Talk:Paula Arai

Articles about Arai's books
Hi, I just created this bio and I wanted to put a note here about some ideas for more articles about Arai. As I researched this bio, I found plenty of sources about Arai's books, mostly in the form of reviews, certainly enough to warrant the creation of new articles about them. The Tsomo source would be a good source about Arai's first two books, Women Living Zen: Japanese Sōtō Buddhist Nuns (1999) and Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women’s Rituals (2011). It's just a suggestion, one that I may follow up on someday, so this note is more for me than for anyone else. If anyone else would like to take these projects on, I'm happy to assist. Christine (Figureskatingfan) (talk) 00:20, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Did you know nomination
As NikosGouliaros mentiones, the only source for the hook's claim that Arai suffered discrimination is Arai herself, whose complaints Tsomo in turn just reports as a fact, assuming them to be true. However, there is no guarantee that it is. Just because someone complains or perceives themselves to be discriminated against doesn't necessarily mean that they really are discriminated against. People are often subjective and biased in their own favour. At most, an adequate summary would be that 'Arai reports having suffered racial and sexual discrimination'. But Tsomo chooses to treat every word by Arai as 'gospel truth', and since Tsomo's book has been peer-reviewed, it counts as a reliable source for Wikipedia and there is nothing to do about it. As subjectivity, poor sourcing and ideological bias seem to have become the norm in certain academic fields (hence, I suspect, the success of Arai's research, much of which seems to consist of blatantly subjective descriptions of her own personal religious feelings and of those of her friends), so Wikipedia articles on such subjects are bound to be equally unreliable.--62.73.69.121 (talk) 10:11, 15 March 2024 (UTC)