University Honors

Ritual is a universal feature of human studies and acts as a “window” into the cultural dynamics through which people “make and remake their worlds.” It is a “patterned, repetitive, and symbolic enactment of a cultural belief or value” with its primary purpose as transformation. The disciplined practices for developing individual dispositions in meditation have led many people to compare meditation to ritual, however distinct from the explicit world of ritual itself. Meditation is ritualized through rites and practices that focus on individual spirituality: repetitive, communal chanting and periodic reading of religious texts. In Buddhist tradition, meditation rituals, specifically that of chanting and reading religious texts, are an embodied and socially constructed technique of self-cultivation. My Capstone project undertook ethnographic fieldwork on these rituals of meditation in the Sōka Gakkai International (SGI) center in Riverside, California. I conducted the research through participant observation and participation in public-facing events within the organization. My study examines the use of contemplative, text-based practice within the community, and sheds light on how contemplative reading can serve as an approach to liberation. Close attention to their specific meditation practice and its ritual production also illuminates evolving ideas about sacred space within the SGI community and allows reflection on how this challenges the normative conceptualizations of Buddhism in the traditional sense of practice (silent prayer) and immigration in anthropological literature.