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Connor Moss Professor Malek Moazzam-Doulat Rels 225: Sufism December 10, 2012 Analysis of Ritual Practice I started my ritual practice by reading one page of the Quran twice per day, starting a new page each day. I read in the grove of trees behind the cooler from 12:00 to 12:15pm, and 5:00 to 5:15pm. I chose to do this ritual because I wanted to give myself something related to the class (Sufism), something new that I did not have prior experience with (reading the Quran), and something that would be mildly inconvenient while still being convenient enough that I would actually do it. I chose the times because they fit with my schedule so that I would never have to skip something else in order to do the ritual. This was meant to make it slightly more convenient, however, it turned out not to be convenient enough. I struggled during the first week to do the ritual on a daily (let alone twice daily) basis. I decided about one and a half weeks in to change my ritual practice to see if something else would work better for me. From around week two I changed my practice to a once daily 30 minute Buddhist Zazen meditation practice. Zazen meditation consists of sitting cross legged with closed eyes, without thinking about anything in particular or attaching meditative thought to the practice. Zazen is intended to calm the intellectual thought processes one goes through constantly to abide in the present moment without thinking (for a more detailed account of Zazen meditation, see my final paper). I meditated from 5:00 to 5:30pm everyday in Herrick chapel. This was something that I was already interested in, and already was

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doing intermittently. The Buddhist meditation club meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:00 to 6:00 so on those days I meditated with a group of people, on the other days I was mostly alone. I felt a bit guilty for switching my practice because it had nothing to do with Sufism and it was something that was convenient and that I was already interested in. However, for reasons I will explore in this paper this ritual was much more successful for me than the first one. I was able to meditate on an almost daily basis for the rest of the month. Why was my first ritual so difficult for me, and why was the Buddhist meditation more successful? I would like to explore the similarities between the two practices a ritualized, methodical, planned combined physical and mental activity, and the differences the reasons, meanings, motivations, and symbolism behind the activities, in order to gain a better understanding of what happened during my ritual. In one sense my two rituals were very similar. Both called for sitting still for a period of time, ignoring any bodily discomfort, impatience, or impulse desires in order to focus the mind and gain some transformation of my mindset. This impulse to repress the body in order to elevate the mind in some practical, real way, came from my conceptions about what ritualized meditation was supposed to do. I wanted my reading of the Quran to not simply be an outer, figurative action, but I hoped to have some inner, real, practical effect on my mind state. I believed that by practicing my ability to will my body and mind to be still, I would better gain that ability. Similar to working out a particular muscle in order to strengthen it, I believed that by exercising my control over my mind and body muscle, I would increase my strength in that area.

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However, it quickly became clear during my first week that I lacked a certain discipline, or ability to sit still. I found myself easily distracted by checking the time, or thinking about what I had to do right after or what I had done right before the ritual practice. In addition, I found it hard to make time for the practice. If I had other plans during the time I was supposed to do the ritual it was easy for me to skip the ritual, but hard to forego my other plans for the ritual. I found it all too easy to just give in to my ordinary, unplanned, slightly lazy everyday mode of being. Why was this, why did I not find the discipline I expected to have in my practice? Why was I so excited to start the ritual but then so willing to skip it once I had started? I think that part of the reason I didnt have the discipline to complete this ritual was that I didnt have the belief or theory behind my ritual to back up my actions. The problem with my reading of the Quran was that I did not believe it would achieve the transformative effects that I assumed at the start of the practice. Since I came into the ritual with the idea that such practice was meant to be symbolic, practical and backed by theory, I had trouble sticking with the Quran reading. There was no higher reason or meaning behind my practice other than that this was an assignment and I was being graded on it at the end of the semester. Because I lacked a practical reason for my ritual, it became purely an outer symbolic action, representational of my study in RELS 225, and symbolic as my assignment, but it was tied to no theoretical or practical justification in my beliefs. Once the practice became merely an assignment, I could think of many reasons to procrastinate (as with other assignments), and excuses to skip the ritual for more important things. I needed some reason beyond just that it was an assignment, or I could not muster to the discipline to read for fifteen minutes twice a day.

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After about a week and a half of mostly failed ritual practice, I switched to Zazen seated meditation. I have always known that meditation has many justifications from the perspective of both science and religion. I was familiar with the fact that meditation makes physiological changes to your brain through things such as pulse rate, oxygen intake, and that these things were supposed to have a panoply of positive effects decreased anxiety, increased focus, less stress, better sleeping habits, etc. In addition I was aware of the religious aspect of the ritual. I have studied Buddhism and am familiar with the Buddhist argument for why you should meditate, and what positive effects the Buddha attributed to meditation. The Buddhist view emphasized effects such as more awareness of such concepts as interdependence and emptiness, and the ability to lessen attachments to ideas and things in your life. In this way the reasons and symbolism behind the meditative practice made the ritual more than just a prescribed, repetitive, meaningless action, instead the ritual became a practical and strategic transformation of my mind. For the final two to three weeks of the meditative practice I continued my Buddhist meditation with relative success. Consolidating the practice into a once a day activity made it much easier to complete each day, as did having group sessions every Tuesday and Thursday to anchor my practice in a community environment. I found that after doing the practice for about five days straight I started to see some of the promised effects of meditation that I was hoping for. I noticed less stress and anxiety, a better sleeping schedule, and the ability to focus better when I needed to for schoolwork. Maybe these were only placebo effects, but I found that especially right after my meditation I would experience a calmness and level headedness. Being able to think of my ritual

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practice in the already established vocabulary of Zen Buddhism aided my assessment of my state of mind during these weeks. I would be able to evaluate my state of mind from the perspective of Buddhism and found that I was progressing towards a calmer state of mind, away from an attached, anxious mind state. Talal Asads Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual sheds some light on my ritual practice and why I failed and then succeeded. I will focus on two different historical approaches to the definition of ritual. The first, what Asad calls the medieval monastic ritual practice, characterizes that the practice of ritual as an outer symbol of the moral discipline of a religious practitioner. The ritual is meant to solidify ones inner devotion to the religious practice by performing ritualized, symbolic action. The virtues were thus formed by developing the ability to behave in accordance with saintly exemplars.1 In this way, ritualized practice was a way to practice ones discipline in order to train the self in a favorable way. The second, more recent interpretation of ritual which comes from Bacons Of Simulation and Dissimulation posits the definition of religious ritual as a strategic, ideological, practical inner transformation. Bacons definition describes ritual as an instrumental, practical transformative practice, as Asad emphasizes: the political effectiveness of conventional behavior requires the devising of strategies.2 From the perspective of these two approaches to ritual practice, I can see how my first practice of reading the Quran was (merely) an outer representation of discipline, akin to the medieval monastic approach to ritual. In contrast, my Buddhist meditation practice was a practical, strategic action, akin to Bacons description of ritual. In this reading, it

1 2

Talal Asad, Towards a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual, p. 63. Talal Asad, "Towards a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual," p. 66.

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was the transformative, practical aspect of ritual which interested me, and gave me incentive to perform the ritual daily. This was all very interesting to me was an overall positive experience. I realized the impact that the motivation of a ritual practice has on its effects. Just being motivated by the instruction in class, and the fact that the endeavor was being graded was not enough for me. I needed to have my own practical reasons that I thought would make the practice worthwhile for me, and it helped that those reasons were grounded in the rational discourse of science and of the Buddhist tradition. I would say that the assignment was successful in that it gave me an appreciation for the difficulty of the practical, ritualized discipline that the Sufis undertake to explore the spiritual path. However, for the ritual to actually have positive effects on my life in religion, psychology, and behavior, the motivation of it being an assignment was insufficient. For me to benefit from the ritual activity, I needed to find motivation and justification that I, personally, deemed sufficient.

Bibliography

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Asad, Talal. "Towards a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual." Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. 55 - 79.