The following article from the Japan Times is notable for a number of reasons. Above all it shows how Shugendo is opening up to outsiders in dramatic fashion: rental clothing from a tourist office, and advertisements in English would have … Read the rest
Category: Syncretism (Page 4 of 17)
What happens if you apply Zen to the Celtic tradition of Druidry? It’s not something that would usually come to mind, though a book with that theme has just been published with neo-pagan specialists, John Hunt Publishing.
Druidry is a … Read the rest
An article in the Japan Times highlights the nature of Endo Shusaku’s ‘swamp’ in which a foreign religion like Christianity is unable to take root but will simply rot and perish. It’s something I had to think about in my … Read the rest
There are many individuals who exemplify the close ties between Zen and Shinto in Japanese history, particularly in the period before an artificial line was drawn between Buddhism and ‘the indigenous religion’ in Meiji times.
One such person is the … Read the rest
The following is taken from Wikipedia, indicating how Buddhism and Shinto overlapped architecturally. The similarities are particularly acute in Zen, which lays great emphasis on the kind of exactitude and purity of form found in Shinto. One thinks for instance … Read the rest
Hearn was an agnostic, but he had a sympathetic interest in Buddhism and Shinto as his writings attest. In an 1893 letter to his friend, Basil Hall Chamberlain, he wrote once of the daily cycle of life in his extended … Read the rest
Some years ago I visited Lafcadio Hearn’s house in Matsue City, which is preserved just as when he lived in it. It’s an attractive former samurai house next to the moat around Matsue Castle. The garden he described in his … Read the rest