In the nineteenth century the Shinto scholar and ritualist Honda Chikaatsu drew on the old court concept of chinkon, along with divination and possession practices, to develop a structured seated meditative discipline he called chinkon kishin, spirit pacification and return to the divine, intended as a specifically Shinto path to spiritual cultivation comparable to Buddhist meditation but rooted, its proponents argued, in native Japanese religious tradition rather than a continental import.
Honda taught the method to Deguchi Onisaburo, who became a central figure of the new religious movement Oomoto in the early twentieth century and made chinkon kishin, sometimes practiced in tandem with a form of controlled spirit possession called kishin, a core devotional technique within that movement, from which related practices spread further into other Shinto derived new religions across the twentieth century. The technique typically involves seated stillness, controlled breathing and chanted invocations, held to still the practitioner's ordinary mental noise and open a channel toward the kami. It is important to distinguish this later, systematized meditative practice, a Meiji and Taisho era innovation drawing on older material, from the original Heian period Chinkonsai, a court rite for the emperor alone that continues today only as a much reduced ceremonial observance within the imperial household.