Oharae no Kotoba

The Oharae no Kotoba, the words of the great purification, is the central norito, the formal Shinto liturgical address to the kami, recited at the great purification ceremony held to cleanse the community of accumulated pollution and offences, above all at the twice-yearly rite in the sixth and twelfth months. One of the oldest surviving Shinto ritual texts, preserved in early collections of court liturgy, it recounts in elevated language the descent of the divine order and enumerates the offences and impurities to be removed, then describes how they are carried away, swept off by the winds, borne down the rivers to the sea, and swallowed up and lost, so that the land and its people are made clean. The recitation gives voice to the tradition's central conviction that impurity, arising from death, wrongdoing and disorder, can be wholly removed and the community restored to purity. Recited anciently at the imperial court and today at shrines throughout Japan, it stands among the most important and beautiful of the norito.

The text's account of a divine order descending to pacify and settle the land before enumerating the offenses to be purified reflects mythological material closely related to the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the earliest chronicles of Japanese myth and early history, and its language remains close to Old Japanese even as it continues to be recited in essentially its ancient form at shrines today. Following the Meiji era's reorganization of Shinto as a state institution the recitation of the Oharae no Kotoba was standardized and promoted nationally, though the twice-yearly great purification rite from which it takes its name long predates that modern administrative history.

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.