There is no decalogue, no catalogue of sins, no confession, no doctrine to affirm, no ordained creed and no scripture that binds. Asked what Shinto teaches, priests characteristically answer by describing what one does — purify, offer, give thanks, keep the place clean, take part. The Meiji state and various twentieth-century movements tried to supply a moral content and what they produced was largely nationalism, which is a cautionary result. Western observers have consistently read the absence as either a primitive stage that never developed doctrine or as an emptiness available for any content to be poured into, and the second criticism has real historical force. The tradition's own answer is that ritual and a sense of what is unseemly do the work a rule-list does elsewhere, that the demand for a written ethic is a question imported along with Buddhism and Confucianism and then Christianity, and that Japanese moral vocabulary was in fact largely supplied by those systems while Shinto handled the kami.