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5. Doing Zen, Being Zen: Creolizing ‘‘Ethnic’’ and ‘‘Convert’’ Buddhism
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5 Doing Zen, Being Zen: Creolizing ‘‘Ethnic’’ and ‘‘Convert’’ Buddhism In 2000, I was at Busshinji Temple for the higan festivities. Higan, literally ‘‘the other shore’’ (a reference to full enlightenment), occurs at the spring and autumn equinoxes. It is the time when Japanese people visit family graves and ask a priest to read Buddhist prayers for ancestors to reach ‘‘the other shore.’’ At Busshinji Temple parishioners usually make a money donation for the names of their ancestors to be read during the ritual. On that Sunday morning there were many non-Japanese Brazilians actively participating in this rite of ancestor worship. If non-JapaneseBrazilian Zen practice were solely about meditation, one would expect to see only Japanese Brazilians in the temple for this ritual. As it happened, I noticed that one young non-Japanese Brazilian was also making an appropriate donation for a name to be read. On closer inspection I noticed he was wearing a T-shirt depicting Nirvana, the famous rock band. I smiled and thought this was a good reminder of how Buddhism goes beyond the religious realm, just to enter it once more, this time creatively transformed by its journey into popular culture. I felt that the scene was a perfect metaphor for my study of Buddhism in Brazilian popular culture as well as in temples and how these two places are closely interconnected. The widespread assumption that Buddhism in the West is typically fractured between ‘‘ethnic’’ and ‘‘convert’’ practices is not applicable in Brazil. ‘‘Ethnic’’ practices are generally defined as devotional and/or the repository of the group’s cultural identity; ‘‘convert’’ practices are characterized by meditation and rational study of Buddhist texts. I argue that although Japanese Brazilians and non-Japanese congregations in Brazil often do have distinct and separate practices (as I have shown in chaps. 1 and 2), this does not adequately define Zen Buddhism in Brazil . There is a host of interactions, hybridizations, and creolizations that make the boundaries between the two congregations very porous. The multiple religious in- fluences Japanese Brazilians received since arriving in Brazil in 1908, and the renewed interest in Buddhism by Japanese Brazilians and non-Japanese Brazilians alike, have made each group adopt practices that have traditionally been thought of as confined to the other. Not only do non-Japanese Brazilians use Catholic, Spiritist, New Age, or/and Afro-Brazilian syntax as matrices for new Buddhist vocabulary —in a clear process of creolization, as I have shown in chapter 3—but also (and more important), Buddhist practices that have long been called ‘‘cultural accretions’’ or ‘‘ethnic’’ in the West are incorporated into this vocabulary. On 154 • Doing Zen, Being Zen the other hand, some Japanese Brazilians whose families have long left Buddhism behind to become Catholic in order to avoid discrimination are going back to Japanese Buddhism through an interest in meditational practices, family history, and fashion. In this context, I believe the dichotomy of ‘‘ethnic’’ and ‘‘non-ethnic’’ Buddhist congregations (used by many scholars since Prebish first formulated it); the three-category model of ‘‘elite,’’ ‘‘missionary,’’ and ‘‘immigrant’’ (proposed by Nattier ); and Baumann’s binary model of ‘‘traditionalist’’ and ‘‘modernist,’’ which focuses on religious concepts and practices, should be afforded greater complexity when applied in the Brazilian context.1 Through my fieldwork findings I will present a more nuanced picture of how issei, nisei, sansei, and yonsei (first, second, third, and fourth generation) Japanese Brazilians and non-Japanese Brazilians are doing and being Zen. CATHOLIC AND/OR BUDDHIST? WHAT IS IN A RITUAL? Nícia Tanabe, a sansei, organized the one-year memorial service for her deceased mother at Tenzui Zen Dōjō, Coen sensei’s recently established temple-cum-Zen center in São Paulo City. Previously, her mother’s seventh-day mass had been at a Catholic Church, but the forty-ninth-day memorial service had been officiated by Coen sensei at Busshinji Temple. Although Nícia and her family did not know what Buddhist tradition they belonged to, all former memorial services she remembers (those of her grandfather, grandmother, father, and mother) were held at Busshinji because, as she put it in an interview in January 2002, ‘‘my mother’s sister-in-law’s aunt was a nun at the temple, which made things easier.’’ However, after having meditation sessions with Coen at her local martial arts and massage school, she decided to follow Coen to Tenzui Zen Dōjō and start learning more about Japanese...