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Why Does Shinto Have So Few Books of Belief/Practice

Samantha Rinne

Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
In religion there are like three categories of holy book:
  1. Myth
  2. Beliefs
  3. Practice
The Bible/Torah is all three. It tells you what to do/what not to do (Practice), many of the letters have stuff on the beliefs (Beliefs), and there are myths which help with the other two (Myth).

Taoism strangely lacks Myth entirely, preferring to deal in the latter two. There are fables in the Chuang Tzu, but they are directly listed as parables, not actual myth.

Then you have Shintoism, which aside from the idea of purity and spirits in everything, it seems to be very hard to get a grasp of what they actually believe, and there don't appear to be any commandments either. It seems very strange in terms of getting a grasp of "this is who we are as Shintos."
 

Sundance

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
As someone who is very deeply interested, perhaps even invested in Shinto, I can answer your question, @Samantha Rinne.

Shinto is not so much concerned with having the correct beliefs, rather the focus is on proper performance of ritual. It isn't a religion that is centered around collecting wisdom through the study of holy books, rather the individual's and (mostly Japanese) community’s relationship to spirits called ‘kami’. There are texts in Shinto (the Kojiki, the Nihon Shoki), however they deal (again) with the origins of rituals, I think certain festivals, the creation of the Japanese islands, and other aspects of mythology.

As for commandments or morality, there is no absolute in Shinto. It depends on either the situation that an individual is faced with or the general flow of Japanese culture.

Practices are generally very simple in Shinto, involving (to my knowledge) home worship (involving the use of a kamidana), shrine worship, and the celebration of Japanese festivals.

In terms of a ‘Shinto identity’ as it were, the word ‘Shinto’ itself originates with the Chinese words shen and dao meaning “the way of shen”. Shen is a word meaning “God, gods, spirit, or spirits”. Before that, the indigenous ways of the Japanese did not possess a distinct name. It was only given its name to distinguish it from the foreign religion known as Buddhism, with which it was beginning to become very much intertwined. So much to the point where, nowadays, the two can't be differentiated. Interesting to note, most Japanese people themselves do not affiliate religiously, rather they practice the mixture of the two religions.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
Beliefs are not nearly so important to some religions as people who are most familiar with the belief-intoxicated Abrahamic religions so often feel beliefs should be. One of the things I learned from my second wife, who was Japanese, was not to expect to gain an understanding of Shinto from asking her what she believed.
 

The Emperor of Mankind

Currently the galaxy's spookiest paraplegic
In religion there are like three categories of holy book:
  1. Myth
  2. Beliefs
  3. Practice
The Bible/Torah is all three. It tells you what to do/what not to do (Practice), many of the letters have stuff on the beliefs (Beliefs), and there are myths which help with the other two (Myth).

Not all religions are orthodoxic. Shinto is orthopraxic; what you do matters more than what you believe. Considering the sheer diversity of ways that Shinto is practised, I should think collating them into a scriptural canon would be quite impossible.


Taoism strangely lacks Myth entirely, preferring to deal in the latter two. There are fables in the Chuang Tzu, but they are directly listed as parables, not actual myth.

Daoism is most often practised as a philosophy so 'myths' i.e. stories of the gods aren't all that important except maybe as allegories. Where religious Daoism exists, there are stories about the gods & sages. They're just not well known because religious Daoism doesn't have much of a following outside of China.


Then you have Shintoism, which aside from the idea of purity and spirits in everything, it seems to be very hard to get a grasp of what they actually believe, and there don't appear to be any commandments either. It seems very strange in terms of getting a grasp of "this is who we are as Shintos."

"Who we are as Shintoists" varies from area to area. Different parts of Japan view different kami with different levels of importance i.e. the kami venerated at one temple or in one village might not be worshipped in the next temple or town. It seems alien to people who have been brought up with a religious orthodoxy enforcing a standard in belief & practice which is understandable.
 
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beenherebeforeagain

Rogue Animist
Premium Member
As I understand it, the origins of Shinto and Taoism lie in the indigenous folk religions of Japan and China, respectively, and originally, as others have mentioned, were about practice for very pragmatic reasons--maintaining good relations with the other-than-human persons in the area, who could intercede for or against the human community. Ancestor veneration was and often still is very important to practitioners. I think that's why both of these "religions" appeal to me, moreso than the Abrahamic faiths.
 

Samantha Rinne

Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
I sort of get that it's supposed to be open-ended, yeah. But it always felt like a book was missing, like the set up of torii or the binding of trees, or the use of paper for that shide staff thing. A sort of "where did this come from" issue.

I couldn't seem to find any of their core books that told the proper rituals, so to an outsider trying to learn more, it's very daunting.

From what I read of it, there were the myths about Izanami and Izanagi, the birth of deities/spirits, many of which were based on islands of Japan from what I could gather. Then there were books about the royal bloodline. But not much about the other stuff.

Not all religions are orthodoxic. Shinto is orthopraxic; what you do matters more than what you believe. Considering the sheer diversity of ways that Shinto is practised, I should think collating them into a scriptural canon would make it quite impossible.

Kinda my point. As a non-orthodoxic religion, I don't expect there to be a beliefs section or moral code. That's cool. What doesn't make sense to me is that there is no . We have Nihon-gi and Kojiki, both of which are myth books. There's no book of rituals and practices as part of the canon. Either it's mixed in with other religions or simply missing.

Daoism is most often practised as a philosophy so 'myths' i.e. stories of the gods aren't all that important except maybe as allegories. Where religious Daoism exists, there are stories about the gods & sages. They're just not well known because religious Daoism doesn't have much of a following outside of China.

From what I understand Taoism has eight immortals. But they're pretty missing, yeah. Having studied other non-revealed religions, not having myths is cool, and morality is not a big issue. But lacking practices, it's hard to get a sense of the religion. Probably my OCD talking. I like rituals.
 

GoodbyeDave

Well-Known Member
We're talking here about traditional, primal, or pagan religion: what everyone had until people started inventing their own religions. The invented religions need instruction books because when they were created, the founders had to tell people what they were!

In Japan, you would learn how to practice Shinto from your parents, just as a Hindu learns in India. It does make it very difficult for the rest of us, though.

My introduction was "Shinto" by Sokyo Ono, which does have some practical information. The following website is interesting if a little academic
國學院デジタルミュージアム
 

Buddha Dharma

Dharma Practitioner
Shinto is virtually inseparable from Japanese identity OP. It's a ancestral religion that has continued as such up until the present day. I doubt many modern westerners could even appreciate an ancestral path like Shinto fully. Before the modern it would have been very odd to speak of Shinto and being Japanese as fundamentally divided. It was so inseparable in most of the society, that even Buddhists didn't give it up.

Maybe people that practice Shinto in the traditional context feel it could lose it's meaning and importance if it were easily accessible.

That being said. You can find the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki translated online easily enough.
 

GoodbyeDave

Well-Known Member
I've just got
Shinto norito : a book of prayers / Ann Llewellyn Evans.
It's a collection of some of the formal prayers used at the Tsubaki Shrine, where Ann Evans trained as a Shinto priestess.

Professor Sokyo Ono wrote that Shinto was "inextricably interwoven with the fabric of Japanese customs" and "not suitable for dissemination abroad." The existence of converts like Ann Evans shows he was unduly pesimistic. But he added that anyone who expresses "gratitude to the spirits of the land and of nature, to their ancestors, to the benefactors of society" understood the spirit of Shinto. Certainly I find it the closest of living primal religions to my own path. But then a Hellenist is probably not a "modern westerner"!
 
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