Religious values and the Environment
2014年3月29日 投稿者：宮司
以下は、2010年に、名古屋市でCOP10が開かれた折に、環境問題と神道の思想との関係について講演した物です。
Religious values and the Environment
The case of Shinto
Shinto is one of polytheisms. In Shinto, people are thinking the spiritual power in Nature and the spiritual energy of Ancestors as Kami, deities or divine being. This might be thought as one of animism, but something different. In this modernized Japan, people still do many Shinto festivals and eagerly participate in such rituals. This means such religious thinking is not contradictory to scientific thinking.
In the past, I asked one question to some of famous artists and scholars in Japan, “For you, what is Kami?” Among them, all of famous musicians and performing artists said, “Kami is the earth,” It was very symbolic answer for me. Earth means the place in this case. Some of shrines in Japan are thought as strong spiritual power spots. In almost all of shrines, there are some forests even if they are located in the center of the city. In such forests, you can easily find many plants, insects and animals. Forests are full of lives. Some scholars of Shinto are thinking that such shrine forests must be the bases of Shinto.
In Japan, there are many beautiful landscapes. Almost all of them are being thought as special sacred places of Japanese traditional faiths, Shinto and Buddhism. Mt. Fuji is a beautiful mountain where every person wants to climb, but it is also a sacred place of Fuji-Sengen Shrine and is thought as the place where the deity of Mt. Fuji is living.
When people using a fire, they do not think there is some deity in a fire.
But a fire will be dangerous when they mistreat it. So, they put a charm of deity controlling a fire, on the wall of the place they use a fire for praying the safety of a fire. In all dynamic movements of nature, there are some spiritual powers by deities. They are works of each deity, not of one deity. All lives are spiritual and humans are most spiritual.
The deities sometimes do evil things to humans. But, if human being prays to the deities who make evils and gives a pleasure to deities through feast, they change their character from bad to good! There are also reverse cases. If people stop offering feast for deities, they will get angry and give them evils. Japanese are thinking that good and evil are relative and unstable. Of course, recently much western culture comes to Japan, and some of people do not think so.
I think such style of thinking is common among the people who live all around of the Pacific Ocean. Thinking of monotheism, people think the world as a creature of God. But there is no such thinking in this region, so people have no confidence of the reasonableness of the world. So Nature and Humans co-exist in the borderless and unclear situation. Theory and system is a convenient but temporary one, so the world might not be understood.
People were praying for their prosperity, safety and many other issues to deities, accepting favors and co-existing with nature. But as the modernization comes flowing into Japan, a sense of western values becomes very popular and there occurs a loss of the rich and stable recognition in which Humans and Deities are living together.
In conclusion, unclear and unstable mind of human being is original disposition, so they might get stability of mind through finding spirituality in Nature and Ancestors, and having faith in such spirituality. This has been same situation from past to today.
Nature could not be controlled rationally, but we have to do our best for keeping diversity of nature.
Lectured at COP(Conference of the Parties)10
