The Sacred Science of Ancient Japan

Author: Avery Morrow
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591437504
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
The first English translation and examination of secret Japanese writings dating from the paleolithic to classical eras • Examines four suppressed and secret texts to discover the deeper truths beneath Japanese mythology • Introduces evidence of ancient civilizations in Japan, the sacred geometry of primitive times, and claims of a non-Earthly origin of the Emperors • Explores how these texts convey the sacred spiritual science of Japan’s Golden Age with parallels in ancient India, Europe, and Egypt In Japan there are roughly two dozen secret manuscripts originally dating back to the paleolithic era, the age of heroes and gods, that have been handed down by the ruling families for centuries. Rejected by orthodox Japanese scholars and never before translated into English, these documents speak of primeval alphabets, lost languages, forgotten technologies, and the sacred spiritual science. Some even refer to UFOs, Atlantis, and Jesus coming to Japan. Translating directly from the original Japanese, Avery Morrow explores four of these manuscripts in full as well as reviewing the key stories of the other Golden Age chronicles. In the Kujiki manuscript Morrow uncovers the secret symbolism of a Buddhist saint and the origin of a modern prophecy of apocalypse. In the Hotsuma Tsutaye manuscript he reveals the exploits of a noble tribe who defeated a million-strong army without violence. In the Takenouchi Documents he shows us how the first Japanese emperor came from another world and ruled at a time when Atlantis and Mu still existed. And in the Katakamuna Documents the author unveils the sacred geometries of the universe from the symbolic songs of the 10,000-year-old Ashiya tribe. He also discusses the lost scripts known as the Kamiyo Moji and the magic spiritual science that underlies all of these texts, which enabled initiates to ascend to higher emotional states and increase their life force. Taking a spiritual approach à la Julius Evola to these “parahistorical” chronicles, Morrow shows how they access a higher order of knowledge and demonstrate direct parallels to many ancient texts of India, Europe, and Egypt.

The Invention of Religion in Japan

Author: Jason Ānanda Josephson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226412342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
Throughout its long history, Japan had no concept of what we call “religion.” There was no corresponding Japanese word, nor anything close to its meaning. But when American warships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 and forced the Japanese government to sign treaties demanding, among other things, freedom of religion, the country had to contend with this Western idea. In this book, Jason Ananda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. More than a tale of oppression or hegemony, Josephson’s account demonstrates that the process of articulating religion offered the Japanese state a valuable opportunity. In addition to carving out space for belief in Christianity and certain forms of Buddhism, Japanese officials excluded Shinto from the category. Instead, they enshrined it as a national ideology while relegating the popular practices of indigenous shamans and female mediums to the category of “superstitions”—and thus beyond the sphere of tolerance. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. This ambitious and wide-ranging book contributes an important perspective to broader debates on the nature of religion, the secular, science, and superstition.

Sacred Mathematics

Author: Fukagawa Hidetoshi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400829712
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries Japan was totally isolated from the West by imperial decree. During that time, a unique brand of homegrown mathematics flourished, one that was completely uninfluenced by developments in Western mathematics. People from all walks of life--samurai, farmers, and merchants--inscribed a wide variety of geometry problems on wooden tablets called sangaku and hung them in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines throughout Japan. Sacred Mathematics is the first book published in the West to fully examine this tantalizing--and incredibly beautiful--mathematical tradition. Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman present for the first time in English excerpts from the travel diary of a nineteenth-century Japanese mathematician, Yamaguchi Kanzan, who journeyed on foot throughout Japan to collect temple geometry problems. The authors set this fascinating travel narrative--and almost everything else that is known about temple geometry--within the broader cultural and historical context of the period. They explain the sacred and devotional aspects of sangaku, and reveal how Japanese folk mathematicians discovered many well-known theorems independently of mathematicians in the West--and in some cases much earlier. The book is generously illustrated with photographs of the tablets and stunning artwork of the period. Then there are the geometry problems themselves, nearly two hundred of them, fully illustrated and ranging from the utterly simple to the virtually impossible. Solutions for most are provided. A unique book in every respect, Sacred Mathematics demonstrates how mathematical thinking can vary by culture yet transcend cultural and geographic boundaries.

Reinventing the Sacred

Author: Stuart A Kauffman
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 046501240X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Consider the woven integrated complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awe-inspiring to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell, or to consider that the living organism was created by the evolving biosphere? As the eminent complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman explains in this ambitious and groundbreaking new book, people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality. For those who believe in a Creator God, no science will ever disprove that belief. In Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman argues that the science of complexity provides a way to move beyond reductionist science to something new: a unified culture where we see God in the creativity of the universe, biosphere, and humanity. Kauffman explains that the ceaseless natural creativity of the world can be a profound source of meaning, wonder, and further grounding of our place in the universe. His theory carries with it a new ethic for an emerging civilization and a reinterpretation of the divine. He asserts that we are impelled by the imperative of life itself to live with faith and courage-and the fact that we do so is indeed sublime. Reinventing the Sacred will change the way we all think about the evolution of humanity, the universe, faith, and reason.

Sacred Kingship in World History

Author: A. Azfar Moin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555407
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 653

Book Description
Sacred kingship has been the core political form, in small-scale societies and in vast empires, for much of world history. This collaborative and interdisciplinary book recasts the relationship between religion and politics by exploring this institution in long-term and global comparative perspective. Editors A. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern present a theoretical framework for understanding sacred kingship, which leading scholars reflect on and respond to in a series of essays. They distinguish between two separate but complementary religious tendencies, immanentism and transcendentalism, which mold kings into divinized or righteous rulers, respectively. Whereas immanence demands priestly and cosmic rites from kings to sustain the flourishing of life, transcendence turns the focus to salvation and subordinates rulers to higher ethical objectives. Secular modernity does not end the struggle between immanence and transcendence—flourishing and righteousness—but only displaces it from kings onto nations and individuals. After an essay by Marshall Sahlins that ranges from the Pacific to the Arctic, the book contains chapters on religion and kingship in settings as far-flung as ancient Egypt, classical Greece, medieval Islam, Mughal India, modern European drama, and ISIS. Sacred Kingship in World History sheds new light on how religion has constructed rulership, with implications spanning global history, religious studies, political theory, and anthropology.

Religion, Power, and the Rise of Shinto in Early Modern Japan

Author: Stefan Köck
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350181080
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
This book sheds new light on the relationship between religion and state in early modern Japan, and demonstrates the growing awareness of Shinto in both the political and the intellectual elite of Tokugawa Japan, even though Buddhism remained the privileged means of stately religious control. The first part analyses how the Tokugawa government aimed to control the populace via Buddhism and at the same time submitted Buddhism to the sacralization of the Tokugawa dynasty. The second part focuses on the religious protests throughout the entire period, with chapters on the suppression of Christians, heterodox Buddhist sects, and unwanted folk practitioners. The third part tackles the question of why early Tokugawa Confucianism was particularly interested in “Shinto” as an alternative to Buddhism and what “Shinto” actually meant from a Confucian stance. The final part of the book explores attempts to curtail the institutional power of Buddhism by reforming Shinto shrines, an important step in the so called “Shintoization of shrines” including the development of a self-contained Shinto clergy.

The Sacred Science

Author: Nick Polizzi
Publisher: Hay House
ISBN: 1401952917
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
In the work of documentary filmmakers, explains Nick Polizzi, one cardinal rule is never forget that your job is to document, not participate. But when Nick set out to explore the native outback of the Americas - meeting healers, shamans, and medicine women and tapping their well of ancient wisdom, nearly lost to the rest of the world - he had to bend that rule. As he found his way into highly sacred and often very private shamanic ceremonies, not participating ceased to be an option. Nick invites readers along on his journey of discovery to make indigenous knowledge of healing accessible to us all.

Creation of the Sacred

Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674175709
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Sacrifice is essential to all religions. Could there be a natural, even biological, reason? Why are sacrifice and numerous other religious rituals and concepts shared by so many different cultures? In this extraordinary book, one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient religions explores the possibility of natural religion.

Civilization and Monsters

Author: Gerald A. Figal
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822324188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
Discusses the representation/role of the supernatural or the "fantastic" in the construction of Japanese modernism in late 19th and early 20th century Japan.

The Lost Wolves of Japan

Author: Brett L. Walker
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295989939
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Book Description
Many Japanese once revered the wolf as Oguchi no Magami, or Large-Mouthed Pure God, but as Japan began its modern transformation wolves lost their otherworldly status and became noxious animals that needed to be killed. By 1905 they had disappeared from the country. In this spirited and absorbing narrative, Brett Walker takes a deep look at the scientific, cultural, and environmental dimensions of wolf extinction in Japan and tracks changing attitudes toward nature through Japan's long history. Grain farmers once worshiped wolves at shrines and left food offerings near their dens, beseeching the elusive canine to protect their crops from the sharp hooves and voracious appetites of wild boars and deer. Talismans and charms adorned with images of wolves protected against fire, disease, and other calamities and brought fertility to agrarian communities and to couples hoping to have children. The Ainu people believed that they were born from the union of a wolflike creature and a goddess. In the eighteenth century, wolves were seen as rabid man-killers in many parts of Japan. Highly ritualized wolf hunts were instigated to cleanse the landscape of what many considered as demons. By the nineteenth century, however, the destruction of wolves had become decidedly unceremonious, as seen on the island of Hokkaido. Through poisoning, hired hunters, and a bounty system, one of the archipelago's largest carnivores was systematically erased. The story of wolf extinction exposes the underside of Japan's modernization. Certain wolf scientists still camp out in Japan to listen for any trace of the elusive canines. The quiet they experience reminds us of the profound silence that awaits all humanity when, as the Japanese priest Kenko taught almost seven centuries ago, we "look on fellow sentient creatures without feeling compassion."