Inherited Buddhist objects and their associated ritual care connect the dead with the living.
Buddhist things are not only material. They contain spiritual and emotional power, even when deemed unwanted. If mistreated or mismanaged, they can become dangerous and need to be handled carefully through ritual action (Gygi 2018). They represent inherited connections but what happens when such inherited sociality is rejected?
On the outskirts of Fukuyama in Hiroshima Prefecture, sprawling across 10,000 square meters of Fudōin temple grounds, is a graveyard where old tombs (furuhaka) and family Buddhist altars (butsudan) come to rest in peace. In 2001, the gravesite of the graves (ohaka no haka) replaced the temple-owned forest to became a densely populated home to Buddhist death-related objects without anyone to care for them. Ohaka no haka embodies the material excess of Buddhist practices and the absence and fragmentation of kin relations in contemporary Japan. This materialized absence poses a challenge to the socio-economic continuity of Buddhist community structures. Buddhist practices and associated karmic obligations are lived out through the inter-generational material heritage like family Buddhist altars, graves, and other charged items. Buddhism thus involves ritual care for such objects and the nourishment of karmic ties (en) involving donations (dana) to and ritual labour of Buddhist professionals.
At Fudōin, for a donation of 2,500 yen, the head priest Mishima Kakudō looks after this death-related material excess: from tightly arranged abandoned headstones to out-of-use wooden Buddhist altars destined for ritual disposal by burning. Such material becomes excessive and burdensome as it imposes on a person entrusted with it a duty of care they may be unable or unwilling to provide. Those who moved away from their hometowns often struggle to accommodate the elaborate Buddhist altars and the physically remote gravestones of their parents and grandparents. Mishima, as a ritual specialist, sees himself as a trusted custodian of the karmic relations that those decommissioned Buddhist objects represent. As Fabio Gygi (2018) argues in his work on rubbish houses (gomi yashiki) in ‘post-bubble’ Japan, materiality can often outlive meaning and utility, thus rendering it excessive as objects move through time and space. But this excess is also generative of new meanings and structures of care.
Such material imposes on a person entrusted with it a duty of care they may be unable or unwilling to provide.
Besides Fudōin, many local temples are facing an ever-increasing number of requests to assist with the disposal and care of emotionally, morally, and spiritually charged things. These objects are not always strictly Buddhist but are affectively “sticky” insofar their stickiness emerges from cultural and personal exchanges that result in the accumulation of affective value and, here, also of karmic and care value. Among the proliferating cases of Buddhist altars left abandoned anonymously at night within temples’ grounds, Buddhist priests in rural Japan often encounter more problematic objects, two examples of which I discuss below: a stone statue of Kannon Buddha and a plane propeller entrusted to the Myōkōji temple in Hiroshima Prefecture.
Since Buddhist temples are seen as places where such material excess can be handled meaningfully, they increasingly face the moral and practical dilemma of managing it. Decommissioning of karmically volatile materiality reveals the fragility of Buddhist care structures and highlights growing concerns about how religious activity generates waste. The management of religious materiality in the world’s fastest ageing society has extensive spiritual, moral, and practical implications.
Decommissioning of karmically volatile materiality reveals the fragility of Buddhist care structures.
Homeless Kannon
In March 2017, I lived with temple custodians of Myōkōji, a mid-size True Pure Land Buddhist temple in northern Hiroshima Prefecture. The family of a recently deceased parishioner called on the temple to drop off a Buddhist statue they had found when clearing out the family house. They intended to downsize and relocate the family butsudan to their Hiroshima apartment, but they did not know what to do with the statue found among their father’s belongings. The son who dropped it off felt uncomfortable just throwing it away, so he hoped it could be stored safely at the temple or that the head priest would know how to dispose of it properly. “It would be wasteful (mottainai) to simply throw it away,” he said. The head priest, Suzuki Shōdō, took the statue and placed it on the kitchen table laughing and shaking his head. It was still wrapped in a green piece of cloth, and he asked me to unwrap it. When I removed the cloth, it transpired that it was a statue of Bodhisattva Kannon — usually associated with esoteric Shingon Buddhism and its founder, Kōbō Daishi (or Kūkai, 774-835), who is considered one of the founders of the Japanese esoteric tradition.
Suzuki was amused: Kannon was not worshipped at his temple and, as such, he felt that the statue could not be placed in the temple hall for safekeeping. Since it was carved in stone, it could not be disposed of through burning and Suzuki felt unsure about how to handle the object ritually. At first, it was stored in one of the alcoves in the temple’s butsudan room, disguised in the green cloth so as not to anger Amida Buddha. Later, it was placed behind the altar in the main temple hall, the original green cover still hiding it away from the residing deities. Despite the denominational conundrum, the temple was selected as the best place to deal with an object believed to host spiritual beings. While the family of the deceased were careful to not just throw it away, they were also not prepared to home it.
The notion of wastefulness invoked by the son is interlinked with Buddhist ritual practices of dealing with decay and death of objects and people. As Hannah Gould (2019) notes, the notion of mottainai refers to “an affective condition of guilt or sadness when disposing of something before its potential utility has been exhausted.” In the early twenty-first century, mottainai was deployed as a lost Japanese value (Siniawer 2019), but the current public discourse on mottainai attempts to evoke an era of post-war thriftiness to face challenges of mass waste and a perceived disease of affluence.
Buddhist rituals of separation, known as kuyō, show respect for the life of material objects, but also remove waste from the life of individuals, allowing them to part with the things and the connections that these objects signify. Kuyō practices developed as a hybrid of Buddhist and animist beliefs that cannot be easily separated (Kretschmer 2000: 145-48, 193-96).
Buddhist priests can liberate the owners from the burden of material affects and also help them dispose of their karmic connections – in some cases, disposing of entire family legacies, as in the case of abandoned Buddhist altars and graves. Although no such ritual took place in case of the stone statue of Kannon Buddha brought to Myōkōji, partially due to the durability of its material, the disconnect was created through the act of giving, thus resulting in the re-orientation of the ownership.
Communal Afterlives
Objects stored at local temples narrate stories of disconnect, as much as they convey narratives of belonging. One morning in early January, I joined a group of Myōkōji’s male supporters for their winter o-migaki duties, when all the temple’s golden and brass ornaments are removed, taken apart, washed, polished, and reassembled. As we huddled around the stove sipping freshly brewed tea, I asked a couple of my companions about the propeller hanging on one of the hall’s walls. Most ornaments and items in the temple’s hall were engraved with the names of their lay donors, but the propeller was unmarked. Considering Hiroshima’s history, I imagined that it might have come from a warplane. I was told, however, that the propeller came from a plane owned by one of the temple parishioners who moved away a few years ago. My companions explained that he was a pilot who after his parents’ passing relocated his family. They were unsure whether the family moved to Kantō or Kansai region and encouraged me to ask the head priest to fill in the gaps. The family was never able to return to live in this community but the men remembered the pilot continued to fly regularly over the village out of his sentiment for it. When he retired, he asked for the propeller to be stored at the temple. As to why Ishida decided to store the propeller at the temple, my companions saw this as the most obvious (atarimae) place to record one’s history and create a connection with the community. One of the men remarked that their generation will still remember the propeller story, but the next generation might not. For them, the temple seemed like the safest place to keep it, hoping that the head priest would guard and pass on this story to the next generation of temple custodians. My other companion looked around the hall and added, “Amida Buddha willing, all this might even survive. Then again, the way we are all going, it will all become rubbish (gomi) one day. What a waste, eh?” We emptied our cups of now lukewarm tea and got on with the job.
I asked a couple of my companions about the propeller hanging on one of the hall’s walls.
The propeller embodied the affective connections that the pilot had maintained by flying frequently over the region and eventually by storing the propeller at Myōkōji. Since he and his family are not there to tell the story, the people left behind must (re)construct and keep the memory of his connection to the place and to ascribe value to this relationship. The propeller, like many other objects stored at the temple for safekeeping, are both markers of continuity of and disconnect in members’ affective links and the responsibility of care that people ascribe to their local temple. The materialized presence and absence of that care is a tangible marker of people’s desire to manage their Buddhist belonging and heritage that has been entrusted to or accidentally passed on to them.
Choosing a Buddhist temple as a site of decommissioned care for (and, sometimes, abandonment of) inherited things has moral implications. Such things become the moral responsibility of the receiving party, imposing the duty of care to retain their emotional and karmic value. Japanese Buddhist materiality and sociality are rooted in the contemporary Japanese view of karmic causality that is characterised by the recognition that physical events and actions have repercussions. Karma (innen) can be transmitted and shared, especially through familial and blood ties. In practical terms, the Japanese Buddhist notion of karmic connections (en) is usually related to practices of memorialisation whereby the bonds between the living and the dead are affirmed and nurtured. Therefore, karmic connections and the associated inherited Buddhist death-related material excess that contains them can become sources of material and emotional pollution. Equally, they can also be fruitfully reinvested into stimulating Buddhist systems of belonging.
Karmic connections and the associated inherited Buddhist death-related material excess that contains them can become sources of material and emotional pollution.
(De-)commissioning Care
Temples are imagined as sites where emotionally and karmically charged materiality is dealt with in meaningful ways and where unaccounted-for death-related inheritance is stored. The moral choices people make about the afterlives of such material inheritance expands the category of Buddhist ‘heritage’ for which a temple must assume care. These choices, however, are not a sign of naïve hope that the karmic connections they represent will survive against all odds. Dependent on its congregation’s donations and on fees for ritual services, Buddhist temple communities are likely to become economically non-viable as the need for a sustained ritual care disappears. People’s actions point to a belief that a continuity of Buddhist care will endure, collectively rather than individually. That promise often seems to be enough for the donors. So, people in rural Hiroshima are making choices to disengage from their responsibility for their individual material histories by transforming them into symbolic matters of communal concern.
Such moral choices are acts of resistance.
Conversely, such moral choices are acts of resistance: a rejection of a burdensome inheritance and the demands it makes on people’s time and economic resources. While it is a conscious act of entrusting that legacy — along with the karmic entanglements and problematic materiality — to those deemed appropriate, knowledgeable, and emotionally prepared to take it in their care, it is also an act of disposal and boundary-making. It is an intentional displacement of care that threatens the cosmological and practical circularity of Buddhist things, thus producing a volatile present and an uncertain future for Japan’s Buddhist tradition.
Featured Image provided by Author
REFERENCES
Ahmed, S. (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press.
Gould, H. (2019) Caring for sacred waste: The disposal of butsudan (Buddhist altars) in contemporary Japan. Japanese Religions 43(1 & 2): 197-220.
Gygi, F. (2018). Things that Believe: Talismans, Amulets, Dolls, and How to Get Rid of Them. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 45(2): 423-452.
Gygi, F. (2018). The Metamorphosis of Excess: ‘Rubbish Houses’ and the Imagined Trajectory of Things in Post-Bubble Japan. In Cwiertka K. & Machotka E. (Eds.), Consuming Life in Post-Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective, 129-152. Amsterdam University Press.
Kretschmer, A. (2000). Mortuary Rites for Inanimate Objects: The Case of Hari Kuyō. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 27(3/4): 379-404.
Siniawer, E. M. (2018). Waste: Consuming Postwar Japan. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
