Chinkon means, roughly, pacifying or settling the spirit, and its oldest documented setting is entirely court centered: the Chinkonsai, a nocturnal rite performed each winter, traditionally on the day before the Niiname-sai first fruits festival, in which court ritualists were understood to strengthen and stabilize the emperor's own tama, or spirit, believed to weaken as the year's vitality waned toward winter. The rite involved chanting, and in some historical descriptions a ritual dance in which a spear was used to stir a covered box or jar said to contain a symbolic representation of the spirit being calmed, a practice whose precise original meaning is debated by historians of Shinto ritual, since the Heian period sources that describe it are already interpreting older, less well documented practice.
The underlying premise, that a person's vital spirit is not a fixed, permanently secure possession but something that can weaken, wander or need periodic settling, and that this settling can be achieved through structured ritual technique rather than left to chance, distinguishes chinkon from more general Shinto notions of purification and would prove adaptable to a very different setting many centuries later, once nineteenth century Shinto revivalists began looking for a native meditative discipline distinct from imported Buddhist practice.