The Kami in All Things
The Teaching
From Motoori Norinaga: “Whatever has the quality of being above ordinary things and possessing a spirit of excellence or power is called kami. This applies to both humans and all other natural phenomena — mountains, seas, rivers, animals, plants, even trees and stones.”
The kami are not remote deities but the sacred power that indwells within natural phenomena: the awesome power of nature, the extraordinary quality of things, the inner life of mountains, rivers, trees, animals. The kami is the depth-dimension of the real.
In every grain of rice, in every gust of wind, in every flowering cherry tree — the kami is present, not as an external spirit added to the thing, but as its own deepest nature.
Commentary
The Shinto understanding of Kami is perhaps the most radically immanent spiritual vision in the world’s traditions. The sacred is not above nature, not separate from nature, not reached by escaping nature, it IS the depth-dimension of nature itself.
Gospel of Thomas Saying 77: ‘Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.’ Jesus and Norinaga are pointing at the same reality with different vocabularies.
The Taoist sage sees the Tao in every phenomenon, not as a presence added to the phenomenon but as its very ground. The disenchantment of the modern West is the loss of this vision, and its recovery is the heart of the perennial project.
Themes
Connections 9
Arose apart
No known transmission between Gnosticism and Shinto while these teachings took shape.
Unsure
Chinese yin-yang and Taoist practice reached Japan (Onmyōdō). How much they shaped Shinto is argued.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Indigenous tradition and Shinto while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Hermeticism and Shinto while these teachings took shape.
Travelled
Buddhism reached Shinto by 552 CE. Buddhism formally reached Japan in the 6th century. For a thousand years kami and buddhas were worshipped together (shinbutsu-shūgō).
Arose apart
No known line from Shinto to this scientific work.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Gnosticism and Shinto while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Shinto and Zoroastrianism while these teachings took shape.