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Introduction for Beginners
What is Shintō Philosophy?
The Most Endemic of Japan’s Endemic Thoughts
Everyone has heard of Shintō. You know the bright red torii (鳥居) which separate the secular from the sacred. You have probably visited famous tourist sites such as Ise Shrine, Itsukushima, or Fushimi Inari — the place in the picture above with a lot of torii.
What you probably ignore is that, just as there is a whole corpus of Christian philosophy behind Notre-Dame de Paris, there is an important philosophical tradition behind these famous Japanese shrines and sanctuaries.
Endemic thought in Japan is of two kinds. It encompasses:
- A corpus of ideas that were more or less strictly born in Japan.
- A corpus of ideas that, while originating in other parts of the world, have developed uniquely in Japan and become something distinct, like a river that cannot be fully explained by its source.
The religion of Shintō is special in that it corresponds more to the first case than does Confucianism and Buddhism, which derive an important part of their doctrines from foreign corpora of ideas. In fact, the term Shintō usually refers to the religious beliefs that existed in Japan before the importation of Buddhism.
