Heaven Is Empty

Recent years have seen a welcome wave of revisionist studies of the culture, religion, and society of early imperial China, informed both by new scholarly methods and questions and by a wealth of sometimes astonishing materials (texts and other artefacts) that have been newly recovered archeologically. This book thus enters a somewhat crowded arena. Unfortunately, it delivers less than its provocative title promises. Heaven Is Empty seems to pursue three main goals. (“Seems” because the arguments are not very clearly enunciated. Chapters lack clear, succinct statements of purpose; many paragraphs lack topic sentences.) First, it articulates the vision of empire that Marsili sees as having informed the socioeconomic, political, and religious policies of a particular Chinese emperor: Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty (reigned 141–87 BCE). Second, the book argues that “the homogenization of diverse religious perspectives into one unified religion” need not always be “a fundamental step toward the organization of . . . integrated political systems” (60). (Here the example of imperial Rome is the one repeatedly returned to in a series of cross-cultural comparisons that do not add very much.) Third, Heaven Is Empty argues against using implicitly monotheistic models of religion to understand a culture such as pre-Buddhist China. Readers familiar with the material covered in the book might feel, with some justification, that the first and third arguments are not quite as novel as suggested here, and that the second is directed against a straw man.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Art · Buddhism · China · Emperor · Empire · Heaven · Literature · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · Chinese history and philosophy · Eurasian Exchange Networks · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy