For small and geographically dispersed Buddhist communities, like the Shin Buddhist Fellowship UK, which acts as an umbrella for the followers of the Hongwanji-ha (????)school of Jodo Shinshu (????) in the United Kingdom, the pandemic has prompted the need to adapt their ritual practices to a virtual space. The new space drastically differs from the spaces where rituals were previously conducted, primarily the homes of members who would gather around the home altar or butsudan (??). This unprecedented situation also paved the way for the adaptation of funeral rites to an online context and it allowed the community to meet more regularly, however virtually. In this way, the community was forced to re-imagine and reflect on its ritual life and the convenience or appropriateness of conducting ritual in an online setting.
This paper analyzes the dynamics of union/disunion, cohesion/fragmentation which have been generated from the virtualization of ritual, as well as exploring new power relations, etiquette and choreographies brought about by the new adaptation. In order to do so I draw on classical theories from ritual anthropology (e.g. Bell), which analyze the ritual body and its significance in power relations, but also on the writings of Hine, which describe the varied textures of online communities and the peculiarity of their study, when conducted from the computer of the researcher. Further, this research discusses my experiences as an ordained member (??, soryo, often translated into English as priest or minister) who has been actively involved in these transformations and who has studied them as a participant observer. This study is also aligned with a more critical and contemporary scholarship on Jodo Shinshu, which tends to focus on embodied practice and is ethnographic in nature, in contrast with the more traditional and text-based ‘doctrinal studies’ (???, Shinshugaku).
