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BEING A ZEN BUDDHIST BRAZILLIAN
Buddhism was introduced into Brazilian territory by immigrants from Japan back in the year 1908. All this started in the state of Sao Paolo where the immigrants possessed occupations in a coffee plantation, earning a few coins hoping one day to return to their motherland. However, they couldn’t go back home after Japan lost in World War Two. As a result, these immigrants were prompted to request their missionaries to preach their ways to the people of their new land. They had strict doctrines and methods which they had to preserve, and in this attempt, they could not do it on their own and had to recruit and convert people of the land they now inhabited.
Brazil was a land inhabited by way different cultures from the immigrants from the far east. Their religion was far from Buddhism, they were Catholics, as far as the Portuguese venture all around the world was concerned. However, these immigrants brought their culture and assimilated Brazilians into it. The aspects of Zen emphasized were devotional practices, (as Japanese-Brazilians call the rituals denoting the influence of the Catholic environment) and funeral rituals. This population sought (and still does) the temples to perform Buddhist ceremonies that besides attending to the immigrants’ religious needs, also assist in the affirmation of their ethnic identity. It is well known that the status of a group is built about another group as by anthropologist Eunice Durham.
The concept of ethnic identity, as a contrastive group identity, it is built in the context of the concrete intergroup relationships and conflicts. The ethnicity of the above two groups before the immigrants came in was different. But based on the above statement, then it is right for the current group of Zen Buddhist’s in Brazil who descend from the interrelation between the Brazilians of that time and the immigrants who assimilated them.
To prove that difference existed, conflicts emerged when their ethnic identity was under threat. The immigrants felt that Brazilians of non-Japanese origin were using the same values (in this case Zen Buddhism) to identify themselves as a group. It is in this context that one can understand the coming up of the issue of which group (Japanese immigrants and descendants or Brazilian of non- Japanese ancestry) have the “true” ancestors’ culture. Here there are a conflict of social traditions, histories, belief, and practices.
Looking closer into Zen Buddhism, it opens up a socio-religious dynamic phase. Buddhism is considered to be more of a philosophy of life than a religion. Zen Buddhism is therefore often viewed as a meditation technique for the reliving of stress as from social aspects. The temple in Sao Paolo and other areas in Brazil offers lectures on this stress relieving stress, for those who provide no intention of becoming Buddhists. However, Buddhism was and still is considered as a way to awaken sensibility without the denial of being a Catholic and many Brazilians continue being Roman Catholics while adopting Buddhism.
The creolization process, on the other hand, incorporated the mixing of these two different cultures to bring about the Zen Buddhist Brazilians. In the context of an analysis of Zen Buddhism in Brazil, the trope of creolization is meaningful because it sheds light on how Japanese Zen has been superimposed on a Brazilian religious syntax upon arrival in the country. The immigrants indeed brought a culture which integrated with that of the Brazilians and fed them with an entirely different understanding of belief and socio-religious aspects.