inauthentic
manner by the post-colonial usage of the word to translate religion, it makes more sense to see the word, like the word religion, as one
with a long history during which various meanings were contested.24 Moreover, using the word to translate religion is both pre-colonial,
and can, depending on context, be quite felicitous.25
Let me now turn to a second site of non-western, pre-colonial self-conscious reection on religion: Japan. In modern Japan, often the
word shukyo is used to translate the word religion. As in the Indian case, the word chosen for the translation does not always work. In a 1980
opinion survey in central Japan (Colligan, 1980: 5863), people were asked whether they followed a religion (shukyo), and 65% answered no.
On the other hand, 62% claimed to regularly pray to a god or kami. In another survey, Japanese were asked to list the religions of the world
that they could think of; 82% named Buddhism, 79% Christianity, 36% Islam, 18% Tenrikyo, 6% Judaism. But Shinto, named in most religion
textbooks as the national religion of Japan, did not even make the list! Even when asked to note passively which religions they had heard
of, only 54% of these folk recognized Shinto, and even fewer on the provincial southern island of Kyushu (47%). All these data seem to
support Balagangadharas contention that religion is a word best kept for describing Christianity. For most Japanese, shukyo is a word for
an organized sect with a specic theology. If that is what religion is, says the average Japanese, then I am not a member of a religion. My
prayers to a kami do not constitute participation in a religion. Moreover, my prayers to a kami are not what has been ofcially designated
shinto, a word formed by two Chinese characters (shen dao) to mean the way of the gods also rendered in Japanese as kami no michi. Thus
the term shukyo is a translation for religion when we mean organized churches and for the average Japanese, it carries a connotation that we
would intend when using the word sect or even cult. We might be tempted to see Shinto, like Hinduism, as a label applied to a wide

23
Note that dharma was already being translated into languages like Greek as piety (eusebeia) and Aramaic as truth (Mukherjee, 1984: 27).
24
In my concentration on the dharma here, I have neglected to discuss other Indian words that might be used to translate the English word religion. Darsana is used to
mean worldview or philosophical school; marga means path; and sampradaya means sect. It is noteworthy that one clearly could convert to anyone of these three, and all
operate at the level of mind. Also, a recent translation of a ninth century text of Jayanta Bhatta (2005) is entitled Much Ado about Religion, rendering the Sanskrit word
agama (tradition) as religion.
25
When Dubuisson asks rhetorically, would we dare to suppose and try to demonstrate that the essence of Christianity was dharmic? (2003: 101n), I would respond in
two ways: (1) Christianity does not have an essence, dharmic or otherwise; and (2) there are some Christianities that are dharmic depending on what language game one is
playing and how dharma functions in that game. I am reminded here of an experience of taking an Indian colleague to a Latin high mass. As a Vedic specialist, she
appreciated the punctilious attention to the ritual rubrics exhibited by the conservative Catholic priests. She described them as karmakandins, a term used to designate
ritualists more interested in dutiful (dharmic) practice than sincere states of mind.
246 J.W. Laine / Religion 40 (2010) 239249

range of religious ideas and practices, producing a single religion only in response to, and comparison with, the Christianity of Europeans.
One is thus tempted to see the articulation of an ideological religion called Shinto, the so-called national religion of Japan, as similar to the
use of Hindu dharm to mean Hinduism, the national or primal religion of India. In other words, both usages emerged as responses to
encounter with European Christians. In her book Shinto and the State 18681988, Helen Hardacre argues precisely that position.
In Hardacres narrative, the sort of self-conscious, ideological construction of Shinto was the project of nation builders responding to
Western interlocutors. The proponents of kokugaku or National Learning, especially Motoori Norinaga (d. 1801) tried to articulate a pure
Shinto, freed from Chinese and Buddhist inuences, as the primal religion of Japan. In fact, Hardacre argues, there never had been a unied
Shinto prior to 1900; even the use of the word was a novelty, the product of kokugaku intellectuals, and alien to popular speech. This clearly
helps to explain the poll cited above. Certainly few people in pre-modern Japan professed a belief in Shinto or could clearly separate Shinto
from other religious practices. And thus, Hardacre, like Daniel, begins to suspect that religion, as understood by Christians, is a problematic
category for understanding traditional Japanese culture:
In pre-Meiji Japan there existed no concept of religion as a general phenomenon, of which there would be variants like Christianity,
Buddhism, and Shinto. People spoke of having faith (shinko) in particular kami and Buddhas, but no word existed to designate a separate
sphere of life that could be called religious, as opposed to the rest of ones existence. This may indicate that religious themes and
concerns were deeply integrated in popular consciousness and social life in a way fundamentally at odds with modern Christocentric
notions of religion as a private matter of an individuals relation to a deity. (Hardacre, 1989:18)
While we might grant that in pre-Meiji times (prior to 1868), the worship of kami was a matter of local traditions, mixed up with popular
Buddhism and not recognizable as a religion called Shinto, do we then assume that the sort of articulated religion we see in Meiji state-
sponsored Shinto is purely the result of encounter with the West and its conceptual category of religion? Is there no good example of self-
conscious, creedal religion in pre-modern Japan?
The place the nationalists turned to nd pure Shinto was to the court-sponsored books of Shinto mythology authored during the Nara
period (711784 A.D.), the Kojiki and Nihon shoki. Written in a hybrid Japanese-Chinese language, and full of Chinese ideas, these texts are
hardly the place to nd the primal voice of Japanese consciousness (though that is what Motoori claimed to nd), and thus it is easy to
criticize the romantic notions of the kokugaku school. Nonetheless, these texts represent the effort to articulate an imperial ideology in
response to growing Chinese inuence, and while they do not represent the religious views of the broader population, they do represent
a sort of reform-oriented religion of mind.
The recuperation of Nara ideas as the basis for a modern history of Shinto is widely dismissed by secular scholars, especially Kuroda Toshio,
whose groundbreaking studies dismantled the nationalist narrative of Shinto (Kuroda, 1993). Breen and Teeuwen argue, however, that while
Kuroda disassembles the construct of a continuous Japanese tradition, usefully challenging the kokugaku orthodoxy, in the process he
comes very close to writing out of Japanese history not only Shinto, but shrines, their priests, kami and distinctive religious practices as well
. (Breen and Teeuwen, 2000: 5). If the construction of sacred arches (torii), gestures like hand-clapping before sacred mirrors and specic
practices of ritual purication are both ancient and wide-spread throughout Japan, one might be missing something by declaring that
Japanese do not see these common elements as contained in a religion called Shinto and thus have neither. In other words, perhaps it is the
taken-for-granted quality of such piety its dependence on mooddthat makes self-conscious ideological justication and theological
ordering of it unnecessary. The encounter with Western ideas of religion and with European power may have provoked that process after 1868,
but it seems that similar responses existed much earlier, in the formation of an imperial ideology in the ancient Nara period.
It is also noteworthy that fairly exclusivist sects of salvation also pre-date any contact with Christianity. As several scholars have noted,
the turbulent Kamakura period (11921333) saw the rise of several Buddhist sects that offered not just a traditional piety mixed with
popular religion and lending legitimacy to the state, but salvation to individuals joining communities independent of the state. Most
prominent among these is the True Pure Land sect, founded by Shinran (Dobbins, 1989), and the radically exclusivist sect of the Lotus Sutra
founded by Nichiren (Anesaki, 1949). Neither reformer opted for a comfortable inclusivist syncretism and both suffered serious persecution
from the state government. Self-conscious apocalyptic theology clearly disrupted the taken-for-granted pieties that supported social
stability and state-supported conformism.
When Christianity did appear, not as part of the nineteenth century opening of Japan, but born by Portuguese Catholic missionaries in
the sixteenth century, there were already indigenous categories for understanding this foreign religion. A missionary such as Francis Xavier
(d. 1543) spread a teaching, and built institutions oriented to the promulgation of a faith that offered salvation to individuals, just as Pure
Land Buddhists had for centuries. In this, he did not essentially differ from Shinran (d.1263), and he called heaven the Pure Land; 26 Xavier
did not have to translate his entire enterprise into something alien to the Japanese. As Martin Riesebrodt has noted, religion may have
a very elusive denition, but Muslims and Christians, or Buddhists and Christians, when confronting and challenging one another, took for
granted some common ground on which to debate (Riesebrodt, 2003).
While such sectarian religion was far more successful in Japan than in China (Overmyer, 1976)27, it nonetheless always threatened the
legitimacy of the state, and while Christianity won state support for a few decades, it was ultimately deemed too foreign, and ruthlessly
exterminated in the early part of the seventeenth century. In other words, any time a Japanese sectarian movement began to challenge

26
.the Jesuit-inspired Khirishitan [Christian] groups followed the general pattern of tightly knit religious societies in Japan during the medieval period, like the True Pure
Land sect or the Nichiren sect. Living as they did at a time when the political order and the social fabric were disintegrating, people were in need of a sense of social identity
and solidarity; many were also looking for the certainty of a salvation experience. (Kitigawa, 1966: 139).
27
The Chinese folk sects were similar in structure to dissenting religious associations in medieval Europe, though in their beginnings they were parallel to the Buddhist
denominations which developed in Kamakura Japan. The great difference between China and both Europe and Japan is that in the Chinese situation, incipient denomi-
national or church structures were never allowed to develop to their full potential because of ofcial hostility. (Overmyer, 1976: 63).
 J.W. Laine / Religion 40 (2010) 239249 247

taken-for-granted values that give the state legitimacy, it was seen as profoundly dangerous, just as was the case in China, where Daoist,
Buddhist, and Manichaean sects were historically repressed as are Christians, Muslims and followers of Falun Gong today. 28
In Japan then, even without the use of the specic words shukyo or Shinto, we can say that we see both modes of Japanese religious life,
one characterized less by theology than by pious practices and community-reinforcing rituals, the other more ideological, soteriological,
self-conscious, and political. In terms of terminology, one might note that precisely when the Japanese began to construct a national religion
during the Meiji reforms, rst as the Great Teaching and a little later as Shinto, standardizing practices and doctrines, examining and
licensing National Evangelists (kyodoshoku), in other words, creating something much more like what one might expect to call a religion,
many began to question if religion was the right category for this national faith. One faction of National Learning apologists, associated
with the heritage of Hirata Atsutane (d. 1843) felt that the grand rituals of the state should be dissociated from religion, i.e., from the popular
worship of kami in local shrines. This group, in opposition to those who felt the new Shinto could authorize common doctrine and a kind of
network of parishes throughout the nation, argued that the priests employed by the government should only have the dignied role of
ritualists while avoiding any role as preachers of doctrine (Hardacre, 1989, 3543).
Either way, as state patronage for Buddhism was withdrawn in favor of what became State Shinto, what emerged is what Hardacre calls
a suprareligion (Hardacre, 1989, 22, 35). Whether this was simply a mark of patriotism, or a Great Teaching transcending and subsuming
sectarian differences (Hardacre, 1989, 43), State Shinto claimed the status of an ideology superior to particular religious groups. With it, the
state made its claims to allegiance primary, demoting adherence to any group Buddhist, Christian, Tenri-kyod to secondary importance. In
making such a move, the Japanese nationalists attempted to govern religion rather than be governed by it.
At this point, I should conclude this reection on mind and mood by clarifying what these modes of religion are not. They are not the sort
of deep structures of cognition that Harvey Whitehouse (2002) has articulated as the imagistic and doctrinal modes of religion. While he
sees two modes that overlap in signicant ways with mind and mood, his are rooted in cognitive processes of memory formation, and the
result of evolutionary selection. This is not the place to analyze Whitehouses complex work, but I must simply note that I offer my categories
as hermeneutical suggestions, helping us to articulate differently a range of religious practices, not as Platonic essences that will be
replicated exactly in culture after culture.

Conclusion

The word religion cannot have a single, agreed-upon, and precise referent, even though Daniel, or perhaps W.C. Smith, who wrote the
Meaning and End of Religion in 1962, would suggest that it does, or should, or should be avoided as imprecise. I would agree with Benson
Saler (1993) that it is a family resemblance term and my denition or yours will overlap but not directly correspond, depending on what
ideological purposes we are using the word to accomplish. In his critique of Saler (2008) Fitzgerald (2009: 194) argues that it is lazy thinking
to simply declare religion to be a word with a variety of meanings, and moreover, its use is highly political. He is correct in warning of
imprecision, and in alerting us to the specic historical contexts in which it is dened in particular ways to serve particular political and
colonial purposes. But language, especially related to discourses like religion, can never a matter of using univocal words that are precisely
exchanged between speaker and listener or writer and reader. As Donald Davidson (1986) tells us, any linguistic exchange is always an
interpretive dance, an act of mutual translation. And as Asad has argued (Asad, 1993: 2729), ones denition of religion might have an
encompassing scope, co-extensive with culture, and thus one would understand a particular religion as co-extensive with the particular
culture within which that religion lives. Or one may wish to circumscribe religion to a much smaller scope so that s/he can participate in
a broader society without too many restrictions (consider here the contrast between the denitions of Judaism given by orthodox and
reformed Jews in contemporary America). The proper denition of religion, like its proper scope, will always be a subject of debate.29 One
might want to claim that religion is a political institution set up to enforce a common worldview and morality among a societys members, or
more precisely, to create a common culture in which certain values are taken-for-granted, that is, hegemonic. This seems to lurk nostalgically
behind Bellahs (1967) famous analysis of American Civil Religion. Opposing such a view, one might agree with Schleiermacher, who asks all
you cultured despisers of religion to turn from all that is usually called religion and aim your attention only at these individual inti-
mations and moods that you will nd in all expressions and noble deeds of God-inspired persons (Schleiermacher, 1988: 92). This may be
a political matter, or a matter of power, as Asad (2003) and Fitzgerald (2004) emphasize, but it may be a less highly charged matter, as Saler
argues, as well.30
The denition of religion that anyone gives will often depend upon the scope that s/he envisions religion having in society. If one
imagines real religion as private and unsullied by politics, s/he will dene religion in ways consonant with Schleiermachers attempts. If, in
so doing, however, religion is to surrender the public square and be a private matter of reection, that relinquished role will be taken up by
some other institution or ideology.
Americans often congratulate themselves for the achievement of a successful separation of Church and state, usually assuming the
Enlightenment conceit that the state should be governed by reason, while sentimental matters of the heart, the surviving vestige of religion
that it no longer governed, could be left to the churches. Do Americans now quietly assume that they uphold the dharma of democracy in the

28
During the Tang Dynasty, the state sometimes supported the notion of the Three Teachings, a doctrine that held that Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism were
complementary. Modern scholars have sometimes taken this act out of context to argue that the Chinese were unusually tolerant and pluralist. In making such a claim, they
overlook the fact that the Tang Emperors also engaged in more than one repression of foreign religions, primarily the great repression of Buddhism and Manichaeism in
842845 A.D. which resulted in the closure of several thousand monasteries and the laicization of several hundred thousand monks.
29
It was once a tactic of students of religion to cite the appendix of James H. Leubas Psychological Study of Religion (1925) which lists more than fty denitions of religion,
to demonstrate that the effort clearly to dene religion in short compass is a hopeless task. The moral of Leuba is not that religion cannot be dened, but that it can be
dened, with greater or lesser success, more than fty ways! (J.Z. Smith, 2004: 193).
30
Imagine being confronted on the street by a well-scrubbed, sincere young man and asked, Are you a Christian? Now imagine being asked by a bureaucrat in
a predominantly Muslim country the same question. What the two questioners are getting at may be entirely different, one asking a question about the state of your salvation
and inner sincerity, a question enabled by protestant shifts of meaning in the seventeenth century that Fitzgerald (2007) has emphasized as at the heart of our use of the term
religion, whereas the latter is assuming an ascriptive identity.
248 J.W. Laine / Religion 40 (2010) 239249

world against those who in fanatical ways let their religion play a larger role than it should? One may nd it perfectly legitimate to make use
of available instruments of power to protect a particular religion; perhaps we cannot but do so. In America or Western Europe, we rarely see
public battles over precise theological formulations (homoousios! no, homoiousios!) but we certainly use what seems to be non-debatable
language in quasi-religious ways to take partisan political positions. This is that slippery place between dharmas: the dharma of the way
things are and should be, and the dharma that means a particular interpretation of how things might be. In Western societies, we assume our
political presuppositions (freedom, democracy, gender equality) not as values we hold, or positions in which we have faith, but as the
dharma in the rst sense, the obvious truth of the way things should be.
It is the mode of taken-for-granted religion that most deeply insinuates itself into a persons identity, and allows for a capacious de-
nition of religion. Whereas Daniel restricts religion to that which is reied, institutional and ideological, I expand it to refer to that which is
most fundamental to cultural identity. And it is this broader denition that includes everything which most powerfully shapes the indi-
viduals identity. We used to hear debates over whether Buddhism, lacking a belief in God, or Confucianism, primarily an ethical system, can
be religions. Perhaps they were philosophies, an attractive title for apologists implying their superiority to traditions heavily laden with
superstition or tired rituals. But certainly within the broad framework that I have proposed, they are religions, often functioning in the
societies where they reign as that a priori starting point from which meaning and value derive. Religion may not always begin with the
mysterium tremendum of mystical encounter but may arise from quiet convictions, unquestioned assumptions like the belief in human
equality, or even the humble acceptance of recognized etiquette.
I realize that I will now be accused of audaciously expanding the denition of religion to such an extent that every human being will be
necessarily religious. Over the broad sweep of world history, it seems like not such an audacious claim since the vast majority of human
beings who have ever lived expressed their deepest values and commitments, and as well organized their quotidian life in language we
would recognize as religious. I am of course baptizing the secular humanist and the Maoist, but they do appear to be religious about their
commitments to human equality or a sacral view of history. But the postmodernist? Here we have a person who makes the humblest of
epistemological claims and can commit to values only in the most ironic of ways. Such epistemological humility cannot, however, be
confused with existential nihilism, and no matter how little one may want to claim metaphysically, one will still strive to live a life of
meaning and purpose and, moreover, try to convince others to adopt similar values.
Is the bafing rise of so-called fundamentalist religion the occasion for a new self-conscious awareness about the religious role played by
the un-named dharma of tolerant, inclusive Western culture? Richard Rorty named it our Eurocentric human rights culture (Rorty, 1993:
117). In a sense, this announces a reversal of roles in European culture. While in medieval Christendom, one religion ruled and philosophy was
a matter of private speculations, in the modern European Union, one European philosophy (of human rights) rules, and religion becomes
a matter of private contemplation, its practice protected as a human right so long as it does not offend other human rights.
Rorty, as an anti-foundationalist, might have been unwilling to accept that human rights culture stands in for Religion. However, one of his
critics, Michael Perry, has found his ironist stance unpersuasive (Perry, 1998: 1141). Perry claims that the very idea of human rights depends
upon the inescapably religious conception of the human person as sacred and inviolable. But even Rorty, while eschewing claims of truth
derived from Kantian reason, seemed willing to assert human rights claims, evoked poetically or emotionally, as a basis for national and
international law. In other words, the rights of human beings, claimed in an a priori way on metaphysical (Perry) or perhaps merely poetic
(Rorty) grounds, can reign in Europe, as Christianity once did, as the nal arbiter in very serious matters of political power, as a nal vocabulary.
The study of religion is often an exercise in making the strange familiar and in making the familiar strange (cf Orsi, 2005:202). Making the
strange familiar, can, by itself, lead astray. The well-meaning ecumenist can declare: I am a Christian, but now after my sympathetic study, I can
understand what it would be like to be a Buddhist or Muslim; I am now tolerant and can engage in fruitful inter-religious dialogue without
ever questioning the framework in which the so-called dialogue takes place, nor the military power that enforces the peace within which
appropriately bourgeois religions conduct dialog.31 Thinking in this way assumes that Buddhism or Islam is to have the same place in society,
the same scope that Christianity now has in secular societies. It assumes that they have both been dethroned from being what I have called
dharma-in-the-classical-sense, that they are no longer matters of mood, no longer ontic realities. This contemporary European view of the
proper place of religion in society assumes further that, as matters of mind, they are particulars subject to something universal and higher. That
something higher can remain un-named, like the dharma of old, for it is so naturalized that one can hardly imagine disclaiming it. But if I can
make the familiar, even this dharma of old, strange, I may begin to see how not only the self-conscious doctrines of my religion (matters of
mind) may appear to an outsider, but how my internalized assumptions (matters of mood) are contingent as well.
In elevating the words mind and mood from a little known text of Valentine Daniel, it has not been my intention to produce a more
adequate denition of religion. I agree with Talal Asad (Shaikh, 2002), who has argued that the point is to understand the purposes of any
given denition or usage, how the author employs it in ways that reinforce certain ideologies, practices and exercises of power. Mind and
mood are two abstracted, perhaps overly abstracted and dichotomized, descriptors of human culture that apply to aspects of what we
commonly call religion. They may overlap with other descriptors habitus, discourse, imagistic religion, ethos, religion of presence,
embodied practice and, like these other terms now in vogue, they may have a brief run. They do not name the eternal, but for now may play
across the mind, waking us up to the ways proponents of one mode of portraying religion fail to comprehend, and thus talk past, the
proponents of another mode, all the while thinking that they are talking about the same thing.

References

Almond, P., 1988. The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge University Press.
Anesaki, M., 1949. Nichiren: The Buddhist Prophet. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Armstrong, K., 1993. A History of God. Ballantine, New York.

31
Because there are so many empirical Americas and because the values of tolerance and pluralism are far more complicated than writers such as Neusner, Eck and
Marty seem to allow, could we not as teachers instead study whether discourses on religious and cultural tolerance and pluralism are but mechanisms used to help focus
collective attention, whether for good or for ill, thereby actually concocting and authorizing specic ideas of the nation-state and, by extension, authorizing those social
worlds made possible by just these ideas. (McCutcheon, 2001: 1645) 30.
 J.W. Laine / Religion 40 (2010) 239249 249

Asad, T., 1993. Genealogies of Religion. Johns Hopkins, Baltimore.

Asad, T., 2001. Reading a modern classic: W.C. Smith's the Meaning and End of Religion. History or Religions 40, 205222.
Asad, T., 2003. Formations of the Secular. Stanford University Press.
Balagangadhara, S.N., 1994. The Heathen in His Blindness. Brill, Leiden.
Bellah, R.N., 1967. Civil Religion in America. Daedalus 96, 121.
Breen, J., Teeuwen, M., 2000. Shinto in History. University of Hawaii Press.
Burghart, R., Cantlie, A., 1985. Indian Religion. St. Martin, New York.
Campbell, J., 195968. The Masks of God. Viking, New York.
Carman, J.B., 1974. The Theology of Ramanuja. Yale University Press.
Colligan, J.P., 1980. The Image of Christianity in Japan: A Survey. Institute of Christian Culture, Sophia University, Tokyo.
Daniel, E.V., 1984. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Daniel, E.V., 1996. Charred Lullabies. Princeton University Press.
Daniel, E.V., 2000. The arrogation of being. Macalester International 8, 171191.
Davidson, D., 1986. A nice derangement of epitaphs. In: Grandy, R., Warner., R. (Eds.), Philosophical Grounds of Rationality. Clarendon, Oxford.
Dobbins, J., 1989. Jodo Shinshu: Shin Buddhism in Medieval Japan. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Doniger, W., Smith, B.K., 1991. trans. with. The Laws of Manu. Penguin, London.
Douglas, M., 1996. Natural Symbols. Routledge, New York.
Dubusisson, D., 2003. The Western construction of Religion (William Sayers trans.). Johns Hopkins Press.
Dubuisson, D., 2005. Impostures et pseudo-science: l'oeuvre de Mircea Eliade. Presses universitaires du Septentrion.
Fitzgerald, J.L., 2004. Dharma and its translation in the Mahabharata. Journal of Indian Philosophy 32, 671685.
Fitzgerald, T., 2007. Discourse on Civility and Barbarity. Oxford University Press.
Fitzgerald, T., 2009. Benson Saler: Conceptualizing religion: some recent reections: a response. Religion 39, 194.
Hacker, P., 1995a. The concept of dharma in Neo-Hinduism. In: Halbfass., W. (Ed.), Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta. State
University of New York Press, Albany, pp. 257272.
Hacker, P., 1995b. Aspects of Neo-Hinduism as contrasted with surviving traditional Hinduism. In: Halbfass., W. (Ed.), Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional
and Modern Vedanta. State University of New York Press, Albany, pp. 229255.
Hardacre, H., 1989. Shinto and the State, 18681988. Princeton University Press.
Hausman, Carl R., 1993. Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
Jayanta Bhatta, 2005. Much Ado about Religion (Czaba Dezso trans.). The Clay Sanskrit Library. New York University Press.
King, R., 1999. Orientalism and Religion. Routledge, London.
Kitigawa, J., 1966. Religion in Japanese History. Columbia University Press, New York.
Kozlowski, K., October 30, 2002. Churches use pagan day to send message. The Detroit News.
Kuroda, T., 1993. Shinto in the history of Japanese religion. Journal of Japanese Studies 7 (1981), 121.
Laine, Joy., 1998. Udayana's Refutation of the Buddhist Thesis of Momentariness in the Atmatattvaviveka. Journal of Indian Philosophy 26, 5197.
Laine, J.W., 1999. The dharma of Islam and the din of Hinduism: Hindus and Muslims in the age of Sivaji. International Journal of Hindu Studies 3, 299318.
Laine, J.W., 2000. Response to E. Valentine Daniel. Macalester International 8, 201206.
Laine, J.W., 2001. The Epic of Shivaji; a Translation and Study of Paramananda's Sivabharata. Orient Longman, Hyderabad.
Laine, J.W., 2003. Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. Oxford University Press, New York.
Laine, J.W., 2007. The body as the locus of religious identity. In: Washburn, D., Reinhart., A.K. (Eds.), Converting Cultures. Brill, Leiden.
Matilal, B.K., 1985. Logic, Language and Reality. Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi.
Masuzawa, T., 2005. The Invention of World Religions. University of Chicago Press.
McCutcheon, R.T., 2001. Critics Not Caretakers. State University of New York Press, Albany.
Mehta, D., 1997. Work, Ritual, Biography: A Muslim Community in North India. Oxford University Press, New York.
Moore, T., 1992. Care of the Soul. HarperCollins, New York.
Mukherjee, B.N., 1984. Studies in the Aramaic Edicts of Asoka. Indian Museum, Calcutta.
Olivelle, P., 2004. The semantic history of dharma in the Middle and late Vedic Periods. Journal of Indian Philosophy 32, 491511.
Olivelle, P., 2005. Manu's Code of Law. Oxford University Press.
Orsi, R.A., 1985. The Madonna of 115th Street. Yale University Press.
Orsi, R.A., 2005. Between Heaven and Earth. Princeton University Press.
Otto, R., 1958. The Idea of the Holy. Oxford University Press [rst published 1923].
Overmyer, D., 1976. Folk Buddhist Religion. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Oxford English Dictionary, 1961. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Peirce, C.S., 1960. Collected Papers, Vols. 12. Belknap, Cambridge.
Perry, M., 1998. The Idea of Human Rights. Oxford University Press.
Pollock, S., 1993. Ramayana and political imagination in India. Journal of Asian Studies 52, 261297.
Ram-Prasad, C., 2007. Indian Philosophy and the Consequences of Knowledge. Ashgate, Aldershot.
Riesebrodt, M., 2003. Religion': Just Another Modern Western Construction? Religion and Culture Web Forum. http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/
webforum/122003.
Rodriguez, R., 1983. Hunger of Memory. Bantam, New York.
Rorty, R., 1993. Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality. In: Shute, S., Hurley, S. (Eds.), On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures.
Saler, B., 1993. Conceptualizing Religion. Brill, Leiden.
Saler, B., 2008. Conceptualizing Religion: some recent reections. Religion 38, 219225.
Schleiermacher, F., 1988. On religion: speeches to its cultured despisers. Tr. R. Crouter. Cambridge University Press.
Shaikh, N., December 16, 2002. Interview with Talal Asad. AsiaSource. http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/asad.cfm.
Smith, B.K., 1987. Exorcising the transcendent: strategies for dening Hinduism and Religion. History of Religions 27, 3255.
Smith, J.Z., 2004. Relating Religion. University of Chicago Press.
Smith, W.C., 1962. The Meaning and End of Religion. Macmillan, New York.
Staal, F., 1989. Rules without Meaning. Peter Lang, New York.
Strenski, I., 2007. Review of Robert A. Orsi, between heaven and earth. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, 730733.
Taylor, C., 2007. A Secular Age. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Turner, V., Turner, E., 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Columbia University Press, New York.
van der Veer, P., 1994. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. University of California Press.
von Stietencron, H., 1989. Hinduism: on the proper use of a deceptive term. In: Sontheimer, G.-D., Kulke, H. (Eds.), Hinduism Reconsidered. Manohar, New Delhi.
Wasserstrom, S., 1999. Religion after Religion. Princeton University Press.
Whitehouse, H., 2002. Modes of Religiosity: towards a cognitive explanation of the Sociopolitical Dynamics of religion. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 14, 293
315.
Wills, G., 1972. Bare Ruined Choirs. Doubleday, Garden City.