Obon graphics from Japan

I love this. The horizon is so far off it gives me vertigo just looking at it, but this guy posts huge graphic files. In general, the Chinese don’t dance Obon. They do rituals to propitiate spirits and the dead for Obon which they call Yu Lan Jie (盂兰节). But I think this is Taiwanese attempting Obon odori. All the ladies are wearing kimono, sort of, but I think that no Japanese lady would be caught dead in those particular slippers at Obon. But what is it about the general atmosphere that is SO unJapanese? It’s dancing on the yagura, and the complete informality about the yagura, is it not? View this link for further evidence:

wenxuecity blog

However, all civilized instincts have not yet been lost from East Asia:

wangguorong blog

sinayn

japan.people.com

Namu Amida Butsu
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Obon at Tassajara

Summer Obon Ceremony Feeds Hungry Ghosts
Written by Heather Iarusso
SFZC Sangha News

At Tassajara the Obon Ceremony, known as Sejiki at Zen Center, is celebrated on Halloween, at the end of October. This summer, however, the Tassajara sangha decided to hold this ceremony in mid-August, at the time it is celebrated in Japan, so that guests and summer students could participate in this traditional Japanese ceremony of evocation and liberation of deceased ancestors and hungry ghosts.

The soft glow from Chinese paper lanterns and an altar adorned with cakes, stacks of fruit, candles, and a ceremonial cloth transformed the courtyard into a festive square. White slips of rice paper with the names of deceased family members and friends were strung around the square like a garland, where they swayed in the breeze as if the spirits themselves were present.

Abbot Ryushin Paul Haller officiated, leading a procession from the Abbot’s Cabin to the courtyard, calling the spirits’ attention with the rap on the ground of a ring-topped staff in response to the gentle ting of the inkin. He entreated the hungry ghosts to take nourishment from the food and sweet water being offered. During the ceremony, he said, “We hear your cries of hunger and make these offerings to feed your bodies and free your souls.” …

Tassajara is part of the San Francisco Zen Center. These are the Dragon-Elephants of American Buddhism, and like Dragon-Elephants everywhere, they don’t go around publicizing themselves. You’ll NEVER find this news article by searching Google News for Obon.

I’m sure this was a wonderful event, but no Obon odori ?!?!? I’d like us in the Hawai’i Buddhasangha to set our intention that there will be a Bon dance at Tassajara next year, OK? Obon isn’t just for the dead, and the hungry ghosts, it’s for us not-yet-dead suffering beep-holes too, you know! Obon odori is REALLY GOOD MEDICINE. The neo-Confucianist drivel that was just perpetrated at Fo Guang Shan in lieu of Obon this year convinced me of that once and for all. Please believe me on this one. I most definitely know all sides of this particular story, and I tell you that if you’re Buddhist, and you want to live long and prosper, you will dance Obon. End of complications, please. Just go do it.

Namu Amida Butsu
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The 2009 Honolulu Okinawan Festival

Herein lies a tale. This lady was a hula dancer from Okinawa, and she had an extraordinary amount of aloha, enough to be a Kumu, in fact. Technically, she wasn’t the best, and that was hardly to be expected, but in any case she really had the spirit. Later that week, one of the Kumu Hula asked her to dance with her group on the hula pa’a with his Halau at Kuhio Beach, and she danced much better in the midst of a bona fide Halau, and she probably was picking a lot of it up by induction on the spot. She also had an extraordinary amount of aloha for everyone in the area. I got some really good shots of that which I will publish down the line.

The hula dancers make it look easy, but when you dance hula, you have to crouch down on your knees a lot. That’s an essential part of how it flows, and it’s just very unnatural body language for both Westerners and East Asians, because it feels like you’re crawling around. It’s also exhausting if you’re not used to it. It’s the kind of basic that’s really better to pick up at a young age. Then it’s natural and automatic. Some people can learn it later, and I think that this wonderful lady is probably one of them, but she’ll never get it in the midst of guys looking at her like these are in this photo, and they did it to her the whole time she performed at the Okinawan Festival.

I didn’t spend a lot of time at this event, but there are a few more photos in my Okinawan Festival – 5 Sep 09 Album

Namu Amida Butsu
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Obon desu yo?

Okinawan Obon, above, is completely different from Japanese Obon. This garb originated in China, not Japan, as did the dance choreography and the spirit. Their dances include the traditional Chinese lion dance. Okinawan folk dancing is vigorous, mansculine, shamanic, and focused on drums, which they carry around the dance circle with them. They even march with a full-size taiko drum, not shown here, which requires an awesome degree of both strength and dexterity. Unlike Japanese Obon, the Okinawan dancers always drum and dance only to live samisen music. I think they also use flutes.

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No sooner did I set my intention to return to Obon, than I ran into a Bon dance at the Okinawan Festival at Kapiolani Park last weekend. So I dragged my hapi shirt out of storage and danced — and was immediately reminded of why I retired from town-side Obon — to make a long story short, it’s quite decadent.

I will start with the Obon class at Haleiwa Jodo Mission next March, and will return to my rule of only dancing where I am personally invited. At present, that is exactly two temples: Haleiwa Jodo Mission and Haleiwa Shingon Mission. I prefer strict traditional Japanese folk dance, and I insist on orthodox temples, i.e., nothing descended from Shinran Shonin.

Oh, and hey, I almost forgot: the highlight of the Okinawan Festival for me was not the Bon Dance –it was the last item on the agenda for the bandstand on Sunday — the Okinawan koto group. I didn’t know that there was a distinct Okinawan koto, and I prefer it. Like Okinawan Bon dancing, the Okinawan koto tradition has preserved Chinese elements which have long since been lost in Japan (Okinawa was actually owned by China for the majority of its history, and its Buddhist tradition came straight from China, not from Japan, although they are trying to ignore this at the moment).

Namu Amida Butsu
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Obon Odori on You Tube

Check it out: Bon Odori Matsuri Dance

This is the first time I have noticed online videos of Obon. The one in the above link is particularly good, I think, because it shows how deceptively simple these dances are. These movements are really good for our health, because they are highly counter-intuitive in the mainstream. How often would you move your left foot forward at the same time with your left hand, and then do it again on the same side of your body, and then reverse direction, still using the same uncharacteristic gait, if left to your own devices? Admit it, never. We would never move this way without instruction, and it’s very good for our carcases, because it clears the toxic results of dead movement habits. Oh, and hey, it’s a real bliss-out when you finally get it to click as well.

The Japanese culture values beauty almost above anything, and excellent Obon instruction is usually free. In the future, I intend to get a video camera and to record Obon odori, because Hawaiian Obon is the most beautiful, both in constume, and in movement. More beautiful than the American mainland, and yes, more beautiful than Japan.

Namu Amida Butsu
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Amateratsu Rules!

Land of the Sun Goddess
By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
Special to The Japan Times

…A devout Buddhist and an earnest Confucianist, Shotoku enrolled his own relatively backward country in China’s school of civilization. The pupil-teacher relationship, rare if not unprecedented in the history of nations, would last centuries, during which Japan in effect Sinicized itself. Buddhism, Confucianism, Chinese writing, Chinese art — all were swallowed whole and, for a time, uncritically.

A century after Shotoku’s death in 622, the resplendent Nara Period (710-784) was bathed in its first luster. It was overwhelmingly Chinese, overwhelmingly Buddhist. The native Shinto kami, with Amaterasu at their head, slipped into oblivion.

When smallpox struck Nara, the capital, in 735, the Emperor Shomu’s thoughts turned not to them but to the Buddha. The course of action his piety suggested to him was to order the casting of a giant bronze image of Roshana Buddha.

But he hesitated. As Sansom explains, “To erect a great Buddha in the middle of the capital . . . was, on the face of it, a serious blow to the native divinities, unless some means could be found of reconciling (Shinto and Buddhism).”

The reconciliation was entrusted to a monk named Gyogi, who journeyed to Ise and for seven days and seven nights prayed at the threshold of the Sun Goddess’ shrine — to good effect, evidently, for in a dream “the Sun Goddess appeared to the emperor as a radiant disc,” writes Sansom, “and proclaimed that the Sun and the Buddha were the same.”

The bronze statue required years of work but was finally completed in 752. This is the enormous Great Buddha — 48.7 meters high — whose serene presence graces Nara’s Todaiji Temple to this day.

Only as Japan approached modern times did the Sun Goddess peek through and finally burst the clouds of indifference that had enveloped her. How thick those clouds were may be gauged from a passage in the 11th-century “Sarashina Diary,” written by an anonymous noblewoman. Troubled by a strange dream, she is advised “to pray to the heavenly goddess Amaterasu. I wondered where this deity might be and whether she was in fact a goddess (kami) or a Buddha,” she wrote. “It was some time before I was interested enough to ask who she actually was.” …

Amateratsu is so beautiful, and as a spirit presence, She is actually stronger in Japanese culture than Buddhism. What has happened to Buddhism in Japan is very wierd and seriously unhealthy – it has been turned into a death cult in which the heads of the largest lineages are literally the keepers of mausoleums, and “temple” is actually a secret Japanese codeword for boneyard – the bones of all of their ancestors are literally clustered around the main altar in their temples.

The reason that Obon odori is so powerful is that it is structurally impossible to do it in a temple. And look at a yagura, and tell me that those powerful red and white stripes are about Buddhism. Where else do you see them but emanating from the sun on Japan’s flag? The central focus of Obon is actually Amateratsu. That’s why Obon works as a multi-cultural festival in Hawaii – basically nobody owns the Sun Goddess. Amateratsu is also still why Japanese culture works, to the extent that it works at all. And look at that word. What is the ‘ra’ in the middle of it but the ‘ra’ in (Jetsun Arya) Tara, the Ra (changed in the modern language to La) which literally means sun in Hawaiian, and the Sun God Ra of ancient Egypt? Amen, I say unto thee beloveds, Amateratsu is absolutely nobody but the Great Mother, the Sun Goddess of Central Asia and this entire planet, Whom we all worshipped in the far past time when God was a Woman.

Namu Amida Butsu
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American Obon

San Jose Obon a Religious And Cultural Celebration
By editor. Posted on Thursday, June 25, 2009.
Published in the Nichi Bei Times Weekly June 18-24, 2009.
By ERIN YASUDA SOTO
Nichi Bei Times Contributor

SAN JOSE — Graceful Bon Odori dancers in colorful kimono and happi coats move in unison to the beats of the taiko drums as the delicious scent of teriyaki chicken fills the air. These will be a few of the sights, sounds and smells of the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin’s Obon, set for July 11-12.

“It’s an opportunity for people to gather together and reconnect with members of the community,” said the Rev. Gerald Sakamoto of the San Jose Buddhist Church Betsuin.

A religious and cultural festival, Obon honors one’s relatives and friends who have died, particularly in the past year. The festival will include Bon Odori, Japanese food, games and an array of cultural exhibits.

Jim McClure, chair of the San Jose Obon, said that preparations are well under way for what is widely considered to be the largest Obon festival in Northern California.

“We’ll buy 1,750 chickens and between 40 to 50 kegs of beer,” he said, adding that hundreds of volunteers are involved in everything from food sales to booth construction.

He said that preparations are ongoing, with the bulk of the work beginning in March, which includes monthly meetings leading up to the festival. …

Are certain tunes starting to float randomly through your head, again? Are certain mainstream-counter-intuitive moves starting to happen to your carcase?

Stay one hopeless Obon freak, you! OK den, go! Go out deah in all dat stuffs for ack one lolo out from heah, li’da,’ awready!

Thoroughly demeanded yours truly is being thoroughly unavailable for Obon this year, but I think I’ll figure out how to sleech over to at least one Yagura before the season’s out. Obon is a lot of fun.

This image has nothing to do with the article above. This is Taiko drummers at an Obon dance in Seaside, CA last year. How do we know that this is American Obon, rather than Japanese Obon, or Hawaiian Obon? Basically, the ethnic diversity, the individuated expressions, the body language, and the use of space. These people are not crowded, and there’s plenty of space to go around, for all elements of the environment. Japanese performances are always crowded and into groupthink, and Hawaiian performances always give pride of place to ethnic Japanese, and generally squash individuated facial expression.

Namu Amida Butsu
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Buddha’s Birthday at Haleiwa Jodo Mission

This was only the second celebration of Buddha’s Birthday that I have attended in which I felt like the Sangha actually cared that the Buddha was born. The first time I felt that was at Green Gulch Zen Center in Marin County, California, in the ’70’s, not long after the first transmission of a Buddhist lineage to America, in the Sangha of that transmission. So I feel like we’re finally reaching critical mass on this whole matter of transmission.

The Japanese Jodo Shu is Honen’s lineage. Honen was a huge Bodhisattva who gave the purest and clearest rendition of Pure Land doctrine ever written or enacted. This particular Sangha is tiny, but very sincere and very pure. It also has the most beautiful altar I’ve ever seen. I prefer it to all other Japanese Sanghas in Hawaii.

This blog gets a lot of administrative attention out of the local Japanese Sangha. Recently, that has taken the form of people searching it for things like “Obon.” I felt like they had gotten the point of my recent posts, however, because nobody asked me whether I was going to Obon practice. When last I was involved with this group, that’s the only thing I heard out of them.

I really had a good time talking to some of the most wonderful East Asians in the world, bar none. The real strength, and the real beauty, of the Pure Land lineage is at the bottom, and it’s a rare privelege to meet such people. If you want to find out the real story in Japanese Pure Land, go to the smallest and most rural temple you can find. Seriously.

I found that my precept robes were respected. I wound up in my usual place as per my own temple: right side, second rank. The only one in front of me was the Minister. You can’t hide in the Buddhasangha when you’re wearing a formal robe. You must sit at the head of the Sangha. Only those who have taken equal or more precepts than you are allowed to sit in front of you. That’s protocol, and if you violate it, it affects transmission from the constantly abiding Three Jewels of the ten directions. Given our general problems with transmission in the American Sangha, we can’t afford to be casual about this, and I’m glad that it intuitively fell into place on this occasion.

For my precept cohort: We need to wear our robes, every day, until we can put them on automatically without thinking, in the dark, when distracted, or when in a life-threatening or sanity-threatening crisis. As a whole planet, we’re entering a time of crisis. Robes which are not instantly available to be utilized, because they’re stored and protected “treasures,” will be lost. It’s not a treasure if you’re not working with it.

Namu Amida Butsu
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Practice Update

I have continued to keep five precepts, with very minor infractions, since I took them on Mar 1. I have also been wearing my precept robe for an hour of walking meditation, beginning before dawn, except for the last ten days in March, when I was too sick with the flu to do that. Tomorrow, 5 April, I will not be present at Fo Guang Shan. I have decided to visit Haleiwa Jodo Mission for their Buddha’s Birthday celebration.

In previous years, whenever I visited a Japanese Sangha in the spring, I wound up spending the months of April, May, June, July and August dancing Obon with the Japanese Sangha, to the exclusion of Fo Guang Shan. That will not happen this year. I will wear my Fo Guang Shan precept robes in the Japanese Sangha, and enjoy their company for exactly one day, and then return to my proper place.

In general, East Asians find ways to grow on you, and they are all well worth knowing, and that includes the Japanese. The Japanese are more emotionally relaxed than the Chinese. In general, they don’t even try for “gratitude” because they know that, as a whole Sangha, it’s just beyond them. But what they demonstrate and insist on is loyalty. They understand that if you can’t even stick to your own lineage, you’re just not even human yet. Even traditional Japanese Christians are expected by Japanese Buddhists to remain Christian. They lose all social status if they convert. (But this is NOT true for recent Christian converts locally!) So also me anymore. Wherever I go, I belong to the lineage that has given me Refuge and Precepts, i.e., Fo Guang Shan.

Namu Amida Butsu
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Obon in Berkeley

Read the whole story. What’s most significant about this is that it appeared in the American mainstream press.

..The youngest generation of Japanese Buddhists at the temple is not only mixed-race, said Katsumoto, as she stood in the temple’s library, many of them do not understand the Japanese language as well. The majority of the books at the temple’s library are written in English.

“There are changes with our children; they’re moving further out, merging into the mainstream,” she said.

She pointed out that the current temple, erected in the ’60s, was built with Christian-inspired pews, an organ and a piano. Matsumoto attributes the changes in language and religious custom to a “concession to American life.”…

Seven generations later, the counter-assimilationist administrative policies of this lineage are finally breaking down. Life goes on.

Namu Amida Butsu
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