Overview

"Healing lies at the heart of Zen in the home, as Paula Arai discovered in her pioneering research on the ritual lives of Zen Buddhist laywomen. She reveals a vital stream of religious practice that flourishes outside the bounds of formal institutions through sacred rites that women develop and transmit to one another. Everyday objects and common materials are used in inventive ways. For example, polishing cloths, vivified by prayer and mantra recitation, become potent tools. The creation of beauty through the arts of tea ceremony, calligraphy, poetry, and flower arrangement become rites of healing. Bringing Zen Home brings a fresh perspective to Zen scholarship by uncovering a previously unrecognized but nonetheless vibrant strand of lay practice. The creativity of domestic Zen is evident in the ritual activities that women fashion, weaving tradition and innovation, to gain a sense of wholeness and balance in the midst of illness, loss, and anguish. Their rituals include chanting, ingesting elixirs and consecrated substances, and contemplative approaches that elevate cleaning, cooking, child-rearing, and caring for the sick and dying into spiritual disciplines. Creating beauty is central to domestic Zen and figures prominently in Arai’s analyses. She also discovers a novel application of the concept of Buddha nature as the women honor deceased loved ones as ""personal Buddhas."" One of the hallmarks of the study is its longitudinal nature, spanning fourteen years of fieldwork. Arai developed a ""second-person,"" or relational, approach to ethnographic research prompted by recent trends in psychobiology. This allowed her to cultivate relationships of trust and mutual vulnerability over many years to inquire into not only the practices but also their ongoing and changing roles. The women in her study entrusted her with their life stories, personal reflections, and religious insights, yielding an ethnography rich in descriptive and narrative detail as well as nuanced explorations of the experiential dimensions and effects of rituals. In Bringing Zen Home, the first study of the ritual lives of Zen laywomen, Arai applies a cutting-edge ethnographic method to reveal a thriving domain of religious practice. Her work represents an important contribution on a number of fronts—to Zen studies, ritual studies, scholarship on women and religion, and the cross-cultural study of healing."

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9780824894184

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Reviews

Bringing Zen Home broadens our idea of Zen in a welcome and enlightening way. It also contributes significantly to a range of developing new academic fields, from women's religious studies to the study of therapeutic ritual and everyday domestic religion. But this is not just a work of excellent and original scholarship; it is also a book of wisdom, the wisdom of generations of Japanese women who have found relief from their everyday sufferings in the therapeutic worldview and meditative ritual practices of Zen. The book is also written in a lucid and graceful style and so may well itself possess the healing power of drawing readers into a state of dokusho zanmai (reading samadhi).-- New Zealand Journal of Asia Studies Essential reading for those who miss the perspective of Buddhist lay women in Japanese Buddhist studies; to overlook this aspect means to ignore an important part of contemporary Buddhism in Japan. Students and scholars of Buddhism, Zen, and ritual studies will leave this book with an enriched understanding of the diversity and complexity of Japanese contemporary Buddhism as well as on the healing function of rituals.-- Religious Studies Review In Bringing Zen Home, Arai shows, through her relationships with 12 Japanese Buddhist women over 14 years, that Soto Zen's teachings are also at the root of a paradigm for healing in the home.... This excellent ethnographic study has relevance beyond its field.-- Choice It's glorious to hear all the voices in Bringing Zen Home--to feel the common yearnings, the different responses to them, and the ways that host and guest can blend into each other. These women's prayers, their outer and inner pilgrimages, and their understandings have entered the vast net of interconnectedness, and we have the pleasure of receiving their communications, heart-mind to heart-mind.-- Shambhala Sun

"Arai paints a vivid portrait of these religious lives, which are rich and complex and have resulted in the achievement of very high levels of Buddhist skill. The author conclusively demonstrates that these lay women practice a Sōtō Zen that, while different from the practice of nuns or monks, is just as sophisticated and--given that the majority of Zen practitioners in Japan are lay people--is more genuinely popular than monastic Buddhism in Japan today.--Gina Cogan, Boston University ""Monumenta Nipponica, 67:2 (2012)"" Bringing Zen Home broadens our idea of Zen in a welcome and enlightening way. It also contributes significantly to a range of developing new academic fields, from women's religious studies to the study of therapeutic ritual and everyday ""domestic"" religion. But this is not just a work of excellent and original scholarship; it is also a book of wisdom, the wisdom of generations of Japanese women who have found relief from their everyday sufferings in the ""therapeutic"" worldview and meditative ritual practices of Zen. The book is also written in a lucid and graceful style and so may well itself possess the ""healing power"" of drawing readers into a state of dokusho zanmai (reading samadhi).-- ""New Zealand Journal of Asia Studies"" Essential reading for those who miss the perspective of Buddhist lay women in Japanese Buddhist studies; to overlook this aspect means to ignore an important part of contemporary Buddhism in Japan. Students and scholars of Buddhism, Zen, and ritual studies will leave this book with an enriched understanding of the diversity and complexity of Japanese contemporary Buddhism as well as on the healing function of rituals.-- ""Religious Studies Review"" In Bringing Zen Home, Arai shows, through her relationships with 12 Japanese Buddhist women over 14 years, that Soto Zen's teachings are also at the root of a paradigm for healing in the home.... This excellent ethnographic study has relevance beyond its field.-- ""Choice"" It's glorious to hear all the voices in Bringing Zen Home--to feel the common yearnings, the different responses to them, and the ways that host and guest can blend into each other. These women's prayers, their outer and inner pilgrimages, and their understandings have entered the vast net of interconnectedness, and we have the pleasure of receiving their communications, heart-mind to heart-mind.-- ""Shambhala Sun"""

Author Information

Paula Arai, the author of Women Living Zen: Japanese Buddhist Nuns, received her Ph.D. in Buddhist studies from Harvard University under the mentorship of Masatoshi Nagatomi. She is an associate professor of religious studies at Louisiana State University.

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