Japan's Most Sacred Shinto Shrine Rebuilt Every 20yrs for More Than a Millennium
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ShintoismJapanese CultureTradition and Heritage
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Shintoism
Japanese Culture
Tradition and Heritage
The article discusses Japan's Ise Grand Shrine, which is rebuilt every 20 years, and the HN discussion revolves around the significance and financial implications of this tradition.
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Old man me thinks “$390 million? How are they funding this?! That seems like a massive sum of money to throw down the drain every 20 years.”
Then I did the back of envelope math. Assuming 20% comes from donations, then all you’d need is a $380m fund earning a real 3% to fund the building of the next temple. That’s very doable.
Something is “weird” when it is absurd, which is to say something that is aimless or has an aim that is not in the service of an objective good. There’s a deviance from the nature of the thing, like intentionally growing a tumor on your forehead or having a tumor growing out of your forward and then happily refusing to have it removed.
Otherwise, what is said of things that are merely unconventional.
So in this case, is there not a purpose? Is the purpose not spiritual and instructive in some sense? Are you not imposing an inappropriate tacit goal onto this practice?
Or perhaps you find it weird because it is nowhere to be found within your conventions?
probably.
Our stonemanship has unfortunately disappeared from lack of state support in the times the subcontinent was under foreign rule.
The shrine is the previous generation teaching the next to build the shrine.
So if the shrine were to fall, then the shrine would eventually fall.
That is why the shrine must keep falling, so that it can keep being rebuilt, and so the shrine keeps standing.
Finish one part of the building and the next part needs doing. And on and on it goes.
By contrast, Hōryū Gakumonji (法隆学問寺) is a 1350+ years old wooden structure more closely related to the themes of imported Buddhism long before the shinbutsu bunri (神仏分離) but in Japanese style. There are/were very large buddha figures carved into rock throughout Iran, Afghanistan, China during the Mongol period and also semi-contemporaneously c. ~7th century Japan's Usuki Stone Buddhas (臼杵磨崖仏).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine#Rebuilding_the_Shri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seng%C5%AB
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dry%C5%AB-ji
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinbutsu_bunri
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuki_Stone_Buddhas
Reminds me of what Jefferson said about the US constitution, but it should be rewritten every 19 years
Imagine how annoying that would be for an eternal being - 20 years might as well be 20 minutes. You just got settled in and the humans start moving stuff again!
Forty years ago, when he was 24, he drove his grandfather to participate in the tree-felling ceremony. “He said to me, ‘Do you know that the trees cry?’
“I answered, ‘No way, how could a tree cry?’”
But as they watched woodsmen chop down the cypress, “the sound of the axes echoed across the mountains, and after about an hour, when the axe struck the core of the tree, the scent of the cypress filled the air, flowing like blood,” he said.
At the final axe stroke, as the wood snapped, “the sound it made was like a shriek, a high-pitched ‘keee’ sound, and then the tree fell with a thunderous thud. In that moment, I thought, ‘Ah... it really cried.’ I felt as if the tree wept, mourning its own life, as if it knew its life was precious.”"
This was like sipping hot tea in the rain.
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