Sōtō Zen in a Japanese Town: Field Notes on a Once-Every-Thirty-Three-Years Kannon Festival

This article reports on a thirty-three-day celebration of the bodhisattva Kannon, which occurred in July and August of 1993 as the latest enactment of a thirty-three-year cycle of such celebrations, at a Sōtō Zen temple in Niigata Japan known as Jingū-ji. Its three parts describe the geographical and historical context of Jingū-ji and its tradition of Kannon worship; the planning, fund raising, sequence of events, and social significance of the thirty-three-day festival last year; and the significance of Jingū-ji's Kannon festival as a contemporary example of sōtō Zen in a Japanese town. It analyzes how the Kannon celebration functions on a local level as a medium for the preservation and reconstitution of local community identity. It concludes by questioning the validity of widespre ad scholarly categorizations that separate the study of Buddhist traditions, such as Zen, from their common cultural manifestations in popular religious practices, such as Kannon worship.