Famous Shrines and Shrine Networks
Those worshiped at a shrine are generally Shinto kami, but sometimes they can be Buddhist or Taoist deities, as well as others not generally considered to belong to Shinto. Some shrines were established to worship living people or figures from myths and legends. A famous example are the Tōshō-gū shrines erected to enshrine Tokugawa Ieyasu, or the many shrines dedicated to Sugawara no Michizane, like Kitano Tenman-gū.
Often the shrines historically most significant do not lie in a former center of power like Kyoto, Nara or Kamakura. For example Ise Shrine, the Imperial household's family shrine, is in Mie prefecture. Izumo-taisha, one of the oldest and most revered shrines in Japan, is in Shimane prefecture. This is because their location is that of a traditionally important kami, and not that of temporal institutions.
Some shrines exist only in one locality, while others are at the head of a network of branch shrines (分社, bunsha?) that extends to all the country. The spreading of a kami can be due to one or more of several different mechanisms. The normal one is an operation called kanjō (see the Re-enshrinement section above), a propagation process through which a kami is invited to a new location and there re-enshrined. The new shrine is administratively completely independent from the one it originated from.
However, other transfer mechanisms exist. In Ise Shrine's case, for example, its network of Shinmei shrines (from Shinmei (神明?), another name for Amaterasu) grew due to two concurrent causes. During the late Heian period the cult of Amaterasu, worshiped initially only at Ise Shrine, started to spread to the shrine's possessions through the usual kanjō mechanism. Later, branches shrines started to appear further away. The first evidence of a Shinmei shrine far from Ise is given by the Azuma Kagami, a Kamakura period text which refers to Amanawa Shinmei-gū's appearance in Kamakura, Kanagawa. Amaterasu began being worshiped in other parts of the country also because of the so-called tobi shinmei (飛び神明, flying Shinmei?) phenomenon, the belief that she would fly to other locations and settle there. Similar mechanisms have been responsible for the spreading around the country of other kami.
Read more about this topic: Shinto Shrine
Famous quotes containing the words famous, shrines, shrine and/or networks:
“A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,
A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl
Make him the quaint great figure that men love,
The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.”
—Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931)
“I don’t care very much for literary shrines and haunts ... I knew a woman in London who boasted that she had lodgings from the windows of which she could throw a stone into Carlyle’s yard. And when I said, “Why throw a stone into Carlyle’s yard?” she looked at me as if I were an imbecile and changed the subject.”
—Carolyn Wells (1862–1942)
“The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine ... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)