The longevity of Chinese civilization is generally conceded to be a unique phenomenon in world history; as such it has evoked explanations ranging from the plausible to the esoteric. A search for the roots of its longevity is now feasible, thanks to the massive archaeological and scientific data pouring out of China since 1949. A preliminary integration of such multifarious new data with rich archaic Chinese literary records has enabled me to reach the conclusion that the trait-complex of each of the major Chinese cultural elements—field agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, metallurgy, script, language, religion including the system of divination, social and political thought—is marked at once by a regionally distinctive Sinitic character and by a pattern of centrifugal geographic spread from the southeastern portion of the loess highlands of North China. The detailed evidence and argument that the Chinese civilization, in spite of its later coalescence and articulation, was just as pristine as the Mesopotamian, have been presented in my recent book, The Cradle of the East: An Inquiry into the Indigenous Origins of Techniques and Ideas of Neolithic and Early Historic China, 5000–1000 B.C. In the course of my research I have uncovered three basic factors that may provide a fresh interpretation as to why the Chinese civilization is the only major civilization of ancient origin that is still distinctive and vital today.

Chu Hsib (1130–1200), one of the greatest Chinese thinkers since Confucius and Mencius, and the most important in the last eight hundred years, synthesized Neo- Confucianism and built his own philosophy on a new basis. This philosophy—which dominated Chinese thought from the fourteenth century on, Korean thought since the fifteenth century, and Japanese thought since the sixteenth century—began to attract European attention in the seventeenth century. At that time, Catholic missionaries in China quarreled over the translation of “God” as Shang-tic (Lord-on-High), and over the interpretations of the Chinese term t'iend (Heaven). Consequently, they began to study Neo-Confucian thought. The publication, in 1715, of the Hsing-li ching-ie (Essentials of Neo-Confucianism) had a strong impact on them; Chu Hsi and other Neo-Confucian thinkers gradually occupied the minds of Catholic missionaries.

Louis Charles Jean Dumont has been Directeur d'Etudes in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris since 1955. From 1951 until 1955 he was Lecturer in Indian Sociology at the University of Oxford. He began field research in India—among a single Tamil-speaking caste—in 1949, when the post-war generation of Anglo-American anthropologists was undertaking fieldwork on Indian villages. He had been trained in indology, Sanskrit and Dravidian studies; reared in the heritage of French sociology descended from Emile Durkheim through Marcel Mauss; and influenced by those intellectual currents that later took the name of structuralism. Thus, his perspective on India was different from that of his colleagues in the English-speaking world, and the results of his research were initially puzzling to them. There is no doubt that his work is now increasingly well understood outside France, especially since the appearance in 1970 of an English translation of his Homo Hierarchies: An Essay on the Caste System, originally published in 1967 in Paris. However, a great deal of uncertainty about the meaning and significance of much of what Dumont has written continues to be expressed in both anthropology and Asian studies. This symposium was organized in the hope that aspects of his thought might be clarified for a wide scholarly audience and some assessment made of his contribution to comparative sociology.

I began the work of this paper by trying to specify the different kinds of “hierarchy” that Louis Dumont uses in Homo Hierarchicus. Such an inventory, I thought, might be helpful to those who find the book difficult to read. Unexpectedly, in the course of the exercise, I began to uncover Dumont's argument and to find what I take to be solutions to two of the problems I had continued to have with this monumental work, even though it had been amply reviewed and discussed. I had been troubled by the mystery of “the mantle of our Lady,” that odd process of the encompassing and the encompassed, and the lack of fit between Dumont's model of the Indian caste system and that of his Anglo- American-trained colleagues. In the paper below, I present the inventory, argument, and solutions mentioned, as well as their implications for an understanding of Homo Hierarchicus by the empirically oriented social scientist.

Louis Dumont has the unique advantage of combining field experience, large ideas, and a basic knowledge of Sanskrit. The patience to master a difficult archaic language, no longer the spoken vehicle of current thoughts in any defined society, is very rare in a scholar devoted to analysis of actual social groups, real people. Dumont is the only person to acquaint himself with traditional societies in India and with the cultural continuity within which they, and their neighbors, are intelligible as a unit. The large and daunting literate past of India is open to him; and there are few who can compete with this combination of skills. Nevertheless his study of the relationship between king and brahmin in traditional and (so far as is relevant) modern Indian society—a study found principally in one essay—impressed me in two ways, which, in association, did not sustain admiration. His ideas need to be placed alongside another interpretation of the facts, in order that a clearer perspective may be obtained. It is not the case that his reading of archaic and ambiguous materials is wrong; we do not yet know enough about the history of India to say that. But there is a real chance that the talent to generalize from the particular (which is one of the strengths of anthropologists) has here run a little ahead of itself. My aim is not to discourage the use of Sanskritic materials, still less to imply that there are “real experts” in competition with whom the anthropologist who emulates Dumont's efforts must remain silent. I value the stimulus Dumont's ideas have offered; and I know they will continue to excite response and encourage further research, even when they arouse suspicion. Let us attempt a new evaluation of the facts, and set that beside Dumont's findings.

Dumont's essay “World Renunciation in Indian Religions,” given as the Frazer lecture at Oxford in 1958, has achieved a considerable reputation; it inspired, for example, J. C. Heesterman's article “Brahmin, Ritual and Renouncer.” Dumont's article is not easy to understand; I feel that the rather naive and hasty general comments: “The renouncer thinks as an individual, and this is the distinctive trait which opposes him to the man-in-the-world and brings him closer to the western thinker” are unfortunate. I also feel that greater historical and linguistic rigor is mandatory. But more important than questions of scholarship and of method, it seems to me that something crucial is missing from Dumont's essay. It is certainly useful to emphasize, as Dumont does, both in this essay and in his more recent Homo Hierarchicus, the structures evident in saṃnyāsa as an institution (“[H]e does not really leave society …”). Even here I could not help but feel that a Marxist approach would have yielded greater theoretical gains. (Cf. the remarkable essays by the late D. D. Kosambi.) I am sorry to see that Dumont has failed to come to terms with renunciation as a psychological event; I shall attempt to focus more closely than has hitherto been done on the psychological characteristics of asceticism.

The importance of Louis Dumont's work—both for specialists in Indian studies and for general social science theory—is by now obvious. Yet, since the publication of the initial volumes of Contributions to Indian Sociology (old series, coedited with D. Pocock), Dumont's work has been subjected to intensive criticisms that do not simply suggest he is wrong about a particular ethnographic fact, but rather that his approach is wrongheaded, that his starting points are idealist, biased (in favor of upper castes), or irretrievably tied to “French intellectual currents.”

Scholars of medieval Japanese history are not often blessed with sufficient statistical data to employ it systematically in their analysis of problems in the political, social, and economic history of the period. Yet in certain limited areas of investigation, enough information does exist to permit independent testing of the validity of conclusions that have been based on the historian's examination of the archival record—for example, the lower bureaucracy during the Muromachi period (1336–1573), which consisted of a group of officials known as the bugyōnin.

The collective name of the work whose translation is here being reviewed was apparently added, long after their composition, to ten of Dōgen's (1200–1253) minor works–only two of which bear a date (1234). How long after the event the compilation was made may be deduced from the colophon, written in 1357. While there can be no quarrel with the title of the translation, a closer paraphrase might be ‘collection of writings concerning the mental preparations necessary for the study of the Path’. The Path is, of course, that of Zen; something must be said about study/étude.