Bibliographic Essay
For general histories of East Asian religions see Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa, Religion in Japanese History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966); John Lagerwey, China: A Religious State (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2010); and Thomas DuBois, Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
On Neo-Confucianism see Benjamin Elman, John Duncan and Herman Ooms, Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).On the legal regulation of religion see Edward Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society following the Era of Mongol Rule, Sinica Leidensia 34 (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Neil McMullin, Buddhism and the State in Sixteenth Century Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
On the development of Maitreyan millenarianism in East Asia see Alan Sponberg and Helen Hardacre, Maitreya, the Future Buddha (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and for the evolution of these ideas in China, see Ma Xisha and Meng Huiying (eds.), Popular Religion and Shamanism, trans. Chi Zhen and Thomas David DuBois (Leiden: Brill, 2011). For studies of the White Lotus and sectarian tradition see Barend ter Haar, The White Lotus Teaching in Chinese Religious History (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992) and Hubert Michael Seiwert, Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
David Ownby, ‘The Heaven and Earth Society as Popular Religion', Journal of Asian Studies 54.4 (1995), 1023-46 discusses the religious orientation of Triad secret societies in China. On the outbreak of religious rebellion in mid-Qing China see Susan Naquin's Shantung Rebellion: The Wang Lun Uprising of 1774 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981) and Millenarian Rebellion in China: The Eight Trigrams Uprising of 1813 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976).
On the destruction of the Enryakuji and Catholics see Carol Richmond Tsang, War and Faith: Ikko ikki in Late Muromachi Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), and on the suppression of Catholics see George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1973).