Shinto

Shinto is the indigenous spiritual tradition of Japan, not so much a religion with doctrines as a way of perceiving the sacred in and through the natural world. The word Shinto means the way of the Kami, and the Kami are not distant deities but the sacred power that indwells all things: mountains, rivers, trees, animals, ancestral spirits, and the forces that animate existence itself.

Motoori Norinaga defined Kami as whatever has the quality of being extraordinary and possessing a spirit of excellence or power, this applies to both humans and all other natural phenomena, including mountains, seas, rivers, animals, plants, even trees and stones. This is perhaps the most radically immanent spiritual vision in the world's traditions: the sacred is not above nature or behind nature but is the very depth-dimension of nature itself.

Shinto's key concepts map beautifully onto the perennial tradition. Musubi, the generative, harmonizing creative force, is the Logos of John's Gospel, is the Tao of Lao Tzu, is Brahman as the creative ground of all manifestation. Kannagara, flowing in the way of the Kami, is Wu Wei, is non-striving, is action from the deepest alignment rather than ego-driven effort. Ma, the sacred interval, the space between things, is the emptiness that makes the vessel useful (Tao Te Ching chapter 11), is the Buddhist Sunyata as generative void.

Mono no Aware, the pathos of things, the bittersweet awareness of transience, is Shinto's distinctive aesthetic gift: the capacity to find beauty in impermanence, to let the cherry blossom's falling be as sacred as its blooming. This is the Buddhist teaching on impermanence transformed into an aesthetic and spiritual practice.