Day 8 of the Digital Curation of Puffenberger’s Religious Artifacts

Today I completed the research on the Buddhist artifacts and its corresponding links to outside sources. I Am happy with the amount of information that is on each artifact but will like to go back to those artifacts later on to see if there are any other sources I can add. When assigning scriptures to the artifacts, as discussed yesterday, I realized that not all the artifacts have corresponding scripture to it. Instead of listing links to scripture, other relevant sources were put in its place. For example, with the Japanese Bamboo Flute, no Buddhist scripture references it in text. In fact, because the flute is mostly associated with a sect of Buddhism, called Zen-Buddhism, they reject text all together, making it almost impossible to find any textual reference to the flute. In in place, I put sources that mention how the flute aids monks and other Zen-Buddhist in their meditation. I also added a video of a Japanese Buddhist playing the flute to give the viewers of the site what the flute sounds like and what kind of music is typical in Buddhist tradition.

In addition to the other artifacts that had no scriptural text attached, Dr. Newton gave me two chapter to read from two different books. The first book, Theorizing Scripture by Vincent L. Wimbush begin the chapter on discussing the complexity of the word “scripture” itself and how it’s existence leads to socio-cultural and political impacts. However Wimbush says shortly after that “scripture” is problematic for many reasons. For one, it favors those of Judaeo-Christian background while ignoring those traditions that do not have a strong scriptural influence. In addition, Wimbush calls for a different orientation on how scholars view and study scripture. Wimbush adds that in order to achieve this new orientation, it is beneficial to look at “subordinate peoples,” because they “teach us that there is much more to expressiveness and representation than conventional literacy would indicate; they teach us they ‘scriptures’ are about more than the study of texts as conventional scripts…”. Wimbush ends the esaay with mentioning that the study of scriptures themselves must be open to all who are trying to study and understand human beings, since scripture itself can be branched off into many different fields of study.

The other book, Iconic Books and Texts by James W. Watts provides similar criticisms when it comes to scripture. Watts begins by saying that many of the controversies surrounding scripture stem from the fact that the scriptures used are taken out of context since they do not involve the interpretation behind the scripture into account, nor do they mention how the text is learned and obeyed. Watts proposed three dimensions in order to study scripture for their cultural and religious significance. The first dimension is the semantic dimension which understands the meaning of the text, including interpretations, commentary and persuasive rhetoric. The second dimension is the performative dimension which is how the scriptures lead to a performed ritual of what is written, including public or private reading, memorization, chants or choral oratorios, calligraphy of the scripture, etc. The third dimension says Watts is the iconic dimension. The iconic dimension is when scriptures find expression in physical forms, such as the leather bound Bibles, the calligraphy of Quranic texts, or how followers treat the book, such as Sikhs placing their Adi Granth in their own room of a private house. Watts goes on to talk about how the dimensions ritualize scripture which can lead to a greater understanding of the texts.

I took both chapter into mind when I was trying to find scripture for the different Buddhist artifacts. Not all artifacts will have text but they are significant in some way so I added sources that I thought would display the significance effectively. Today, I also added a description to the “Blog”. It was decided that the hyper link version of the blog would be used if the RSS code could not be figured out. So I added a description of the purpose of the blog and will possibly add a picture. Tomorrow I plan on editing my research and other items I added to the website to finish out the weekly goals.

-Amal Ismail