Mark MacWilliams

Virtual Pilgrimages on the Internet

Abstract Virtual pilgrimage on the Internet is an important religious phenomenon for understanding the new ways of being spiritual in the postmodern world. While often conservative in character, linked as they are to actual sacred sites that are permeated by the mythical imaginare of tradition, virtual pilgrimages exploit the new technological possibilities of the Internet to re-imagine the sacred. In what follows, I argue that virtual pilgrimage has four key characteristics as a form of religious travel. First, it creates a mythscape, an immaterial mental geography that originally comes from sacred oral or scriptural traditions. Second, it exists as an interactive visual-auditory medium for experiencing a sense of sacred presence. Third, it generates symbolic forms of entertainment that are liminoid in character. Fourth, as a leisure activity of individuals ‘Net surfing’ from their home or office computers, it can create ‘virtual travelling communities’ of pilgrims who use the discourse of communitas to describe their experience.

Introduction to the Symposium

The topic of this symposium is timely for a number of reasons. First, there is the Internet itself, which, especially in the last ten years, has become increasingly an important medium for human experience and expression. According to the PEW Internet and the American life Project, to take one national case study, over three million Americans accessed the Internet every day for spiritual and religious purposes in 2001, up from two million users the previous year, and over 25% of Internet users overall have also done so at one point or another (see Larsen 2001, p. 1). In short, computer mediated communication (CMC) is a major arena for religious life—a place to access information, to post prayer, travel to sacred sites, do darsan before virtual images, and so on. The second reason is that, as Internet use grows, the way it is being used is transforming the way people ‘do’ religion. A case in point comes from my own Religious Life of Japan class. One day, when I had a representative of Soka Gakkai International visiting, the topic of the ‘Gohonzon’, Nichiren’s sacred mandala of the title of the Lotus Sutra that is used for worship in the various Nichiren Buddhist sects, came up for discussion. Our SGI speaker mentioned that, since it was considered extremely sacred, SGI members housed theirs in their home altar and only displayed it privately for devotional chanting. But then one of my students raised her hand and told him that this was not true, for she had found a Gohonzon on the Internet. Sure enough, the student showed us a ‘prayer Gohonzon’ from the American Independent Movement, a Buddhist group unaffiliated with SGI (http://campross.crosswinds.net/ Kaikan.html). This Internet site offers a virtual altar with a fully displayed Gohonzon, twinkling lighted candles before it, and the chant ‘Namu Myoho Renge Kyo’ flashing syllable by syllable on the screen. It seemed a perfect place to pray virtually. However, it was not so for our speaker who was very upset by what he saw and declared that such a public display of the Gohonzon was sacrilegious. It was then that I realised the power of the Internet to transform religious practice with virtual prayer, to challenge real life ecclesiastical organisations by downloading a Gohonzon from the site without SGI’s approval, and to cause religious conflict by displaying the Gohonzon online, which was religiously wrong for some, religiously fine for others. A third reason for the symposium is that it represents a second wave of academic studies that owes much to the work of previous scholars. The seminal work on religion on the Internet by Brenda Brasher, Margaret Wertheim, Jeffrey Zalesky, Stephen O’Leary, and others has inaugurated a new sub-field in religious studies. Cyberspace, along with real world space, has become a new frontier of religious life that is open to scholarly investigation. The articles of this symposium mainly come from two panels on ‘Cyberspace as Sacred Space’ and ‘The Virtual Frontier: Transforming Power and Identity in the Electronic Dimension of Religion’ that were given at the XVIIIth Quinquennial World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions in Durban, South Africa in August 2000. Christopher Helland’s essay comes from another conference, sponsored by the Department of the History of Religions at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, ‘Religious Encounters in Digital Networks: Religion and Computer-Mediated-Communication’ in November 2001. I would like to thank the

Manufacturing Shintō as a “World Religion”: An Analysis of Anglo-American Textbooks

How is Shintō presented in Anglo-American world religions textbooks? While not included in the earliest of such survey courses, it regularly appears in such texts from the early 20th century to the present. Why is Shintō included as one of “great” or “world” religions given how greatly it differs from the likes of Christianity and Islam? Textbook authors include Shintō by constructing an image of it that reflects their own model of world religions, an image that is also based on the “Shintō” that Meiji Japanese officials and scholars invented for their own political-ideological purposes. The standard portrayal of Shintō in Western textbooks has remained more or less the same for a century: It is described as (1) an archaic religion; (2) centered on Japanese imperial mythology; (3) nature worship; (4) apolitical, emphasizing personal piety at shrines. While the most recent editions have tried to incorporate new scholarship in their portrayal, they still rely a world religions model of Shintō that is seriously misleading, failing to adequately present Shintō’s complexities as a tradition.

The holy man's hut as a symbol of stability in Japanese Buddhist Pilgrimage

In this paper, I examine the way holy mens huts are portrayed in eighteenth century Buddhist tales from the Saikoku and Bando Japanese Buddhist pilgrimage routes. These stories suggest that holy mens huts are ultimately located in places beyond the ordinary human life of suffering, marked as it is by impermanence and instability. That the hermits hut transcends the transient world is indicated in two important ways in these tales. First, the holy mens statues of the Buddhist celestial bodhisattva Kannon, which they carry or carve while on the road, display a preternatural mobility or immobility which force the ascetics to stop their peregrination. Second, the places they build their huts to enshrine the statues are revealed as spiritual places (reijo), Pure Land paradises where the living Kannon has a permanent abode. These holy mens huts were the prototypes of the Saikoku and Bando temples that continue to attract multitudes of Japanese pilgrims who travel there even today seeking freedom from the sorrows of transmigration.