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The First Dance in the Hawaiian Obon Season
I managed to get one clear photo of this dance circle, during Fukushima Ondo. The graphic is currently posted to the group head (add. in my signature), and to a folder called "God Rays" in both this group and my photosite domain:
http://www.photosite.com/horaku/
The Hawaiin Obon season does not usually kick off like this. It is usually started by the largest temple in the largest lineage, which is Honpa Betsuin, on the Pali Hwy. in downtown Honolulu.
The change this year was entirely auspicious. The season was started by this tiny little temple with beachfront in the tiny and beautiful town of Haleiwa on the north shore of O'ahu: Haleiwa Jodo Mission. This Pure Land lineage is smaller but more orthodox than the largest lineage, which has been doctrinally corrupted by political involvement throughout its history, here as well as in Japan.
It is a small, very Japanese, and very warm Sangha. Not one word of Japanese was spoken at the Bon dance (with exception of song lyrics), in deference to the local population. But the minister and the dance instructors were obviously Japanese, not locals, and the choice of dances was the most refined of any Bon dance that I have ever attended.
You see, dear reader, it's sad. The local Bon dance teachers have stupidly watered down the tradition with a lot of jazzercize- and nightclub-derived stuff. It just destroys the force of the dance circle when they drag that stuff out, and in recent years, I have been walking out of such dances.
If you're dancing for ancestors, you have to do what is familiar to ancestors, no? Why is this not obvious to dance teachers in a tradition? And the traditional Japnese dances are very refined, very conscious, very counter-intuitive for us, very difficult for us to get right, and very corrective for our worst movement schemas, which are generally fire-converted and often simply wrong.
There was a response from heaven to this dance. It rained on the final rendition of Fukushima Ondo, in a dance that had started with clear skies. Of course, a lot of heretics, Japanese and otherwise, don't believe in blessings from heaven, but then, they can't dance either. We will ignore them.
Namu Amida Butsu
Horaku
http://www.photosite.com/horaku/
The Hawaiin Obon season does not usually kick off like this. It is usually started by the largest temple in the largest lineage, which is Honpa Betsuin, on the Pali Hwy. in downtown Honolulu.
The change this year was entirely auspicious. The season was started by this tiny little temple with beachfront in the tiny and beautiful town of Haleiwa on the north shore of O'ahu: Haleiwa Jodo Mission. This Pure Land lineage is smaller but more orthodox than the largest lineage, which has been doctrinally corrupted by political involvement throughout its history, here as well as in Japan.
It is a small, very Japanese, and very warm Sangha. Not one word of Japanese was spoken at the Bon dance (with exception of song lyrics), in deference to the local population. But the minister and the dance instructors were obviously Japanese, not locals, and the choice of dances was the most refined of any Bon dance that I have ever attended.
You see, dear reader, it's sad. The local Bon dance teachers have stupidly watered down the tradition with a lot of jazzercize- and nightclub-derived stuff. It just destroys the force of the dance circle when they drag that stuff out, and in recent years, I have been walking out of such dances.
If you're dancing for ancestors, you have to do what is familiar to ancestors, no? Why is this not obvious to dance teachers in a tradition? And the traditional Japnese dances are very refined, very conscious, very counter-intuitive for us, very difficult for us to get right, and very corrective for our worst movement schemas, which are generally fire-converted and often simply wrong.
There was a response from heaven to this dance. It rained on the final rendition of Fukushima Ondo, in a dance that had started with clear skies. Of course, a lot of heretics, Japanese and otherwise, don't believe in blessings from heaven, but then, they can't dance either. We will ignore them.
Namu Amida Butsu
Horaku
0
Comments
Can you clarify the connection with the pre-Buddhist Tibetan shamanism, please?
There isn't any connection. I believe the Tibetans have a dance form sometimes also called Bon or Bonze, but there's no connection, except the structural similarities of all dance. There was a prominent Lama present at this dance, and he loved Fukushima Ondo, which he had never seen before. I actually managed to sleech him onto the floor for "Tanko Bushi."
We danced again last night, and I got a few more photos, which I filed with comments to the same addresses, in an album called "Obon."
"Bon" is the name given to the 'shamanistic' religion of Tibet which preceded Buddhism there, mingled with it and still exists. I had never seen the word used for a form of dance.
I know all that.
Trust me, there are Bon dances in Tibet too, and neither the linguistic roots nor the forms of the dances are connected, except that they're both shamanic dances that were taken over and preserved by Buddhism.
In both cases, the dances also co-exist in their pre-Buddhist forms. In the Japanese case, that is usually called Matsuuri, which simply means (harvest) celebration.
You're very welcome.
But, you know, the dance isn't verbal. Dancers and the dance finally do not make verbal sense. The transmission in it is real and beyond the verbal mind, and in real ways, it takes one dancer to understand another.
Very true, Horaku. Within the Oral Tradition of teaching the Enneagram, we used dance as an essential part of the transmission and learning. Most of the very important things we learn in life come through movement and not words.
Perhaps.
--Avatar Meher Baba
"A picture paints a thousand words"......"Silence is Golden"......"Least said, soonest mended"......"A fool is known by a multitude of words"....." 'I' before 'E' except after 'C'...."....
I'll shut up now.
I KNOW that, sugar plum pie.
LOL! I don't think so! And neither will I. Let's confuse the issue, OK? It's fun. Consider this, X-posted from my group:
_______________________________________________________________________
Post Mortem on Independence Day -- the Dance.
On the evening of July 4, I picked my way across the central plateau of O'ahu, between encampments of people who were systematically getting themselves wasted on both sides of the road, in preparation for viewing what was reputed to be a spectacular fireworks display from Schofield Barracks. Turning onto residential roads in Wahiawa, I continued to pick my way through private fireworks displays going off all over the road. Then I turned and pulled into the temple of my chioce for Bon dance practice, leaving the noise, glitz, and wastitude behind.
O'ahu is a place where you can get world-class dance instruction for free. Really? No, not really. The attention around such teachers is always squeaky clean, and the price is always our own distractions. Always. Structural demand; no way around it.
Your first dance teacher is like your first girlfriend. Your body never forgets. Never. She'll always be there in you for subsequent teachers to deal with and understand. Fortunately, most dance teachers get along with most other dance teachers. There are exceptions, and that's how lineages happen.
My first one was called Rurisan. She refused to be called a teacher, and never explained anything, and when she entered the teacher's circle, everything changed. Absolutely everything. Ruri always moved from her hara; she never used effort, and she never got off her hara. She was incapable of an unclear movement, or an extraneous movement. If I could relax around her, I could easily duplicate her movements as she did them, without knowing what she would do next, and when she was literally doing things that I had nver seen before. That was the easy part. The hard part was reconstructing it when whe was not there.
It's because people won't do the hard work of reconstructing the movement when the teacher isn't there that there is so much praise of teachers, and so few excellent dancers. But even this is not the totality of the dance. If that's all the instruction there is, you inevitably hit a wall about meaning, and I did.
So there's a different kind of teacher than Ruri, and I met one yesterday. Despite that I can still get drunk just by thinking about her (and there was absolutely nothing but dance instruction between us), it's time to go on to this whole matter of what it means. For example, when you make the movement for "mountain" in the abstract, you put your fingers together in a point, to indicate the peak. But when you're discussing Mt. Fuji, you leave a space, because there is a volcanic crater at the top of Mt. Fuji. That changes the disposition of every single molecule in my body. Mt. Fuji is a spiritual presence, and if we live in the Pacific basin, and can't feel Mt. Fuji yet, we're just not functioning here yet. As dancers, we can transmit from Mt. Fuji, if we use the right iconography. In fact, it's a duty to do that if we're capable of it. That allows the audience to benefit beyond our individual personalities.
For us as human beings, meaning is encoded and transmitted verbally as well. The words are where the permission comes from to enact the spiritual energies involved, and until that, I'm just not dancing up to capacity yet.