I feel like Rein's point about how the emic effectively tells us nothing was easy to misconstrue. It doesn't tell us nothing about her experience, or about what it means to see God, or whatever: it tells us nothing about religion. And I think the "us" in there is important, too. "I can see this color called mincius. You can't? Oh well."

I don't feel like Ali's example is necessarily the best example of how the emic doesn't quite work. One that I always get stuck on is with born-again Christianity, what it means to be saved. "I'm saved!" "What's that mean?" "It means Jesus died for my sins." "What's that like?" "It's salvation!" "[[Would tear out hair if he had any]]" By keeping it totally within the experience, no comparative work can be done.

And so I'm totally behind the point Rein was making, and it's bizarre to me, because it seems so intuitively true, and yet we have bajillions of examples of where people are not doing that. And furthermore, I would not be terribly surprised if I were to try and do some work that fails to be balanced between emic and etic; it's probably a lot easier to say, "Nope, you're leaning too far to the etic side" than to actually write something that's totally balanced.

But that's OK. I might step on some toes, I might miss some things, all that jazz, but I'll still try to engage. I can't stand the whole "you've got your truth and that's totally unintelligible to me" business.

Place!

The men’s bathroom in the basement of Myrin strikes me as having both a spiritual and religious significance. The spiritual is that when I walk down there, I suddenly feel deeply aware. There is a bizarre silence that makes me strongly attentive and conscientious of what’s going on outside and inside of me. It’s not a settled awareness; it feels mildly discombobulating. Nevertheless, there is something peaceful within the discomfort.

It has religious significance because of the stall closest to the window. Written on the wall are a few notes about marijuana use and sexual encounters, but there is a surprising amount of material that is related to religious matters. They’re often written with clusters of comments around them. I’ll try to explain.

One seemed to begin with the statement “Love everyone,” which may or may not have some kind of religious or spiritual connotation. Pointing to it is a comment that would be difficult to describe, and so I’ll write what I’ve deduced it to mean. It would seem that someone drew an arrow pointing to “Love everyone” that says “Except the Faggots.” But someone then crossed out the “Except” and the “Faggots” and instead wrote “Even the Assholes.” I have to say, I find it touching that no one has yet scribbled this out.

Another note written on the wall is “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” obviously alluding to John 3:16.

On the stall door is written a note with (seemingly) three authors. The first: :GOD IS AWESOME,” followed by “for causing genocide & war.” Within the last few months (I’ve long been fascinated by this stall, and have kept up to date when new notes arise), a new comment joined these two: “no.. For being the reason for the rise of civilization...”

Next to this triad of comments is written this stark comment: “POOPING > ARGUING ABOUT RELIGION,” where the “greater than” symbol can presumably be taken to mean “better than.”

I’ve always found it so fascinating that so much religious content could be found written on the walls. Why so much emphasis? I wonder how many different people were involved in writing the different notes.

Object!

When I graduated to performing 108 prostrations as part of my purification practice, my mentor kyomunim gave me a rosary with 108 beads. It is made of cedar, and it used to have a strong, soothing smell, but it has largely faded. From time to time when I’m doing prostrations, I’ll smell it strongly again. One of the beads is white and made of plastic, and it has a circle on one side (a representation of the enlightened mind) and a picture of the founder of Won Buddhism on the other. The picture there has always creeped me out; it seems cultish to me. Nonetheless, holding this particular rosary is calming and even inspiring, and I’m often reminded of the bodhisattva vows. I feel reinforced in my dedication to practice.

Memory!

When I was at the Mahabodhi Temple, everyone around kept commenting on the intense spiritual vibrations they were encountering, or how soothing it was, or how awe-inspiring it was. I didn’t feel a darn thing. I felt neutral, and even indignant, or frustrated, if anything. It didn’t seem the slightest bit special to me. It was another place. Yes, there were many myths about how a trip to the Mahabodhi is an impetus for enlightenment, and things like that. But the fact of the matter was that suffering was still a reality for me. What’d it matter if that guy saw through all suffering? Yeah, he’s given priceless advice to myself and others, but he gave me a prescription and told me to go fill it myself, and he didn’t tell me where I could find the ingredients or anything like that. I’ll thank him if it works. So, being there reinforced my vow to practice, to realize for myself and for the benefit of others something genuine. I’d been practicing for years, and, while I had certainly had something to show for it, agony persisted, delusion persisted, craving persisted. So it ended up being a pretty powerful experience, seeing how spiritually devoid it was.

A girl in one of my classes mentioned how her epileptic seizures induced the most thoroughly religious moments of her life, a stunning sense of spiritual intimacy and reality.

I think a lot of people have had the experience of having a sudden experience of intense wholeness, reality, and depth, with no seeming reason behind it. It may seem to have been triggered by some object, sensory experience, thought, or whatever, but the effect might seem quite disproportionate to the cause.

Is this religious experience? This summer, I read The Year of Living Biblically, in which an atheist strictly abides by the prescriptions of the Bible. He's mostly doing it as a stunt to write his book, but he mentions that he's also hopeful that it would induce that feeling of profound ease, wholeness, and alertness.

Would those experiences be called spiritual? Maybe by some. It's weird that that would get tied up with sacred. And the sacred is so vast a topic; it can apply to so much, and be both favorable and unfavorable. It can be the deepest experience imaginable; it can be as trivial as putting a dish in a separate dishwasher.

It's a weird little word. On the one hand, it seems like it would be helpful to have a larger vocabulary to categorize all these different things. But then you miss so much, and perhaps you lose the ground for relating them? I dunno...

Protestant DNA

We talked in class today about how the characters in “This Blessed House” finding Christian things hidden around their house was like how one realizes all of these religious leftovers from one’s culture and upbringing. Nathan had mentioned how it was significant that they were Hindus in a Christian nation, without a past here, uncertain as to their identity.

It wasn’t until I started seriously considering other religious systems that I started realizing how very Protestant I was. My family isn’t Protestant; both parents were Catholic growing up, and came to strongly reject their faith before I was ever thought of. Yet so many of my assumptions about morality, reality, truth, and so forth were informed by Protestant doctrine: I thought Theravada must be the true Buddhism, since it was purportedly the original Buddha’s words; I was interested in a personal practice, unadulterated by tradition or what have you; I thought ritual was a meaningless and potentially dangerous exercise. Of course, I was deeply attracted to the practice element of Buddhism, which might go against the Protestant ethic, but even there some shadow of born-again-ism: I wanted the practice to transform me, to make me into something I wasn’t; to give me what I lacked.

What I seek from Buddhism has changed somewhat, but they were nonetheless valuable reflections. I have all of these strongly-held beliefs the source of which escaped me. It’s humbling, and at the time seemed even a little paralyzing. Why do I believe what I believe? Why is what is right right to me? Is it by the merit of the content, or because of what is near me?

And I realized something else: I had been turning to Buddhism to give me what I lacked; I was sincerely interested in the Buddhist tradition, yes, but I was equally attracted to its non-Westernness. When I saw that I was looking for the Westernness in the non-Western, it seemed a little less real. But I think it led me to look in a new way, and with a bit more of an open mind. Of course, I didn’t realize a lot of my beliefs were Protestant until I’d learned about Christianity, and in the process I gained a genuine respect for that tradition.

I'll finish this later. I hope I remember.

"I don't think you get there unless you start telling the stories and the stories start sounding normal. ... The more you tell certain stories, the more possible and plausible they become, and the more you can accomplish them." (Or something like that.)

It's an interesting idea, one that seems pretty real. She said that shows like Will & Grace got people to see homosexuality as much more normal, much more OK; black and female presidents on TV perhaps eased us into accepting Obama.

I find it very compelling. I'm always wondering how to institute shift in society, and you know, these little culture boxes called television really do seem to have an astonishing power. It's no wonder that these shows that take on these big questions are so popular; television and film really are the things people talk about (in my social circles, anyway). They're the springboard to talk (and even begin thinking) about ethics, truth, virtue, and aesthetics.

The idea of watching TV as a ritual act was startling, but is undoubtedly true. It really does bring people together in a way that nothing else seems to in the kids at my school. Somebody puts on the DVD of True Blood, and suddenly there's a rush to that room. There's so much shared identity, so much emotion when you realize someone else loves the same TV show as you, or the same movie. I hadn't thought about this, but it's a neat insight.

The professor said that a lot of people were asking the question, "How do we re-enchant things?" She said that capitalism and industrialism (protestantism?) has largely sucked the mystery and the meaning out of life. When I think of my brother and my best friends' mother starting to talk about some particular movie or scene, man, their faces light up, and they're there. They bring a richness and a color to life that can't be found in the monotony of daily life; sounds like religion...!

I'm glad Nathan opened up the class the way he did, saying that he wants us to encounter the unfamiliarity, the discomfort. When we were talking about how we thought Li's religion served him, I felt like we were so deeply missing it. Talking about reality, meaning, symbolism, and so forth, it missed something. It really missed the raw emotion in Li's writing. It's unadulterated, it doesn't have the tinge of self-reflection or anything like that; it comes before all of that stuff. To even say "raw emotion" misses it: it's more raw than emotion. I dunno, reflecting on it this way feels like I'm missing it, still. Maybe I could just smash a window with a chair; that would probably capture it more effectively.

It invokes symbolism, but it isn't about the symbolism. (Or at least that's how it struck me.) The symbols are there, but they're not there for you to pick apart and cognize: they're just part of the raw experience. I think Bud had a lot of insight in that regard.

And you can't study that. The act of thinking, the act of rationalizing, arises far after -- and opposes -- the rawness. To reflect on it is to miss it, and so I think that's why we're gonna be going to these religious centers. What is real, what has meaning, what is felt can be alluded to by word and symbol and concept, but it cannot be captured by it. Granted, I don't know how much reality and meaning and such we'll find in these places we visit, but maybe some people find it there each Friday or Saturday or Sunday.

I've been reading a book called With God in Russia, and it's an autobiography of a Catholic priest who went to Russia to minister to believers, and he ends up in prisons and GULAGs and on the cusp of life far more times than is reasonable. He was there from like 1939 until 1963, when he was traded for some Soviet spies. It just so happens he's buried about an hour away from here. I'd really like to go visit his grave. I don't know why I want to; I wouldn't know what to do once I get there. But I still really want to go, to pay my respects, and to I guess participate in that reality, or something. I'm not expecting anything special; there are pictures on the internet of his gravestone, and it's not noteworthy, nor is it noteworthy for it being ignored; it's got flags or something around it. But I want to be there for it.

When I was reading "This Blessed House," I saw it as some kind of allegory about modern religion. It seemed like it was about what modern religion was, what it should be, and stuff like that. It seems like Twinkle relishes the tradition, even though it's alien and not her own, which could be said for how I think a modern person could easily feel about her religion. She nonetheless celebrates it and embraces it and makes it her own. Sanjeev, however, just sees the kookiness of it, and wants his house to conform with his values. When Twinkle gets upset about losing religion, Sanjeev suddenly encounters this force, this emotion, this "strangely at peace" vulnerability and sadness that totally disarms him. His first encounter with the divine, perhaps? It leads him to compromise, and put the contentious statue "in a recess at the side of the house, so that it wasn't obvious to passersby, but was still clearly visible to all who came" (150), in other words, nicely compartmentalized. There were a lot of things like that, I felt.

I found this article about the "Dotbusters."

In July of 1987, a month before Mody's death, a local newspaper called attention to the rising number of harassment incidents. In response, it received a letter, signed "Jersey City Dot Busters:"

"I'm writing about your article during July about the abuse of Indian People. Well I'm here to state the other side. I hate them, if you had to live near them you would also. We are an organization called dot busters. We have been around for 2 years. We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I'm walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her. We plan some of our most extreme attacks such as breaking windows, breaking car windows, and crashing family parties. We use the phone books and look up the name Patel. Have you seen how many of them there are? Do you even live in Jersey City? Do you walk down Central avenue and experience what its like to be near them: we have and we just don't want it anymore. You said that they will have to start protecting themselves because the police cannot always be there. They will never do anything. They are a week race Physically and mentally. We are going to continue our way. We will never be stopped."

I have to say, it's really not something I understand. I guess I find what Eck's comment helpful when she says these are targeted more because they're the only overtly visible public image of these different communities. But nonetheless, I just can't understand the depth of the anger and the hatred. I've felt some powerful anger in my life, but (as far as I can remember) never towards a particular person that I've wanted to harm. I think I need to understand it, though, because they're human. I'll have to interact with these people; I may even feel what they feel at some point in my life. Just as Eck says we have to go beyond tolerance and relativism in studying religion, I think we also need to understand intolerance and hatred.

No Shoes in the Dharma Hall

An example of religious difference that I've often encountered is at the Buddhist temple I often attend. One of the rituals for the English-speaking congregation is that one removes one's shoes before entering the dharma hall, the place where services are held. It often happens that newcomers and children do not take their shoes off before entering the dharma hall. I've observed an interesting phenomenon when this breach occurs: on numerous occasions, a child will eagerly run up to the altar to play with the big bell or the various ritual implements sitting on the altar. When he or she is wearing shoes, the mother or father, as well as those American members who have been attending services for a while, all run after the child to prevent him or her from getting to the altar. Native Korean members and ministers typically do not make any attempt to impede the child. I find it interesting that the ones for whom the tradition is most natural do not attempt to prevent the child's "infraction" upon the focal point of the temple.

There does seem to be less of a rush to stop the child if she isn't wearing shoes. I think it is especially interesting to note that during the Korean congregation's services, all of the members (children included) typically stand in the altar area with their shoes on: their shoes are touching the gorgeous wood paneling that the children's shoes are forbidden from standing upon.

There are innumerable social and religious rituals mixing in here, and I don't know that I could break them all down. What fundamentally seems to be happening is that the American members see the altar as a sacred space that will be somehow violated by a child's footwear and behavior. It is not a place for shoes and play. The Koreans and ministers do not seem to think that the presence of footwear is a violation. I am uncertain if they believe the altar to be more sacred than the rest of the dharma hall, but I would imagine they do to some degree.