How to Live
the ethic — what it asks of a life
Makoto — a sincere heart.
The nearest thing to a first principle, and it means the absence of a second, concealed intention rather than intensity of feeling. A rite done correctly with a divided heart is held to be worth less than one done clumsily with a whole one, and no one can check which you did.
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Purity, sincerity, gratitude.
Not a commandment list: wash before approaching, mean what you say before the kami (makoto), and treat rice, water, and ancestors as gifts already received.
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Kegare, and staying away.
Death, blood, illness and childbirth are polluting — not wicked, polluting — and the polluted stay away from the shrine until it passes; the bereaved traditionally for around fifty days. The rules about menstruation and childbirth read now as plain discrimination, most shrines have quietly abandoned them, and a few mountains and festivals have not.
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Sweep it.
The parish keeps the grounds — weeding the approach, washing the stone, clearing the leaves, on a household rota. It is the most concrete obligation in the tradition and the first to fail: a shrine nobody sweeps is a shrine closing, and rural Japan has a great many of them.
held by most
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Take your turn.
The unit of obligation is the household, not the individual — a house belongs to the parish and owes it labour, money and a body under the mikoshi. People who move away often keep paying, and people who move in and decline are noticed.
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There is no list.
No commandments, no catalogue of sins, no confession and no doctrine to affirm. Asked what Shinto teaches, priests tend to describe what one does. Critics read the absence as emptiness; the tradition reads the demand for a list as a foreign question.
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