Ritual: Theory in Practice
Review of Zen Ritual: Studies of Zen Buddhist Theory in Practice, ed. by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright, review written by Zoketsu Norman Fischer for the Spring 2008 issue of Buddhadharma. Excerpt:
There’s no doubt that if you read Buddhist texts—from the Zen masters’ sayings to the Pali canon materials—you will find a basic philosophy and recommended practice that does lend itself to the idea of Buddhism as a sort of rational self-improvement religion. And Zen and early Buddhist texts do express, to some extent, the notion that ritual, faith, and sacrifice are to be rejected in favor of personal ethics, meditational cultivation, and transformative insight. So the early scholars, however blinded they were by their own cultural biases, were not making something up out of whole cloth. They had texts to cite.
But the essays in this book are not based on the study of sacred texts. These essays are valuable because they reflect a crucial sea change in the contemporary study of religion: a shift away from the study of what religion says it is about (as explained in sacred texts) to what religion is actually about (as discovered in historical records and sociological observation). And this turns out to be one of the most astonishing and salient facts about Buddhism and religion in general—that there is always a huge gap between what a religion says and thinks it is about, and what it is actually about. And the question of ritual, why and how it is practiced, and how important or unimportant it is lies at the center of this gap.
