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- Title
“Ordinariness of Spirituality”: An Anthropology of Personal Integration from a Perspective of Japanese Buddhist Philosophy.
- Authors
Kiyoshi Kawahara
- Abstract
Generative anthropology posits a private scene tied to language and signification. Since both Eric Gans and Ian Dennis have begun a conversation with Buddhism and the problematic nature of desire, I would like to engage that conversation in this presentation through a model of the self, derived from Japanese philosophy, specifically, “linguistic ālaya-vijñāna” in the philosophy of Toshihiko Izutsu, and “logic of place,” “philosophy of the individual,” and “self-identity of absolute contradiction” in the philosophy of Kitaro Nishida. I argue that each person embodies a spirit and that “spirituality” emerges at every moment in our daily lives. This is what I call the “ordinariness of spirituality” hypothesis. I verified this hypothesis by analyzing every comment about a book dealing with terminal illness from book reading sessions. My assertion is that we realize that we always reconstitute and renew what could be called our authentic self at every moment of daily communication, sometimes with instantaneous awakening. This process includes detachment from our desires, from a competitive mode of our mindset, and from a dichotomic way of thinking such as winner vs. loser, assailant vs. victim, and center vs. periphery. In the terms of generative anthropology, this corresponds to overcoming resentment. Instead of competition, struggle and exclusion, we can mutually recognize ourselves as diverse beings each with something unique to contribute and advance toward integration instead of polarization.
- Subjects
SPIRITUALITY; JAPANESE Buddhist literature; BUDDHIST philosophy
- Publication
Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology, 2024, Vol 29, Issue 2, p37
- ISSN
1083-7264
- Publication type
Article