Article one already reports the field's leading internal critique, Jonathan Z. Smith's argument that sacredness is relational rather than substantive. A separate and equally serious challenge questions whether the binary itself, sacred against profane, is the universal feature of religion Durkheim and Otto took it to be, or a specifically Western category exported onto material that does not actually work that way.
Several East Asian traditions are the clearest counter-examples. Chan and Zen Buddhist teaching repeatedly collapses the distinction rather than relying on it, insisting that enlightenment is found in ordinary activity, chopping wood and carrying water, rather than in a domain set apart from it; a sharp sacred-profane boundary is, on this account, the kind of dualistic thinking the tradition aims to dissolve. Confucian ritual propriety, li, likewise treats correct conduct in mundane settings, the family, the meal, official duty, as continuous with cosmic order rather than as a lesser sphere outside it.
Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion (1993) pressed the point further, arguing that "religion" itself, and categories built into it such as the sacred and the profane, is not a neutral cross-cultural tool but a concept with a specific post-Enlightenment and largely Protestant genealogy, one importing assumptions about private belief and institutional separation that do not describe how many traditions organise themselves. On this view, applying the Durkheimian binary to a tradition that does not draw it is not a discovery about that tradition but an imposition of the analyst's own categories, a considerably sharper objection than merely finding exceptions to a rule.