Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

SPECIFICITIES OF GLOBALIZATION 175…what we call the deity coming to be born onearth that we see floating in the air must actuallybe some kind of animal which can fly up high, justlike the snake or fish swimming in the sea. As forthe rays of light… is actually a meteorite, whichwherever it falls will burst a glowing light around(Tippakarawongse Mahakosadibbhadee 1867).As a result, Buddhism has become formalized andrationalized, with a scientific worldview permeating thefabric and order of things of the Buddhist cosmos. Agood example would be the belief in the existence ofthe Buddha Amida’s Pure Land, thought to be locatedin the ‘West,’ a purely symbolic belief referring to thesunset of this life. However, with the new geographicalknowledge that came with the Western-style globe,many simple believers were confused. Today, manyThais also believe that nibbana is a place or a space toreach for or to go to, often associated with the imageof the universe as scientifically constructed. Spiritualitywas made modern in its essence so that it could easily bereferred to or incorporated into other modern discoursesemerging around the same time, such as the building upof the modern nation-state, as can be witnessed in thecases of Japanese State Shintoism, Bushido, HachimanDaibutsu and the Thai nationalist ideology of Nation-Religion-Monarchy. This transformation usually tookplace in the center of a nation where contact withthe West was immense, but the process was usuallyinconsistent in more distant areas, such as Okinawa orChiang Mai, whose spirituality and spiritual worldviewsvaried, although imposition of the central culture alsooccurred, often with violence.ConsumptionAs Clifford Geertz (1973) observes, the more youlearn about another culture, the less foreign, and themore normal it becomes. The more we study aboutJapanese spirituality and its development, the less exoticor romantic it becomes. It is like everything else thatmoves with time and operates within an ever-changingsocio-historical context. However, during the researchperiod, I also came to realize that it did not matterhow much I knew that that kind of image was only aversion of a representation of a reality, which was noteven necessarily a reality itself, although there were stillmany people who were ready or would like to believe inthat image. To say that they were wrong and I was rightwas simply to hold a certain academic arrogance and,more importantly, to be ignorant of another importantphenomenon that was emerging.Therefore, the investigation into the history of Japanesespirituality stopped at that point, and, towards the endof the research period, I set out the task to visit as manyof the temples that offered zazen meditation sessions tolay people as possible. Heeding Foucault’s warning that“discourse must not be referred to the distant presence ofthe origin, but treated as and when it occurs” (Foucault1972), I thought that these temples would be theplace where this reluctant state of constructing oneselfthrough the image represented by others would actuallytake place. Perhaps this half-baked representation-cumrealitywould be best summarized by a simple commentfrom a person I befriended with in one of these sessions:“I come to try Zen meditation because I want to knowwhy Westerners are so interested in it.” On anotheroccasion, I found a similar incongruity when I cameacross a book of collected English-language haikupoems translated into Japanese by a Japanese collectorwho mentioned:I was born, grew up, and have always lived in Japan,but I’ve never read a haiku until I read TenementLandscape by Paul David Mena. For me, readingEnglish language haiku is a pleasurable meditation.Why? I found Paul’s haiku to be surely haiku. Itreveals the deep haiku mind, but at the same time,it presents a very contemporary and openmindedview. So I was greatly moved by it. (Daikoku inMena 2001)This search for one’s self, one’s own identity, may recallthe characteristics and development of theories of theuniqueness of the Japanese (Nihonjinron), as well asits Nativist and nationalist precursors. Yet, the currentphenomenon departs from the previous ones in that itis not directly linked with the idea of being a Japanesesubject of the government or the nation (although theprospect that this can be resorted to in the future cannotbe ruled out as a rise of right-wing sentiment is beingseen), but involves mediation through the mass mediaand the consumption of its images in a personalized,individualistic way. For example, at the end of eachzazen session in one temple, all the newcomers wereasked to introduce themselves and to tell how theycame to know about the place. The majority of thepeople—who, to my surprise, were young people fromaround the age of university student to early thirties—said that they learned about it from the Internet (seeFigure 1). Only one person, a middle-aged woman,reported that she saw it in a newspaper column. Othersources included TV programs, which made one ofthe temples I visited very popular, magazines, some ofwhich you could pick up for free at train stations, anddirect advertisements made by the temples themselves(see Figure 2). In the urban context, the sense of sharingAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows