As with Arai's first book, Bringing Zen Home is an anthropological study delving into the lived experience of a small group of Sōtō Zen practitioners in contemporary Japan. The work is built upon a foundation of in-depth interviews conducted with twelve laywomen and is informed by fourteen years of participant observation. Arai draws on this wealth of ethnographic data in order to elucidate a picture of “domestic Zen,” that is, Zen which is “done amidst the sounds of water running from the laundry, dishes, and baths,” where the “aroma of food cooking” blends with that of incense burning on the family altar (p. 165). Arai's particular concern is to describe the various, often homemade, rituals of her consociates and to articulate the ways in which the women experience these activities as healing.
In the opening chapter (Mapping the Terrain), Arai lays the tripartite theoretical groundwork of her study, defining her approaches to field research, health, and ritual studies. Taking her cues from the practices of feminist ethnography, Arai explains her close attendance to the “balance of power” (p. 3) between herself and her consociates, an ethically-concerned move which required that she make herself vulnerable, sharing her own worries and setbacks with the twelve women (and, by extension, with her readers), as part of an exchange of trust. While effective, this “second person” mode is not consistently maintained and certain passages in later chapters are marred by confusing, unmarked shifts from the dominant grammatical subject (“you”) to an array of less-often employed options (“one,” “the women in my study,” “they,” and even “the mind” or “the heart-mind,” pp. 86–7).
Despite this infelicity, her discussions of healing and of ritual in this first chapter are illuminating. Drawing on the writings of Dōgen, the thirteenth century founder of Sōtō Zen, Arai explores the terms sahō (“method of actualizing”) and shushō ittō (“practice and enlightenment are one”), deploying these toward a general understanding of the spiritual value of ritualized activity. In this context, Arai argues, “healing is not about finding a cure nor is it about direct cause-and-effect relationship [sic].” Rather, it is a worldview or way of living and facing challenges of the nonbifurcated body-mind in the context of intricate human relations and natural forces” (p. 16). In this estimation, to the extent that ritualized behavior facilitates awareness and acceptance of the world as it is, it is an explicitly healing activity.
In chapter 2 (The Way of Healing), Arai sketches the broad contours of healing as a spiritual path. She identifies ten principles, namely: experiencing interrelatedness, living body-mind, engaging in rituals, nurturing the self, enjoying life, creating beauty, cultivating gratitude, accepting reality as it is, expanding perspective, and embodying compassion. Arai is careful to draw a distinction between healing (a spiritual activity) and curing (a medical objective): “from a nondualistic view, you can experience sickness as something with which you are in relationship, not something you want to defeat, destroy or conquer. How you relate to a sickness makes all the difference. To relate well to a sickness, however, does not imply that the sickness will go away” (p. 37).
The ensuing chapters explore three domains of ritualized healing. Chapter 3 (Personal Buddhas: Living with Loss and Grief) investigates the ways in which mortuary and ancestral rites help people integrate death and loss into their lives. Chapter 4 (Domestic Zen: Living Esoteric Wisdom) considers how the women's ritualization of daily tasks (washing dishes, preparing food, rearing children) has helped them to overcome stress, anger and resentment, cultivating in their place a soothing sense of gratitude. Chapter 5 (The Healing Power of Beauty) turns to the arts (tea ceremony, scripture copying, poetry), articulating these as restorative, affirming, and ultimately healing practices.
There are some problems with the study. Arai's research promises useful, even potentially groundbreaking connections with a range of fields including ritual studies, performance studies, and cognitive science. Unfortunately, she does not pause to unpack any of these sufficiently and they remain, tantalizing but absolutely unintegrated, at the edges of her discussion. A second concern is the untroubled optimism, which prevents her from raising some important questions regarding the gendered costs resulting from the ritualization of domestic chores: a brief mention of fujinbyō (“women's illness”), for instance (p. 45), goes nowhere.
These critiques aside, Arai's study will find a wide readership among scholars of modern Japan, religious studies, gender, ritual and performance. Its array of ethnographic detail sheds light on only rarely-seen practices of daily, lived Zen in the domestic sphere and is a useful corrective to the largely androcentric, text-based methodologies that have dominated until recently the field of Zen studies. Arai's straightforward prose will be especially welcomed by students, and any of her stand-alone chapters is eminently suitable to the undergraduate classroom.
