Danser au milieu du chaos: secrets zen d’une nonne bouddhiste by Kankyo Tannier
2022; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tfr.2022.0206
ISSN2329-7131
Autores Tópico(s)Chinese history and philosophy
ResumoReviewed by: Danser au milieu du chaos: secrets zen d’une nonne bouddhiste by Kankyo Tannier Michel Gueldry Tannier, Kankyo. Danser au milieu du chaos: secrets zen d’une nonne bouddhiste. Flammarion, 2021. ISBN 978-2-0815-0268-0. Pp. 288. Twenty years ago, after a mainstream early life and a master’s degree in public law in Besançon, Isabelle Lorca (now Kankyo Tannier) became a Buddhist nun in the Ryumon-Ji Zen monastery , near Strasbourg. She has authored widely translated books on silence and meditation. She manages la ferme Kibo (“hope”), an animal sanctuary that teaches the spiritual care of nature, permaculture, and Zen retreats. She also manages four websites: , , , and her quadrilingual . Alternating seriousness and irreverence, wisdom and impatience, her aptly-named book Danser joyfully mixes the local and the global, her individuality and universality, French slang and Japanese terms, cultural universes (French television programs and Buddhist tenets, her love of horses and Twitter, Jeanne d’Arc and Master Dōgen), and genres (the sacred and ordinary life). She discusses human nature and soteriology (doctrine of salvation), her emotions and struggles with the rigorous Zen way, the busy life of her monastery, the “bonheurs et misères de la communauté” (57–93), the “colères et jalousies sur la voie du Bouddha” (209–32), sexism within the global Zen community, and the environmental crisis. Core Buddhist teachings are explained simply: our unconscious unconsciousness and inner fragmentation (255), the mental construction of and societal obsession with “persona” (20), the elusiveness of “la réalité ultime” (22), the tetralemma (quadruple negation) that exhausts our conceptualization of reality (44), the necessity of “lâcher-prise” (63), “laisser être” (65), “laisser passer” (148) and “observer sans toucher l’objet” (107), practicing zazen, and the “coproduction conditionnée” (66) of phenomena. Our “circonvolutionsmentales” (123) such as “pareidolia” (112, fabrication of mental images from reality), our difficulty to “voir la réalité en face” (32), our addiction to “réifier l’insaisissable” (148) are aggravated by modern plights: digital obsession, con sumerism, competition, anxiety due to “l’emploi au compte-goutte” (37), and addiction to speed and busyness. Against the hypnotic nature of quotidian emotions and thoughts, against the identification with our “vagabond mind” (165) that combines agitation and absence, she advocates “l’incertitude lumineuse” (21), “l’attention tranquille et spacieuse” (24) beyond words and categories, and a heightened attention to the body, our “maison intérieure” (189), in her case through chanting, the Feldenkrais method, and proprioception (awareness of body position and movement). In her prose, east meets west and France meets the world: Thich Nhat Hanh and Le Clézio, Taisen Deshimaru (who introduced Zen to France in the 1960s) and Georges Moustaki, Paris-Roubaix and Swami Prajnanpad, Bernard Pivot and “Dark Vador” [sic] (140), Edward Snowden and Claude Hagège, Greta Thunberg and Jean-Marc Jancovici, Netflix and Fort Boyard, the Matrix and [End Page 227] Alsace... This postmodern jumble is both hopeful and anguished, notably regarding the environmental crisis. She delineates a Buddhist economy that includes the protection of commons, redefinition of private property rights, localism, community and giving. In sum, hers is a serious way, not an instance of “la mode du mindfulness” (111). Her French—or more widely, Western—approach to Buddhism rejects its downgrading to personal development, relaxation, or therapy, but it integrates sciences, IT, gender equality, psychotherapy, hypnosis, and engages vigorously with modernity. [End Page 228] Michel Gueldry Missouri University of Science & Technology Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French
Referência(s)