Not Doctrinal, Not Theological An Empirical-Pragmatic Approach to the Concept of an Afterlife in Reference to China

Contrary to the philosophical purism of academic depictions of religious doctrines, syncretism is not a random event that might or might not happen to traditions but a consistent and nearly inevitable anthropological process whereby beliefs and doctrinal concepts are assimilated under the objective pressure of spiritual experience. As recent research presents indigenous traditions according to their original meaning, filtering colonial perspectives out of the analysis, anti-Western biases prove equally inadequate to revealing what these traditions actually mean. Scholarly understanding of afterlife conceptions in China suffered from the excessive emphasis on the tension between Westernized and anti-Western approaches, demanding not only a revaluation of original cultural meanings in the humanistic sense but also philosophical and scientific attempts to scrutinize objective experiential patterns. Through the exemplary Chinese case, this paper proposes that a more empirical and pragmatic approach to afterlife conceptions could be more fruitful for the philosophy of religion than more humanistic analyses based solely on cultural interpretation.