PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

78Pacific Worldand episodic events. Disembodied benevolent others—deceased ancestors,saints, bodhisattvas—located in some non-physical reality who cancome to one’s assistance in times of need is a counter-intuitive category.ON RITUALPyysiäinen’s treatment of ritual draws on Harvey Whitehouse’s studiesof ritual in Melanesia. 14 The cognitive character of Whitehouse’s anthropologicalstudies is found in the way in which he bases his distinctionbetween two modes of religion—imagistic and doctrinal—on two kinds ofmemory—episodic and semantic, respectively. The connection betweenthese two kinds of memory and the two kinds of religious practice is thatin general the doctrinal mode of religion is given its sense of validitythrough repetition and is a part of semantic memory, while the imagisticmode of religion is given its sense of validity through emotional stimulationand is part of episodic memory.Whitehouse bases his link between mode of religion and frequency ofritual performance on psychological studies of memory. Episodic memory(also known as autobiographical memory) involves “recollections of specificevents” and this is “the way people remember revelatory rituals, thespecific moments when their understandings about the nature of the worldwere violated or transformed.” 15 Infrequent and highly emotionally chargedrituals, such as the Melanesian initiatory rites Whitehouse has studied, areaccording to this theory remembered as specific episodes, including suchthings as the identity of the specific participants. Infrequency, episodicmemory, and dramatic uniqueness form an integral relation inWhitehouse’s theory:The transmission of imagistic practices depends upon the uniqueand intense quality of ritual experience. It is not conducive to thecultivation of such messages to repeat them very often. Repetitiondeprives the experience of its uniqueness. 16Semantic memory, on the other hand, deals with frequently repeatedevents which are “repetitive and predictable” and are remembered in theform of “scripts or ‘schemas’.” 17 Frequently occuring rituals, such as aSunday service in Christianity, are not remembered as specific episodes,but rather as a typical sequence of familiar events. While dramatic ritualsrecorded in episdodic memory and performed infrequently provide opportunitiesfor revelatory shifts of how one understands the world, familiarrituals recorded in semantic memory and performed frequently areopportunities for inculcating a specific doctrinal perspective. Indeed,