Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/233

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
WORSHIP.
223

or reposoir and back again to the shrine. The confusion in many minds between the shintai and the mitama is illustrated by the fact that a standard modern dictionary speaks of the Mikoshi as containing the God's mitama.

Shrines.—A shrine is a species of offering. Whatever may be the case in other countries, in Japan the shrine is not a development of the tomb. They have no resemblance to each other. The tomb is a partly subterranean megalithic vault enclosed in a huge mound of earth, while the shrine is a wooden structure raised on posts some feet above the ground. The Japanese words for shrine indicate that it is intended as a house for the God. Miya, august house, is used equally of a shrine and of a palace, but not of a tomb, except poetically, as when the Manyōshiu speaks of one as a toko no miya, or "long home." Araka, another word for shrine, probably means "dwelling-place." In yashiro, a very common word for shrine, ya means house and shiro representative or equivalent. There is evidence[1] that this word comes to us from a time when the yashiro was a plot of ground consecrated for the occasion to repre- sent a place of abode for the deity. The analogy of the Roman templum will occur to the classical scholar. The himorogi (p. 226), a term which has been the subject of some controversy, was probably, as Hirata suggests, at first an enclosure of sakaki twigs stuck in the ground so as to represent a house. It is probable that in all these cases the make-believe preceded any actual edifice, and was not a substitute for it.

There is a somewhat rare word, namely oki-tsuki, properly a mound, which is applied to both tombs and shrines. Old sepulchral mounds have frequently a small shrine on their summit.

The Shinto shrine is by no means so costly an edifice as its Buddhist counterpart. The hokora,[2] as the smaller

  1. Nihongi, ii. 293.
  2. See illustration in Chapter XIV.