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From Abhinavagupta to Zen

It is surely not insignificant that, as soon as Mircea Eliade's Encyclopedia of Religion (ER) arrived in the library of the college where I teach, the thirteen volumes of James Hastings's Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (ERE; reprint, Edinburgh, 1955) were removed from the permanent reference collection and consigned to the stacks. The librarians explained this as due to lack of shelving space, but students of religion understand the symbolism of this move better; quite plainly, the ER has displaced the ERE. Nowhere is this clearer, perhaps, than in the entries dealing with the religions of Asia. To be sure, the Hastings encyclopedia contained some articles by great scholars that will long remain classics (e.g., the thirty-six contributions on Buddhism by Louis de La Vallee Poussin), but many of its entries on Indian and Chinese religions, penned by missionaries or civil servants, are now quaintly obsolete and reflect a perspective that the field has outgrown. Moreover, it is certainly symptomatic of the internationalization of the study of religions in the past seventy-five years that, while the vast majority of contributors to the ERE were Westerners (and only six were of Asian nationalities), the ER includes articles by nearly ninety Japanese, Chinese, and South Asian scholars. Clearly, in Eliade's encyclopedia, Asian religions have come to occupy the consideration they merit. Not counting entries on Islam, there are over six hundred articles (more than 2,000 pages) covering different aspects of religion in various parts of Asia. When one adds to this the approximately two hundred transregional studies of religious phenomena (from "Ablutions" to "Zodiac"), most of which include some consideration of Asian materials, it may be said that close to a third of the entries in the encyclopedia deal with Asian religions in one fashion or another. In the vast majority of these, the level of scholarship and clarity of writing are excellent. By and large, the ER editors were successful in calling on the services of the most competent experts in the field, so that their entries