Tag: animism (Page 2 of 2)

Animism (1): Trees

May 10, 2020 / John D. / 0 Comments

Here’s a treat for anyone attracted by the animist aspects of Shinto. It’s part of a series of short videos called Wander by filmmaker Beau Kerouac to give quarantined people a virtual sense of parks and cultural sites, accompanied by meaningful narration.

In this particular five–minute video, Natascha McElhone recites a passage from Herman Hesse originally published in 1920 in a miscellany entitled Wandering: Notes and Sketches (words below the video). Accompanying the extract are scenes from London’s Kew Gardens, which bring together the visual and the verbal in a triumphant championing of the majesty of trees. Their spiritual and restorative power is here presented in a way that is uplifting and inspirational. If you can’t hug a tree, you can do so virtually through this creative collaboration, a perfect antidote to our socially distanced times.

The recognition of certain trees as embodying the life-force is indicated in Shinto by the designation of shinboku (sacred tree). As in other shamanic traditions, these are the trees selected by the kami as special. Some are extraordinary for their size, some for their age, some for their shape, and some because they have been struck by lightning (a sign of heavenly descent). The trees are honoured by having a shimenawa rice rope strung around them, as if to express in physical manner a desire to embrace the tree. As Herman Hesse says, they have much to teach us if we listen…

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one

thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts… Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

Chichibu Festival

December 8, 2019 / John D. / 0 Comments

Chichibu Shinto festival carries on centuries-old tradition

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS /December 5, 2019 Asahi Shimbun

An interesting description in the Asahi Shimbun of a traditional festival in Japan run by a priest who is a leading proponent of Shinto’s ‘green credentials’. It’s interesting because it touches on many of the key points in Shinto. Is it primarily animist or ancestral? Is it basically a religion of Japaneseness? Is it even a religion at all?

(It’s worth noting in reference to Sonoda Minoru’s quote below that prominent amongst the kami worshipped at his shrine is the very modern ancestral figure of Prince Chichibu (1902-53), second son of Emperor Taisho. It raises the question of what exactly worshippers are praying to.)

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Photo/Illutration — *Men stand on top of a lantern-covered float as fireworks light up the sky during the Chichibu Night Festival in Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture, on Dec. 3. (AP Photo)*

CHICHIBU, Saitama Prefecture–As fireworks light up the winter night, scores of men, women and teenagers crying “washoi, washoi” haul the last of six towering, lantern-covered floats up a small hill and into the town center, the culminating moment of a Shinto festival that has evolved from a harvest thanksgiving into a once-a-year meeting between two local gods.

The Chichibu Night Festival, which has roots stretching more than 1,000 years, is one of three famous Japanese festivals to feature huge floats, which can top 7 meters and weigh up to 15 tons. They are pulled through the streets on large wooden wheels by hundreds of residents in traditional festival garb –headbands, black leggings and thick cotton jackets emblazoned with Japanese characters — to drums, whistles and exuberant chants.

Shinto is Japan’s indigenous religion that goes back centuries. It is an animism that believes there are thousands of kami, or spirits, inhabiting nature, such as forests, rivers and mountains. People are encouraged to live in harmony with the spirits and can ask for their help. Ancestors also become kami and can also help the living.

This two-day festival has its roots in an older tradition of villagers giving thanks to the nearby mountain god for helping them during the planting and harvesting season, said Minoru Sonoda, the chief priest of the Chichibu Shrine and a former Kyoto University professor of religious studies. In 2016, it was designated a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage.

“It’s a time to celebrate the bounty of nature,” Sonoda said. During medieval times, the festival evolved into a celebration of an annual rendezvous between the nearby mountain god and the goddess of the town. The latter is carried in an ornate ark-like box by a group of white-clad men through streets to the central park, where it rests while the six floats slowly converge on the crowded square, each one’s arrival celebrated with a burst of fireworks.

But these days, many Japanese who flock to the festival, which draws about 200,000 every December, don’t know either of those stories and say the event holds no religious meaning for them — but they do want to maintain the tradition. They visit simply for a fun, cultural experience: walking the thronged streets, watching the procession and eating from the hundreds of food stalls selling grilled squid, yakitori chicken skewers and dozens of other snacks.

Some may squeeze in a quick visit to the Chichibu Shrine to offer a prayer, typically done by clapping ones’ hands twice to get the attention of the gods and then bowing with folded hands.

“I like the fireworks and the food. Purely to enjoy. I don’t really think about the religious aspects,” said Mitsuo Yamashita, a 69-year-old retiree who has come to the festival for the past 15 years. “Japanese aren’t very religious, and in other ways we’re all over the place religiously.”

Robot animism

January 17, 2019 / John D. / 2 Comments

Robot friends are on their way to a shop near you

An article by Joi Ito on wired.com brings up the topic of why Japanese appear to be more disposed to seeing robots in a positive manner than Westerners. It’s a subject Green Shinto has covered before, notably when Christal Whelan wrote from the viewpoint of mana (see here).

Like many others, Joi Ito calls for a rethinking of our attitudes, away from the human-centric thinking that sees the rest of the world, whether living or not, as simply something that is there for our exploitation. What we need is a Gaia-centric outlook.

Ancient religions taught that we are an integral part of the world around us. It’s something that Alan Watts always stressed. And it’s something that struck me the other day when listening to a Native American speaking of rocks as ‘our brothers and sisters’. What a leap in consciousness from our economic imperative which drives the brutal rape of the earth. Too bad for us. The earth will survive, but whether humans will is looking increasingly doubtful.

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Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not 
by Ito Joi (July 30, 2018, Wired)

AS A JAPANESE, I grew up watching anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion, which depicts a future in which machines and humans merge into cyborg ecstasy. Such programs caused many of us kids to become giddy with dreams of becoming bionic superheroes. Robots have always been part of the Japanese psyche—our hero, Astro Boy, was officially entered into the legal registry as a resident of the city of Niiza, just north of Tokyo, which, as any non-Japanese can tell you, is no easy feat. Not only do we Japanese have no fear of our new robot overlords, we’re kind of looking forward to them.

It’s not that Westerners haven’t had their fair share of friendly robots like R2-D2 and Rosie, the Jetsons’ robot maid. But compared to the Japanese, the Western world is warier of robots. I think the difference has something to do with our different religious contexts, as well as historical differences with respect to industrial-scale slavery.The Western concept of “humanity” is limited, and I think it’s time to seriously question whether we have the right to exploit the environment, animals, tools, or robots simply because we’re human and they are not.

Dolls are important in Japanese culture, and there are services for used dolls that have given years of service

SOMETIME IN THE late 1980s, I participated in a meeting organized by the Honda Foundation in which a Japanese professor—I can’t remember his name—made the case that the Japanese had more success integrating robots into society because of their country’s indigenous Shinto religion, which remains the official national religion of Japan. Followers of Shinto, unlike Judeo-Christian monotheists and the Greeks before them, do not believe that humans are particularly “special.” Instead, there are spirits in everything, rather like the Force in Star Wars. Nature doesn’t belong to us, we belong to Nature, and spirits live in everything, including rocks, tools, homes, and even empty spaces.

The West, the professor contended, has a problem with the idea of things having spirits and feels that anthropomorphism, the attribution of human-like attributes to things or animals, is childish, primitive, or even bad. He argued that the Luddites who smashed the automated looms that were eliminating their jobs in the 19th century were an example of that, and for contrast he showed an image of a Japanese robot in a factory wearing a cap, having a name and being treated like a colleague rather than a creepy enemy.

The general idea that Japanese accept robots far more easily than Westerners is fairly common these days. Osamu Tezuka, the Japanese cartoonist and the creator of Atom Boy noted the relationship between Buddhism and robots, saying, ”Japanese don’t make a distinction between man, the superior creature, and the world about him. Everything is fused together, and we accept robots easily along with the wide world about us, the insects, the rocks—it’s all one. We have none of the doubting attitude toward robots, as pseudohumans, that you find in the West. So here you find no resistance, simply quiet acceptance.” And while the Japanese did of course become agrarian and then industrial, Shinto and Buddhist influences have caused Japan to retain many of the rituals and sensibilities of a more pre-humanist period.

Protective amulets on sale at a shrine on the Fushimi Inari hill

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, describes the notion of “humanity” as something that evolved in our belief system as we morphed from hunter-gatherers to shepherds to farmers to capitalists. As early hunter-gatherers, nature did not belong to us—we were simply part of nature—and many indigenous people today still live with belief systems that reflect this point of view. Native Americans listen to and talk to the wind. Indigenous hunters often use elaborate rituals to communicate with their prey and the predators in the forest. Many hunter-gatherer cultures, for example, are deeply connected to the land but have no tradition of land ownership, which has been a source of misunderstandings and clashes with Western colonists that continues even today.

It wasn’t until humans began engaging in animal husbandry and farming that we began to have the notion that we own and have dominion over other things, over nature. The notion that anything—a rock, a sheep, a dog, a car, or a person—can belong to a human being or a corporation is a relatively new idea. In many ways, it’s at the core of an idea of “humanity” that makes humans a special protected class and, in the process, dehumanizes and oppresses anything that’s not human, living or non-living. Dehumanization and the notion of ownership and economics gave birth to slavery at scale.

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Lots of powerful people (in other words, mostly white men) in the West are publicly expressing their fears about the potential power of robots to rule humans, driving the public narrative. Yet many of the same people wringing their hands are also racing to build robots powerful enough to do that—and, of course, underwriting research to try to keep control of the machines they’re inventing, although this time it doesn’t involved Christianizing robots … yet.

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My view is that merely replacing oppressed humans with oppressed machines will not fix the fundamentally dysfunctional order that has evolved over centuries. As a Shintoist, I’m obviously biased, but I think that taking a look at “primitive” belief systems might be a good place to start. Thinking about the development and evolution of machine-based intelligence as an integrated “Extended Intelligence” rather than artificial intelligence that threatens humanity will also help.

As we make rules for robots and their rights, we will likely need to make policy before we know what their societal impact will be. Just as the Golden Rule teaches us to treat others the way we would like to be treated, abusing and “dehumanizing” robots prepares children and structures society to continue reinforcing the hierarchical class system that has been in place since the beginning of civilization.

It’s easy to see how the shepherds and farmers of yore could easily come up with the idea that humans were special, but I think AI and robots may help us begin to imagine that perhaps humans are just one instance of consciousness and that “humanity” is a bit overrated. Rather than just being human-centric, we must develop a respect for, and emotional and spiritual dialogue with, all things.

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For a related Green Shinto article which focusses on the Japanese use of dolls, please click here.

Jun Ito has been recognized for his work as an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and advocate of emergent democracy, privacy and internet freedom. He is coauthor with Jeff Howe of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future. As director of the MIT Media Lab and a professor of the practice of media arts and sciences, he is currently exploring how radical new approaches to science and technology can transform society in substantial and positive ways.

Zen and Shinto 8: Animism and ancestry

March 6, 2016 / John D. / 0 Comments

Rituals at Shinto shrines are for ancestral or animist spirits

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 central to its practice. Perhaps the influence of Shinto brought out the tendencies in the imported religion.

In an essay in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye entitled ‘The sound of the valley stream, the colors of the mountain’, Dogen, the founder of the Soto sect wrote as follows:

The sound of the valley stream, the colors of the valley stream, the sound of the mountain, and the colors of the mountain all reveal truth unstintingly. If you do not prize honor and gain, then the valley stream and the mountain will expound truth to you without stint.

“The sound of the stream, the colour of the mountain…”

Dogen advocated recalling nature internally and searching out ways to live according to the laws of nature. It all sounds very similar to the thinking of Shinto and cold water austerity (misgoi) as a way to immerse oneself in nature and so be true to one’s real self.

Along with the reverence of nature goes reverence for ancestors. In Shinto this begins on a personal level with maintenance of the memory of one’s parents and grandparents, and then extends to the larger anonymous mass of ancestors that goes to make up the whole inherited past of the nation.

Similarly in Zen there is a concern with maintaining the spirit-memory of one’s teachers, both one’s own teacher and the whole line of transmission back to the founder of the sect, and beyond that to the founder of Zen, and beyond that to the historical and other Buddhas. The pamphlet of the subtemple of Ryogen-in at Daitoku-ji states the following about the images of founders Rinzai and the subtemple founder Tokei:

We attend to them as if they are still here, and we hold fast to the first teaching of Zen Buddhism, ‘hoon shatoku’ (display gratitude for the kindness and virtue shown to you).

Attending to ancestral spirits as if they are still here – you could hardly get a better description of kami. Displaying gratitude for what you have received is a key Shinto virtue too. Here then is a strong overlap in the mindsets of Zen and Shinto – unseen spirits in a living universe.

The Zen garden abstracts the quintessence of nature as a means to bring the practitioner closer to enlightenment