Religion as a Complex and Dynamic System

The turn to historical methods and suspicion of universal theories of religion has led to an ethos of particularism in which the increasing data of religions are treated like atomistic and self-sufficient units of knowl-edge. But as complex systems, religions exhibit patterns that are visible only when we look beyond the most particulate scale of analysis, similar to phenomena examined in the natural and social sciences. To see reli-gions as complex and dynamic systems enables us to resist the fragmen-tation of knowledge, account for change without sacrificing systemic consistency, and formulate generalizations that allow for comparison across religious systems. The study of Buddhism is used as a reference point for these methodological discussions. WHEN CLIFFORD GEERTZ penned his iconic essays “Religion as a Cultural System ” and “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, ” he helped establish the study of religion as interpretations of meaning systems that “stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case in sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction ” (1973: 24). With this principle, Geertz fended off functional-ist and reductive theories of religion, as well as the kind of universal