Shintō — Kami, Sacred Presence, and the Practice of Purity
Japan's indigenous spiritual tradition — one of the world's few remaining living examples of a prehistoric nature-spirit religion that survived into the modern era. Shintō has no founding figure, no canonical scripture, no systematic theology. It is a practice of attention to the sacred dimension of ordinary reality: the kami that inhabit natural phenomena, places, and ancestors.
Kami: sacred presence, not supernatural beings
Kami is often translated as 'god' or 'spirit' — both are misleading. Kami are not separate beings who inhabit a supernatural realm above the natural world. They are the sacred quality that certain natural phenomena, places, persons, and processes possess. A waterfall can be kami. A mountain is kami. An ancestor becomes kami after death.
The Vedic parallel is not the personal deva but the concept of brahman in its early sense — the sacred power immanent in certain words, actions, and objects. Kami and this pre-Upanishadic brahman share the quality of being the sacred as inherent in things, not imposed on them from outside.
Foundational concepts
Key thinkers
The tradition predates any named teacher
The kami are not remote — they are the sacredness in the wind, the river, the ancestor.
In dialogue with
Primary sources
Kojiki
The earliest account of Japanese mythology and kami cosmology (712 CE).
Sources are drawn from indexed primary texts and traditional commentarial literature.
Related traditions