Temizu is the rite of purification with water performed by every visitor to a Shinto shrine before approaching the sanctuary, an abbreviated everyday form of the tradition's deeper water-purification, misogi. Near the entrance to the shrine stands the temizuya, a covered basin of clear water furnished with long-handled ladles, and there the worshipper cleanses before coming into the presence of the kami. Purity is the central value of Shinto and its opposite, pollution, the chief barrier to right relation with the divine; the temizu removes the ordinary impurity a person carries and readies them, in body and symbolically in spirit, to worship.
The rite follows a set sequence. Taking a ladle in the right hand, the worshipper draws water and rinses the left hand, then the right; pouring water into the cupped left hand, they rinse the mouth, without touching the ladle to the lips, and then rinse the left hand again; finally they tip the ladle upright so that the remaining water runs down the handle to cleanse it for the next person, and return it. Only then do they proceed to the sanctuary to make their offering and prayer. In this small, precise act of washing at the gate, repeated by millions of shrine visitors, the fundamental Shinto principle that purity must precede the approach to the sacred is made part of ordinary religious life.