Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses, through ethnographic data, a Zen Buddhist monastery qua container. Widening the concept, I will focus on how the monastery can elicit, with a sort of retrocausation, the aim of religious practice, superseding a human-centred approach.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to think the locus as a container. The place that I will discuss is a Sōtō Zen Buddhist monastery. Expanding the category 'container', I would like to show - through the ethnographic example of Zen religious practice - how the monastic site models the ascetic discipline of the residents in a nontrivial way.

A Zen monastery is often thought as the instantiation of a cosmic body composed by seven segments (Baroni 2002), each of them representing a part of the human body. Inside, the monks dwell and live in accordance with the Rule that governs - through ritualization (Bell 2009) - their body-minds. From a mundane perspective, the monastery seems to be a highly symbolic place that only collaterally affects the monk's religious practice.

However, how the place is embodied - and how the body is displaced - is one of the major tenets of the monk's training. Materiality in Zen is not nuanced by "meaning" and "value" but, rather, is meaning and value from the very beginning (Faure 2009; Heine and Winfield 2017).

Following Gibson (1979), I will argue that, focusing on place as a container, the Zen monastery has affordances for «doing Buddha», it is a container-niche that creates its own object through ritual induction. Finally, I will show how a «post-human» perspective is helpful, on one hand, to countervail a disembodied approach to Zen in the West, and, on the other, to reflect about the relation between concept and materiality.