Paula Arai – författare

Popular representations of Buddhism often depict it as spiritual, disembodied, and largely devoid of ritual. Yet embodiment, materiality, emotion, and gender shape the way most Buddhists engage with their traditions. The essays within The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice push beyond traditional representations of Buddhism as divided into static schools and traditions, highlighting instead the contested and negotiated character of individual and group identities. This volume will serve as a corrective to the common misconception that Buddhist practice is limited to seated meditation and that ritualized activities are not an integral dimension of authoritative Buddhist practice. Essays in this handbook explore the transformational aims of practices that require practitioners to move, gesture, and emote in prescribed ways, including the ways that scholars'' own embodied practices are integral to their research methodology. Authors foreground the role of the body, examining how the senses, gender, specific emotions, and material engagements impact religious experience. They highlight, as well, the multiplicity of methods and theoretical perspectives that scholars of Buddhism use in their research and writing, including field-based, textual, and historical approaches. Given the fluidity and diversity of Buddhist practices, the question that animates this volume is: What makes a given practice Buddhist?

Popular representations of Buddhism often depict it as spiritual, disembodied, and largely devoid of ritual. Yet embodiment, materiality, emotion, and gender shape the way most Buddhists engage with their traditions. The essays within The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice push beyond traditional representations of Buddhism as divided into static schools and traditions, highlighting instead the contested and negotiated character of individual and group identities. This volume will serve as a corrective to the common misconception that Buddhist practice is limited to seated meditation and that ritualized activities are not an integral dimension of authoritative Buddhist practice. Essays in this handbook explore the transformational aims of practices that require practitioners to move, gesture, and emote in prescribed ways, including the ways that scholars'' own embodied practices are integral to their research methodology. Authors foreground the role of the body, examining how the senses, gender, specific emotions, and material engagements impact religious experience. They highlight, as well, the multiplicity of methods and theoretical perspectives that scholars of Buddhism use in their research and writing, including field-based, textual, and historical approaches. Given the fluidity and diversity of Buddhist practices, the question that animates this volume is: What makes a given practice Buddhist?

In Bringing Zen Home, the first study of the ritual lives of Zen laywomen, Paula 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.

Conceived at the crossroads of Buddhism and indigenous earth-based practice, The Shamanic Bones of Zen explores the deep human traditions of transformation that are made possible by meditation, ceremony, ritual, dreams, and spiritual connection to one’s ancestry.In The Shamanic Bones of Zen, celebrated author and Buddhist teacher Zenju Earthlyn Manuel undertakes a rich exploration of the connections between contemporary Zen practice and shamanic, or indigenous, spirituality. Drawing on her personal journey with the black church, with African, Caribbean, and Native American ceremonial practices, and with Nichiren and Zen Buddhism, she builds a compelling case for discovering and cultivating the shamanic, or magical, elements in Buddhism—many of which have been marginalized by colonialist and modernist forces in the religion.   Displaying reverence for the Zen tradition, creativity in expressing her own intuitive seeing, and profound gratitude for the guidance of spirit, Manuel models the path of a seeker unafraid to plumb the depths of her ancestry and face the totality of the present. The book conveys guidance for readers interested in Zen practice including ritual, preparing sanctuaries, engaging in chanting practices, and deepening embodiment with ceremony. "I often felt my ancestors at ease with my practice of Zen. I felt they had led me through other traditions to this practice of ritual and ceremony,“ writes Manuel. ”The ancestors needed me to be still and breathe as they approached with what they had to offer my life.”

A unique blend of personal reflection, creative histories, and interview-based nonfiction that vividly imagines the lives of Buddhist women over 2,500 years. Of Mud and Lotuses illuminates the hardships, resilience, and  creative ways in which Buddhist women have applied the Dharma to daily life—often in ways that history has ignored.With lyrical storytelling and a perspective informed by decades as a Japanese American scholar of women in Buddhism, Paula Arai conjures the kitchens, temples, and intimate moments of Buddhist women’s lives across India, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, and the contemporary U.S.A mother and daughter circle a stupa amidst a scent of jasmine. The Buddha exchanges letters with Mahaprajapati, his aunt and adoptive mother. An ancient Indian queen proclaims the womb as the very cradle of Buddha-nature. A woman in fifth-century Sri Lanka expresses the Dharma by cooking for the local bhikkhus even as she cares for her ill sister-in-law. A widow finds solace in the communal rituals of a Japanese nunnery. In these creative histories, motherhood is sacred and everyday, caregiving is both burden and liberation, and the “womb of the Buddha” pulses at the heart of spiritual awakening.Complementing these fictional pieces are Arai’s personal and scholarly reflections on Buddhist women’s history, as well as several nonfiction narratives of contemporary American Buddhist women whose struggles and triumphs reveal a striking continuity with the ancestors who preceded them.