Shinto Shrines: Sacred Space in the Japanese Forest
Shinto — Japan's indigenous spiritual tradition — has no founder, no sacred scripture in the Western sense, no systematic theology. What it has is kami : the divine presence that inhabits mountains, rivers, trees, rocks, and the forces of nature; and jinja : the shrine, the sacred enclosure where kami are invited to dwell in concentrated form and where the human relationship with the divine is enacted through ritual, purification, and offering. The shrine is not primarily a place for congregational worship in the way a church or mosque is. It is a place where the sacred is especially present, where the boundary between the ordinary and the divine is especially thin, and where the human being can enter into a quality of relationship with the natural world that ordinary life does not normally permit. The Ise Grand Shrine — rebuilt in exactly the same form every twenty years since at least the 7th century CE, the most sacred site in Japan, said to enshrine the sun goddess Amaterasu he...