United States or Kosovo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The most ambitious achievement was a miniature garden in a wooden box a wonderful garden where grasses stood for tall bamboo, and a saucer of water, surrounded by moss and pebbles, made a shining lake across which a bridge led through a torii to a diminutive shrine above.
I will re-roof it with feathers of little birds; and the ridge of the roof I will cover with thigh-feathers of falcons. "This torii and these lanterns of stone are ugly: I will erect a torii of gold; and I will make a thousand lamps of gold and a thousand of silver, and every evening I will light them. "In so large a garden as this there should be trees.
You enter, and find the latter seated on the floor, and if the service is not going on at the moment they are smoking and chatting together, and the children are crawling about in the crowd. When the service is over the worshippers disperse to find a cool spot in the temple grounds to eat their simple meal. In front of the temple stands a wooden arch, called a torii.
I put on my war paint, and the chief priest having been written from Tokyo of our impending arrival, an hour had been set. At the outermost gate, the Torii, the ceremony of purification, took place. We had water poured out on our hands out of a little ceremonial cup and basin and then the priest sprinkled salt on us; nobody else had this but us.
The shape of these roots, rather than any tradition, would seem to have made the tree sacred in popular belief: it is the object of a special cult; and a little torii has been erected before it, bearing a votive annunciation of the most artless and curious kind. I cannot venture to offer a translation of it though for the anthropologist and folk-lorist it certainly possesses peculiar interest.
This last curious fact reminded me of the little torii I had seen erected before the images of Jizo in the Cave of the Children's Ghosts. Shinto, in these remote districts of the west, now appropriates the popular divinities of Buddhism, just as of old Buddhism used to absorb the divinities of Shinto in other parts of Japan.
There is shell-work jewellery indescribable, things that Japanese girls love, enchantments in mother-of-pearl, hair-pins carven in a hundred forms, brooches, necklaces. And there are photographs of Enoshima. This curious street ends at another torii, a wooden torii, with a steeper flight of stone steps ascending to it.
The village terminates abruptly at the top of the hill, where there is another grand granite torii a structure so ponderous that it is almost as difficult to imagine how it was ever brought up the hill as to understand the methods of the builders of Stonehenge.
The ancient Imari, Satsuma, and the old bits of pottery that have been kept in the older families for centuries are, to my mind, the most wonderful works of art of the kind in the world; they look with pride on the articles of virtu as almost sacred. One of the many objects to attract the eyes of one traveling in Japan is the "Torii" or sacred gateway.
Sometimes the shimenawa is made of bronze, when the torii itself is of bronze; but according to tradition it should be made of straw, and most commonly is.
Word Of The Day