How Shinto Finds the Sacred in Ordinary Things

How Shinto Finds the Sacred in Ordinary Things

What a mountain with no gods and a god with no face taught me about the way things actually are

There Are No Gods Inside a Shinto Shrine

If you visit a Shinto shrine for the first time expecting to find what you find in a church or a temple (e.g. an image or figure of the divine), you will be sadly disappointed.

The honden, the inner sanctuary, contains no paintings, no statues, and no face. What it contains, in most shrines, is a shintai — a sacred object. The most common shintai are mirrors, swords, or stones. The object is not the god. It is more like an antenna — a focal point through which something that cannot be depicted makes itself available to human attention.

Near the shrine there is almost always something older such as a mountain, tree, or a rock formation that has been there longer than anyone can remember. This is where the kami resides. Not in the building. In that place.

This is the animistic sensibility at the heart of Shinto — the ancient, indigenous worldview of Japan. Shinto, unlike Western religions, is not a dogma. It has no founding text, no creed to recite, and no deity whose will must be obeyed. It is closer to a way of paying attention to the world around us and recognizing that it is already alive in some sense that exceeds easy explanation.

The Mountain That Is the God

In Nara Prefecture, there is a shrine called Ōmiwa Jinja (大神神社). It is among the oldest in Japan — some say the oldest. What makes it unusual, even among Shinto shrines, is that it has no honden at all. No inner sanctuary. Because the sanctuary is the mountain behind it.

Mount Miwa is the shintai (神体). The mountain itself is the sacred object.

The current haiden — the hall of worship — was rebuilt in 1664 (Kanbun 4) under Tokugawa Ietsuna, the fourth shogun of the Edo period. But the form of worship it preserves is far older: worshippers face the mountain directly through the mitsu-torii, the triple torii gate, without any image or statue as intermediary. The mountain is what you face. The mountain is what you address.

For most of its history, the mountain was kinsokuchi (禁足地) — forbidden ground. No one entered. The shrine existed simply as the place where humans could approach the boundary of something that did not belong to the human world.

In recent years, entry has been permitted. But the conditions are strict. No photography. No sketching. No conversation. And whatever you see or hear on the mountain, you do not speak of afterward.

There are no penalties for breaking these rules. No authority enforcing them. No surveillance cameras in the cedar forest.

Only this: you made a promise. To the mountain. And you know whether you kept it.

I have been inside that forest. I made that promise, and I intend to keep it — so I will not recount what I saw or heard there. What I can say is that the air was different. The quality of silence was different. Something in my body registered a change that I could not explain and did not try to.

You could tell me that this was suggestion — that I felt what I expected to feel because I had been told the mountain was sacred. Perhaps. I cannot disprove that. But I also cannot unfeel what I felt. And I have learned, over the years, to take seriously the things my body notices before my mind has had time to have an opinion about them.

The God in the Tool Drawer

There is a concept in Japanese culture called tsukumogami (付喪神).

The idea is this: objects that have been used and cared for over a long period of time acquire a spirit. A needle used by a seamstress for decades. A kitchen knife that has prepared ten thousand meals. A writing brush worn down to its last few hairs. These things, the tradition says, become inhabited.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to present this as charming folklore — the kind of thing that gets printed on the packaging of Japanese souvenirs. That would miss the point entirely.

The point is not that tools are literally alive. The point is the orientation that the concept produces in the person who holds it.

If you believe — or even half-believe, or find it natural to act as if — the knife in your hand has accumulated something through years of use, then you handle it differently. You clean it. You store it properly. You do not throw it across the kitchen in frustration.

No one is watching you. No one will know. There is no penalty.

But you will know.

“Returning to the root is called stillness. Stillness is called returning to one’s destiny.” — Lao Tzu, Chapter 16

The Japanese hold ceremonies for worn-out objects — kuyō (供養) — in which needles, brushes, kitchen knives, and even factory machinery are thanked and formally retired. Not because anyone requires it. Because something in the relationship between a person and the things they use deserves acknowledgment before it ends.

This is not religion in the Western sense. There is no theology behind it, no doctrine. It is closer to a habit of attention — a way of moving through the world that keeps alive the sense that nothing is merely a means to an end.

What This Has to Do with Lao Tzu

Chapter 25 of the Tao Te Ching contains a line that I have returned to more times than I can count:

人法地、地法天、天法道、道法自然。

Humanity follows the earth. The earth follows heaven. Heaven follows the Tao. The Tao follows only itself — which is to say, it follows what is natural.

The Tao takes nature itself as its standard.

When I read this alongside everything I have described above — the mountain that is the god, the tool that accumulates spirit, the shrine that points toward a place rather than a face — I do not feel that I am encountering two different ideas. I feel that I am encountering the same idea in two different languages.

What Lao Tzu is saying, in his compressed and difficult way, is that the deepest order is not something imposed from outside. It is not a commandment. It is not a system. It is what was already there before any system was invented — the structure of things as they actually are, which does not need your belief or your approval to continue operating.

The Shinto sense of kami — the recognition that certain places, certain objects, certain encounters carry a quality that exceeds ordinary explanation — is, I think, a way of staying in contact with that order. Not through doctrine. Through attention.

The world is sacred. It cannot be improved. If you tamper with it, you will ruin it. — Lao Tzu, Chapter 29

How Shinto Changed What Zen Became

Before exploring how Shinto shaped Japanese Zen, it is worth noting that the relationship between these two traditions has never been one of simple conflict or separation.

Through a centuries-long process known as shinbutsu-shūgō (神仏習合) — the syncretism of kami and buddhas — the divine figures of Shinto and the bodhisattvas of Buddhism came to be understood not as rivals but as overlapping expressions of the same underlying reality. This blending was not confusion. It was a distinctly Japanese way of holding two things at once without forcing them into contradiction.

Chinese Chan Buddhism, from which Japanese Zen descends, was a tradition shaped by the encounter between Indian Buddhist thought and the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi. Its emphasis on the ineffable, on paradox, on the limits of language — all of this carries the imprint of that earlier meeting. In that sense, Zen arrived in Japan already bearing Lao Tzu’s fingerprints.

But something changed when it reached Japanese soil.

The Chinese tradition, particularly in its Linji (Rinzai) form, placed great weight on the koan — those paradoxical exchanges and riddles designed to exhaust the rational mind and force a breakthrough beyond language. There is a certain intellectual sharpness to this, a willingness to push the limits of what words can do by using them aggressively against themselves.

Japanese Zen, especially in the Sōtō school founded by Dōgen in the thirteenth century, moved in a different direction: shikantaza (只管打坐) — just sitting. Nothing more. No goal. No breakthrough to achieve. The practice is the practice.

My own sense — and I hold this as personal conviction — is that this shift was made possible in part by Shinto’s deep-rooted suspicion of words. The Japanese concept of kotodama (言霊), the spirit of language, carries within it an awareness that words are powerful precisely because they are dangerous — that saying too much risks diminishing what is real. The Shinto tradition of kotoage sezu (言挙げせず) — not making things explicit, not declaring what need not be declared — found a natural resonance with the silent, embodied practice of just sitting.

And there is something else. Chinese Chan spoke of sunyata — emptiness — as an abstract philosophical category. Japan already had a different relationship with emptiness: the emptiness of the shrine interior that points toward the mountain, the emptiness of the tea room that makes space for the encounter between host and guest, the emptiness of the raked gravel garden in which a single stone carries the weight of an island.

These were not philosophical abstractions. They were lived forms. And when Zen encountered them, it did not so much transform them as recognize itself in them — and, in doing so, became something that could take root not only in the monastery but in the kitchen, the garden, the tearoom, and the dojo.

The Buddhist teaching of mujo (無常) — impermanence — underwent a similar transformation. In its original Indian context, impermanence is primarily a teaching about suffering: things pass away, attachment to them causes pain, liberation requires releasing that attachment. This is not pessimism, but it carries a certain orientation away from the world as it is.

Japan already had mono no aware (物の哀れ) — the bittersweet recognition that things are beautiful precisely because they do not last. The cherry blossom is not tragic. It is perfect. Its falling is not a failure but a completion.

When Buddhist impermanence met this sensibility, something shifted. The teaching did not lose its depth, but it changed its direction — from a turning away from the world toward a deeper turning toward it. Impermanence became not a reason to detach but a reason to pay attention, now, to what is here.

This, I think, is one of the most distinctive things about Japanese Zen — and I believe it is inseparable from the Shinto ground in which it grew.

The Ordinary Is Not the Opposite of the Sacred

Here is where I want to be direct about something, because I think it is the most important point in this essay and also the one most easily misunderstood.

The important takeaway is that the Shinto orientation toward the sacred is not reserved for mountaintops and ancient shrines. It is not a special mode that one enters at the shrine gate and exits on the way home.

When I say that the sacred is in ordinary things, I mean this literally.

The meal that begins with itadakimasu — a word that acknowledges the life given so that you could eat, the labor of the people who grew the food, the chain of relationships that brought it to your table. The morning sweep of the path outside the house — not because anyone requires it, not because guests are coming, but because the space around you is part of the world and the world deserves that attention. The careful washing of a bowl after tea.

These are not spiritual practices in the sense of being elevated above daily life. They are daily life, conducted with a particular quality of attention.

And that quality of attention — this is what I find most interesting — does not require that you believe anything specific. You do not need to believe in kami. You do not need to have read Lao Tzu. You only need to be willing to treat the things in front of you as if they matter. As if the knife deserves to be cleaned. As if the path deserves to be swept. As if the mountain deserves silence.

What happens when you do this consistently, over time, is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. But something in your relationship to the ordinary world quietly shifts.

What I Actually Believe

I want to be honest about my own position, because I think honesty is more useful here than a tidy philosophical conclusion.

I do not know whether kami exist in any literal sense. I cannot tell you what I encountered on Mount Miwa — whether it was something real or something I constructed from expectation and silence and the particular quality of cedar forest light on an autumn morning.

What I can tell you is that the framework — the habit of approaching the world as if things matter, as if places carry histories that deserve respect, as if the objects in my life have accumulated something through use — has changed how I move through my days. Quietly. Without drama. In ways that I would find difficult to measure and do not particularly want to.

Lao Tzu wrote that the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. I take this seriously. I am not going to tell you that what I experienced on the mountain was the Tao, or kami, or anything else with a name. Names are what we reach for when we want to stop paying attention.

What the mountain asked of me was to stop reaching. To be in that place, in that silence, without converting the experience into something portable.

Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? — Lao Tzu, Chapter 15

I am still practicing.

A Note on Practice

If any of this resonates — and I say this without prescription, because this essay is not a set of instructions — the entry point is simpler than it might seem.

All you have to do the next time you use something is just notice it.

The next time you enter a place, notice what changes in you. The next time you prepare a meal, let the moment before eating be a moment of actual acknowledgment rather than habit.

Someone reading this might reasonably ask: and what has this practice changed in you? It is a fair question, and I find I cannot answer it — not because nothing has changed, but because these habits began so early, and have been so continuous, that I have no version of myself without them to compare against.

I cannot see the change the way you can see a before and after. It is more like asking someone who has always lived near the sea what it is like to smell salt air. They may not notice it at all. But take it away, and something essential would be missing.

That is all. It may amount to nothing. Or it may be the beginning of a very long and quiet conversation with the world you already live in.

About the Author

Takeshi Kitagawa was born in Kobe in 1965 and now lives in Osaka. He practiced kendo for nearly a decade at a police dojo in Kobe, and studied Zen and Buddhist philosophy at temples in Kyoto, where he had the opportunity to listen directly to Sōtō and Rinzai priests over many years. His writing explores Japanese philosophy, aesthetics, and the dō traditions — not as cultural artifacts to be admired from a distance, but as living orientations toward how to be in the world.