From Description to Measurement: A Methodological Reconstruction of Comparative Religion through Daopology

Comparative religion has long faced a fundamental dilemma: comparisons among religious traditions have remained at the level of qualitative description, lacking computable and verifiable formal tools. This paper systematically examines five major methodological approaches in comparative religion—Ninian Smart’s seven-dimensional phenomenological model, Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s faith–tradition dialectical framework, John Hick’s pluralistic hypothesis, Stephen Prothero’s difference thesis, and the quantitative methods of computational comparative religion—and analyzes their contributions and limitations one by one. On this basis, the paper proposes Daopology as a new methodological framework for comparative religion. Daopology starts from two axioms and formalizes any expressible Dao into a quadruple kernel model K=(G,Σ,B,Θ)K=(G,Σ,B,Θ), where GG is the set of generative elements, ΣΣ is the structural graph, BB is the boundary conditions, and ΘΘ is the parameter space. Based on this model, the paper defines three computable indicators—generative-element Jaccard similarity, structural difference measure DD, and structural entropy HDHD—moving the structural comparison of religious traditions from qualitative judgment to quantitative measurement. The paper constructs a multi-dimensional comparison table covering five methodological dimensions, and takes Christianity, Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam as cases, providing preliminary comparative conclusions based on an existing core dataset (10,455 structural units). The paper argues that the Daopological framework provides analytical capabilities that existing approaches lack in three dimensions—unity, comparability, and transferability—and offers a new meta-level analytical language for comparative religion.