Zen Chanting and Jazz at a Public Arts Festival

This article explores ritual change and innovation based on my participation as a saxophone player in two rituals featuring traditional Buddhist chant and jazz, which were performed at the Sōtō Zen temple Tōkōji in Ōmiya (Saitama prefecture) during the Yume Arts Festival. In designing these ceremonies, the monks selected elements from traditional rituals and put them together in new ways, while adding new entertaining elements, such as jazz and yōkai. I suggest that the modularity of rituals made it possible to easily create new ceremonies and perform them without extensive rehearsals. Moreover, I show that the monks aimed to offer an entertaining performance in order to reach out to the local community. This article further illuminates that Sōtō Zen has a rich sonic dimension, which our crossover ceremonies showcased.

Just Sitting and Just Saying: The Hermeneutics of Dōgen’s Realization-Based View of Language

This paper explicates the complex relationship between contemplative practice and enlightened activity conducted both on and off the meditative cushion as demonstrated in the approach of the Sōtō Zen Buddhist founder Dōgen (1200–1253). I examine Dōgen’s intricate views regarding how language, or what I refer to as just saying, can and should be used in creative yet often puzzling and perplexing ways to express the experience of self-realization by reflecting the state of non-thinking that is attained through unremitting seated meditation or just sitting (shikan taza). In light of the sometimes-forbidding obscurity of his writing, as well as his occasional admonitions against a preoccupation with literary pursuits, I show based on a close reading of primary sources that Dōgen’s basic hermeneutic standpoint seeks to overcome conventional sets of binary oppositions involving uses of language. These polarities typically separate the respective roles of teacher and learner by distinguishing sharply between delusion and insight, truth and untruth, right and wrong, or speech and silence, and thereby reinforce a hierarchical, instrumental, and finite view of discourse. Instead, Dōgen inventively develops expressions that emphasize the non-hierarchical, realization–based, and eminently flexible functions of self-extricating rhetoric such that, according to his paradoxical teaching, “entangled vines are disentangled by using nothing other than entwined creepers,” or as a deceptively straightforward example, “the eyes are horizontal, and the nose is vertical.”

Zen in Distress: Theorizing Gender Dysphoria and Traumatic Remembrance within Sōtō Zen Meditation

Gender dysphoria is considered a pronounced experience of distress in the bodies and minds of some transgender people. Examining the text Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryū Suzuki, I analyze some of the difficulties that may arise for transgender practitioners experiencing acutely strong gender dysphoria within the Sōtō Zen meditation experience. I seek to understand how physical and psychological gender distress may make concentration, and thereby realization, challenging and potentially harmful within a context of Sōtō Zen meditation. I consider how meditation can exacerbate the panic and traumatic remembrance of the body and mind, leading both to embodied struggles, as well as undoubtedly philosophical ones too. This paper theorizes gender dysphoria to exist beyond a state of unitary “distress” to include trauma. I put forward an understanding of gender dysphoria that is grounded in traumatic, gendered remembrances—what I call “sustained traumas.” Within the meditation experience, I argue trans, gender dysphoric people may experience heightened disconnect, separation, and deepening into their solid and suffering “self” rather than open to the fundamental nature of emptiness, non-duality, and an empty and move-able core. Ultimately, I argue meditation may lead to a deepening of traumatic remembrance, posing potential corporeal and philosophical problematics for gender dysphoric practitioners within Sōtō Zen meditation.

A Mystical Path Stemming from Eiheiji

This chapter gives an overview of the origins, content, historical development, and important literary, religious, and philosophical implications of Giun’s Verse Comments on Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, which was written in 1329 and published a century later and remained a key component of Sōtō Zen intellectual life for several centuries during the medieval period. It explains how Giun made decisive contributions to the restoration of Sōtō Zen at a key turning point in its early institutional expansion. These developments followed a few decades of decline caused by intense intrafactional rivalries at Eiheiji as part of the aftermath of Dōgen’s death compounded by the impact of a devastating fire in 1297 that destroyed many of the monastery’s architectural and textual treasures. By the Edo period, the significance of Giun’s Verse Comments was eclipsed by the Prose Comments (Goshō) on Dōgen’s Treasury written by Senne and Kyōgō.

Flowers Blooming on a Withered Tree

This volume, containing a translation, annotations, and historical studies of Giun’s (1200–1253) Verse Comments on Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō honmokuju), represents the initial book-length contribution to a crucial though previously unnoticed sub-field in Japanese Buddhist studies involving text-historical and literary-philological examinations of a key example of the copious premodern collections of annotations and interpretations of the masterwork of Zen master Dōgen. It is the first study of the life and thought of Giun and of the 60-fascicle version of Dōgen’s masterwork, which are crucial for understanding the history of the Sōtō Zen Buddhist sect’s intellectual development. The main translation of this text consists of four-line verses and capping phrases composed by Giun, accompanied by additional capping phrases that were contributed by an eighteenth-century commentator, Katsusdō Honkō. The book also provides an examination of the background and influences exerted on and by Giun’s Verse Comments in relation to various aspects of Dōgen’s writings and Zen thought in China and Japan.

A Survey of the Japanese Influence on Buddhist Education in Taiwan during the Japanese Colonial Period (1895–1945)

This paper analyses the Japanese influence upon Taiwanese Buddhist communities during the Colonial Period. I will discuss the interplay between monasticism, education, and politics by examining the process of institutionalisation of monastics and Buddhist educational programs in Taiwan between 1895 and 1945. In accord with pertinent historical developments, this paper is divided into five sections: (1) the Sōtō Zen lineage, (2) the Rinzai Zen lineage, (3) the Pure Land (Jōdo) lineage, (4) Taiwanese monastics who studied in Japan, and (5) Taiwanese nuns. Based on the strong Japanese sectarian tradition, different sects had disparate strategies in Taiwan. The Sōtō lineage arrived first, engaged in precept ceremonies, and started up a well-run Buddhist college. The Myōshinji Sect of Rinzai took Kaiyuansi in Tainan as the main headquarters in southern Taiwan for teaching Buddhist classes as well as holding monumental precept-conferral ceremonies. As for the Pure Land lineage, they came slightly later but eventually established 37 branches across Taiwan, implementing social-educational programs actively. Finally, the nuns and monks who went abroad to study Buddhism in Japan matured and took important roles in advancing Buddhist education in Taiwan. All of these cases demonstrate a profound Japanese influence upon Taiwanese Buddhist education and monastic culture.

WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF BUDDHIST CULTURE OF MEDIEVAL JAPAN

The article is devoted to the consideration of the role of women in the history of Buddhist culture in medieval Japan. The article examines the formation of the first female Buddhist monastic community in Japan. It is noted that the formation of the first Buddhist monastic community here was associated with women of Korean origin. A significant role in the institutionalization of Buddhism in Japan and its transformation into the dominant ideology was played by the Japanese empresses, who were impressed by the Buddhist approach to the religious status of women. The Japanese empresses actively supported the construction of Buddhist temples, donated land and significant funds to them. While pursuing a policy of strengthening the Buddhist church, they simultaneously contributed to its centralization and the establishment of strict control over the sangha by the state. The social and confessional status of women in the history of medieval Japan was constantly changing. If, until the end of the Nara period, nuns had the same social and confessional status as monks, then in the Heian era, nuns were removed from government positions and state ceremonies, and in religious treatises the opinion that women could not find salvation until will not be reborn as men. During the Kamakura and Muromachi eras, women again began to play an active role in society, including in religious institutions. During this period, new directions of Buddhism appeared (Amidaism, Soto-Zen, the Nichiren school), in whose doctrines the attitude towards women was more respectful. In the subsequent period, there was an increase in the influence of Confucianism and a weakening of the position of Buddhism in Japanese society, which negatively affected the social status of women and the state of the female monastic community.

Barth’s Theology of Religion and Dōgen’s Nondualism

James Farwell begins by challenging the now-common classification of Barth’s theology of religions as “exclusivism,” calling his position rather a “kerygmatically generated inverse pluralism.” Arguing that Barth’s project is a rejection of any theology of religions, Farwell goes on to engage Barth as a partner in comparative theology, particularly in conversation with the Zen teacher Dōgen, who founded the Soto Zen school of Japanese Buddhism. Despite Barth’s own quick rejection of Zen Buddhism as a religion that seeks salvation in human striving, Farwell finds in Dōgen a critique of religion very similar to Barth’s own. That surprising convergence is itself a worthwhile fruit of comparative theological study. Coupled with this critique, however, Dōgen offers an illuminating nondualism that makes no ultimate distinction between practice and realization, between the path and the goal of “salvation.” This offers a new insight that may helpfully temper Barth’s own emphasis on God’s revealing Word as over against human effort.

Religious and Ritual Space in New Media World: A Study of “Internet Zazenkai” in Japan

Zazenkai, also known as Zen meditation or Zen Mindfulness, is held in Japan for the general public, usually with time, place and procedures set by a Buddhist Zen Temple. With the emergence of the Internet and new media, several Zen Temples have started to hold Zazenkai by utilizing these media technologies including online live streaming. This new type of Zazenkai is known as Internet Zazenkai. Compared with traditional Zazenkai that are held at a certain time and place, the application of new media enables Internet Zazenkai to go beyond the spatial and temporal limits of nature, where Zen practitioners in different global locations participate together using webcam. Individuals spatially separated from each other could share the same time and space of Zazenkai on the Internet. While the new media technologies open up new opportunities for Zazenkai, they also invite examinations into religious meanings of time and space for Zen practitioners. This paper is based on the study and examination of Internet Zazenkai regularly held by Treeleaf Zendo, a Soto Zen temple in Tsukuba. Its homepage Treeleaf.org is a virtual space where live streaming of Zazenkai is provided, its recorded videos are kept, web podcast of lectures and talks are heard, and so on. By analyzing the techno-ritual phenomenon, this paper attempts to analyze the role of Zen masters and participants in the process of Internet Zazenkai and to examine the differences and similarities between traditional Zazenkai and Internet Zazenkai. This paper will shed new light on the influence of new media upon religious and ritual space in modern society.