A Forest for a Thousand Years: Cultivating Life and Disciplining Death at Daihonzan Sojiji, a Japanese Soto Zen Temple.

Abstract

Few religious institutions in Japan have as vibrant a history as Daihonzan Sōjiji, one of two head temples of the Sōtō Zen sect of Japanese Buddhism. Over the course of seven hundred years, clergy affiliated with Sōjiji have been instrumental in guiding the growth and development of Sōtō Zen throughout Japan through innovations oriented towards the laity, such as funerals, ordination ceremonies, devotional rites, and more recently, zazen practice.

Using data from over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I discuss the ways in which Sōjiji is a site in which expectations of life in modern Japan are reconciled with the temple’s historic roles as a seminary for training Sōtō Zen clergy, as a thriving parishioner temple, and as a bastion of Sōtō Zen traditions and ritual practice. I show that the ongoing negotiation of the tense dialogue between history and tradition, on the one hand, and innovation and modernization, on the other, speaks directly to issues of identity, authenticity and legitimacy which are pressing concerns for both the Sōtō Zen sect and Japanese Buddhism as a whole.

Beginning with the premise of a Zen temple as a lived space, each chapter discusses a different facet of Sōjiji’s religious community as it pertains to the practice of shugyō. In a Sōtō Zen context, shugyō is best understood as an embodied, normalizing process which is most closely captured in the concept of “disciplining” and “cultivation.” Through the performance of shugyō, a person is disciplined in such a way that they will begin to experience their social and phenomenal worlds in new and dramatically different ways.

By highlighting Sōjiji’s role as a shugyō dōjō – a place where shugyō is performed – I show how the people who make up the religious community of Sōjiji create meaning in their own lives and pave a path for the future of Zen Buddhist practice in Japan through participation in the daily life of the temple, through interactions with other members of the temple community in both formal and informal contexts, and through their experiences of the physical and temporal landscape of the temple itself.