Cognitive Theories of Ritual and Buddhist Practice : An Examination of Ilkka Pyysiainen's Theory

Cognitive Theories of Ritual and
Buddhist Practice: An Examination of
Ilkka Pyysiäinen’s Theory
Richard K. Payne
Dean, Institute of Buddhist Studies
at the Graduate Theological Union
WHILE WE ARE HERE CONCERNED with the cognitive theory of ritual
put forward by Ilkka Pyysiäinen, it is important to note at the start that
Pyysiäinen’s project is much more ambitious. It is nothing less than a
cognitive theory of religion as a whole. As a consequence, it will be
necessary to contextualize his treatment of ritual in terms of the theoretical
bases of his larger project.
THE “COUNTER-INTUITIVE”:
BASIS OF PYYSIÄINEN’S THEORY
Pyysiäinen’s general theory of religion works with a notion of the
counter-intuitive as the necessary—though not sufficient—marker of reli-
gious beliefs:
Religious representations, considered in isolation, are not a unique
type of mental representation, and ‘religion’ does not refer to
objects with distinctive causal properties. It is a more or less
arbitrary process whereby certain counter-intuitive representa-
tions become selected for a use such that they are regarded as
instances of religion.1
Pyysiäinen’s approach to understanding religion in terms of the counter-
intuitive contrasts with approaches frequently found in anthropology and
religious studies, which employ such categories as “the supernatural” or
“the superhuman.” However, these categories in turn depend upon what
is understood as “natural” and “human,” categories which are not stable
across cultures, or even in different contexts within the same culture.2
Consequently, what might be considered “natural” or “human” varies so
75

---

76
Pacific World
greatly across religious cultures that no universally applicable under-
standing of religion can be developed from these categories. For these
reasons Pyysiäinen argues that the categories of “the supernatural” or “the
superhuman” are inadequate for application across different religious
traditions.
However, there are universal standards of intuitive reasoning based
on what are known as “intuitive” or “natural ontologies.” These are
categories of existence which appear to be universally shared by all
humans, but which are not fixed—they change and develop over time.3
Intuitive ontologies are most clearly revealed in developmental studies of
children’s cognition. Pascal Boyer has developed the research on intuitive
ontologies as an approach to cognitive theories of religion, and is one of the
primary sources for Pyysiäinen. Boyer explains that,
Children, whose vocabulary does not include abstract terms like
“event,” “property,” and “living kind,” nevertheless make clear
distinctions between these ontological categories. The ontological
“tree” is of course gradually developed, mainly by subdividing
categories that originally merge two or more adult categories.4
In relation to religion Boyer makes the point that “Religious representa-
tions typically center on claims that violate commonsense expectations
concerning ordinary things, beings and processes.”5 Boyer further speci-
fies that such religious claims range over four different “repertoires”:
representations concerning ontological categories, causal relations, ac-
tions or episodes, and social categories.6 These repertoires are inter-
related: for example, a deceased ancestor (ontological) may when angry
cause disease (causal) to his or her descendants (social), requiring a
sacrificial offering (event). Out of these four repertoires Boyer focuses on
the ontological, and is followed in this by Pyysiäinen. To establish the
intuitive or natural character of ontological representations, Boyer cites the
work of Frank C. Keil.7 In his experimentation with children—who are not
able to explicitly express abstract, general categories—Keil found that they
still worked with “implicit ontological categories, for example, EVENT,
OBJECT, LIVING THING, ANIMATE, HUMAN, and so forth, which are
(1) organized in a hierarchy and (2) made manifest by predicate selection.”8
The hierarchical nature of concepts refers to the way in which there are
more general categories which subsume more specific ones: oranges are
members of the category fruit. That these implicit ontological categories
are made manifest in predicate selection means that children will attribute
thought to humans, while they will not do so to objects.
With this background Pyysiäinen uses the term “counter-intuitive”
with a very specific meaning: “’Counter-intuitive’ means ‘violating
panhuman intuitive expectations’ in a well defined fashion.”9 While the

---

Payne: Cognitive Theories of Ritual and Buddhist Practice
77
kinds of “natural” or “intuitive” categories established by Keil’s research
grounds the notion of the counter-intuitive, Pyyiäinen cites Boyer for two
specific ways in which counter-intuitive ideas are created: transference of
qualities appropriate to one category to another where those qualities are
not appropriate, and violation of the boundaries of an intuitive category:
It is important to bear in mind that counter-intuitiveness consists
precisely of violations against or tranferences across the bound-
aries between ontological categories. “Counter-intuitive” is not by
definition the same as “false,” “ridiculous,” or “odd.” Counter-
intuitiveness also contradicts intutive expectations; it is therefore
possible that a believer finds some familiar counter-intuitive rep-
resentations as being quite natural, because this judgement is
made at the level of explicit knowledge.10
This notion of the counter-intuitive is strengthened as a definition for
religion by recent research that has demonstrated the fact that counter-
intuitive ideas are more memorable than intuitive ones: “optimally counter-
intuitive ideas are better recalled than ordinary or overly counter-intuitive
ones, and thus are also more effectively distributed.”11 In other words, if an
idea is unusual but not obviously implausible, then we are more likely to
remember it, and it is more likely that we will share it with others. If we
consider the prevalence and similarity of miracle stories in so many
different religious traditions, as well as the speed with which conspiracy
theories propagate in society, this concept may be less implausible than it
perhaps seems upon first hearing. “Counter-intuitiveness has also been
shown to enhance the recall of items in experimental conditions. This
enhanced recall may explain—ceteris paribus—why counter-intuitive rep-
resentations seem so easily to become widespread in and across cul-
tures.”12 As explified in the notion of “optimally counter-intuitive,” reli-
gious representations are not simply counter-intuitive, but rather form
part of a system of beliefs, some of which are intuitive, while others are
counter-intuitive:
[C]ounter-intuitive representations form only one aspect of reli-
gious cognition, the other being that counter-intuitive representa-
tions are embedded in intuitive ones. . . . It is the intuitive aspects
of religious representations that make them understandable and
learnable, but it is the counter-intuitive aspect that makes them
religious.13
The idea that there are benevolent elders, perhaps aunts and uncles, who
might come to one’s assistance in times of need is an intuitive one based on
our experience of social categories, causal relations, ontological statuses,

---

78
Pacific World
and episodic events. Disembodied benevolent others—deceased ances-
tors, saints, bodhisattvas—located in some non-physical reality who can
come to one’s assistance in times of need is a counter-intuitive category.
ON RITUAL
Pyysiäinen’s treatment of ritual draws on Harvey Whitehouse’s stud-
ies of ritual in Melanesia.14 The cognitive character of Whitehouse’s anthro-
pological studies is found in the way in which he bases his distinction
between two modes of religion—imagistic and doctrinal—on two kinds of
memory—episodic and semantic, respectively. The connection between
these two kinds of memory and the two kinds of religious practice is that
in general the doctrinal mode of religion is given its sense of validity
through repetition and is a part of semantic memory, while the imagistic
mode of religion is given its sense of validity through emotional stimula-
tion and is part of episodic memory.
Whitehouse bases his link between mode of religion and frequency of
ritual performance on psychological studies of memory. Episodic memory
(also known as autobiographical memory) involves “recollections of spe-
cific events” and this is “the way people remember revelatory rituals, the
specific moments when their understandings about the nature of the world
were violated or transformed.”15 Infrequent and highly emotionally charged
rituals, such as the Melanesian initiatory rites Whitehouse has studied, are
according to this theory remembered as specific episodes, including such
things as the identity of the specific participants. Infrequency, episodic
memory, and dramatic uniqueness form an integral relation in
Whitehouse’s theory:
The transmission of imagistic practices depends upon the unique
and intense quality of ritual experience. It is not conducive to the
cultivation of such messages to repeat them very often. Repetition
deprives the experience of its uniqueness.16
Semantic memory, on the other hand, deals with frequently repeated
events which are “repetitive and predictable” and are remembered in the
form of “scripts or ‘schemas’.”17 Frequently occuring rituals, such as a
Sunday service in Christianity, are not remembered as specific episodes,
but rather as a typical sequence of familiar events. While dramatic rituals
recorded in episdodic memory and performed infrequently provide op-
portunities for revelatory shifts of how one understands the world, famil-
iar rituals recorded in semantic memory and performed frequently are
opportunities for inculcating a specific doctrinal perspective. Indeed,

---

Payne: Cognitive Theories of Ritual and Buddhist Practice
79
Whitehouse argues that the creation of repetitive ritual is actually more
important in the history of religion than the creation of print media:
[N]otwithstanding those historians who emphasize the impor-
tance of printing in the Reformation, it must be appreciated that
ideas contained in print were only able to exercise a sustained and
uniform influence on those they reached in so far as the written
words were continually reviewed and, in practice, rehearsed in
countless speech events.18
In some places Whitehouse writes as if he thinks of the two modes of
religion as forming something of a dialectic. The repetitive quality of
doctrinal religion leads to boredom, and this sets the stage for imagistic
practices to be appealing.
Pyysiäinen borrows this fundamental three-fold distinction (religious
mode, frequency of ritual performance, and type of memory involved) and
applies it to the way in which religious belief is created by ritual practices:
“[B]elief in the truth and importance of religious beliefs is created in two
ways: through repetition and through emotional stimulation.”19 These
different ways of creating religious belief correlate with different kinds of
rituals. Rituals which are performed repetitively inform doctrinal under-
standing, and rituals which are performed irregularly create a memorable
experience. Pyysiäinen notes that the two are not mutually exclusive of one
another—while repetitive rituals are not specifically intended to create
emotional responses, emotional reactions to such rituals may still occur.
However, “these emotional experiences are soon interpreted according to
the prevailing doctrinal schemata.”20 When that happens, the memories
become depersonalized, and are remembered in semantic rather than
episodic memory. Emotion is still the key here according to Pyysiäinen, as
it is emotion that establishes the sense of commitment to religious doctrines
(or what he calls “schematized religious representations”), despite their
counter-intuitive character. Further, “doctrines too may be enhanced by
imagistic experiences.”21 According to Pyysiäinen, “religious belief” is
defined by this emotionally-rooted commitment. In contrast to religious
belief is “religious experience” which Pyysiäinen defines as “emotion-
laden thoughts and perceptions that come to be encoded in episodic
memory as unique events.”22 Pyysiäinen then attempts to ground both
religious belief and religious experience in a neurophysiology of emotion:
“The emotions that characterize both belief and experience are bodily
states that mark religious representations and bodily reactions that are
experienced as fear, sadness, happiness, anger or disgust.”23
Pyysiäinen draws on Damasio’s “somatic marker hypothesis” for his
link between the emotional basis of religious belief in the bodily responses
of fear, and so on, and the character of religious experience produced by

---

80
Pacific World
different ritual types. Damasio’s hypothesis is that there is an emotional
reaction which precedes rational decision-making.24 This has the evolu-
tionary benefit of reducing the number of alternatives between which a
person has to choose. These responses can either be positive or negative,
and “may operate covertly (without coming to consciousness).”25 It is the
strength of these bodily responses that give religious beliefs their resil-
ience, despite the counter-intuitive character of those beliefs.
These somatic markers force particular attention on the negative
outcome of the possible rejection of religious belief. . . . Although
this holds in most non-religious cases as well, religious thinking is
special in that it involves counter-intuitive representations more
difficult to process than representations merely confirming do-
main-specific intuitive ontology.26
For Pyysiäinen, then, the two ways of creating religious belief (repetition
and emotional stimulation) serve to identify two kinds of ritual (frequent
and irregular), which utilize two kinds of memory (semantic and episodic)
and characterize two different modes of religion (doctrinal and imagistic).
These can be schematized as follows:
MODE OF RELIGION
IMAGISTIC
DOCTRINAL
kind of memoryepisodic
semantic
kind of ritual
irregular
frequent
ways of creating belief
emotional stimulation
repetition
According to Pyysiäinen’s theory, religious beliefs are counter-intuitive,
the commitment to which is grounded in the bodily, preconscious emo-
tional response formed under these two modes of religion.
There is a greater variety to the types of rituals and to the ways in which
they may effect us cognitively than Pyysiäinen’s bipartite theory would
indicate. That Whitehouse has only considered two modes of religion—
justifiably so on the basis of his research field—does not mean that there are
not more.
PERFORMATIVE MEMORY
Cognitive studies of memory have pointed to a third form of memory—
procedural memory. Procedural memory is evidenced by knowing how to
do things, and is therefore also sometimes referred to as “procedural

---

Payne: Cognitive Theories of Ritual and Buddhist Practice
81
knowledge.”27 As Alvin I. Goldman has pointed out, the “phrase ‘how to
do things’ first brings to mind motor skills, because these are the most
concrete examples of procedural knowledge.”28 However, it can also be
taken to include “cognitive skills such as decision making, mathematical
problem solving, and language generation.”29 In other words, cognitive
skills involving “how to do things” as well as specifically motor skills are
understood to be part of the same cognitive faculty—procedural memory.30
Studies of brain activity have found “that extensive practice on a task often
produces a shift in the brain pathways used to complete the task.”31 This
shift of brain pathway is linked with increased facility in task performance.
Procedural memory does not appear to be as well-studied as other
forms of memory.32 One of the leading contemporary memory researchers,
Daniel L. Schachter, tells us that it was only in the early 1980s he began “to
take seriously the idea that memory is not a single thing. Laboratory
evidence pointed toward three different long-term memory systems: epi-
sodic memory, which allows us to recollect specific incidents from our
pasts; semantic memory, the vast network of associations and concepts
that underlies our general knowledge of the world; and procedural memory,
which allows us to learn skills and know how to do things.”33 The proce-
dural memory system “is selectively involved in ‘knowing how’ to do
things: ride a bicycle, type words on a keyboard, solve a jigsaw puzzle, or
read words in mirror-image form.”34
The character of Buddhist ritual practice—repetitive but not semantic,
experiential but not emotionally charged—suggests that it employs proce-
dural memory to produce its effects. This appears to also be the case in
traditions of Japanese arts (Jpn. dø), which employ very repetitive forms of
practice emphasizing physical activity. In contrast to the dichotomy pro-
posed by Pyysiäinen, such ritualized practices do not primarily depend on
verbal information, i.e., are not primarily semantic; nor do they employ
intense emotional experiences. Dorinne K. Kondo has discussed this as a
“theory of pedagogy.” She says of these “methods of learning and self-
cultivation” that
[O]ne first learns through imitation. Stereotyped movements are
repeated endlessly; for example, as a student of tea ceremony, one
begins with seemingly simple tasks such as how to walk properly,
how to fold a tea napkin, how to wipe the tea utensils. Unlike
similar movements in everyday life, these are precisely defined, to
be executed “just so.” Later these learned actions are orchestrated
into a ceremony that is the epitome of “natural,” disciplined grace.
The martial arts, also arts of “the way” (dø), practice their kata,
patterned movements, until the movements are inscribed in
muscle memory.35

---

82
Pacific World
Kondo’s “muscle memory” is procedural memory. This kind of approach
to pedagogy is found not only in Buddhist ritual practice and Japanese arts
of “the Way,” but also informs neo-Confucian educational practice as well.
In the following we will explore the tantric tradition of ritual practice found
in the Shingon sect of Japanese Buddhism.
SHINGON BUDDHIST RITUAL PRACTICE:
EMPTINESS AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE SELF
One of the teachings central to Mahåyåna Buddhism is the emptiness
of all existing things, including both objects and persons. Today, from the
Mahåyåna perspective, this idea is identified most clearly with the
Mådhyamika school of thought from which the terminology of emptiness
derives. However, emptiness of the self does have precursors all the way
back to Ûåkyamuni Buddha under different terminology.
The emptiness of the personal self means that there is no permanent,
eternal, absolute, or unchanging essence, and not—as the idea of emptiness
is misunderstood to mean—that there is no personal self. Rather than a
permanent or unchanging self, the personal self as empty does exist as a
construct. It is not a given and it is never fully stable. It is, rather, an ongoing
construction which may be interpreted as the interface between attempts
to preserve our own sense of self-identity—whether positive or negative—
in the face of changing situations and expectations.
As cognitive beings we hold mental images, memories, narratives, and
so on about the world of our experience.36 Because we are also self-
consciously aware, one of the images that we hold is an image of our self.
This self-image is constructed out of our own experience, including what
others reflect back to us. The malleability of the self-image suggests that it
can be purposely reconstructed.37
One way of framing the issue of awakening, then, is how to transform
this self-representation from one of a foolish being (Skt. p®tagjana, Jpn.
ishø), to one of an awakened being. This suggests that a self-representation
is the basis for living life from an awakened perspective, changing the way
that one not only thinks of oneself, but also the ways in which we engage
with others and the world around us. This way of framing the issue
purposely attempts to shift the understanding of awakening from being
conceived as a sudden, transformative “mystical” experience, to a concep-
tion which acknowledges the importance of the interpersonal, social, and
cultural construction of such a sense of self-representation. The category of
mystical experience introduces a set of problems about defining mysticism
and the attendant issues of mediated versus unmediated experience that
have proven to be so intransigent that one may reasonably conclude that
the problem has been so poorly stated that it is a pseudo-problem. Further,

---

Payne: Cognitive Theories of Ritual and Buddhist Practice
83
the rhetoric of transformative experience generally ignores both the social
nature of humans and the way in which culture itself molds the develop-
mental process. It assumes that there is an individual person who is
separate from both the others around him/her, and separate from the
effects of the culture within which the person has grown up. The view
being developed here is that one’s self-identity is constructed specifically
out of interaction with both society and culture, and is fully interdependent
with both society and culture. This interdependence is one of the reasons
that change is often so difficult—existing ways of being are “over-deter-
mined,” that is they are supported both by a person’s own self-conception
and by the conceptions that others have of that person, manifested in the
ways that they act toward the person. Consequently, there can be no
unmediated, transformative experience occuring to the separate self, since
the separate self does not exist. It is important to note that this approach to
awakening does not deny the existence or value of transformative experi-
ence, but rather intends to open up an understanding of how such experi-
ences become transformative in a particular way, i.e., become defined as
Buddhist experiences of awakening.
The emptiness of the self, its constructed nature, matches the findings
of cognitive science across the range of different theoretical approaches to
cognitive science—computational, connectionist, embodied-enactive. From
a religious perspective, the question which needs to be asked then is: How
can the nature of the self-representation, the sense of self-identity, be
changed, particularly if it is so over-determined?
Turning specifically to the Shingon tradition, as an esoteric or tantric
Buddhist tradition, the actual performance of ritual practice is only done by
initiates. Different kinds of ritual practices may be performed by different
kinds of initiates, from very simple meditative rituals for what may be
called “lay initiates” to very complex rituals performed by full initiates
(Skt. åcårya, Jpn. ajari). While there are many different strands making up
any polythetic definition of tantra, in this case it is the use of ritual
identification that is important to our discussions here. Ritual identifica-
tion refers to the central ritual action in almost all Shingon rituals—the
identification of the practitioner with the deity evoked in the ritual. In the
parlance of Shingon ritual manuals, this is known as ny¥ ga, ga ny¥ (Skt.
ahaµkåra) or “me entering, entering me.” Through the unity of one’s body,
speech, and mind with the body, speech, and mind of the Buddha, one
gradually learns to live from a perspective of being awakened. The theo-
retical background for this is the idea that all living beings are already
inherently awakened (Jpn. hongaku), and that it is possible for human
beings to become aware of this state in this very lifetime (Jpn. sokushin
jøbutsu). According to traditional Shingon interpretations, ritual practice
leads to this awareness through three stages.

---

84
Pacific World
First, the inherent principle of being awake (Jpn. rigu-jøbutsu), which
refers to the view that the dharmakåya, i.e., Mahåvairocana Buddha, is the
actual existence of all things as empty. Second, practice toward being
awake (Jpn. kaji-jøbutsu), which refers to the power inherent in ritual
practice to activate the compassionate response of the awakened con-
sciousness of the Buddha, is itself nothing other than the awakened nature
of one’s own consciousness.38 Third, realization of being awake (Jpn.
kendoku-jøbutsu), which refers to the revealing (ken) and acquiring (doku)
of the awakened character of one’s existence.
The hypothesis that I am suggesting here, then, is that the repetitive
practice of ritual identification in the course of Shingon training serves to
transform the self-image through embodied action recorded in procedural
memory. Shingon ritual practice does not fit into either of the two catego-
ries of ritual discussed by Pyysiäinen. This would seem to be too sharp a
dichotomy for an adequate treatment not only of Shingon, but also of much
of Buddhist practice, which works on a repetitive experiential approach.
While not disconnected from doctrine (note that the doctrine versus
experience dichotomy needs also to be questioned), much practice in the
Buddhist tradition is repetitive and primarily experiential. Contrary to
Pyysiäinen’s use of Whitehouse’s paired categories, Buddhist practice is
often repetitive without being semantic, and experiential without being
highly emotional. It is, however, strongly embodied, a fact reflected in the
slogan by which Shingon Buddhism is often characterized: sokushin
jøbutsu. Sokushin jøbutsu literally means “becoming buddha in this body,”
despite it often being taken to refer to “this lifetime.” Conversely, the
emphasis on embodiment implies that the obscurations (Skt. kle?a, Jpn.
bonnø) which impede us from living as awakened beings are not simply
mental in character. Such mistaken conceptions and misplaced affections
are themselves embodied activity that we repeatedly perform (Skt. saµsåra)
despite its unsatisfactory outcome (Skt. du©kha). The third form of memory,
procedural memory, fits Buddhist ritual practice much more adequately
than do either semantic or episodic memory. The constructed character of
the self suggests that the self-image can be transformed through embodied
activity, and the work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch has shown that
embodied activity is central to cognition.39
THE CONTRIBUTION OF BUDDHISM TO
A COGNITIVE THEORY OF RITUAL
In Pyysiäinen’s view, repetition is linked with the acquisition of
doctrinal claims as discursive elements in semantic memory in such a
fashion that they are held as true beliefs, despite their counter-intuitive
status. “Rituals form an artificial reality of sorts, set apart from ordinary

---