Quotes About Shinto

Japanese "indifference to the Mystery of the Universe," my cousin's great-grandfather was wise enough to add, "is that which enables them to give more time and to spend more energy on the solution of the problems nearer at hand." · That same indifference binds them together, because there's no need for individual speculation or debate in a choir; Shinto, lacking arguments, cannot be refuted.

I will never forget the experience I had when I was in Japan, a place that never heard of the Fall and the Garden of Eden. One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified. There is a glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature, so that in some of those gardens you don't know where nature begins and art ends—this was a tremendous experience.

I found eternal peace in a Shinto shrine. I've been to Shinto shrines and God is everywhere. Christ is one of the ways! God is everywhere.

In Japan, the Shinto Sun goddess Amaterasu is especially prominent. She's considered the ancestress of the Japanese ruling family and is represented by the red circle on the Japanese flag.

Shinto is nature. Perhaps animism—and Shinto is the only formal animistic religion left—is the true religion. It has roots deep in all of us. One recognizes this. It is the only religion that can inspire the feeling children know when the wind or a rock is made god for a week or a day. Its essence is unknown and unknowable, yet this unknown does not exclude us because we too are unknown. This religion speaks to us, to something in us which is deep and permanent.

Allowing Islamic Sharia law into the constitutions of the U.S-created Islamic (!) Republic of Afghanistan and Republic of Iraq in 2004 and 2005 was as foolhardy as it would have been to write emperor-worship and Shinto militarism into Japan's 1946 constitution.

Go to any Shinto temple in Japan and you'll see it: a simple stand from which hang hundreds of wooden postcard-size plaques with a colorful image on one side and, on the other, densely scribbled Japanese characters in black felt-tip pen, pleas to the gods for help or succor.

Tokyo in the late 1960s seemed to be like one of the futures that science fiction presents. Here was the proto- super-technology of the future, electronically, robotically, blahblahblah, intercut with traditional Japanese cultural patterns, Shinto patterns.

Japan used to be an animistic society before Shinto imperialism was established. But most of us still have an animistic sense.

It was Buddhist and Shinto priests who were recruiting and training the suicide bombers, or Kamikaze (Divine Wind), fanatics, assuring them the emperor was a Golden Wheel-Turning Sacred King, one indeed of the four manifestations of the ideal Buddhist monarch and a Tathagata, or fully enlightened being, of the material world.

When we face the Abyss, we stare into a mirror. In Shinto temples, there is a mirror. The purpose of this mirror is to remind the Murid of the fact that to see REALITY, it is necessary to see both oneself and the illusory nature of the self.

The inside of a house or apartment after decluttering has much in common with a Shinto shrine... a place where there are no unnecessary things, and our thoughts become clear.

I argue that although the term Shinto scarcely appears, we can identify Shinto's institutional origins in the late seventh- and early eighth-century coordination of Kami worship, regarded as embodying indigenous tradition, by a government ministry following legal mandates.

the period from the Meiji Restoration of 1868 to the creation in 1900 of a branch of government solely dedicated to shrine administration. In 1868, Shinto finally achieved independence from Buddhism through a government-mandated separation of shrines from temples, and the Jingikan was briefly reinstated. It was downgraded and then abolished, however, as provisions were made for the emperor to begin performing rites based on ancient jingi in the new palace in the capital Tokyo.

read that according to Shinto, the ancient religion of Japan, the invisible space of a doorway is what both separates and unites two opposite worlds. It is still everyday tradition for a visitor approaching someone's home to call out, "Ojama shimasu." Used in the same way, we might say, "May I come in?" The literal translation is, "I am about to disturb you.

Shinto theology has no place for the dogma of "original sin." On the contrary, it believes in the innate goodness and God-like purity of the human soul, adoring it as the adytum5 from which divine oracles are proclaimed.

The idea that everyone should have a house of his own is based on an ancient custom of the Japanese race, Shinto superstition ordaining that every dwelling should be evacuated on the death of its chief occupant.

They were of overpowering fear, not the terror the sight of ghosts in a graveyard might arouse, but rather a fierce ancestral dread that could not be expressed in four or five words, something perhaps like encountering in the sacred grove of a Shinto shrine the white-clothed body of the god.