Modern Buddhist Suffering: Pathos, History, and Moral Responses at a Contemporary Japanese Leprosarium
with
Jessica Starling
Lewis and Clark College
In his history of Western humanitarianism, Didier Fassin, drawing on Charles Taylor, writes that “suffering is a recent invention” (2011, 40). Previously, these thinkers observe, suffering was either a private experience or an element of a soteriological framework. Although the framework cited is usually a Christian one, Buddhism’s notion of dukkha, an awareness of which is necessary in order to relinquish attachments and purify one’s mind of ignorance and desires, could fit just as well.
This talk inquires into the status of suffering in contemporary Buddhism by taking as a case study the volunteer work carried out by Jōdo Shinshū Buddhists at rehabilitation centers for those diagnosed with leprosy (Hansen’s Disease). Drawing on participant observation and interviews with Buddhist volunteers at three different leprosaria in Japan, I present some examples of the ways in which suffering – an amorphous, expansive notion that could cover a variety of dimensions of experience ranging from the physiological, to the social and emotional, to the existential – is understood by my interlocutors. I argue that two themes in particular – history (narrated through the language of karma), and pathos (the emotionally evocative quality of suffering engendered by Hansen’s disease) – are especially useful for illuminating the shifting meaning of suffering across the 20th and 21st centuries in Japan, as well as revealing the contours of a form of Buddhist humanitarianism.
Sponsored by the Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies, the Council on East Asian Studies, and the Department of Religious Studies
For more information, please contact Eric Greene