Disrupting Buddhist circular economies: excess and abandonment in contemporary Japan

Anti-materialism is the most pervasive popular assumption about Buddhism that obscures Buddhisms material presence and its environmental impacts.

Problematising such moulds, this ethnographic project will demonstrate how Buddhist materiality drives Buddhist circular economies, rooted in practices of merit-making and inherited ritual labour.

By tracing Buddhist objects biographies and illuminating the circular nature of Buddhist material exchanges, I investigate how things given to local temples generate excess and abandonment practices in contemporary post-growth Japan.

Through histories of these objects and their relations, I uncover how demographic hyper-ageing, regional depopulation, and changing consumption patterns inform and disrupt Buddhist material exchanges: how family altars and other personal ritual items, as well as meritorious food, land and object donations get caught up in discard, disposal, and reuse cycles and what emotional, ethical, practical, and spiritual implications ensue.

As such, I will illuminate how Buddhist practices for processing accumulation and abandonment of Buddhist gifts are key to understanding contemporary Buddhism, and the wider issues of consumption, recycling, and aspirational non-waste economies they inhabit.

I will therefore consider Buddhist giving as forces that generate and handle excess/abandonment that challenge the viability of the circular economy ideal by producing waste.

Global concern about waste continues to rise: this research interrogates the waste-making impacts of religious activity and assesseses the spiritual and practical implications of managing religious excess in the worlds fastest ageing society.

It complements, and is complemented by, the research at the University of Copenhagens Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies interrogating Buddhist economic entanglements and waste that is created by Buddhist economic exchanges, thus supporting my development as an expert within this critical field.