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Shintoism

#1
Magical Realist Offline
"Shinto ("the way of the gods") is the indigenous faith of the Japanese people and as old as Japan itself. It remains Japan's major religion alongside Buddhism.

Introduction

Shinto does not have a founder nor does it have sacred scriptures like the sutras or the Bible. Propaganda and preaching are not common either, because Shinto is deeply rooted in the Japanese people and traditions.

"Shinto gods" are called kami. They are sacred spirits which take the form of things and concepts important to life, such as wind, rain, mountains, trees, rivers and fertility. Humans become kami after they die and are revered by their families as ancestral kami. The kami of extraordinary people are even enshrined at some shrines. The Sun Goddess Amaterasu is considered Shinto's most important kami.


In contrast to many monotheistic religions, there are no absolutes in Shinto. There is no absolute right and wrong, and nobody is perfect. Shinto is an optimistic faith, as humans are thought to be fundamentally good, and evil is believed to be caused by evil spirits. Consequently, the purpose of most Shinto rituals is to keep away evil spirits by purification, prayers and offerings to the kami.

Shinto shrines are the places of worship and the homes of kami. Most shrines celebrate festivals (matsuri) regularly in order to show the kami the outside world. Shinto priests perform Shinto rituals and often live on the shrine grounds. Men and women can become priests, and they are allowed to marry and have children. Priests are aided by younger women (miko) during rituals and shrine tasks. Miko wear white kimono, must be unmarried, and are often the priests' daughters.

Important features of Shinto art are shrine architecture and the cultivation and preservation of ancient art forms such as Noh theater, calligraphy and court music (gagaku), a dance music that originated in the courts of Tang China (618-907).


Shinto History

The introduction of Buddhism in the 6th century was followed by a few initial conflicts, however, the two religions were soon able to co-exist and even complement each other by considering kami to be manifestations of Buddha.

In the Meiji Period, Shinto was made Japan's state religion. Shinto priests became state officials, important shrines received governmental funding, Japan's creation myths were used to foster a national identity with the Emperor at its center, and efforts were made to separate and emancipate Shinto from Buddhism.

After World War II, Shinto and the state were separated.


Shinto Today

People seek support from Shinto by praying at a home altar or by visiting shrines. A whole range of talismans are available at shrines for traffic safety, good health, success in business, safe childbirth, good exam performance and more.

Many wedding ceremonies are held in Shinto style. Death, however, is considered a source of impurity and is left to Buddhism to deal with. Consequently, there are virtually no Shinto cemeteries, and most funerals are held in Buddhist style."

https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2056.html...the%20kami.
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#2
C C Offline
(Oct 25, 2020 07:10 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] Many wedding ceremonies are held in Shinto style. Death, however, is considered a source of impurity and is left to Buddhism to deal with. Consequently, there are virtually no Shinto cemeteries, and most funerals are held in Buddhist style."

https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2056.html...the%20kami.


Japanese culture has often struck me as eclectic. Borrowing whatever struck its fancy from China and other neighboring countries back in early days, and doing similar later with the Western world. Without necessarily much concern about those jumbled items lacking an overall coherence. (Unless an integrating system was formulated later long after the initial, feral circumstance.) 

So I guess little surprise it would be similar with religion: ". . . further research showed that this strange result [measuring religious affiliation] was caused by respondents happily checking the boxes for numerous religions without seeing any contradiction. After all, as the old saying goes a Japanese person is born to Shinto rites, married with Christian rites, and buried with Buddhist ones." --Japan: The Most Religious Atheist Country
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Shintō Mortuary Rites in Contemporary Japan
https://www.persee.fr/doc/asie_0766-1177...m_9_1_1124

EXCERPTS: . . . Shinto funerals embody a central tension: a profound aversion to the impurity of death juxtaposed with the necessity of close contact with the corpse. As Robert J. Smith writes, “At the most fundamental level, a Shinto funeral is a contradiction in terms. Shinto abhors pollution in any form — that being virtually its only tenet”.

One way of resolving the contradiction is to redefine impurity. When I asked two priests at Kamigamo Shrine how they could perform funerals, given the Shinto aversion to impurity, they responded by saying that the spirit of the dead is not polluted. In the funeral, they are dealing with the spirit, not the body, of the deceased. As it happens, these priests offered the same explanation Meiji reformers produced to justify the Shinto-style funeral for the emperor: the Emperor’s tamashii is pure and is separate from his body.

According to the priests, Kamigamo Shrine performs about ten funerals a year. This is not a large number for one of the nation’s major shrines. [...] Although the priests claim that pollution does not complicate a Shinto funeral, most Japanese people instinctively feel that death and Shinto should be kept apart.

Not all Shinto priests agree with their Kamigamo colleagues. A priest at a small shrine in suburban Osaka refuses to perform Shinto funerals [...] This priest, well into his eighties, said that people ask him to perform a Shinto funeral three or four times a year, but he always refuses.

[...] When all is said and done, we must see that the polluting power of the corpse is still powerfully felt in Japan. The fact that Shinto funerals are never held within a shrine is testament enough ... A quick look at attitudes toward crematoriums and hearses demonstrates that Japanese people continue to shun the corpse.

[...] It is significant that even among college students, who might be expected to express “modern” views (whether or not they actually subscribe to them), there is a strong desire to avoid close contact with death and its processes. Another indication of the expulsion of the corpse from society is the fact that neighborhoods actually do mount organized protest campaigns against the construction of crematoriums or even funeral halls.

The Japanese hearse is a gorgeous vehicle.[...] Beautiful or not, hearses are not welcome in everyday life. ... the magical power of words: avoidance of the taboo word “hearse” offers protection against the negative force of death.

[...] Wouldn’t Americans or Europeans also oppose a crematorium in their neighborhood? Yes. I have no doubt that the corpse is, if anything, even more abhorrent in the West. But Western notions of death pollution are a topic for another paper.
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Japan: The Most Religious Atheist Country
https://blog.gaijinpot.com/japan-religio...t-country/

EXCERPT: As an author of numerous books on the subject, Professor Reader believes that asking whether Japan is atheist or not is missing the point. “Surveys usually ask about religious belief, but that can be interpreted by ordinary people as asking if they have faith in a ‘specific religious organization’. Most would answer no,” He explains, “It does not mean they are ‘atheist’ in terms of denying existence of a god. These studies indicate a ‘not quite sure’ attitude as a rule.”

Certainly one of the big problems with saying that the Japanese are ‘atheist’ is that atheism requires there to be a ‘god’ to not believe in. Instead Japanese religions are somewhat unclear on the matter. After all, are the kami, spirits and ancestral entities that make up the Japanese indigenous beliefs really equivalent to the god of the Abrahamic religions?
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#3
Syne Offline
The Japanese generally have no problem mixing religious beliefs, even Western and Eastern ones together. They just don't see them as conflicting. Like their belief in "saving face", where they can present very different faces in different company or circumstances, they seem to believe different religions can suit different aspects of life.
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#4
Magical Realist Offline

[Image: 6690.jpg.avif?v=1599771602]
[Image: 6690.jpg.avif?v=1599771602]



"The Fushimi Inari Shrine near Kyoto (Heiankyo) is the largest and most important shrine dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice and prosperity. It is famous for the large number of red gates (torii) at the site. The shrine was founded in 711 CE by the Hata clan and moved from its original location on Mt. Inari to its present location near Kyoto in the 9th century CE."---
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#5
Yazata Online
I love Shinto architecture. The Chinese influence is obvious but there's a tranquility to it and a harmony with its surroundings that I identify as quintessentially Japanese. (Think Zen, but without the austere simplicity)

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=shinto+archite...&ia=images

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinto_architecture

And I like the Shinto idea of Kami. These can be personified gods, but they can also be unnamed nature spirits or even anything sensed as awesome or transcendent in any way. A mountaintop can be a kami and Japanese mountaintops are holy places in Japan. (My American parents were married in Japan and honeymooned by climbing Mt. Fuji and staying at the inns along the pilgrim's route.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kami

The idea seems to be analogous in some ways with the idea of the sublime in Western aesthetics and philosophy. It occupies a place where psychology, art, religion and magic all seem to come together. Even psychedelic experience. I like it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy)

In Japan, even though Shinto is no longer formally associated with the state, it's still very much associated with the community. More so than Buddhism, which I think that many Japanese think of as something for spiritual athletes, while Shinto is the familiar village festivals and a much easier sort of intuitive spirituality. I think that Shinto is more prevalent in Japan than any other religion, though modernization and urbanization are cutting into its way of seeing things.
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#6
Magical Realist Offline
I find Shintoism fascinating. It encapsulates a kind of nature spirituality and aesthetic of the pure and natural much as China's Taoism does. No sin, no guilt, just a peaceful and benevolent coexistence with the kami and a reverence and resignation to the essences of nature. It might even be the one religion that conforms most to my belief in a magical reality of spirits and parallel worlds. Quoting Thales: "Everything is filled with gods."
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#7
Yazata Online
(Oct 26, 2020 03:33 AM)C C Wrote: After all, as the old saying goes a Japanese person is born to Shinto rites, married with Christian rites, and buried with Buddhist ones.[/color]" --Japan: The Most Religious Atheist Country

I believe that many young Japanese women want Christian-style weddings, not because they believe in Christ or anything like that, but because they like the wedding ceremony, the procession, the white wedding dress and all that.

I should add that when my parents married in Japan, they weren't looking for a Japanese religious ceremony. They were both working (for the US government) in Japan and met each other there. They were married in atheist-approved style by a justice of the peace in Yokohama. I still have their old Japanese marriage certificate in my safety deposit box, I'm sentimental about it. They did go a bit native for their honeymoon though.
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#8
C C Offline
(Oct 27, 2020 08:59 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: I find Shintoism fascinating. It encapsulates a kind of nature spirituality and aesthetic of the pure and natural much as China's Taoism does. No sin, no guilt, just a peaceful and benevolent coexistence with the kami and a reverence and resignation to the essences of nature. It might even be the one religion that conforms most to my belief in a magical reality of spirits and parallel worlds. Quoting Thales: "Everything is filled with gods."


Who knows what physical representations actually signify in terms of their total, potentially hidden attributes. For instance, the abstract symbol "five" only retains (designates) the quantitative property which sets of same-count fingers, marbles, spoons, trees, cars, dogs, apples, etc have in common. The varying richness of their other characteristics is stripped away.

Humans and their activity can be reduced to abstract atoms, relationships, regulating principles and statistical probabilities in social physics and econophysics. The details, contingencies and complexities of everyday life and biological nature are stripped away as unnecessary (for accomplishing the goals of those fields).

Our environmental experiences and the outer appearances of that material body "stuff" could also be what amounts to another level's version of nonfigurative representation. Where likewise tons of transensory details have been stripped away. If any kind of "directional orientation" is applicable at all, then what existentially lurks inside of or behind a particle might be equivalent to the rising and falling of a dot or bar on a dynamic computer screen graph which represents measurement of the state of financial transactions occurring in the entire country of India.

If a Japanese person is having a dream about the kami, then the manifestation and the understanding of the events of that narrow, simulated world literally are supervening on or correlating to some of the neural tissue of that individual's brain. Electrochemical processes which do not remotely resemble what is transpiring with that dream domain. It's not even speculation that either a superficial or richer reality can nest in, above, beside, under, or behind another reality or mere dynamic configurations that have little do themselves with the concept of a vaster creative realm.
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