Religious Syncretism and Cultural Pluralism along the Central and East Asian Silk Road – New Discoveries and Venues for Research

The current and continuing shifts in frequently contrasting „official” and popular stances multiculturalism and religious pluralism in Europe are clearly symptomatic of the growing crisis of state multiculturalism in Europe, a crisis increasingly visible on a variety of political and cultural levels. These developments also indicate that cultural and religious pluralism cannot be approached and understood solely in the framework of European modernity. The traditional Eurocentric lens certainly need to be widened and transcended to consider also comparable pre-modern and nonEuropean phenomena, involving international networks promoting inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue and co-existence. The historic trans-continental routes linking the Mediterranean and East Asia, commonly labelled the Silk Road, and the dynamics of the wide-ranging religious and cultural exchange and syncretism during the active phases of its millennia-old history, certainly represents the most characteristic and illustrative of these pre-modern globalization phenomena. In the fields of religious and cultural history the antique and late antique syncretistic and pluralist cultures which existed along the Central Asian sectors of the Silk Road and the transmutations of Manichaeism in contact with Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism in China (until its absorption into Chinese popular religions) is of vital significance for understanding the nature and trajectories of inter-religious and inter-cultural relations and globalizing exchange in pre-modern and nonEuropean settings. The mounting evidence of Taocisation of Christian and Manichaean notions and beliefs in pre-modern Chinese contexts indicate a dynamic of religio-cultural trasplantability and translatability which are undoubtedly of obvious relevance to the contemporary global dilemmas and crises of multiculturalism and religious diversity, rapidly intensifying in an increasingly interconnected and inter-dependent world