Conan the Praying Dog!!!

The week before the 沖縄全島エイサまつり (All-Island Eisa Festival) we drove down to Kannondo Temple to receive a blessing for our upcoming performance and to show proper filial piety to our ancestors.

Japan is not a religious place, in the sense that Westerners mean it, in fact, when Admiral Perry forced Japan to surrender its ports to Western ships he demanded that the Japanese also allow the traders to establish churches as they pleased and that freedom of religion by enacted. The Japanese had no idea what he meant, and so they had to create a word that meant religion in the sens that Westerners meant. To this day the Japanese do not believe themselves to be religious at all, but you will see nearly all Japanese people visiting Shinto shrines, praying in Buddhist temples, and even having Christian wedding ceremonies (albeit Christian in the most "Walt Disney Presents" manner, replete with Cinderella-Princess dress). That's because religion in the Western sense means a way of seeing the world that assumes that there is this world and then there is the more real, more perfect, Heavenly world where God(s) live.

In Japan, as most of East Asia, there is no other world in which you might find something divine. This world is perfectible according to the perfection of practices, i.e. meditation, chanting, etc. And so, when you visit Japan, you will see the red torii gates, the shimenawa (the hemp ropes tied around trees), the zig-zag paper called shide. You will see Buddhist temples and monks walking the streets in the morning silently asking for alms. And the history of Japan is a history of feuding Buddhist temples, of the Imperial Appropriation of Shinto for the justification of becoming a Colonial power (thanks to the Japanese being forced open they came to the West and realized they needed some of that opiate of the masses to get the common folk to die en masse for the Emperor just like the Pope in the Middle Ages).

But Okinawa is not Japanese in this way. Okinawa has a long tradition of women shamans that acted as mediums between a world of the dead and the forces of life and death. More prominently over the past several hundred years, the Ryukyu Kingdom ("Okinawa" before becoming a colony of Japan) looked almost completely to the great power in the region for the past millenia, China. From China the Ryukyuans learned statecraft, which meant they learned Confucianism. Confucianism holds as a central tenet the veneration of those that came before us, our ancestors; and this resonated with the (now) Okinawans. So into Confucianism were the Ryukyuans that the Chinese gave as a symbol of affection a plaque to hang above Shuruijo (the castle where the Ryukyuan Emperor lived) that says this is the land of perfected propriety, which is a high honor in the Confucian worldview.

And so the Okinawans never really built many Shinto shrines or Buddhist temples. When the Japanese formally colonized Okinawa in the 19th century they brought with them a real need for a Buddhist temple, but the only place that colonizing Japanese would want to live in this (to their minds at that time) backward place was the capital, Naha. And so today we have Kannondo* Temple where Conan the Praying Dog lives.
*Kannon is the Japanese name for the Chinese Guan Yin, or the Sanskrit Avalokitesvara, do just means (the/a/on) "path of-"

Kannondo is a Zen sect (apparently, according to the world news reports) and I am not surprised by this praying dog business because there is a classic Zen parable where a monk asked Master Joshu (as he is known in Japan):

"If there is no world beyond this one (no heavenly, or Nirvana state - Nirvana being a Hindu belief), then everything must be of the same nature as the Buddha. Do dogs have Buddha-nature?"
To which Joshu answered, "Mu," which is a negation but also not a negation.

This is a very famous koan that Zen students must consider as they develop their understanding of the Zen path. So, of course, Kannondo next to Shuri Castle will have a dog that prays, why not?

The monk who watches out for Conan (who is named, apparently, after Sir Conan Arthur Doyle, not the Barbarian, or Mr. O'Brian), was super nice to us and in exchange for translating a letter he received in English from someone in India, he gave us some nice postcards which I will be sending out soon.

Here's the graphic evidence, you're moment of Zen, if you will:

We even made it onto Conan's personal webpage:
http://gasshouken.ti-da.net/