Currently, he is working on an edited book on religious ideas and rituals related to the sea in Japan transformations in religious thought during the Muromachi period and the premodern Japanese imagination of India. He also published two books on the Japanese understanding and imagintation of Italy (Itariateki kangaekata, 1997, and Itariateki, 2005). Books include Vegetal Buddhas (2001), Buddhas and Kami in Japan (with Mark Teeuwen, 2001), Buddhist Materiality (2007), Buddhism and Iconoclasm in East Asia (with Eric Reinders, 2012), A Buddhist Theory of Semiotics (2013), Buddhist Anarchism (2014). His research focuses on Japanese esoteric Buddhism (especially, semiotics and representation theories and practices), on the interaction of Buddhism with local cults in Asia, and on the formation of Shinto discourses in premodern Japan. Jby Megan Manson 0 Comments An important part of Shinto worship within the home is the offering of Shinto prayers, or norito, to the kami (deities). I will suggest that a shared feature of the theology of the kami throughout history is a constant oscillation (and indecision) between materiality and spirituality, a structural oscillation that is responsible for both the constancy of certain themes and religious innovation.įabio Rambelli (PhD, 1992) teaches Japanese religions and cultural history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he holds the ISF endowed chair in Shinto Studies. In this paper, I present some aspects of premodern Japanese discussions on the body of the kami( shintai), with their multiplicity and ultimate irreducibility, with special emphasis on medieval doctrinal texts and early modern philosophical treatments by Confucians and Nativists. The notion of kami also shares some semantic elements with concepts such as mono (entity endowed with supernatural powers), tama (spirit), and kokoro (mind). In addition, human beings can, in certain cases, be deified as well. The general understanding today is that kami are spiritual (immaterial) entities that attach themselves to particular things (rocks, trees, mountains, etc.) however, there are also beliefs that natural objects are divine in themselves. One of the striking aspects of Shinto is the vagueness and multiplicity that characterize descriptions of the gods ( kami). For Tomoko Iwasawa, the 'Western concept of Godis inappropriate for analyzing Japanese religious experience.'1 She proposes instead to focus on the concept of tama, which seems to be at the origin and at the core of many aspects of Shinto thought and practice (including many kami-related matters) and on its primary power, musubi (life-force).
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