The Oharae no Kotoba survives because it was copied into the Engishiki, a vast tenth century compilation completed in 927 CE that functioned primarily as a work of administrative and ceremonial law, cataloguing court procedures, offerings and ritual protocols for the Japanese state rather than existing as a devotional or theological text in its own right. This means the norito's preservation is almost incidental to the Engishiki's main purpose, one ritual text recorded because the ceremony it belonged to was a required item of state ceremonial law that needed documenting precisely, alongside sections of the same compilation dealing with matters as different as court ranks and tax procedures, a reminder that the boundary between religious and administrative text was not sharply drawn in the compiling of this kind of Japanese court document.
The ceremony it belongs to, the Oharae or Great Purification, was performed twice yearly at the end of the sixth and twelfth lunar months, at the imperial court and eventually at shrines across Japan, functioning as a periodic clearing of accumulated ritual impurity for the whole community rather than as a response to any specific individual transgression, a preventive and calendrical rather than penitential logic. The short lay formula harae tamae kiyome tamae, recorded separately in this atlas, functions as an everyday compressed echo of this much older, twice yearly state ceremony, letting an individual worshipper invoke in miniature, at any shrine's water basin on any day, the same purifying request the full court ceremony performed formally and communally on a fixed calendar.