Professor Ōmichi’s second Komorebi column was in the August 31st issue of Jinja Shinpō, and she continued her discussion of the relationship between media and the sacred, specifically Shinto.
She started by talking about a certain Buddhist temple in Kamakura (that is what she said — she didn’t say which one it was) that has forbidden photography throughout the precincts, unless you have specific permission. She said that she put her camera and smartphone away, and felt that the release from the obligation to, or at least expectation that one should, photograph anything remarkable had made all of her senses more sensitive to the experiences that she could only have in that place, in that moment.
The photography of sacred spaces, she said, began in the Meiji period (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), when the government decided to record the cultural heritage at temples and jinja. When you look at those records, they are overwhelmingly dominated by Buddhist images. She referred to the notes left by one of the people who did it, commenting that images of kami tended to be simplistic and artistically uninteresting, and that in some cases even the priests of the jinja had never seen them.
This, she said, brings into relief a difference between Shinto and Buddhism. Shinto does not seek to show the kami to anyone. They resist being seen or being made visible. And therefore the experience of the sacred place itself, the experience of physically being there, an experience that cannot be captured in any media — in anything that mediates — is strongly emphasised in Shinto.
I think there is something right and important about this. Physically visiting a jinja is a very important part of Shinto practice, and this is a problem for people who live outside Japan. The kami are not everywhere, although the exact sense in which they are localised to jinja is far from clear. Any version of Shinto that does not emphasise physical presence on sacred ground has abandoned an important part of the tradition.
But on the other hand there are a lot of elements of the tradition that do use media. There are the “Miya Mandala”, which are paintings of a jinja and its environs that were used to encourage pilgrimage. There are forms of kagura that re-enact the activities of the kami. Mikoshi processions could also be seen as a form of mediation, bringing the kami out of the jinja and into the surrounding community. There are several traditions pushing a thousand years old in which people venerate a jinja from a great distance for most of the time, and visit maybe once in their lives.
If we simply take this as a matter of balance, then I think we can say that Shinto puts greater weight on things that cannot be seen and things that can only be experienced in person than a lot of religious traditions. All the Abrahamic traditions and Buddhism, for example, put less weight on these than Shinto, although such things are still important in those traditions. But I do not think it is simply a matter of balance. I feel that there is a fundamental difference in the underlying attitude that causes the difference in balance.
But trying to put that into words may well be an exercise in futility.