Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic research with Buddhist temples in rural Japan to tell stories of food donations as they travel through the Buddhist networked economies. It focuses on how food mobilises and disrupts religious practice by generating waste and how temples handle such edible donations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic research with Buddhist temples in rural Japan to tell stories of food donations as they travel through the Buddhist networked economies. It focuses on how food donations mobilise and disrupt religious practice by generating waste and how Buddhist temples deal with this excess of edible gifts. Food is one of the most common donations in Buddhism and it is meant to be consumed by temple priests and their families on behalf of the buddhas. Such food offerings “nourish the buddhas” and embody vital technologies through which people articulate their Buddhist belonging and practice. In rural Japan, food donations are aligned with seasonal production of food, resulting in large quantities of the same produce being donated at a given time. In the depopulating rural communities struggling with the overproduction of food, it becomes particularly troublesome. As offerings, food becomes incorporated into the Buddhist value economies of meritorious giving, and becomes charged with spiritual value. In accumulation, it is both a marker of spiritual potency and material excess. By following what happens to food offerings and how people thereby build connections practically and emotionally, the paper explores how food excess is handled in Buddhist temples caught up in discard and reuse cycles of Buddhist practice. It considers the importance of Buddhist edible gifts for the wider issues of consumption, recycling, and aspirational non-waste economies in contemporary Japan.