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The Invention of Buddho-Taoism: Critical Historiography of a Western Neologism, 1940s–2010s

Abstract “Buddho-Taoism” is a neologism that appeared in Western academic writings during the late nineteen-forties, was put to various uses without ever being consensually defined, enjoyed a brief vogue around the turn of the twenty-first century, and began to fall from grace in recent years. Not only did this neologism implicitly create new epistemic repertoires derived from the names of two presumably known religions. Increasingly loaded with a heterogeneous subtext pertaining to Western-centred representations of the non-European Other, it has become a highly versatile speech unit. By contextualising the appearance of “Buddho-Taoism” and its attested variants in European-language writings and following their semantic evolution, this essay attempts to shed light on some of the problems raised by its retrospective implementation in contemporary Western discourse on China. It also illustrates the power of seduction of trendy terms that academics tend to overuse without careful consideration for their meaning, thereby adding unnecessary problems to the intrinsic difficulties of their primary materials.