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This article investigates the understudied mission of Bishop Carlo van Melckebeke CICM as Apostolic Visitor for the Chinese overseas from 1953 to his retirement in 1970. Although Chinese had settled overseas from as far back as the twelfth century, the Catholic Church never had a significant presence among these communities, except in British colonial era Singapore-Malaya. Following the mid-twentieth century forced exodus of Chinese seminarians and Western missionaries from the mainland after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Holy See responded by redirecting missionary efforts through the initiatives of Bishop van Melckebeke and his colleagues to this major ethnic group scattered across the world. This article deals with this unprecedented apostolate to these diasporic communities, in a substantially different manner from previous scholarship on Catholicism in China in terms of notions of institution, and the framing of missionary activities, networks, and resources. Based on archival resources, media reports and interviews, it recounts how the Office of Apostolic Visitor and the Singapore Catholic Central Bureau extended their mission beyond the politics of the Cold War, and organised a variety of ministries to serve the overseas Chinese population residing on five continents.

This study examines how the Roman Catholic Church formulated and implemented its principal directive during China’s civil war and subsequent regime change in the mid-twentieth century, particularly the obligation that clergy remain at their posts alongside the relocation of seminarians to safer areas. Drawing on newly available Vatican archival materials, it demonstrates that the decision to evacuate seminarians was not solely prompted by the petition of the first Chinese cardinal to the pope, as previously assumed; rather, the Apostolic Internuncio’s shift in position played a decisive role. It further identifies an original Italian version of the directive that differs in sequence and emphasis from the widely circulated Chinese text. Against this background, criticisms of the Internuncio as “the executioner of native priests” require reconsideration. Rather, the study reinterprets him as an adaptive intermediary within the process of policy formation and implementation.

A Movie Produced in Macau that chronicles the life of Wu Li, a voyager from the past of whom played a significant role in Macau's Historical Value.

Archaeological reports show that about 70% of Han dynasty pictorial stone sites feature historical figures, revealing a significant yet understudied aspect of tomb ritual practice (muji yishi). This study examines how these depictions may reflect ritual characteristics and their relationship to temple ritual practice (miaoji yishi). From the Qin to Han period (221 BCE–220 CE), tomb and temple rituals increasingly converged; temple rituals were sometimes performed by tombs, and the imagery incorporated cosmological models alongside representations of daily life, including clothing, diet, dwellings, and mobility. The historical figures depicted can be grouped into three categories: emperors and sages, loyal ministers and righteous heroes, and filial sons and chaste women. These figures were closely associated with ideals of transcendence and immortality, suggesting a ritual framework that connected temple and tomb practices, with emperors and sages appearing most frequently, accounting for about 80% of the depictions. Notably, these images occur predominantly in commoners’ tombs (approximately 95%), where fewer social restrictions may have allowed greater creative freedom. While research on tomb ritual practices has traditionally relied on textual sources, the present study emphasizes archaeological evidence, offering an analytical perspective on the relationship between temple and tomb rituals in Han funeral art and highlighting their potential role in shaping Han ritual logic and religious expression.

The Japanese scholar and art critic Okakura Tenshin traveled to colonial India from January to September 1902 and made three visits to the Buddhist holy site of Bodh Gaya. There, he attempted to purchase a piece of land from the landowner, the Mahant, to build a vihāra (resthouse) for Japanese Buddhist devotees. His purchase request was rejected by the British colonial authority for his foreigner status, despite no legal prohibition against land sales to foreigners under Bodh Gaya’s land management laws at the time. The year after his journey to India, Okakura Tenshin published The Ideals of the East, wherein the renowned declaration that “Asia is one” subsequently evolved to be the intellectual cornerstone of twentieth-century Asianism (or Pan-Asianism). How did Okakura’s Indian journey and his experience of the failed attempt to purchase land in Bodh Gaya catalyze his conception of “Asia is One”? This essay first traces the Buddhist revival movements in late nineteenth-century India and Japan, elucidating how Buddhism helped forge a sense of transnational solidarity between the two nations, which Okakura also embraced. It then examines Okakura’s trip to India and his plan to purchase land at Bodh Gaya, uncovering the underlying geopolitical struggle between the British Empire and the New Asian Power Japan. In this context, the analysis will show that Okakura’s frustrating experience of failed land purchase underscored for him the necessity for the solidarity between Japan and India and the need for a unitary idea of Asia to articulate that solidarity. Finally, a comparative textual analysis between The Ideals of the East (1903) and Okakura’s “History of Japanese Art” lectures given at the Tokyo Fine Arts School before his trip to India explicates how Buddhism, which was being revived by a collective of various groups in and outside its place of origin India, served as a cohesive discursive agent in Okakura’s construction of the narrative of an Asian unity. This Buddhist framework helped Okakura to reconstruct the interlinked cultural histories of India, China, and Japan into a unified notion of Asia within which he crystallized a unique and favored cultural identity for Japan.

This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power to examine the history of penal punishment and Buddhist chaplaincy at Lüshun Prison in Dalian during Japan’s colonial rule (1905–1945). The goal is to call into question the dominant understanding of Japanese prison system as simply an apparatus of naked colonial oppression by exploring the contradictions and limitations in the penitentiary system of Japan as an empire and a modern nation-state. The research is based on official prison documents, True Pure Land Buddhist Honganji sect archival sources, local Chinese publications, oral testimonies from the 2000s, interviews with descendants, and fieldwork at Lüshun Prison. The first part introduces the history of Lüshun Prison and the second explains the prison as a modern criminal justice institution embodying the Benthamian panopticon principle and modern disciplinary power. The third part examines the brutal corporeal punishment at Lüshun Prison and explores how the prison combined deliberate strategies of disciplining manipulation with bodily punishment to (re)create disciplined and subjected individuals. The fourth and fifth parts focus on Buddhist chaplaincy at Lüshun Prison as a disciplining practice. The fourth considers the limits of Buddhist chaplaincy by showing the depoliticized Buddhist doctrine deployed by chaplains was unable to discipline prisoners as it failed to make them repent and be loyal subjects of imperial Japan. The notion of public good used to justify Buddhist chaplaincy in Japan loses its political meaning when applied to the colonial penitentiary setting of Lüshun Prison. The fifth part further explores this ambiguity in Buddhist chaplaincy by focusing on examining the case of Ahn Jung-geun, the Korean independence activist who assassinated the Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi and was imprisoned and executed at Lüshun Prison in 1910. Rather than transforming Ahn, prison chaplains ended up being transformed by him. This reversion betrays not just a tension between the private and the public, or the individual and the social, but at the same time a tension between the supposedly homogenized nation-state and the multi-ethnic empire.

This paper focuses on the early Qing monk-painter Hongren 弘仁, systematically exploring the pathways through which the Chan Buddhist “emptiness contemplation” is manifested in his landscape paintings. As a representative monk-painter, Hongren produced works that profoundly embody the Chan contemplation of emptiness, yielding a singular style defined by austere coldness, minimalist simplicity, and profound quietude. Transcending conventional stylistic descriptions in art history and essentialist philosophical deductions, this study adopts a comprehensive empirical approach that integrates poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seals (shi-shu-hua-yin 诗书画印). By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective of philosophy, religion, and art history, this study argues that Hongren’s landscapes are not merely subjective emotional expressions or aesthetic pursuits; rather, they constitute a visual extension and a spiritual externalization of his emptiness contemplation. Through a multi-layered analysis of his form, brushwork, composition, and artistic conception, combined with the mutual corroboration of poetic inscriptions on paintings and textual inscriptions on seals, this paper reveals how the Chan philosophy of “emptiness contemplation” is reflected within his artistic language. While Hongren’s style is the cumulative result of various factors such as the Ming-Qing dynasty transition, his personal life, the inheritance of painting techniques, and the regional culture of Mount Huang, this paper specifically takes Chan thought as its analytical starting point, focusing on its unique expression in his work. Hongren’s path of “Painting-Chan” (hua chan 画禅) not only infused early Qing painting with a sublime spiritual power but also provides a vital religious exegesis of the deep-seated Chinese tradition of “Technique Ascending to the Dao” (ji jin yu dao 技进于道).

This article studies the unique funerary decorative and architectural programs of the Foyemiaowan tombs in Dunhuang, dating to the third and fourth centuries CE. While Dunhuang is known for its later Buddhist grottoes, its sophisticated pre-Buddhist religious landscape remains understudied. This article focuses on the elaborate screen walls constructed of painted pictorial bricks, which represent the celestial realm designed to visualize the soul’s transcendence to heaven. Based on iconographic analysis, this study discusses the highlighted decorative design of screen wall at Foyemiaowan and explains the different artistic logics behind the lavish exterior decoration of Foyemiaowan vis-à-vis the interior-focused programs of neighboring sites like Xincheng in Jiayuguan. This study situates visual and material symbols in the distinct arrangement of the whole tomb space, which together reflect local adoption and innovation of Central Plain traditions in Early Medieval Dunhuang.

The representations of a Buddha flanked on either side by Brahmā and Indra from Gandhāra have long been identified as the iconography of “Entreaty to Teach,” an episode in the Buddha’s life. After he obtained enlightenment, Śākyamuni had planned to enter nirvana immediately but Brahmā and Indra persuaded the Buddha to teach the Dharma for the sake of sentient beings. This subject is quite prominent in Gandhāran Buddhist art. It appears among a group of earliest anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha. It is one of the first events singled out from the Buddha’s life to be represented with the Buddha image; this event does not glorify the Buddha, but rather contaminates his imagery somewhat. In fact, pairing Brahmā and Indra on either side of a main figure became very common later in Gandhāran, art and it also appears in other iconographies. Were these images meant only to represent the narrative of “Entreaty to Teach?” This study reassesses this well-known iconography in both visual and textual traditions. Challenging current identification in the field, the author suggests the possibility that this iconography represents an iconic image of the Buddha that is meant to glorify the Buddha by subordinating the top two Brahmanic gods as his attendants.

The significance of forgetting in the Zhuangzi and its methodological significance for living a good life in particular has long been recognized by Zhuangzian scholars. However, with regard to what is really meant by forgetting, scholars are still far from reaching some clear consensus. Thus, with the aim of clarifying what is meant by forgetting in the Zhuangzi, I propose a wholistic understanding of forgetting in terms of the Zhuangzian conception of human self-cultivation. On the one hand, it involves an analysis of how forgetting is used negatively in the Zhuangzi to characterize and explain human fallenness. On the other hand, it also entails a careful analysis of all positive uses of forgetting in the text to mean our elimination of chengxin, orientation to the Dao, and fitness with all things in harmony.

This article explores Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī’s political thought in relation to modern debates on secularism and Islamic reform. While often invoked by Islamist thinkers to support their anti-secular stance, al-Afghānī’s reflections on reason, religion, and constitutional politics show that he engaged with modernity in a more nuanced way than is commonly recognized. This article examines al-Afghānī’s writings and their reception. It argues that his thought was not about choosing a side between religion and secularism. Instead, his thought is better understood as a pragmatic anti-colonial strategy aimed at the revival of Muslim civilization. This reframing challenges the widely cited genealogical narrative that links him to later Islamists. His attempt to reconcile religious traditions with the imperative for reform provides valuable insights into the responses of Muslim reformers to modernity—insights that remain highly relevant today.

In the name of God and profit, Jorge Álvares, the first Portuguese to set foot in China, arrived in 1513 and opened a new chapter for missionary work. One of the most significant forms of “Sino-Portuguese” decorative art, ivory sculpture, is closely linked to the Portuguese mission in the Orient and serves as a witness to encounters between different cultures and religions. This study focuses on representative Sino-Portuguese ivory sculptures of the Virgin and Child from the Late Ming period through a detailed analysis of iconography and a comparative visual critique with European prototypes and Guanyin representations to discuss the significance of missionary visual imagery in cultural interactions. The ivory sculpture of the Virgin and Child is not merely an image; it is a physical object with both material and visual characteristics, acquiring its religious significance during the missionary process. The present study aims to present its artistic hybridity and demonstrate how the Chinese carvers make the Sino-Portuguese “speak” different visual languages, leading to different interpretations. It also reflects the cultural translation that occurs in the complex process of religious contact. In this space of ‘culture in between’, Christianity has been able to transcend cultural and religious boundaries.

Just war theory, significantly shaped by Christian moral theology, has provided a prominent ethical framework for discussions on the justice of war. Numerous works have been published on classical Chinese counterparts, including passages from the Mengzi, Mozi, Xunzi, and Huangdi Sijing. Although the Zhuangzi frequently discusses warfare, it has been largely overlooked in this field of research because its war ethics do not revolve around any concept similar to that of justice. Based on Zhuangzian critiques of Confucian and Mohist views on justice, this paper tentatively reconstructs Zhuangzian war ethics. This reconstruction reveals a perspective that the concept of just war or justified war is inherently problematic, and promoting such ideas can be perilous and even morally questionable. The belief that just war theory can help us identify a “just side” to morally condemn or legally restrain aggressors is a dangerous illusion. In practice, this approach fails to prevent wars and often exacerbates conflict. According to the Zhuangzian perspective, during wars, states do not operate as traditional political entities with universal jurisdiction and centralized authority. Instead, they resemble rivers and lakes with indistinct boundaries, rendering the concepts of justice and punishment largely irrelevant. A practical peace strategy, therefore, must abandon the pursuit of administering justice and punishing wrongdoers. Instead, it should focus on strategies that facilitate the involved parties to “forget” their grudges and start their peaceful relationship anew.

The Confucian hermeneutic approach to the Yijing 易經 (or Book of Changes) delineates a transition from the pursuit of divinatory meaning to the cultivation of virtue and action. As an integral part of the Yijing’s semantic framework, decisive phrases (Duanci 斷辭)—such as those denoting auspiciousness or ominousness—not only reflect historical efforts to ascertain the significance of divinatory cases, but also embody a distinct normative orientation inherent in the text’s teachings. This orientation not only guides human action but also shapes moral character, which in turn provides the foundation for virtuous and effective action. The interpretive paradigm initiated by Confucian exegetes thus offers valuable insights for contemporary theories of ethics and practical philosophy.

Since the arrival of Christian missionaries in China through maritime trade networks, missionary activities have been changing from the 16th century to the 18th century. Christian missionaries faced numerous challenges stemming from cultural context and religious policies in China. Throughout history, various religious strategies have been employed to address these challenges. The use of Chinese porcelain to depict Christian imagery holds significant importance. The present study is focused on four representative Chinese porcelains dating from the Ming to Qing dynasties, each associated with specific phases of Christianity in China. Examining the connections between the Christian mission in China and Christian iconography on Chinese porcelain leads to the conclusion that the visual culture associated with the Christian mission in China is influenced by and reflects intercultural or interreligious dialogue with mutual understanding. In the meantime, it signifies an intricate process of interaction, appropriation, hybridization, and adaptation, through which Christian iconography gained new significance on Chinese porcelain.

In the late Qing Dynasty, religious periodicals by Western missionaries were made legal in China, and subsequently became an important manner of their missionary cause. Among them, Child’s Paper 小孩月报 (1875–1881) by John Marshall Willoughby Farnham, a Protestant missionary from the United States, endeavoured to convert child readers by carrying children’s stories of moral and emotional education. By concentrating on the educational elements of Child’s Paper, this article inspects how conversion was achieved via the intertextual interpretation of Christian doctrines within these educational elements. Specifically, how the image of little Christians and urchins, respectively, represents salvation and redemption in Christian morals. This article holds that the missionaries’ stress on the authority of Christian discourse in the education of Chinese children makes evident an increasing emphasis on the reformative effects of Christianity on Chinese children. Moreover, the conversion-education efforts by missionaries also construed helping Chinese children gain a cross-cultural perspective on Western religion, and arguably inspired later Chinese intellectuals’ to create newspapers for the purpose of the pre-primary education of Chinese children.

Xiao-filiality is the most fundamental concept in the Chinese intellectual-cultural tradition. It represents not only family values but also religious, political and ethical ideologies. The conception of xiao, which originally denoted the meanings of presenting offerings to deceased ancestors and inheriting their legacy in the Shang dynasty, went through two stages of evolution from the early Zhou dynasty to the Warring States period. In the first stage, xiao was extended to ethical domain with the humanistic turn from human-spirit relationship to human-human relationship. Xiao was not only expanded to the empirical exercise of serving living parents but also established as a ritual-ethical norm that defined people’s familial, social, and hierarchical role duties and regulated their conducts of dealing with interpersonal relationships. As a result, the religious authority of paranormal ancestral spirits was transferred to the social-political authority who enforced the implement of the ritual-ethical norm of xiao. In the second stage, Confucius and his followers on the one hand recognized the importance of compliance with this prescribed ritual-ethical norm, and on the other internalized it to become the individual agent’s moral emotion and free choice. Consequently, the social-political authority was further transferred to the internal authority of moral autonomy.

The worldwide launch of neoliberalism ushered everyone into an atomized society. Neoliberalism transforms Homo sapiens into Homo economicus, a narcissistic self-entrepreneur that positions their body as a factory, skills as resources, and earnings as products while relying less on others. Such atomization of individuals undermines the community. Following the Cartesian moment, enlightenment, and postmodernism’s later wave, the world is disenchanted, deprived of unity in the form of community fragmentation. Foucault offered a Greco–Roman philosophical remedy for contemporary society, focusing on the formulation of ‘Spiritual-Corporality’ through the practice of care of the self. Foucault believed the one who takes good care of himself is often self-assured of his ability, expectations, and missions in relationships with others, he does not resort to tyranny in those relationships, giving him an ethical advantage in caring for his family and fellow citizens. If everyone strives to take care of themselves, the city-state will prosper. However, Foucault relied on Stoic philosophy over other ancient schools and failed to provide concrete practices on how to bind ourselves with others through care of the self. In partial agreement with Foucault, the present study chooses Hadot’s spiritual exercise as a more accurate terminology to justify Greco–Roman philosophies’ affordance to contemporary social unification. After reviewing the philosophies of Aristotle, the Stoics, and Epicurus, the present study selected the spiritual exercises of ‘hitting the mean as deliberation’, ‘reframing of self’, and ‘thinking outside the box’ as suitable practices for community flourishing.

This study delves into the profound impact and significance of religious culture on the urban spatial configuration and local cultural essence of Macau amidst contemporary societal transformations. Emphasis is placed on how religious sites undergo functional reshaping and role redefinition within the urban fabric, thereby influencing residents’ quality of life, cityscape, and cultural identity. Adopting a spatial anthropological lens, this research employs a multitude of methodologies including city walking, participatory observation, and historical analysis to investigate the spatial configurations and developmental trajectories of Macau’s diverse religious sites and their immediate environments. The aim is to unearth the historical drivers behind the formation and dissemination of religious culture in Macau and to elucidate its intricate interactions with urban space. The findings reveal that religious sites in Macau not only physically delineate unique urban spatial patterns but also serve as vital hubs for fostering local cultural cohesion and weaving social networks through routine religious practices, community engagements, and a plethora of festive and ritualistic events. The pervasive influence of these sites extends across multiple domains of society, culture, and economy, playing a pivotal role in maintaining regional stability and harmony, enriching cultural diversity, and propelling socioeconomic transformation.

This paper explores the scholarly discourse on the divinity of the emperor in postwar Japan to better understand Japanese conservative nationalism, which has been regaining momentum since the 1990s. Viewing the idea of the divinity of the emperor as ideologically fundamental to Japanese conservative nationalism, this paper looks at how conservative scholars from the 1970s developed a culturalist argument for the divinity of the emperor, first to negate the “humanity declaration”, i.e., the New Year’s greeting by the Showa emperor on 1 January 1946 renouncing his divinity, and then to reconfigure conservative ideology into a popular discourse on Japanese identity (i.e., the Nihonjin-ron), thereby making it more easily accepted by postwar society. Key to this culturalist argument is an essentialized dichotomy between Japanese culture and Western culture, more specifically a binary between Shinto kami and the Christian God—that the Japanese concept of kami is qualitatively different from that of the Christian God, so the emperor is not God but is kami; therefore, the emperor’s divinity is not really denied and he remains the spiritual pillar of the Japanese nation even under the postwar constitutional regime. Refashioning itself as part of the increasingly popular but depoliticized Nihonjin-ron discourse, the culturalist argument on the divinity of the emperor helped make the imperial house a popular topic of the discourse on Japanese identities, even while it completely circumvented the very issues of war responsibility and historical memory which gave rise to the “humanity declaration” in 1946 in the first place. In its depoliticized, popularly appealing form, the culturalist argument played a role in legitimating the regressive conservative nationalism that seeks to revive the pre-1945 divine emperor-centered political regime. Exploring the scholarly discourse on the divinity of the emperor, then, helps shed light on how and why conservative nationalism could persist and gain momentum in the 21st century.