The first book in English to apply ancient Japanese Shinto traditions to daily spiritual fulfillment.

The first book in English to apply ancient Japanese Shinto traditions to daily spiritual fulfillment.

Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan is the first systematic study of Shinto's environmental turn. The book traces the development in recent decades of the idea of Shinto as an 'ancient nature religion,' and a resource for overcoming environmental problems. The volume shows how these ideas gradually achieved popularity among scientists, priests, Shinto-related new religious movements and, eventually, the conservative shrine establishment. Aike P. Rots argues that central to this development is the notion of chinju no mori: the sacred groves surrounding many Shinto shrines. Although initially used to refer to remaining areas of primary or secondary forest, today the term has come to be extended to any sort of shrine land, signifying not only historical and ecological continuity but also abstract values such as community spirit, patriotism and traditional culture. The book shows how Shinto's environmental turn has also provided legitimacy internationally: influenced by the global discourse on religion and ecology, in recent years the Shinto establishment has actively engaged with international organizations devoted to the conservation of sacred sites. Shinto sacred forests thus carry significance locally as well as nationally and internationally, and figure prominently in attempts to reposition Shinto in the centre of public space.

Shinto is an ancient faith of forests and snow-capped mountains. It sees the divine in rocks and streams, communing with spirit worlds through bamboo twigs and the evergreen sakaki tree. Yet it is also the manicured suburban garden and the blades of grass between cracks in city paving stones. Structured around ritual cleansing, Shinto contains no concept of sin. It reveres ancestors, but thinks little about the afterlife, asking us to live in, and improve, the present. Central to Shinto is Kannagara: intuitive acceptance of the divine power contained in all living things. Dai Shizen (Great Nature) is the life force with which we ally ourselves through spiritual practice and living simply. This is not asceticism, but an affirmation of all aspects of life. Musubi (organic growth) provides a model for reconciling ancient intuition with modern science, modern society with primal human needs. Shinto is an unbroken indigenous path that now reaches beyond its native Japan. It has special relevance to us a

One of Japan's major religions, Shinto has no doctrines and there are no sacred texts from which religious authority can be derived. It does not have an identifiable historical founder, and it has survived the vicissitudes of history through rituals and symbols rather than through continuity of doctrine. Shinto is primarily a religion of nature, centered on the cultivation of rice, the basis of a culture with which the western world is not familiar in terms of either its annual cycle or the kind of lifestyle it generates. The roots of the Shinto tradition probably precede this and reflect an awareness of the natural order. The oldest shrines came to be located in places that inspired awe and wonder in their observers, such as the great Fall of Nachi in Kumano, or in mountains that conveyed a sense of power. The expanded second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Shinto relates the history of Shinto through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and over 800 cross-referenced dictionary entries on Shinto concepts, significant figures, places, activities, and periods. Scholars and students will find the overviews and sources for further research provided by this book to be enormously helpful.

The Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of religion in contemporary Asia. Compiled and introduced by Bryan S. Turner and Oscar Salemink, the Handbook contains specially written chapters by experts in their respective fields. The wide-ranging introduction discusses issues surrounding Orientalism and the historical development of the discipline of Religious Studies. It conveys how there have been many centuries of interaction between different religious traditions in Asia and discusses the problem of world religions and the range of concepts, such as high and low traditions, folk and formal religions, popular and orthodox developments. Individual chapters are presented in the following five sections: Asian Origins: religious formations Missions, States and Religious Competition Reform Movements and Modernity Popular Religions Religion and Globalization: social dimensions Striking a balance between offering basic information about religious cultures in Asia and addressing the complexity of employing a western terminology in societies with radically different traditions, this advanced level reference work will be essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of Asian Religions, Sociology, Anthropology, Asian Studies and Religious Studies.

Nature, Space and the Sacred offers the first investigative mapping of a new and highly significant agenda: the spatial interactions between religion, nature and culture. In this ground-breaking work, different concepts of religion, theology, space and place and their internal relations are discussed in an impressive range of approaches. Weaving together a diversity of perspectives, this book presents an innovative and truly transdisciplinary environmental science. Its broad range offers a rich exchange of insights, methods and theoretical engagements.