Body, Speech and Thought - The Transformative Power of Ritual

Puett and Gross-Loh argue that ritual is a kind of make believe, a form of play, or an art form that people tend to forget as they grow out of childhood.

When children play, they consciously pretend and lose themselves in alternate realities, exploring imagined and different sides of themselves, and finding new and creative ways of being in the world.

Confucian ritual was a cultivated form of play or performance art that could have the same effect on adults as play does on children.

Puett and Gros-Loh say: “Our patterned behaviours and rote habits – not rituals – are what really dictate our lives and get in the way of our caring for other people.

But through life spent doing as-if rituals that break these patterns, we gain the ability to sense how to be good to those around us.”

To deliberately engage in ritual is not to behave like an automaton. On the contrary, it can bring about a recognition of how many of our everyday, unexamined patterns of behaviour truly are the places where we act like automatons.

If we’re to perform ritual as if it’s true then we will need to do it wholeheartedly, which is to say, with body, speech and thought. 

When the whole self is engaged in activity, we participate selflessly, because no part of us is left out from the activity. 

Body, speech and mind are ambivalent agents. They are gateways to both enlightened and deluded activity.

To put things simply, we could say that the role of the body, is to bring the hands together or to adopt the posture of meditation; understood as speech it is remain silent; and understood as thought, it is to concentrate.