Religions of Ancient China — Edition Insights

Diction and the Problem of Translation

Giles repeatedly signals the difficulty of rendering Chinese religious terms into English. He notes that the term for God is T'ien, and in only one passage does Mencius use Shang Ti. When discussing Ch'u Yuan's poem titled "God Questions," Giles explains that the literal meaning would be "Questions put to God," but such a phrase was impossible because of the holiness of God and the irreverence of questioning Him. This lexical scrupulousness reveals Giles's awareness that translation is never neutral: the choice of "God" for T'ien or Shang Ti carries theological baggage from the Christian tradition. He also flags when a Chinese term has no exact English equivalent, as with the "divine maiden" Nu-ch'i, about whom the commentary says nothing more seems to be known. These moments foreground the gap between the source culture and the reader.

Voice and Authorial Stance

Giles writes as an authoritative guide, often using the first-person plural "we" to align himself with the reader against the obscurities of the material. He describes the literati who spread a story about the First Emperor being prevented from sacrificing by a storm, adding that they alleged he was deficient in virtue. The phrase "gave out that" carries a hint of skepticism. Elsewhere, he reports that the truthful historian—the Herodotus of China—accompanied the Emperor and heard the voices of spirits. Giles does not dismiss this claim outright, but the comparison to Herodotus subtly places it in the realm of anecdotal reportage. His tone is that of a lecturer who expects his audience to share his rationalist assumptions, yet he refrains from outright debunking, allowing the texts to speak with their own authority.

Structure and the Use of Primary Sources

The book is organized into five chapters, moving from the ancient faith through Confucianism, Taoism, Materialism, and Buddhism. Within each chapter, Giles weaves together translated excerpts, paraphrases, and commentary. He quotes Ch'u Yuan's biography at length: "Man came originally from God, just as the individual comes from his parents." The effect is to let the Chinese sources carry the argument, with Giles providing context and occasional glosses. He also includes a chronological syllabus and a list of selected works, framing the study as a scholarly reference. The structure mirrors the series format—Religions: Ancient and Modern—but Giles's choices in excerpting and ordering reveal his own emphasis on textual evidence over speculative reconstruction.

Recurring Details and Thematic Threads

Several motifs recur across the excerpts. The concept of a Supreme Being who is impartial and appoints virtuous men as Assistants appears in Ch'u Yuan's poetry. The sacrifice to God and Earth on Mount T'ai is described twice, once with the First Emperor in 219 B.C. and again with a later emperor in 110 B.C., who wore yellow robes and heard a voice. Giles notes that the earlier sacrifice was kept a profound secret, while the later one was accompanied by music and a white cloud over the altar. These parallel accounts invite comparison between the two rulers' legitimacy. Another thread is the tension between philosophical and popular religion: the simple system of the Great Monad had to be added to in deference to the intelligence of the masses, producing the figure of P'an Ku. Giles's language here—"had to be made"—implies a sociological explanation for mythological elaboration.

Giles's Handling of Uncertainty

Throughout the text, Giles acknowledges gaps in knowledge. He states that Lao Tzu lived nobody knows when, probably about a certain period. He reports that the commentary on Nu-ch'i says nothing more seems to be known about her. When describing the First Emperor's secret sacrifice, he notes that what actually took place was always kept a profound secret. These admissions of ignorance are not weaknesses but methodological signals: Giles is committed to what the sources say and do not say. He does not fill lacunae with speculation. This restraint gives the book a scholarly credibility that a more sweeping narrative would lack. Readers are left with a sense of the fragmentary nature of the evidence, and of Giles's respect for its limits.

Giles's Religions of Ancient China rewards readers who attend to his lexical choices and his handling of sources. The book is less a comprehensive survey than a guided tour through key texts, with a scholar who points out cruxes and contradictions along the way. Readers should note how Giles's own Victorian rationalism colors his presentation, and compare his translations with those in more recent scholarship. The work remains valuable as a document of early twentieth-century sinology and as a concise introduction to the primary materials of Chinese religious thought.

Reading Herbert Giles’s careful tracing of ancient Chinese texts, I felt the same quiet reverence for primary sources that colours any true study of faith. His attention to original terminology reminded me of a different sort of patience I found later, in the gentle verses of The Buddha's Path of Virtue: A Translation of the Dhammapada — Background and Themes. Both seem to whisper rather than proclaim, asking only for a moment’s still attention.