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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