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Oxford Scholarship Online Oxford Scholarship Online Biology Business and Management Classical Studies Economics and Finance History Law Linguistics Literature Mathematics Go to page: Go Music Neuroscience Palliative Care Philosophy Physics Political Science Psychology Public Health and Epidemiology Religion Social Work Sociology Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America Jeff Wilson Print publication date: 2009 Print ISBN-13: 9780195371932 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2009 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195371932.001.0001 “Without Biblical Revelation” Rhetorical Appropriations of Mizuko Kuyō by Christians and Other Non-Buddhist Americans Jeff Wilson (Contributor Webpage) DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195371932.003.0006 Abstract and Keywords This chapter discusses how Catholics, Evangelicals, feminists, and other non-Buddhists have rhetorically appropriated mizuko kuyō in the various battles of the American cultural wars, especially abortion. Pro-life advocates have actively disseminated information about mizuko kuyō as a way of proving that post-abortion trauma is a universal phenomenon and of demonstrating that they care about women, not just fetuses. Pro-choice activists have pointed to mizuko kuyō as proof that religion doesn’t need to condemn abortion and that ritual, rather than legal, means can be used to deal with abortion’s effects on society. This points to the need for a new category in the historiography of American Buddhism: Buddhist appropriators, who are non-Buddhists that strategically employ selected elements of Buddhism for their own purposes, thus contributing in often unrecognized ways to the Americanization of Buddhism. Keywords: abortion, Buddhism, Catholicism, culture war, evangelical Christianity, pro-choice, pro-life, post- abortion syndrome People appropriate religious idioms as they need them, in response to particular circumstances. All religious ideas and impulses are of the moment, invented, taken, borrowed, and improvised at the intersections of life. —Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles” “Well before I came to my faith in Christ, I traveled to Tokyo,” explains actress and longtime Cover Girl model Jennifer O’Neill. As she further recounts in her evangelical post-abortion manual You’re Not Alone: Healing through God’s Grace after Abortion, “I found myself taking a tour bus out into the countryside to visit one of the largest Buddhist temples.”1 It’s no mistake that this passage starts out with passive verbs and the assurance that she wasn’t yet born again. They serve to safely bracket her exposure and interest in a non-Christian practice she discovered on this trip: mizuko kuyō. Disclaimers in place, she can now proceed to passionately describe mizuko, which at this temple are represented by children’s pinwheels: When I arrived at the temple, the image before me stopped me dead in my tracks …. Speckled across acres of property, as far as the eye could see surrounding this incredibly ornate temple, were little pinwheels, no bigger than six inches tall, all stuck in the ground. There were literally thousands and thousands of these tiny, odd structures planted over the (p.130) rolling landscape…. What was more curious than the pinwheels themselves was what was propped next to each little pinwheel—groupings of mementos, empty picture frames, knitted baby booties. It was very odd to me, as I didn’t understand their significance. With not a clue about what I was observing, I couldn’t quench my curiosity until I finally found someone who spoke English who explained to me that I was viewing the burial ground for the Japanese aborted babies. It took me a moment to catch my breath, I was so stunned. All my emotions surrounding my own abortion flooded back as I tried to digest the display of love and loss that spilled across the field before me. My mind suddenly filled with the images of babies who might have filled the empty picture frames. Paralyzed, I stared at the spinning landscape, trying desperately to marry the tenderness of the moment to the savagery of abortion.2 Her mind moved from Japan back to America, which seemed to provide a stark contrast: Back home in those days, I had never seen abortions recognized with mementos. Worse, I had never heard of any recognition of loss at all concerning the millions of our aborted babies. Remember, we who have had those millions of abortions were told that it was “nothing” that we were carrying … just a problem to discard. So what was this thing I was looking at? I remember thinking that Buddhists believe in reincarnation, so perhaps this display of recognition and love may have emotionally eased the expectant mother’s and father’s loss … a loss made by their own decision to abort their babies. I’m speculating—but what I do know is that they were allowed to openly grieve and honor their children taken by abortion, for whatever reason. Grieving is part of surviving loss and is an integrally crucial part of the healing process. Grieving is not a step you can skip if you want to heal.3 Frozen by this Buddhist scene, O’Neill reflects on her own anguish over abortion and wishes that America would provide religious recognition of pain such as hers. Even though she stops short of explicitly recommending mizuko kuyō, her description, one of the longest and most vivid passages in the book, provides such clear visual imagery that readers seem to be invited to mentally encounter the field of mizuko just as she did. Later in You’re Not Alone, she explicitly tells her readers to ritually memorialize their aborted children. This scene is a window into a realm totally different from the one that has been discussed so far in this book: the presence of Jizō bodhisattva and mizuko (p.131) in the imagination and rhetoric of non-Buddhist Americans. As knowledge of Jizō is reaching the very different religious world of North America, he is being selectively called upon to speak to traditions outside of Buddhism. In this and the next chapter I discuss how non- Buddhists also participate in the discussion and ritualization of mizuko kuyō, and thus add their own unique and often unacknowledged contributions to the process of Buddhism’s Americanization. A survey of both general and religious literature over the past three decades reveals a persistent fascination with mizuko kuyō among segments of the wider American culture, particularly those invested in the rancorous debate about abortion issues. My investigation turned up more than one hundred published works in popular (nonacademic) venues by non-Buddhist Americans that discuss the Japanese practice of mizuko kuyō, most of them written in the 1990s and 2000s.4 Additionally, many of these articles were also republished repeatedly in other forums (including some of the most important and widely read pro-life and Christian publications) and continue to circulate informally among networks of pro-life activists and women dealing with pregnancy loss. Jizō and mizuko kuyō have appeared in articles, books, and sermons by American Catholics, evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Jews, Unitarian Universalists, Mormons, neopagans, secular feminists, bioethicists, and others. In fact, Jizō and mizuko kuyō have been drawn into the American debates surrounding issues as diverse as abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, birth control, infertility, stem cell research, cloning, genetic engineering, and laboratory use of human tissue. In investigating these American Christian and other appropriations of Buddhist elements in this chapter, I uncover some of the paths that Buddhist practices and ideas take into non-Buddhist settings. There has been much speculation about Buddhism’s increasing impact on American culture over the past several decades, but little sustained attention to the channels of influence and how non-Buddhists actively disseminate selected information about Buddhism. Research on the transmission of Buddhism to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by scholars such as Thomas Tweed and Richard Seager has shown the important role that non-Buddhists once played.5 But as the story of American Buddhism evolves into the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries to include significantly more actual Buddhists—both American converts and new Buddhist immigrants—the current historiography seems to lose sight of the continuing importance of non-Buddhists in the story. In fact, there has been a significant historiographical shift—especially in works focusing on the present or recent history— from attention to “how Buddhism arrives here” to “who here can claim a Buddhist identity and to what extent.”6 This is good and necessary work, to be sure. But there is still much work to be done on how non-Buddhists today are making considerable contributions to knowledge (p.132) and attitudes about Buddhism in America. Perhaps we might do well to expand Jan Nattier’s description of “import Buddhism” to observe how non-Buddhists package and disseminate elements of Asian Buddhism for consumption by other non-Buddhists, with no intention of conversion to formal Buddhist practice or adherence.7 The closest that current historiography comes to noting the role of non-Buddhists in contemporary American Buddhism are a few suggestive lines in one of Thomas Tweed’s articles on night-stand Buddhists. Tweed makes brief allusion to people he calls “Buddhist opponents” and “Buddhist interpreters,” terms that could be applied to many of the figures whom we will meet in this chapter.8 Certainly they are closer approximations of many of the actors in our story, whom, as we will see, do not fit comfortably in the more widely used category of “Buddhist sympathizers.” But until this present work, Tweed’s suggestions have remained largely pointers to investigative paths not taken. Channels of Knowledge and Appropriation Like Jennifer O’Neill, many other Americans have stumbled across this seemingly alien religious approach to abortion and pregnancy loss by accident while working or vacationing in Japan.
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