Where Everybody's Crazy

So this week is O-Bon, the Buddhist festival of the dead. And so last night I went over to the main Shinto shrine (yes, you work that one out...) to see their "ten thousand lantern festival".

Now I said that O-bon is the Buddhist festival of the dead. Strictly speaking, that's what it used to be. Just like Christmas used to be a celebration of the birth of Jesus and is now a commercial festival, O-bon is an excuse for the family to get together on hot summer evenings and play games and eat ice and dance the night away. So part of the celebrations involved a dancing competition, which some people took surprisingly seriously:

As well as prizes for the dancing, there were raffle prizes, some of which were quite bizarre. (I think someone was sent down to the hundred-yen shop with orders to get a bunch of prizes...)

The dance basically involves walking around a central tower, making turns and hand gestures, while one person on the tower beats a drum and another sings folk songs; some of which have vague religious significance, and some of which are just the singer freestyling about whatever comes into his head. (There was one really weird one about spending too much time with horses and giving horse germs to all the family...)

And of course, there's always one:

He won a prize for trying. Of course he did. I don't think anyone didn't see that coming. :)

I didn't dance, because I'm a good missionary and wouldn't be seen involving myself in a pagan ritual. And because it was hot.

See, I don't consider o-bon dancing to be a religiously significant event. Now of course I know others do, and so I wouldn't get involved even if I wanted to, but I think they are more concerned with what it used to mean, not what it means now. Just as I can't approve of Christmas being an orgy of commercialism because what it originally meant makes it OK, I can't disapprove of a good chance for the family to get together and have a dance because what it originally meant makes it bad.

Graeco-Buddhism is a really fascinating thing: it's about how Buddhism came to the Greek empire and the syncretism that took place between Buddhist thought and Greek philosophy between around the 4th century BC and the 5th century AD. Rather an important time frame from Christian theologians, one might think.

So with that in mind, how do we translate James 3:6? The KJV goes for this:

And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.

But that "course of nature" bit is a little funny. It actually reads τὸν τροχὸν τῆς γενέσεως - literally, "the wheel of life" or, perhaps better "the wheel of becoming". And actually that "iniquity" is a bit odd as well. OK, I'll grant that most of the time "αδικια" means "unrighteous". But looking in TDNT, we see that αδικια can refer to "what is of purely illusory value". Let's translate that as "maya".

So we've got the wheel of life being set on fire, the pollution of the body, and the illusory cosmos. Seen that anywhere before?

The Jargon File, bless it, says:

Also, many hackers are influenced to varying degrees by Zen Buddhism or (less commonly) Taoism, and blend them easily with their `native' religions.

There's certainly a lot of Zen, and other Buddhist, influence in the computer programming world. (AI koans, "has the X nature"^*, and so on.) I want to try to work out why, where it came from, who the vectors were and still are, how much of the appeal of Buddhism is playful and how much serious, and so on.

If you have any tips, please mail me, or, if you must, leave stuff in the comments. Any ideas would be appreciated, and even more so if you would (a) be prepared to take part in a survey, and/or (b) have some quotable references for me.