Negotiating Zen Buddhist and Western language ideologies and identities in a text-based, English-language online forum
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: This article explores how members of an English-language, online Zen Buddhist forum communicate their Buddhist identities and constitute a community through online postings. In the absence of the typical, constitutive elements of Zen Buddhist communities – a physical temple, monks, and copresent, silent meditation – ways of using language are the central means to performing Zen Buddhist identities. An analysis of segments of four threads on this forum shows forum members negotiating two competing linguistic ideologies: (1) an everyday Western language ideology that privileges logical, linear, and referential use of language, and (2) a Zen Buddhist language ideology that approaches everyday rational language as an impediment to achieving enlightenment and that privileges nonlogical, paradoxical language as a means to overcoming the limitations of ordinary, everyday thinking. Theoretically, this illustrates the power of language to enact ideologies and constitute community in an online space that is not tied to a particular cultural or linguistic place; it highlights the fact that everyday Western communication beliefs and practices – often treated as natural in the Western, English-speaking world – are cultural and ideological, and it shows that Westerners can adopt communication practices and ideology associated with Asia, thus paying symbolic homage to them.
Authors: Eunsook Sul, Benjamin Bailey
Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2065358399