Because Shinto shrines are considered places of superior potency kami of the forces of life musubi , it is in these locations that worship services are most regularly held. Our primary example here is the daily morning service the Choo Hai conducted at Tsubaki Grand Shrine located in Mie Prefecture at the base of one of seven mountains of Suzuka.
The entire shrine complex is situated within a forest of year old cypress trees. A large torii gate and an ablution pavilion mark the beginning of a path through the forest to the main shrine. From beginning to end, the priests endeavor to courteously call upon and take leave of the kami through proper demeanor and formal bows and claps.
It is evident that Shinto liturgical rituals are formalized, elegant performances exhibiting aesthetically honed, repetitive patterns. A case in point is the basic action of bowing and clapping--a series of invariant, solemn gestures occurring several times in each ceremony.
A more complex example is the appearance of the shrine's hall of offerings heiden. It presents itself as an aesthetic object in several ways. It is a static, visual composition dominated by horizontals, sharply delineated designs of costumes and curtains, and the intersecting diagonals of bowed bodies. At the same time, it is the area in which offerings are precisely displayed, and the stage on which the priests move, chant, and drum with stylized deliberation.
All this evinces order, rule, and structure. One way to approach the family of aesthetic characteristics that we wish to highlight, is to imagine scoring such ritual performances, as anthropologists sometimes do. Here we intend a broad sense of score: any abstract notational system for displaying, in skeletal ideal form, the underlying structure of an object or event, usually an artwork or ritual.
One could score a daily purification ritual, for example, using dance and acoustic or musical notations indicating the location of the priest and audience, his posture, movements, costume, and "stage setting;" and acoustically, the pitch, duration, and rhythm of the clapping, chanting and drumming.
Even the visual composition of the priests, seated among the offerings on the raised platform, could be "scored" in geometric terms--horizontals, diagonals, and areas of contrasting color. To speak of scoring is to emphasize that rituals are repeated, highly structured, and more or less fixed sequences of events evincing many of the features of the visual and the performing arts.
The score, of course, does not match every aspect of the performance. For example, the clapping of the participants, led by the chief priest is often uneven, but the score would clearly indicate a certain number of equally spaced, synchronized claps.
That is, scores not only display the structure of a performance, but they rely on a distinction between an idealized pattern and a concrete instance of the pattern. This has an experiential correlate: we are sometimes aware, as ritual participants, of trying to conform to an ideal pattern or sequence. Scoring such events invites distinctions akin to those between performance and script, or painting and geometric form.
In the theory of fine arts, such distinctions come under the heading of formalism. Formalism is an aesthetic theory peculiar to twentieth century Western art; but it is claimed by its adherents to reveal a universal, timeless, and culture-independent dimension of the arts.
Whether or not those ambitious claims are true, we believe that art's formal dimension goes some way in explicating the connection between art and Shinto practices of purification. According to formalist doctrine, to perceive an artwork aesthetically is to attend to its formal qualities. These, in turn, are such features speaking of the visual arts as color, composition, texture, form and line. Formalism takes our attention away from the representational or narrative content of the work, its emotional effects, and its instrumental uses.
It directs our attention to the way in which the artist has brought together formal elements. Six Persimmons , by Mu Ch'i. On this view, the well-known brush painting by Mu-chi'i of six persimmons casually arranged within an otherwise empty space is justly famous because of the texture and line of the six images and their composition, not because persimmons are an inherently compelling subject.
Even minor changes in the point of view or the spaces between the fruits will result in very different and generally inferior effects. In addition, formalism not only directs our attention to such aesthetic dimensions as composition and color, but it further directs our attention to underlying structural relations such as geometric form or complementary relations among colors.
With respect to music, it emphasizes intervals and harmonic structures, not just the melodic line. Formalism says, in effect, that what is most important about art is not its content but its grammar. In the evaluation of artworks, it is form that counts. These structural features may not immediately be apparent to the casual viewer, but they are operative nevertheless as the source of the artwork's power to affect us aesthetically.
Thus, formalism adds an important consideration to the above discussion of scoring. Not only can we distinguish in artworks and rituals between the particular instance and the underlying form; it is the latter that is claimed to account for their power.
Formalism makes apparent that the priest's ability to successfully manipulate formal elements contributes to ritual efficacy. Those who talk about art in formalist terms are often tempted to use the word "pure.
It follows that formalism is fiercely anti-instrumental. That an artwork expresses a political message, for example, is irrelevant to its aesthetic evaluation. Art is sometimes characterized, therefore, as divinely "useless," inhabiting a pure realm unsullied by utilitarian concerns. When we learn to perceive artworks, we learn to attend to their formal qualities and to suspend attention to other features such as representative content or didactic force.
Trained musicians perceive the abstract pattern informing the sensuous sound of the performance. As Kishimoto Hideo states: " Ultimately, they are one for the Japanese. Charles A.
An aesthetically "pure and cheerful heart" akaki kiyoki kokoro is, consequently, the basis of communion with the kami, i. In this state of purity, one is connected to the order and harmony of Great Nature, the "sacrality of the total cosmos.
Tsubaki Grand Shrine. Because Shinto shrines are considered places of superior potency kami of the forces of life musubi , it is in these locations that worship services are most regularly held. In an article for the Japan Times , Michael Hoffman presents the oddity of the belief thus: Shinto teaches nothing, enjoins nothing, demands no submission, works no miracles, effaces evil by cleansing it, transmutes dread into joy.
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