3- Panel 3

Religion and Culture

S. Kanzaki: Arayashiki 阿頼耶識: Robots, AI and VR

For some time now, the relationship and compatibility between Buddhism and science has been on the mind of practitioners and contemporary scholars alike. Today, Japan elaborates its Society 5.0, the idea of a super-smart society, a wider-reaching idea beyond the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In this presentation, I shall examine Japanese popular culture discourse to explore the Japanese perception on the development of technologies envisioned for a future society that relies on robots, AI and VR. In particular, I focus on the incorporation of the Mahayana Buddhist phenomenon known as arayashiki 阿頼耶識, the “eighth consciousness” or “storehouse/repository consciousness” (Sk. ālāyavijñāna) of karma seeds (future and past) which appears from time to time in Japanese manga, anime and literature. Examples include recent animations Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans (2015-2017) and Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song (2021- ) where an AI robot attempts to change the history of humanity. In the third and last arc of the famous manga Saint Seiya, we can trace back the influence of the arayashiki as early as the 1980s. We can also return to the 1970s with Mishima Yukio’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy for which the fourth and last novel, The Decay of the Angel (tenningosui 天人五衰) will be closely analyzed in relation to both a Buddhist point of view as well as a Western nihilist perspective. My presentation addresses the phenomenological question of existence by examining the idea of arayashiki that appears throughout contemporary Japanese society.

M. Bouthillier: A Different Twist on ‘the Personal is Political’: Belief, Legitimacy and Political Change in late-Heian and early-Kamakura Japan

Due to narratives embedded in secularism, contemporary works on legitimacy generally avoid the inclusion of ‘belief’ as an analytical concept. However, pioneer of social science studies Max Webber clarified in The Profession and Vocation of Politics (1919) the necessary relationship between the two concepts when he demonstrated that structures of authority/power can never be legitimate based only on their existence alone; rather, they find they legitimacy only when they are anchored in beliefs. This means that to understand catalyzers of political change – even more so the legitimizing of new political orders – political theorists need to set aside their secular biases and start engaging with beliefs seriously again. This paper is going to take preliminary steps in this direction by looking at the central role one particular belief played in discussions surrounding legitimacy during the change from the Heian to the Kamakura period of Japanese history. More specifically, this paper draws from my own translations of classical Japanese passages stemming from Art, Poetry, Buddhism, and Folk Stories to highlight the overly naturalized belief expressing that legitimate governance is reflected in adequate/proper personal behavior stemming from having a “pure heart.” This paper then demonstrate the central role this belief has in the work of political theory, 六代勝 事記 Rokudaishōjiki, written around 1221. The conclusion emphasizes that re-centering analyses of political change around beliefs allows for a significantly different understanding of political history, one which allows to question mainstream narratives around which events can be considered to have magnitude.