Max Weber: Selections in Translation

We may summarise what has been said in this survey of Asian civilisation (extremely superficial as it has been in view of the richness of the structures considered) in the following way:

For Asia as a whole, China has played much the same role as France has done in the modern Western world. From China has stemmed all gentlemanly ‘polish’, from Tibet to Japan and Indo-China. India, on the other hand, has come to have something of the significance that ancient Greece has had in the West. There is little thought about anything beyond purely practical concerns in Asia whose sources are not ultimately to be sought in India. Above all, the Indian salvation religions, both orthodox and heterodox, have had some claim to be considered as playing roughly the role, for the whole of Asia, that Christianity has played in the West. With one big difference: apart from local, and usually short-lived, exceptions, none of them has been elevated for any length of time to the position of the single dominant ‘church’ in the sense in which this was the case in the West in the Middle Ages and indeed right up to the Peace of Westphalia. Asia was, and remained, in principle the land of free competition between religions, of ‘tolerance’ in the sense of late Classical antiquity – subject, that is, to due reservations for the limits imposed by reasons of state, which, it should not be forgotten, continue even in the modern world to set bounds to all forms of religious toleration, albeit taking effect in a different direction.