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Experiences in a Buddhist Temple

We like to think of ourselves as competent. One of the great advantages of adulthood, after all, is the sense that we have that we finally have mastered the rules of our society and our culture. We are no longer likely to make the kind of culturally mistakes that embarrassed us as teenagers. However, as soon as we step - even briefly - into a cultural arena that is different from our own we lose this sense of mastery. This sudden ignorance, this overwhelming sense that we are no longer capable of negotiating the simplest transaction without making the kind of elemental mistakes that a young child would be likely to make, is at the heart of what we often call "culture shock". And because such a phenomenon has more to do with the ways in which we view ourselves and the ways in which we value our own sense of knowing cultural rules, culture shock can occur even when the culture that we are encountering is only a little different from our own (Storti 2001). It does not require us to travel around the world to feel as if we are out of our element.

I experienced this myself this past week when I went to a Buddhist temple. I have to admit that in choosing this location for this class experiment I had hoped to minimize my own culture shock. While I am not a Buddhist, I have read a far amount about Buddhism (initially for another class paper and then simply out of my own interest). I believed that because I had some background knowledge about Buddhism that I would feel more at home at the temple. This did not seem to be the case. Of course, I cannot know exactly how I would feel if I had not had any information about Buddhism before I walked through the temple gate since I cannot perform time travel and go back to the point at which I knew nothing about this major world religion, but my impression is that it would not have helped at all. I also do not know how much difference it made that I was going to the temple as a part of a class projec...

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Experiences in a Buddhist Temple. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:19, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688429.html