“Spiritual Leveling and “Ethical Pilgrimage” among Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū Buddhists”

Le 2 décembre prochain (9h30-12h30),

Jessica Starling
(Lewis and Clark College, spécialiste du bouddhisme japonais contemporain)
donnera une conférence intitulée
“Spiritual Leveling and “Ethical Pilgrimage” among Contemporary Jōdo Shinshū Buddhists”
dans le cadre du séminaire “anthropologie comparée du bouddhisme”
organisé par
Bénédicte Brac de La Perrière (CNRS / Centre Asie du Sud-Est, CNRS/EHESS/INALCO) et
Nicolas Sihlé (CNRS / Centre d’Études Himalayennes).

Cette séance spéciale du séminaire est organisée en collaboration avec le Centre “Chine, Corée, Japon” et le Centre de Recherches sur la Corée (EHESS/CNRS/UPCité).

La conférence aura lieu dans le Bâtiment EHESS-Condorcet, Salle A327
EHESS, 2 cours des humanités 93300 Aubervilliers

résumé

My research draws on several years of ethnographic research among Jōdo Shin “lay-clerics”: religious professionals, male and female, who reside and propagate Buddhism in family-run parish temples across Japan.  The Jōdo Shinshū tradition dates to the 13th century, when the founder Shinran (1173-1263) renounced his monastic status, proclaiming his spiritual inadequacy and utter reliance on the compassion of the Buddha Amitabha.  Shinran also openly married, referring to himself as “neither monk nor layman,” and ever since his time, clerics in this tradition have eschewed asceticism, embraced the family life, and espoused total spiritual reliance on “other power” (tariki) – that of Amitabha’s primal vow. This doctrinal turn has important implications for contemporary ritual and ethical practice in Japan’s most popular Buddhist tradition.

In this presentation, I describe two very different rituals.  In both, I focalize the perspective of Sachiko, a 70-year-old temple daughter, wife, and mother who — in addition to managing the domestic sphere of her family’s temple — is also a credentialed ritual specialist. The first ritual is the one most commonly performed by Jōdo Shin clerics: a monthly memorial service for deceased family ancestors, performed at parishioners’ homes. The second is a different kind of monthly journey: a visit to a Hansen’s disease (leprosy) sanitarium several hours from Sachiko’s home temple. This, she insists, is her true life’s work as a Buddhist: responding to the social suffering of Hansen’s disease patients in Japan and its former colonies.  I suggest that this could fruitfully be understood as a sort of “ethical pilgrimage.” Attending to the operations of space, time, and gender in these Japanese Pure Land practices should present a productive challenge to theorizing Buddhist ritual writ large.