The Prayer and Practice Project
The basic idea underpinning this project is that there is no religion that does not engage in prayer and no form of Buddhism that is not founded on practice. The teachings of the Japanese Jōdo Shin sect prohibit prayer and practice, but even priests of this sect privately recognize that when devotees clasp their hands together and recite the name of the Buddha Amitābha for those who have passed away, this act is nothing other than a form of prayer or practice. In India, zealous practitioners chose Sanskrit to record their individual experiences of cultivated practice, which properly speaking cannot be verbally expressed, for the purpose of keeping records of these experiences and also guiding future generations of practitioners, and these records formed the basis of Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda thought. Taking into account historical changes in Vijñānavāda theories, this project aims to understand these theories by viewing the early theories in particular, based on the living voices and exploits of practitioners, as practical theories and viewing as doctrinal theories the theories that Xuanzang brought back to China from India in the seventh century and which were developed into systematic theories with a high level of internal consistency in the doctrines of the Faxiang school in China and the Hossō school in Japan. On top of this, we are also comparing the lived experiences of practitioners as recorded in past texts with the analysis of data on brain waves and so on obtained from people living today (including practitioners).
It is difficult to subject cultivated practice, which differs from one person to another, to academic scrutiny, which places importance on universality and objectivity. In the United States and Europe, vast amounts of data on Zen monks and Tibetan monks have been collected by means of scientific techniques in the fields of medicine and so on, including the measuring of brain waves and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and these data have been made the subject of academic research. But almost no attempts have been made to compare these findings with the vast quantity of material about practitioners of the past that survives in particular in Sanskrit texts and their Tibetan and Chinese translations.
The aim of this project is to turn into academically valid results the findings obtained through joint research on meditation conducted together with researchers of Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda thought and other branches of Buddhism, experts in the practice of meditation, and specialists in brain science, psychology, and so on. The experiences of individual practitioners naturally differ, but by observing and analyzing their individual characteristics, formulating theories about them, and making them visibly apprehensible, we aim to discover characteristics common to many different practitioners. We also hope to foster a renewed appreciation of the fact that the practice of meditation can make a positive contribution to contemporary society.