Place · island shrine · Japan
Itsukushima Shrine, Miyajima
The shrine built out over the water on Miyajima, with the great torii standing in the tide, and the third of the three great Benzaiten sites. Its Benzaiten image was kept at the adjoining Daiganji after the Meiji separation of Buddhism and Shinto forced the two apart. The island was held so sacred that for centuries no one was permitted to be born or to die on it.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.296, 132.320
Worth knowing
The Meiji edicts that separated Shinto from Buddhism in 1868 cut Benzaiten out of the shrine and left her next door, which is the clearest sign of how thoroughly an Indian deity had been absorbed: she had to be legislated apart from a Japanese one.
Connections (2)
- In the same set asEnoshima
The third and first of the three great Benzaiten. Itsukushima put its shrine out over the tide and Enoshima put its cave at the sea’s edge, and both were sacred islands before Benzaiten reached them — which is how she was received: an Indian water goddess arriving at places Japan already treated as holy because of the water.
- In the same set asHōgon-ji, Chikubushima
Itsukushima in the Inland Sea and Chikubushima in Lake Biwa, six hundred kilometres apart and joined only by the goddess. The three-site circuit is late medieval and devotional rather than doctrinal: nobody decided that Sarasvatī should be worshipped on islands, and by the time anybody noticed the pattern it was already the rule.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Itsukushima Shrine”, “Benzaiten” and “Shinbutsu bunri”.
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