Ritual purification (harae)

The single most useful thing to know about Shinto purification is that what is being removed is not guilt.

Kegare is defilement: a condition contracted through contact with death, blood, illness or decay, regardless of intention and regardless of fault. A person who has attended a funeral is polluted. A person who is bereaved is polluted, which is why in traditional practice a bereaved family did not visit a shrine during mourning, and part of why Shinto has historically left funerals to Buddhism. None of this implies wrongdoing, and treating it as a moral category produces immediate and serious misreadings.

Tsumi is nearer to transgression, and the old catalogues of it are revealing. They include breaking irrigation channels and skinning an animal backwards alongside offences a modern reader would recognise as such, and they also include leprosy and being struck by lightning. Misfortune and misconduct appear in the same list, which is what a category of pollution looks like before anyone has moralised it.

Because the condition is a state rather than an act, it is removed by procedure rather than by repentance. Rinsing, waving a wand, transferring the impurity to a paper figure and destroying it: these work in the way that washing works. There is nothing to confess and nobody whose forgiveness is required.

This is one of the clearest cases in comparative religion where an obvious-looking parallel is false. Christian confession and Shinto purification both restore a person to a fit state before approaching the sacred, and they are addressed to entirely different problems.

The techniques are graded by cost and difficulty, and people participate at whatever level they choose.

Temizu is the minimum, performed by everyone entering a shrine at a stone basin near the gate with a wooden ladle: left hand, then right hand, then water poured into the cupped left hand and used to rinse the mouth, then the ladle tipped upright so the remaining water runs down the handle and cleans it for the next person. Nobody drinks from the ladle itself. During the pandemic many shrines removed the ladles and ran water from bamboo spouts instead, and a number have not restored them.

Misogi is the demanding form: full immersion, standing under a waterfall or entering the sea, sometimes in midwinter, generally preceded by fasting and preparatory exercises, and undertaken by priests, by martial artists and by laypeople on retreat. It is voluntary and required of nobody.

Oharae, the great purification, is the institutional form. Established as court ritual by the legal code of 701 and performed twice a year at the end of June and the end of December, it purifies the population as a whole rather than the individuals who happen to attend. The summer rite has worshippers pass through a large ring of woven grass; the winter rite uses paper figures, which people breathe on or rub against themselves before handing them in for disposal. It is performed after national disasters as well.

The professional dimension matters and is easy to miss. Purification of a construction site before building, of a new car, of a factory line or an office is ordinary commercial practice in Japan, arranged with a shrine and paid for, and commissioned by companies whose executives would not describe themselves as religious. The rite is treated as something done rather than something believed, and that distinction is the key to most Japanese religious behaviour.