Exo-Zen as a surrogate of Japanese Zen Buddhism in the modern Russian mass culture

Abstract

The article is devoted to the exo-zen phenomenon and its features in modern Russian mass culture. The way of transformations of classical Zen Buddhism, originated in India, perceived in China and developed in Japan as a general cultural phenomenon is shown. The Japanese Zen-Buddhism came to the West in the 20^th century and transformed into the globalized Zen (globo-zen) as a modern synthetic religious trend. A modern version of globo-zen, exo-Zen, emerged as a result of com­bining Zen-Buddhist practices with Western mass culture, is ana­ly­zed. The term “exo-zen” includes two shades of meaning: exoteric and exotic. The modern exo-zen is claimed to be a psycho-technical or general theoretical in­struc­tion to various types of activities – business, pro­duction, artistic creativity, sports, enter­tain­ment, etc. As an international mass movement, which has an intensely general cultural and socially-organizing meaning, exo-zen has had a serious impact on cinema and animation (anime, manga), computer games, the sphere of youth leisure (cosplay, selfie) etc. From the philosophical point of view, exo-zen is a non­religious, polyethnic, and multicultural trend in the modern mass culture. As part of the Russian modern mass culture, exo-zen is considered on examples of its various manifestations in literature (A. Chanyshev, G. Arsenyev, V. Pelevin, S. Ko­val, Yu. Holin, R. Dolya), painting (M. She­myakin, A. Khlobystin), in the sphere of entertainment. Both positive and negative aspects of the exo-zen popularity in modern Russian mass culture are noted.