The most sacred shrine in Shinto is a plain cypress building that is torn down and rebuilt, identically, every twenty years — and has been for some thirteen centuries.
Tagged: Architecture Temple/Shrine Ancient Devotional Extant Sacred Renewal Shikinen Sengu Jinja Shinto Shinto
Why It Stands Here
Ise answers the question of permanence backward: the shrine is preserved by never being kept. The shikinen sengu rebuilding makes renewal itself the sacred act, and the craft lineages that carry it are as much the artwork as the building.
The Inner Shrine (Naiku) houses Amaterasu, the sun goddess and ancestress of the imperial line; the Outer Shrine (Geku) serves Toyouke, goddess of food and industry. Both are built of unpainted cypress with raised floors, forked finials, and thatched roofs, without a single nail, in a style older than Buddhism's arrival in Japan.
Every twenty years, in the rite of shikinen sengu, an identical shrine rises on the adjacent plot, the deity is transferred by night, and the old building is dismantled, its timbers distributed to shrines across Japan. The 62nd rebuilding took place in 2013. Between the trees of the shrine forest, the holiest object in Shinto is perpetually twenty years old at most — and some thirteen centuries old in form.
References
Related Across the Site
- The Dilwara Temples Art Entry — Five Jain temples on Mount Abu whose plain exteriors open into marble interiors carved to the thinness of lace — the summit of Jain temple art.
- The Golden Temple Art Entry — A gilded sanctum standing in the middle of a sacred pool, reached by one causeway and entered by doors on all four sides — open to every direction and every caste.
- The Great Stupa at Sanchi Art Entry — The oldest stone stupa in India, begun under Ashoka and crowned with four carved gateways: the reliquary mound as Buddhism's first monumental art, and its first aniconic center.
- The Hanging Temple Art Entry — A monastery of forty halls pinned to a cliff face on Mount Heng, holding altars to Confucius, Laozi, and the Buddha under one roof — the Three Teachings in a single building.
- The Shintai Mirror Art Entry — Behind the doors of a Shinto shrine sits an object no one looks at — a mirror, sword, or stone that is the seat of the kami. The pictured mirror is of the kind enshrined; the enshrined mirror itself has never been photographed.
- The Shiva Linga Art Entry — A polished stone shaft rising from its base, bathed daily in water, milk, and flowers: the aniconic murti of Shiva, worshipped not as a symbol of an absent god but as the god's own form.
- The Yazd Fire Temple Art Entry — A temple in Yazd whose sacred fire has been kept burning, by the tradition's account, since about 470 CE — carried from shrine to shrine across fifteen centuries and tended daily behind glass.
- The Ise Carpenters (Miyadaiku) Artist — The master shrine carpenters who rebuild Ise Jingu every twenty years with hand tools and unjoined cypress — a craft transmitted by being performed.