Thought experiment:
OK, this is not about to happen any time soon, but what if we were
to set up a Radical Centrist café. Call it Café Saint-Simon.
Or Café Radical Centrise
What would be in it besides beverages and snacks?
For reflection on a rainy day.
Billy
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Café Unites Monks With Urban Seekers
Mari Iwata ("The Wall Street Journal," September 2, 2013)
One of Japan’s oldest, most prestigious Buddhist sects has set up shop —
literally — at a café in downtown Tokyo, offering a taste of tradition to
the city’s dwellers.
The Koyasan Café — named after the mountain in Wakayama prefecture near
Osaka where the Shingon Buddhist sect is based– opened Friday, Aug. 30 for a
10-day stint, on the seventh floor of the posh Shin-Marunouchi Building in
front of Tokyo Station.
This is the café’s eighth summer in Tokyo, co-sponsored by Nankai Electric
Railway in western Japan. While the cafe’s is in town, visitors can eat
dishes created by chefs according to Buddhist vegetarian rules, drink tea,
listen to chanting, talk with the monks and practice shakyo—copying Buddhist
scripts by hand.
In past years, “we have had many visitors — mainly ladies in their 20s and
30s,” said Kunihiko Yabu, a monk and the public-relations director of
Koyasan. Hironobu Watanabe, business planning director of Nankai’s Tokyo
branch, said the cafe has attracted between 7,000 and 8,000 people during each
of
the past two summers.
Some Japan-watchers attribute the popularity of Buddhism — particularly
with young women — to the recent trendiness of traditional, Japanese culture.
Mr. Yabu said he doesn’t care why the women come to the café — what’s
important is that they’re getting exposure to Buddhism. “Buddhism is generally
associated (in Japan) with funerals and memorial services,” he said. “But
its teachings are actually for the living, not for the dead. It’s about
how we live our lives fully. We’d be happy if this café works as an entrance.”
“There are many people who seek peace and serenity out of their busy city
lives,” added Nankai’s Mr. Watanabe. “We want to reach a wider population
here.”
Even as some urbanites are yearning for a taste of Buddhist culture, many
of Japan’s monks are reaching out the other way as well.
More and more Buddhist monks have opened cafés and bars in recent years, as
they search for venues to interact with potential practitioners, according
to Hideo Usui, a Tokyo-based business and financial consultant for
religious organizations. “It’s been a quiet trend in the past 10 to 15 years,”
said Mr. Usui.
Among the drivers of that trend are the peculiarities of modern Buddhism in
Japan, said Mr. Usui. The stewardship of many temples in Japan —
particularly smaller ones — is hereditary, passed down in families through the
generations, rather than left to devotees. Many of those temples have
historically supported themselves with money followers pay for funeral
services and
maintaining family graves — a pattern bolstered during the early 17th
century, when the feudal government obliged all Japanese to belong to a
Buddhist
temple in order to block the spread of Christianity, and temples took on
duties like registering births and deaths.
Now, roughly 90% of funerals in Japan are thought to be performed in the
Buddhist tradition, said Mr. Usui. Yet that practice is widely seen as a
matter of custom rather than religion, he said: Many of the same people these
days prefer Christian-style wedding ceremonies.
What’s more, financial support for temples is withering as well. After
World War II, when the public started rethinking many traditions, some people
stopped paying offerings to monks, while many others cut the amount, said
Mr. Usui.
All that has left many temples with a dwindling and weakly committed base
of followers — and set the monks looking for new ways to connect with
practitioners.
“Nowadays, few people regularly come to temples,” said Mr. Usui. “Monks
are looking for their raison d’etre. For visitors, it’s much easier to talk
to monks at a café than at the temples where their family graves are.”
____________________________________
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