American Gāthā
Several years ago, I did some research on Shin Buddhist music in the United States, ultimately publishing an article on the subject [PDF]. A lot of the research I did then found its way into my doctoral dissertation, and I’ve always been interested in returning to the topic. Of course, post-PhD life can be busy! One necessarily needs to take on certain projects that lend themselves to professional development, and it can be hard to say no. Over the last several months, however, I’ve cleared my plate and am now finally able to return to the subject of Buddhist music.
For more than a century, Shin Buddhists in the United States have sung gāthā (hymns) set to Western-style music, often accompanied by piano or organ, during weekly Dharma Family Services. Theses songs have a long and colorful history in the US, a history that is not often discussed in the academic literature on American or Western Buddhism. Songs sung include updated versions of traditional Japanese folk songs, Shinran Shonin’s devotional poems (wasan), and modern compositions by life-long and convert Buddhists alike.
In a very general sense, I’m interested in the types of music being composed, performed, and played within US Shin Buddhist communities today, who’s making this music, and why. My long-term goal is to write a book on the subject which will focus primarily (though not exclusively) on music performed as practice during Shin Buddhist rituals, services, and celebrations. I am curious about the place of music-as-practice within the borader context of Shin Buddhist ritual/practice life. How does music making compare to, say, reciting the nembutsu, reading a book about Buddhism, mediation, or hearing a Dharma talk? Furthermore, are US Shin Buddhist musical practices local in nature or do they travel across the country? In what ways has the music of Jane Imamura, for example, helped shape a shared sense of belonging among Shin Buddhists across North America?
These are some of the big questions I’ll be asking over the coming year as I research this topic, interview music makers, and survey members of Shin Buddhist communities about their musical and practice lives. To help in this regard, I’ve set up a new website called “American Gāthā” where I’ll chronicle my work and solicit information and feedback. Please check out the site and subscribe for updates.
The Tranquil Meditator
This past weekend at the American Academy of Religion, I participated in a panel for the Dharma Academy of North America. Our panel was organized by the wonderful Karma Lekshe Tsomo, and it brought together a variety of perspectives on the transmission and development of Buddhism in the United States. More details on other papers can be found here (PDF, see page 6).
I recorded my talk and have posted audio below. The audio quality isn’t great, and I feel as though my argument is larger than a fifteen-minute presentation can really hold. But I also believe that there might be the germ of a good idea here, so in the off chance anyone else finds this topic useful, here it is.
A couple of things: this piece is about pop-culture and mass media representations of Buddhism in the U.S., representations often done by non-Buddhists and perpetuated within Buddhist media. These representations are a reflection of just one discourse among many, and the icon of the Tranquil Meditator I propose here is just an icon, an imperfect reflection of certain aspects of our culture. But drawing our attention to this icon and the discourse it represents, I hope to actually move past it to discuss more important issues.
Namely, I believe that Buddhist philosophies, doctrines, ethics, and practices potentially contain extremely useful and powerful tools and strategies for solving contemporary social problems and collective suffering. And by that I don’t mean that mindfulness/meditation alone can save the world. The style of meditation represented by the icon of the Tranquil Meditator is just one Buddhist tool, one practice. And no one practice or spiritual technology can solve all of our problems. Moreover, what the Tranquil Meditator represents is extremely seductive; she promises a type of instant psychological and emotional gratification that may alleviate immediate or short-term suffering without necessarily addressing the underlying or root causes, thus merely delaying any potential cure to that suffering. And it is precisely those underlying or root causes — as well as practical and reasonable solutions to these causes — that I would like to see more people (especially Buddhists) talking about in the media, rather than just the constant quest for short-term happiness.
I believe we can do better.
I’m deeply grateful to Karma Lekshe Tsomo for organizing this panel and to DANAM for providing us the opportunity to present our work. I am also grateful to my fellow panelists whose own papers were of far better quality than my own! I’m humbled by their hard work and dedication and hope to see all of our work developed and published in the near future.
I hope to write another post soon about other experiences and lessons learned at this year’s AAR. So stay tuned.
Lastly, because I don’t technically have permission for all of the images I used during my presentation, I do not feel comfortable posting the slides here. But if you’re interested in either the slides themselves or in getting a hard copy of my paper, let me know and I might be able to send them to you.
Dharma Dialogue
Jane Iwamura down at the University of the West has a class going on right now on Buddhism in the West, and her students are managing a blog called “Dharma Dialogue.” It’s an admirable project to give students the opportunity to share their experiences and what they’re learning, studying, and the issues with which they’re wrestling with the public at large. Especially given the vitriol one usually finds in the Buddhist blogs these days when the topics hit so close to home. I find the posts smart and the entire project bold. I’m a fan.
In a recent post, my name was mentioned. Specifically, my Masters thesis. Dear god. That thing’s still floating around out there? Rumor has it that the GTU library can’t find their copy of it, and my electronic file has been corrupted and is barely readable. Which is just as well. I defended my thesis in the summer of 2002, and did most of the research for it over the corse of the previous year. The Internet, in 2001-2002, was a much different animal. Things have changed. When I wrote my thesis, not only did “web 2.0″ not yet exist, not only was there no Facebook or Twitter, but “blog” wasn’t really even a household word yet. That’s the problem with doing research on contemporary issues and especially the problem with the Internet. It’s the very definition of a moving target.
If I could do it all over again, I’d probably do it differently. Specifically, I’d be interested in the questions of community, identity formation, and the five skandhas. That is, of late, I’ve been thinking more and more about the importance of sangha (community) in one’s Buddhist practice, how community helps in the formation of identity, and (to put a Buddhist spin on all of it) the extent to which the five skandhas are actually present in one’s online life or if it’s just two or three (or four?) of them. I don’t have any firm answers here on any of these questions because, quite frankly, I’ve haven’t been doing any real research on these issues of late. I’ve been focused on other things. But I hope that as others, including the dedicated students down as U-West, dig more into this topic, they keep some of these issues in mind.
Now, where Monica is absolutely right, of course, is in her observation that digital Buddhism does not necessarily reflect real-world Buddhism. Her statistics about how many folks are online, what languages they speak, and where they live in the real world are worth a look.
However, I’d caution against using Google searches as any indication of anything. First is the problem that Google searches are powered by a proprietary search algorithm that changes rather frequently. How search results are ranked is a complete mystery. Secondly, and related to the first issue, even though a “casual” Google search might appear to be the same for a large number of people, it isn’t. As Google grows in sophistication, search results are actually custom tailored toward specific demographics, locations, and individuals. One person’s “causal” results might not be like the next person’s.
Further, and perhaps more importantly, Google searches are clearly not the only way that folks discover new content on the web. The Internet mirrors real-life, and it’s reasonable to assume that one discovers new Buddhist content through existing, self-selected networks. For example, I might follow Buddhist Blogger A, not only her blog but also on Twitter, largely because I agree with her point of view. i.e., the digital equivalent of self-segregation in the real world. If Buddhist Blogger A re-posts something or links to something or tweets some other blog, I’m likely to start following that as well. (It is, after all, how I found out about Dharma Dialogue.) And this has nothing to do with what Google might serve up or what the “mainstream” blogs or media assumes is important.
Simply put, we need more research on use patterns. We need more data about how individuals use the web, search out new content sources, and discover digital Buddhism(s).
I’ll end here, in part because I’m actually 39,000 feet above Nevada at the moment, on my way to Chicago. But I wanted to say that I appreciated this particular post, part of a much needed new blog in the mix of digital Buddhism. Great work!
See you in Chicago
For those who go to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, it’s coming up this weekend in Chicago. The program book is online, searchable, and here’s what’s happening in Buddhist Studies.
I’ll be presenting on Friday during a related meeting, the Dharma Academy of North America. My topic is, once again, media representations of Buddhism. Check it out if you’re in town.
Also, the main Buddhism Section meeting is Sunday morning. It’s worth going to this meeting (not only because the topic looks interesting) but because during the business meeting future topics for the group are discussed. If you’re interested in participating in the ongoing development of Buddhist studies as an academic discipline, this is one way to get your voice heard.
See you in Chicago!
Space Buddha
Supposed 1000-year-old iron staute of Vaishravana carved from meteorite.
As you may remember, the story of a Tibetan Buddhist statue carved out of a meteorite and found in Germany with connections to the Nazis made the rounds of Buddhist and mainstream media a month or so ago. And really, that’s not surprising. Nazis, Tibet, statues made from space rocks. It has all the makings of a great TV movie.
Via the Buddhist scholars network H-Buddhism, however, I found an article by a Tibetologist who makes a convincing argument that the statue is not, in fact, Tibetan but is likely an imitation. (Here’s a direct link to the PDF of the article.) The original scholarly article that brought this story to life was written by mineralogists and planetologist who explicitly asked for folks from other fields to weigh in on “cultural matters” related to the statue. Achim Bayer, in his article, has done so. In sum, he argues that the iconography of the statue is inconsistent with what one would expect of a statue made a thousand years ago in central Asia. Instead, he believes it was likely made in the twentieth century in Germany.
Bayer goes on to discuss the continued popularity of various myths surrounding Tibet and Shangri-la and suggests that there is a “myth of Tibetology” as well. He suggests that Tibetology as a field of study is a science with a “methodology just as rigid as any other.” While I’m not sure I want to grant any rigid methodology the label “science” just yet, I do agree that Tibetology, Buddhist Studies, and religious studies more generally do in fact have sophisticated methodologies and that, as a general rule, the humanities are not taken as seriously as the hard sciences. Which is a shame.
More importantly, to my mind, Bayer points out that there is often a distance between academics and popular discourses about our subject of study. In this case, journalists seemed to have all but ignored Tibetologists and Buddhist Studies scholars and assumed, uncritically, that “iron man” Buddha statue really is a thousand years old. It is the silence of professional scholars here that helps maintain these myths of Tibet, Tibetology, and Buddhist Studies.
This isn’t always true, of course. In my paper on media representations of Buddhism, I found that reporters did reach out to Buddhist Studies scholars quite frequently. Reporters’ motivations and how scholarly opinions are reported, of course, is another matter. Regardless, Bayer’s point is well taken. Buddhist Studies scholars tend not to be public intellectuals (with a few exceptions, of course); avoiding public discourse does no one any favors. It allows for our work to be considered unimportant or irrelevant to the everyday practice of religion or the social good, and it allows misperceptions about Buddhism and Buddhist scholars to persist unchecked.