A similar quality is found in the debates observed by Kenneth Liberman
(1992) in Tibetan monastic practice. Here the contents are much more overtly
intellectual than in Zen, consisting in problems descending from the Abhid-
harma and Madhyamika philosophies brought to Tibet from medieval India.
As in Zen, what Tibetan debate encourages in practice is not intellectual
innovation (in fact, the same arguments have been used for a thousand years)
but instead fluid engagement in the exchange. There is a premium on making
quick replies, on laying traps for one’s opponent through a series of questions,
on springing triumphantly into the breach (also with shouts, gestures, and
musical percussion) when one’s opponent hesitates or breaks down. The coor-
dinated rhythms and emotional intensity make us aware that Tibetan debate
is a ritual in the Durkheimian sense; specifically it is a ritual of membership in
the spiritual community of transverbal detachment, conferring marks of spiri-
tual progress.
There is no religion without sacred objects, without symbols representing
the focus of attention and the distinctive sense of membership in the group; it
is these symbols that set apart the experiences which are transcendent from
those which are profane. And even when one’s purpose is to transcend thought,
that trajectory can only be set in thought, and through the medium of symbols
which represent the group and its history. Symbols are the residue and the
continuity of experiences over time. They flow through individual brains,
shaping their attention and emotions, setting up the possibility of transcendent
private experience, and then bringing those experiences back into the network
of social relations which give them meaning, and which re-create the possibility
of other persons’ acquiring their own private experience.
From the level of material organization, through the interpersonal net-
works, the flow of symbols and the building up of emotional energies, peak
experiences are fashioned. These same conditions undermine pure religious
experience, bringing attention down to the mundanities of organizational
power, the blandishments of material property, the displacements into scholas-
ticism and intellectual discourse. Social reality is at once creating and bringing
down religious experience. The one flows into the other in waves, and peak
and trough share aspects of each other. The same can be said in religious
language: samsara is nirvana.
Tokugawa as a Modernizing Society
The Tokugawa regime was a time of spectacular economic growth, taking off
from the market relations established in the Buddhist economy of the previous
period, and turning its confiscated wealth into secular channels. The govern-
ment of the shogun was reestablished at Edo (Tokyo) at a symbolically sig-
Innovation through Conservatism: Japan • 347