China, the vast civilization of the Yellow and Yangtze river basins, developed a religious culture unlike the exclusive monotheisms of the West, organized around the idea that a person could draw on three teachings (san jiao) at once: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Rather than demanding sole allegiance, these functioned as complementary resources, Confucianism ordering social ethics, family, and the state; Taoism addressing nature, longevity, ritual, and the individual's harmony with the Dao; Buddhism, arriving from India in the first centuries CE and thoroughly sinicized, answering questions of suffering, death, and salvation.
Beneath and around all three ran the enormously durable substratum of Chinese folk religion, the veneration of ancestors, the worship of local and household gods, the placation of ghosts, and the vast apparatus of temples, festivals, and geomancy that governed everyday life. Over this whole field presided, for most of imperial history, the state cult of Heaven (Tian) and the emperor as the "Son of Heaven," ruling by the Mandate of Heaven that could be lost through misgovernment. The distinctive feature of Chinese religion is this pluralism and its embeddedness in family and state: one worshipped at the Buddhist temple, honoured Confucian propriety, consulted a Taoist priest, and tended the ancestors, without any sense of contradiction, a religious ecology exported, with local transformations, across Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.