United States or Barbados ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Little, however, is said about misdemeanours of a minor sort until the time of the great local Shinto festival, the annual festival of the tutelar god. It is then that the community gives its warnings or inflicts its penalties: this at least in the case of conduct offensive to local ethics.
When one compares the utterances which West and East have given to their dreams, their aspirations, their sensations, a Gothic cathedral with a Shinto temple, an opera by Verdi or a trilogy by Wagner with a performance of geisha, a European epic with a Japanese poem, how incalculable the difference in emotional volume, in imaginative power, in artistic synthesis!
Strictly speaking, all these utensils, except the flower-vases, should be made of unglazed red earthenware, such as we find described in the early chapters of the Kojiki: and still at Shinto festivals in Izumo, when sake is drunk in honour of the gods, it is drunk out of cups of red baked unglazed clay shaped like shallow round dishes.
In every home on these days sake is poured as an offering into the o-mikidokkuri, and in the vases of the kamidana are placed sprays of the holy sakaki, or sprigs of pine, or fresh flowers. But only the ancient gods of Shinto are worshipped before the kamidana.
Shinto the students all sincerely are, or very nearly all; yet not as fervent worshippers of certain Kami, but as rigid observers of what the higher Shinto signifies loyalty, filial piety, obedience to parents, teachers, and superiors, and respect to ancestors. For Shinto means more than faith.
At the present time a faint struggle is being carried on by the Buddhist priesthood against rivals in comparison with whom Shinto is insignificant: we mean the two great streams of European thought Christianity and physical science. A few a very few men trained in European methods fight for the Buddhist cause.
The hamlet of Rakuzan, known only for its bright yellow pottery and its little Shinto temple, drowses at the foot of a wooded hill about one ri from Matsue, beyond a wilderness of rice-fields. And the deity of Rakuzan-jinja is Naomasa, grandson of Iyeyasu, and father of the Daimyo of Matsue.
But offerings were still made, on special occasions, at the graves; and the three Shinto forms of the cult, together with later forms of Buddhist introduction, continued to exist; and they rule the life of the nation to-day. It was the cult of the supreme ruler that first gave to the people a written account of traditional beliefs.
In Shinto, as in old Greek belief, to die was to enter into the possession of superhuman power, to become capable of conferring benefit or of inflicting misfortune by supernatural means .... But yesterday, such or such a man was a common toiler, a person of no importance; to-day, being dead, he becomes a divine power, and his children pray to him for the prosperity of their undertakings.
WHEN the Taira sept was shattered finally at Dan-no-ura, a baby grandson of Kiyomori was carried by its mother to the hamlet of Tsuda, in Omi province. Subsequently this child, Chikazane, was adopted by a Shinto official of Oda, in Echizen, and thus acquired the name of Oda. From that time the fortunes of the family became brighter.
Word Of The Day