Chinkon

Chinkon means, roughly, pacifying or settling the spirit, and its oldest documented setting is entirely court centered: the Chinkonsai, a nocturnal rite performed each winter, traditionally on the day before the Niiname-sai first fruits festival, in which court ritualists were understood to strengthen and stabilize the emperor's own tama, or spirit, believed to weaken as the year's vitality waned toward winter. The rite involved chanting, and in some historical descriptions a ritual dance in which a spear was used to stir a covered box or jar said to contain a symbolic representation of the spirit being calmed, a practice whose precise original meaning is debated by historians of Shinto ritual, since the Heian period sources that describe it are already interpreting older, less well documented practice.

The underlying premise, that a person's vital spirit is not a fixed, permanently secure possession but something that can weaken, wander or need periodic settling, and that this settling can be achieved through structured ritual technique rather than left to chance, distinguishes chinkon from more general Shinto notions of purification and would prove adaptable to a very different setting many centuries later, once nineteenth century Shinto revivalists began looking for a native meditative discipline distinct from imported Buddhist practice.

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.