Norito: A Translation of the Ancient Japanese Ritual Prayers - Updated Edition

The Japanese religion of Shinto has no holy book, no guide for how to live a moral life and achieve glory in heaven. It is very much a "this worldly" religion, trading worship of the kami in return for blessings on crops and weather. The traditions of worship, the calls to the kami for their blessing, have been handed down through the centuries and remain some of the little Japanese writing unaltered by outside influence. In "Norito," Donald L. Philippi has gathered together these calls to the kami, these prayers, from many ancient sources such as the "Engi-shiki" ("Procedures of the Engi Era,") the "Nihongi," the "Kojiki," the "Hitachi Fudoki" and the twelfth-century diary of a Fujiwara nobleman. He has brought them all together into this single book, and undertook modern translations, attempting as much as possible to retain the intended flavor of the original, without allowing the Western way of thinking about religion to influence the translations. The norito are heavily footnoted, introducing the formal thinking of the Emperor and the royal family, and the role of the kami deities. Reading these original prayers helps frame an understanding of Shinto, and the culture that spawned it. In addition to this valuable collection of norito, Joseph Kitagawa provides us with a lengthy opening preface discussing the norito and "The "Strangeness" of non-Western Traditions." This article, with insights into the norito, their origin and evolution, is as interesting as the prayers themselves. My only complaint of "Norito" is that I wish it were a bilingual edition, with the original Japanese norito included along with the translation. The ability to compare the original along with Philippi's interpretation would make a great book even better.

Few books can match Donald Philippi's "Norito" in its ability to transport us back to the very earliest days of Japanese history and thinking. This slender volume provides as fine an understanding as it is possible to obtain of Japan's original conceptions of religion. In the centuries that would follow the era that these "songs" represent, Japan would be transformed by the Buddhism introduced from China. By this process of cultural sharing, a native religion (Shinto) that had existed without written texts or formal doctrine, without much real estate or a church hierarchy, would be changed forever, losing its essential innocence and intimate relationship to nature.Philippi's "Norito" would be especially well teamed with a reading of Michiko Aoki's translation of the "Fudoki" ("Records of Wind and Earth"). This eighth-century gazeteer of regional information provides, far more than the contemporaneous and now better known "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" histories, a view of early Japanese life still relatively untouched by outside influences.