Eastern Philosophical Rituals Samples †MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the Eastern Philosophical Rituals Answer: The philosophical knowledge of the humans has always contained, in itself, some sort of religious connection and have tried to give the meaning of life and interpret the actions of humans that have logical reasons and explanations. Modern science often tries to look at philosophy as a metaphysical counterpart of psychology. The ancient philosophical schools have formed the foregrounds for every contemporary debates and the Eastern philosophical views have had significant and lasting impacts for thousands of years (Jung). Philosophical teachings that had steam from India, China and Japan are some of the most important ones to be ever recorded in history and have many different interpretations of them by a huge number of philosophers. The rituals of the different religions of these regions are also credited with philosophical contents and are sources of many scholarly discussions over the millennia. In this paper, three different ritual practices from the Asian continent is taken as ex amples and are looked at from three different perspectives using three different philosophical approaches that are aimed to understand the rituals from alternate viewpoints (Pearson and Schunke) The selected rituals The Indian ritual that is going to looked into in the paper is the Yajna. The Chinese ritual that has been selected to be viewed in this paper is the burial rituals of a person and the different ways that the family of the deceased are supposed to take when performing the ritual. The Japanese ritual that has been identified as the topic to be discussed is the ancient lantern festival or Obon. These three rituals are used as the basic foregrounds for facilitating the different philosophical approaches to understand the sanctity and logical reasons for the rituals (Zemmour and Ballet). The three selected Asian countries have some of the oldest religions in the world and their religious ritual practices are among the oldest surviving practices that have been modified though the ages and different other cultural and religious influences have changed the original practices, however, the rituals themselves have not varied widely even so. Brief description of the three aproaches To delve into these three ritual practices, three modes of approaches will be used that are supposed to offer insight about the rituals and interpret them through different lenses using alternate perspectives. A religionist approach is evident about its purpose: it uses religion as the mode of analyses and tries to understand the practices from a very simplistic religious aspect and try to match the practice with the religion so that the practice can be validated through religion (Belzen). However, a religionist approach to any ancient rituals may come off as misled or hold a basic fallacy, as the ancient religions were not always the same as the modern day religions and the advent of the new religions have all significantly changed the requirements and methods of the rituals that have existed even long before the established religions of the modern age. Reductionism is mostly the practice of taking one particular phenomenon and then trying to explain the same using another set of ph enomena. A reductionist believes that any theory or set of events can be reduced to some other theory or set of events. For my own personal approach, I shall be taking on not a very philosophical approach, but shall rather use a method that is more reliant on logic and rationality to understand the rituals and give details about what are the reasons for them to be followed or observed (Jung). A religionist approach to the Indian ritual of Yajna The religionists maintain that all religions can be described as sui generis, a Latin proverb that literally translates to in a class by itself. According to their belief, the reason for religion to be born was to facilitate the human connection with something, or someone, which is not seen by the naked eye and the humans have to enhance their senses and the inner eye to feel the entity (Smith). In most often cases, these entities are said to be existing in other dimensions that are not felt by the humans on regular basis. This very connection is often viewed as something sacred or may be recognized as the existence of the cosmic forces that directly interact with the humans throughout their course of life and death. To apply this approach to the Indian ritual of Yajna does, somewhat, make sense, as the whole purpose of Yajna (or Yagna) or Home is to purify the soul and drive away the evil forces from the surroundings of a person so that the connection with the higher entities can be established more strongly. The religionist connections are usually advocates of realization of the universal laws that are related to the ways through which the connections between the human beings and the cosmos are established. Scientific researches mostly ignore and often overlook these connections as a religious sense of inquiry is conserved within the human-cosmic interactions. Rituals come in this exact area where the religionists claim that the practices to establish these connections are sacred and have to be done with much care and belief. Religionists emphasize on the sanctity aspect of religion as they believe that being sacred is something that is irreducible and this is the fundamental of any religion (Peters). Religious rituals can be viewed as research methods that are supposed to uncover the true meaning of something that is sacred. The word Yajna translate, literally. To devotion, sacrifice, worship and offering. The ritual is done with fire and mantras and a pit o f sacred fire is used as the medium to make these offerings. The performing of yajna has been described in the ancient Vedic texts, in the Yajurveda and Brahmanas. A yajna holds a high, and often supreme, position in the Hindu culture and religion. Though it has been modified by other religious and regional cultural differences, the basic premise of it has remained the same as well as the ideologies behind it. Hinduism believes that fire is the supremely sacred entity and something which purifies everything (Lucas). The powers of fire and its spiritual powers can be essentially religionist in its views and no ritual or offering can be complete without fire. Hinduism has always had a close affinity with destruction, Shiva being one of the three major Gods, and the embodiment of wrath and destruction. Hinduism is a staunch believer in the circle of life and rebirth. Hence destruction is seen as merely a gateway through which something new is born again. Fire almost acts a catalyst tha t induces this destruction process; or as a cleansing agent that burns away the impurities from everything that is earthly and makes sure they are only in their purest forms so that they can be offered to the Gods without the fear of giving them anything with flaws or impurity. There are over four hundred forms of yajnas described in the Vedas, with twenty-one of them being deemed as compulsory and which must be done by any true Hindu, if a path of righteousness is to be followed (Lucas). From a religionists aspect, yajna would seem to be an absolutely valid way of making the connection with the cosmos as fire is inherently been viewed as something utterly pure. From the dawn of civilization, fire has been a major source of human development and evolution (Segal). A reductionist approach to the Chinese funeral rituals While religionists talk about the ultimate sacred aspect of religion and its inclusion in any ritual, the reductionists reject the notion and voice their opinion denying the fact that religion is in fact sui generis. They say that religion has no unique or distinct features that would be making it fall in a class of its own (McCauley). They feel that nothing can be inherently religious and argue that religion is something that was created by the humans to aid them in their daily lives and also to make sure some group of the society could be subdued by another who claimed the rights of performing of the religious rituals (Smith). Reductionists believe that religion can efficiently be described by analyzing the social, political, economic and psychological aspects of the human society and no single aspect can effectively explain the whole story. A great deal of the religious data is examined to conduct any form of reductionist research that are available from the society within which t he religion operates. The Chinese funeral rituals are ancient and in most cases predate the modern day religions that are popular and widespread in the country (Demmrich, Wolfradt, and Domsgen). Upon the death of a family member, the deceased person is made to sit in a sitting position to help the soul in the process of leaving the body. The friends and family members of the dead person shave their heads, clip their nails and wash their bodies after the funeral rites have been executed. The people who are still breathing then commence a ritual that aims to call the soul of the dead person back so that they can sure of the soul being released. This ancient ritual may seem like trying to create a connection with the dead by approaching the soul to come back, but a reductionist method can help to understand that this only a way of life where people leave behind something that is gone and is now no longer among us, so that they can move ahead without any backward pull. The person who is dead is released and the people around him all cleanse themselves marking a new beginning and a new initiative to go on with life. This does seem an accurate way of looking into the ritual, because even in the modern society people are always trying to get a fresh start after some tragedy has befallen them. Religion is something that was established to facilitate the humans with their own lives and this ritual is one the best examples as to why religion is more like an earthly way of doing things rather than trying to get closer to the divine. Personal philosophical approach to the Japanese Obon Japan has mostly two religions: Shinto and Buddhism. Shinto is as old as the country and the culture itself, while the later was imported from the Orient mainland during the 6th century. Even though religion is not a big part of the daily lives of the Japanese people, some ancient rituals have become synonymous with the Japanese culture and are celebrated throughout the year with various festivals that still have some pagan traits in them (Smith). As a personal view on religion, a stereoscopic approach h can be beneficial as it leaves a lot of room for different interpretations and methods that can be adopted to explain the mechanics of religion. Seeing things through a binocular helps not only seeing things far off with more detail, but also helps to preserve the three dimensional stereoscopic view that people normally have. The ancient lantern festival of Japan is a ritual and a festival that makes the people have a chance at connecting with their ancestors who have passed away (Sm ith). It is believed that the departed souls come back to the mortal world during Obon and can find their heirs if the living people signal them with lights. This is a beautiful and often enchanting idea that tries to help people feel like they are surrounded by their ancestors, even if that is for a momentary period. Seeing this from a distant viewpoint, the ritual may be deciphered as something that is set to give humans a moral support and assure them that they are being watched over by their families, even the ones who are not living amongst them anymore. This may well be a planned placebo that would give humans the moral high to keep going even in times of troubles to make them believe that they cannot be harmed by evil forces as they are being protected by their own families who may not be seen but are certainly there, hovering around them (Spencer). The different views and approaches to religion and religious rituals can be highly varying in nature and may help a person to have different interpretations on the same. Religion is a debated area that needs a lot of explanations to firmly establish its grounds and make sure that it is accepted by everyone. However, a number of philosophical methods themselves often deny its validity and discard it as a creation of humans and not any sort of process to reach out to the cosmic entities. References Belzen, Jacob A. "Religion and Religiosity as Cultural Phenomena: From Ontological Reductionism to Acknowledgment of Plurality."Psychology as the Science of Human Being. Springer International Publishing, 2016. 193-208. Demmrich, Sarah, Uwe Wolfradt, and Michael Domsgen. "Dissociation in religion and spirituality: God images and religious rituals in the context of dissociative experiences among a sample of German adults."Journal of Empirical Theology26.2 (2013): 229-241. Jung, Carl Gustav.Psychology and Religion Volume 11: West and East. Routledge, 2014. Lucas, Phillip Charles. "Homo ritualis: Hindu ritual and its significance for ritual theory, by Axel Michaels, New York, Oxford University Press, 2016, xix372 pp., US $99.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 1902 6262 4." (2017): 1-4. McCauley, Robert. "Explanatory pluralism and the cognitive science of religion."Mental Culture: Classical Social Theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion(2016): 11. Pearson, Christopher H., and Matthew P. Schunke. "In this essay, we set out to survey and critically assess various attitudes and understandings of reductionism as it appears in discussions regarding the scientific study of religion. Our objective in the essay is twofold. First, we articulate what we will refer to as three meta-interpretativeframeworks, which summarize the distinct positions one can witness in response to the explanations coming..."Sophia54.1 (2015): 111-113. Peters, T. "Universal Humanity, Religious Particularity, and Scientific Reductionism."On Human Nature. 2017. 685-694. Segal, Robert Alan. "Reductionism/anti-reductionism."Vocabulary for the Study of Religion. Brill, 2015. Smith, Brent A. "Transforming discourse: Interdisciplinary critique, the university, and the academic study of religion."Cogent Arts Humanities3.1 (2016): 1128318. Smith, Christian.Disruptive religion: The force of faith in social movement activism. Routledge, 2014. Spencer, Sidney.Mysticism in world religion. Penguin Books Limited (1963), 2016. Zemmour, Rmi, and Jrme Ballet. "Religion and Market: From Economic Reductionism to a Consideration of the Role of Beliefs."Revue Franaise de Socio-conomie2 (2016): 143-161.