Blogging for the/a Spiritual Archive
In my “non-Circle” life, I have seen the importance of archives and records of peoples’ daily lives. Especially for religious movements that are small in whatever country or language they are being practised in, practitioners can fly under the knowledge radar.
Pure Land Buddhist practitioners in my country, charitably, number in the high dozens, split across a few different temples and traditions. In this regard, part of the impulse for me to blog about my way of being is simply for there be a representation of what an example of “Pure Land convert Buddhism” looks like in the early-to-mid 2020s.
This has become a stronger recently, as the Japan-based temple I attend remotely has stopped doing remote initiation ceremonies. These ceremonies are not ordinations, but essentially confirm the individual as being “on the books” and part of the organisation, as well as providing a spiritual benefit of dedication. The traditions of Pure Land Buddhism in my country that have active temples do not appeal to me for regular attendance (this is not for personal reasons, but simply because I have a very particular attachment to a specific tradition of Pure Land practice that has only a small reach outside of Japan). This has left me slightly adrift organisationally, but that has turned quickly to a sense of calm about the trajectory of my practice. I simply cannot, without getting on a plane (not impossible in the near future, though!), become a formal member of the lineage I currently most closely align with.
This is frankly, a relief. I can now freestyle. I can take the fragments of English-language (and as my Japanese skill improves, online Japanese-language) Pure Land materia that I have, and develop an independent way of being in the world. This is not completely anarchic—the sūtras and Hōnen provide axiomatic grounding for how I make decisions about how to practice and how to view. Yet my “home” is the practice itself, not an organisation. I do not have to be orthodox or orthopraxic, just true to where my existence is leading me.
This is why I consider a wider spiritual archive important—even if my own contributions to it are not particularly important or interesting. The way in which the dharma has navigated the West, producing syncretic and hybrid practices, is not due to a failure of Western practitioners to grasp a “true” Buddhism, but the way in which Buddhist practice inherently works—upāya includes the fact that full access to the nuances of traditions is fragmentary for many outside of particular countries where large organisations are based.
It is a truism that within each religious movement, no matter how big, each individual practitioner will have their own unique understandings and practices. Online blogs and other avenues for DIY publication provide a space for an ecology of archives to grow, away from the tenets of specific organisations, and back to sharing the lives created when the dharma begins to grow in someone’s way of being.
Peace,
⭕