My holiday reading this summer includes a Japanese novel by Hikaru Okuizumi that won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize after it came out in 1993. The Stones Cry Out is the English translation by James N. Westerhoven, published in 1999 by … Read the rest
Category: Rocks (Page 3 of 6)
The awesomeness of rocks
Green Shinto has written several times of the spiritual significance of rocks in Shinto (see the righthand column for previous postings). It’s a much overlooked subject. Why? Partly because it is associated with the kind of … Read the rest
In my investigations into Zen this morning, I had something of an epiphany – or perhaps I should say, an awakening. Both Zen and Shinto share roots in Daoism (Taoism). Zen it has been said is the result of Indian … Read the rest
Nice paragraph today by Stephen Mansfield writing about Kurashiki near Okayama… it draws attention to one of the aspects of Shinto that is little written about and yet is central to the practice as a whole. What’s interesting about … Read the rest
In 1955 the head of Yamakage Shinto, Yamakage Motohisa, met with a Shinto researcher called Jean Herbert. Together the pair visited something like 1000 shrines, and the research was eventually used in Herbert’s massive book on Shinto; at the fountain-head … Read the rest
Japanese have exquisite manners, and respect is extended not just to people but to objects. Swords for example are particularly revered, for they are thought to contain spirits, but there are many other occasions where objects are treated with a … Read the rest
Westerners are often drawn to the animist side of Shinto, and for those of us who look to the past before the religion was made into an emperor-centred ideology, one of the salient characteristics of early Japan is rock … Read the rest