It’s often said that while Shinto is concerned with affairs of this world, Buddhism looks to salvation in the next. Hence the emphasis in Shinto on rites of passage, such as birth, 7-5-3, weddings, yakudoshi ages of transition, etc. Buddhism … Read the rest
Category: Zen (Page 3 of 4)
Look at the picture above. Is it a Zen garden with raked sand and rocks arranged in an enigmatic pattern to represent islands in an ocean of nothingness? Or is it a Shinto circle of ‘iwakura’ (sacred rocks), such as … Read the rest
Brian Victoria, author of Zen at War, recently gave a talk in Kyoto about Zen terrorism in the 1930s. Brian is a Soto Zen priest, and his book has been hugely influential – as well as controversial. The … Read the rest
Manpuku-ji is possibly the most striking Zen temple in Japan, because it looks so Chinese. The architecture is different, the clothing different, the statues radically different from the Japanese norm. Established in 1661 by a Chinese immigrant named Ingen, it’s … Read the rest
This post follows up the previous post on mirrors in Zen and Shinto. It consists of an article adapted from the latest issue of Sacred Hoop (no. 91), a magazine about shamanism. The article is useful in placing the context … Read the rest
Both Shinto and Buddhism in Japan use mirrors as spiritual symbols, and Green Shinto has covered their use in several previous posts (here and here or here or here for instance).
The essential idea, common to both religions, is … Read the rest
Green Shinto has written before of how Shinto stands on the twin pillars of animism and ancestor worship, and how these two different strands are interlocked. (See here for instance.) Zen too cultivates both aspects, though they are not so … Read the rest