Tiny God

I’ve been reading Things Become Other Things, a book by friend-of-the-blog Craig Mod. As I expected, it is a great read. To be savored. If you are like me, it will put you in a pleasant state and inspire you at the very least to go for a walk.

Here is one passage that resonated with me. It was a reminder of the kind of person I would like to be when interacting with humans, and offered a strangely nice method for doing it more:

…many of the natural features along the routes are considered to be deities. He means the mountains but I take it to mean the people. Each a tiny god.

So I stop and chat. I’ll stop and chat with most anyone.

Craig’s book is the result of his walking through a rural and especially spiritual part of Japan, the Kii Peninsula, and about the musings and insights and healing we get from walking.

Tangent: The passage is in the context of a discussion of Shintoism and Buddhism and their syncretic history in Japan, and the book is of extra interest to me because the Kii Peninsula and specifically Koyasan located thereon are closely connected to our local object of reverence, Takaosan. The Shingon Buddhism and Shugendo mountain asceticism practiced by our* monks are very similar to those of Koyasan. Our monks go there to train. They are indeed adamant that their practices and the primary Izuna Daigongen deity of Takaosan are not just Buddhism** and far more complex. They are of the mentality prevalent in Japan that I treasure: Religious traditions and strains of spirituality don’t have to be in competition, or even delineated strictly, to be of use to society. I would say that we derive maximum benefit the less that beliefs are pitted against one another or forced into a clear-cut taxonomy.

(It is fine for you to set all this aside. I just get more engaged when there is even a tenuous personal connection, like Koyasan-Takaosan.)

It is reasonable or at least a useful exercise to consider the world and all the things and life in it to have some kind of spirit. By this, I guess I mean that there is more to the things and people we meet than just what we can see. Don’t we sometimes sense something more, say, when we stand quietly alone in the woods? So many people also point out that if you zoom out from Earth, we are all just part of a tiny speck. We all affect each other, empirically, as things and beings. We are more connected than we are usually aware. All this is beyond cliché.

A deep cut of belief that I love from the Mormonism in which I was raised is that all matter has a spirit. This always struck me as very Shinto***.

The concept of kami in Shintoism is often translated as “god” or “gods", but a mind developed in christianity such as mine tends to think of a god as being perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful, and so on, but that’s not a very precise rendering of what kami means. As the above Wikipedia link quickly and dirtily says, in Shintoism it’s much broader. The cast of kami includes a lot more quirkiness and capriciousness, which I for one find more rational and enjoyable.

Craig mentions the Miyazaki film Spirited Away in the book, and I thank him for it: It perfectly illustrates the quirky and whimsical possibilities in the traditions and concept of kami in Shintoism, with scenes like this, when sundry kami are visiting a bathhouse and waited on by humans and other beings.

If you take the easy bridge from the idea of spirit to god, in the sense that every kind of spirit deserves to be revered, you have arrived at every human deserving reverence as a kind of god.

I can think of a lot of interactions with people when I could have imagined them as some quirky god and enjoyed the situation much more. And I am one hell of a quirky god myself, being unusual in myriad ways, but also behaving warmly to strangers one moment and taking umbrage at some silly thing the next in an embarrassingly mercurial way. The passage made me look back on specific interactions and reimagine them through the quirky god lens. I think I left some opportunities on the table.

Interacting with one of these gods the same way we view the whimsical bathhouse-guest gods of Spirited Away, maybe their strangeness or irrationality (by our arbitrary sensibilities, anyway) or unwanted inquiries or gruffness, etc., become easier to tolerate, navigate, and, possibly, eventually, embrace.

What a nice thing, to be a big enough person to do that.

So yeah, I liked that passage of Things Become Other Things.

The passage appeared when I was reading on my roof, looking up at Mount Takao in the background. Special thanks to Craig for the adjacent photograph of a keitora, another tiny god in my personal belief system.

*To say “our” is perhaps presumptuous, but for example, I did spend two days this month on the Mt. Takao Shotenkai bus trip, chatting with and pouring beers for the Yakuoin monk who is in charge of the waterfall for which I named my company.

**Buddhism is what they chose when Japan’s government required religious institutions under Shinbutsu Bunri laws to declare whether they were Buddhism or Shinto in the late 1800s.

***Nice work, Joseph Smith, you communist Shintoist, you.