context: architecture > origins > shinto

What is Shinto Architecture?

an 80' high torii from 1929, marking the entrance to the Heian Jingu shrine

Essentially shinto, the ancient animistic indigenous religion of Japan, was pretty shapeless - indeed, it seems to have only been named to distinguish it from Buddhism, when that came to Japan in the 6th Century. Originally, a shinto shrine was a place of natural beauty (rocks, gnarled trees, that kind of thing) marked off with a boundary of smaller rocks or a rope. I suspect that is below the threshhold where we can talk about architecture, but I don't know what else it is - the Japanese always included the outside in their architecture, and maybe this is where that started.

From the 5th century, buildings began to be created for this purpose: the most notable shinto shrine of this kind can be seen on the next oage. There were others - Izumo is also famous - but nonetheless the practice of defining an outside space as a shrine never went away. From around the 9th Century, shinto shrines were allowed inside the precincts of Buddhist temples - shinto was interpreted as some kind of specialised local manifestation of the Buddhist spirit.

The torii (it means 'bird roost') was the standard marker of an entrance to a shinto shrine, and is one of the distinctive symbols of Japan.

forwards: Ise Jingu