Download or read book Ancient Japanese Rituals written by Satow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2002. What is Shinto? is the key question asked by all who seek to understand Japan and the Japanese, answered in this volume by Sir Ernest Satow, the great British scholar and diplomat. Shinto is the unique and little-known religious beliefs that flourished in Japan before the introduction of Buddhism and Confucianism, but there are many versions - which is the pure form? Satow begins with a detailed study of core Shinto rituals as revealed in ancient texts, which embody the deepest and oldest traditions of Shinto belief in divinity, national destiny and, above all, Japan's special favored status as 'the country of the gods', beliefs that endure today behind the facade of Japan Inc. Shinto rites, incantations, sacred objects and symbols are described meticulously, with illustrations and translations by Karl Florenz. Satow then describes how the Ancient Way of Shinto survived centuries of foreign influence to be revived during the Meiji era, when it became the driving force behind the transformation of Japan into a world power. Unrivalled for its scholarship and elegance, this is a classic in Japanese studies.
Download or read book Ancient Japanese Rituals written by and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Norito written by Donald L. Philippi and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the only English translation of the prayers of Japan's indigenous religious tradition, Shinto. These prayers, norito, are works of religious literature that are basic to our understanding of Japanese religious history. Locating Donald Philippi as one of a small number of scholars who have developed a perceptive approach to the problem of "hermeneutical distance" in dealing with ancient or foreign texts, Joseph M. Kitagawa recalls Mircea Eliade's observation that "most of the time [our] encounters and comparisons with non-Western cultures have not made all the `strangeness' of these cultures evident. . . . We may say that the Western world has not yet, or not generally, met with authentic representatives of the `real' non-Western traditions." Composed in the stately ritual language of the ancient Japanese and presented as a "performing text," these prayers are, Kitagawa tells us, "one of the authentic foreign representatives in Eliade's sense." In the preface Kitagawa elucidates their significance, discusses Philippi's methods of encountering the "strangeness" of Japan, and comments astutely on aspects of the encounter of East and West.
Download or read book Ancient Japanese Rituals written by and published by . This book was released on 1888 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ancient Japanese Rituals written by Ernest Mason Satow and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ancient Japanese rituals written by Karl Florenz and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ancient Japanese Rituals written by Karl Adolf Florenz and published by . This book was released on 1898 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ancient Japanese Rituals and The Revival of Pure Shintau written by Ernest Mason Satow and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Modern Passings written by Andrew Bernstein and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-01-31 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What to do with the dead? In Imperial Japan, as elsewhere in the modernizing world, answering this perennial question meant relying on age-old solutions. Funerals, burials, and other mortuary rites had developed over the centuries with the aim of building continuity in the face of loss. As Japanese coped with the economic, political, and social changes that radically remade their lives in the decades after the Meiji Restoration (1868), they clung to local customs and Buddhist rituals such as sutra readings and incense offerings that for generations had given meaning to death. Yet death, as this highly original study shows, was not impervious to nationalism, capitalism, and the other isms that constituted and still constitute modernity. As Japan changed, so did its handling of the inevitable. Following an overview of the early development of funerary rituals in Japan,Andrew Bernstein demonstrates how diverse premodern practices from different regions and social strata were homogenized with those generated by middle-class city dwellers to create the form of funerary practice dominant today. He describes the controversy over cremation, explaining how and why it became the accepted manner of disposing of the dead. He also explores the conflict-filled process of remaking burial practices, which gave rise, in part, to the suburban "soul parks" now prevalent throughout Japan; the (largely failed) attempt by nativists to replace Buddhist death rites with Shinto ones; and the rise and fall of the funeral procession. In the process, Bernstein shows how today’s "traditional" funeral is in fact an early twentieth-century invention and traces the social and political factors that led to this development. These include a government wanting to separate itself from religion even while propagating State Shinto, the appearance of a new middle class, and new forms of transportation. As these and other developments created new contexts for old rituals, Japanese faced the problem of how to fit them all together. What to do with the dead? is thus a question tied to a still broader one that haunts all societies experiencing rapid change: What to do with the past? Modern Passings is an impressive and far-reaching exploration of Japan’s efforts to solve this puzzle, one that is at the heart of the modern experience.
Download or read book The Holy Kojiki Including the Yengishiki written by and published by Cosimo, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-07-01 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Also known as the "Records of Ancient Matters," this is the "official" story of the Japanese peoples, first written down in the 8th century and documenting the creation of the world, the gods, and Japan. The oldest known document in the Japanese language, this is a vital text of the Shinto religion, a beautiful evocation of the mythology and traditions of ancient Japan.This edition also includes the Yengishiki, a compilation of Shinto rituals, including "The Harvest Ritual," "The Ritual for the Wind-Gods," "The Ritual for EvilSpirits," and others.
Download or read book Weaving and Binding written by Michael Como and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2009-09-02 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the most exciting developments in the study of Japanese religion over the past two decades has been the discovery of tens of thousands of ritual vessels, implements, and scapegoat dolls (hitogata) from the Nara (710-784) and early Heian (794-1185) periods. Because inscriptions on many of the items are clearly derived from Chinese rites of spirit pacification, it is now evident that previous scholarship has mischaracterized the role of Buddhism in early Japanese religion. Weaving and Binding makes a compelling argument that both the Japanese royal system and the Japanese Buddhist tradition owe much to continental rituals centered on the manipulation of yin and yang, animal sacrifice, and spirit quelling. Building on these recent archaeological discoveries, Michael Como charts an epochal transformation in the religious culture of the Japanese islands, tracing the transmission and development of fundamental paradigms of religious practice to immigrant lineages and deities from the Korean peninsula. In addition to archaeological materials, Como makes extensive use of a wide range of textual sources from across Asia, including court chronicles, poetry collections, gazetteers, temple records, and divinatory texts. As he investigates the influence of myths, legends, and rites of the ancient Chinese festival calendar on religious practice across the Japanese islands, Como shows how the ability of immigrant lineages to propitiate hostile deities led to the creation of elaborate networks of temple-shrine complexes that shaped later sectarian Shinto as well as popular understandings of the relationship between the buddhas and the gods of Japan. For much of the book, this process is examined through rites and legends from the Chinese calendar that were related to weaving, sericulture, and medicine—technologies that to a large degree were controlled by lineages with roots in the Korean peninsula and that claimed female deities and weaving maidens as founding ancestors. Como’s examination of a series of ancient Japanese legends of female immortals, weaving maidens, and shamanesses reveals that female deities played a key role in the moving of technologies and ritual practices from peripheral regions in Kyushu and elsewhere into central Japan and the heart of the imperial cult. As a result, some of the most important building blocks of the purportedly native Shinto tradition were to a remarkable degree shaped by the ancestral cults of immigrant lineages and popular Korean and Chinese religious practices. This is a provocative and innovative work that upsets the standard interpretation of early historical religion in Japan, revealing a complex picture of continental cultic practice both at court and in the countryside.
Download or read book Ceremony and Ritual in Japan written by D. P. Martinez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is one of the most urbanised and industrialised countries in the world. Yet the Japanese continue to practise a variety of religious rituals and ceremonies despite the high-tech, highly regimented nature of Japanese society. Ceremony and Ritual in Japan focuses on the traditional and religious aspects of Japanese society from an anthropological perspective, presenting new material and making cross-cultural comparisons. The chapters in this collection cover topics as diverse as funerals and mourning, sweeping, women's roles in ritual, the division of ceremonial foods into bitter and sweet, the history of a shrine, the playing of games, the exchange of towels and the relationship between ceremony and the workplace. The book provides an overview of the meaning of tradition, and looks at the way in which new ceremonies have sprung up in changing circumstances, while old ones have been preserved, or have developed new meanings.
Download or read book Religion Power and the Rise of Shinto in Early Modern Japan written by Stefan Köck and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sheds new light on the relationship between religion and state in early modern Japan, and demonstrates the growing awareness of Shinto in both the political and the intellectual elite of Tokugawa Japan, even though Buddhism remained the privileged means of stately religious control. The first part analyses how the Tokugawa government aimed to control the populace via Buddhism and at the same time submitted Buddhism to the sacralization of the Tokugawa dynasty. The second part focuses on the religious protests throughout the entire period, with chapters on the suppression of Christians, heterodox Buddhist sects, and unwanted folk practitioners. The third part tackles the question of why early Tokugawa Confucianism was particularly interested in “Shinto” as an alternative to Buddhism and what “Shinto” actually meant from a Confucian stance. The final part of the book explores attempts to curtail the institutional power of Buddhism by reforming Shinto shrines, an important step in the so called “Shintoization of shrines” including the development of a self-contained Shinto clergy.
Download or read book The Dark Side of Japan written by Antony Cummins and published by . This book was released on 2017-08-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating collection of folktales, ritual black magic, protection spells, monsters and other dark interpretations of life and death from Japanese folklore.
Download or read book Ancient Japanese Rituals i e the Engishiki Norito written by and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine written by John K. Nelson and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What we today call Shinto has been at the heart of Japanese culture for almost as long as there has been a political entity distinguishing itself as Japan. A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine describes the ritual cycle at Suwa Shrine, Nagasaki’s major Shinto shrine. Conversations with priests, other shrine personnel, and people attending shrine functions supplement John K. Nelson’s observations of over fifty shrine rituals and festivals. He elicits their views on the meaning and personal relevance of the religious events and the place of Shinto and Suwa Shrine in Japanese society, culture, and politics. Nelson focuses on the very human side of an ancient institution and provides a detailed look at beliefs and practices that, although grounded in natural cycles, are nonetheless meaningful in late-twentieth-century Japanese society. Nelson explains the history of Suwa Shrine, basic Shinto concepts, and the Shinto worldview, including a discussion of the Kami, supernatural forces that pervade the universe. He explores the meaning of ritual in Japanese culture and society and examines the symbols, gestures, dances, and meanings of a typical shrine ceremony. He then describes the cycle of activities at the shrine during a calendar year: the seasonal rituals and festivals and the petitionary, propitiary, and rite-of-passage ceremonies performed for individuals and specific groups. Among them are the Dolls’ Day festival, in which young women participate in a procession and worship service wearing Heian period costumes; the autumn Okunchi festival, which attracts participants from all over Japan and even brings emigrants home for a visit; the ritual invoking the blessing of the Kami for young children; and the ritual sanctifying the earth before a building is constructed. The author also describes the many roles women play in Shinto and includes an interview with a female priest. Shinto has always been attentive to the protection of communities from unpredictable human and divine forces and has imbued its ritual practices with techniques and strategies to aid human life. By observing the Nagasaki shrine’s traditions and rituals, the people who make it work, and their interactions with the community at large, the author shows that cosmologies from the past are still very much a part of the cultural codes utilized by the nation and its people to meet the challenges of today.
