Purify and Cleanse

This is a short Shinto purification formula, a plea that one be purified and cleansed, used at the water basins where worshippers rinse the hands and mouth before approaching a shrine, in the cold-water austerity of misogi, and in various purificatory contexts. Purity stands at the centre of Shinto: contact with death, illness and wrongdoing is understood to produce a pollution (kegare) that obstructs relationship with the kami, and it is removed through acts of washing and formal purification (harae).

The formula gives voice to this concern, asking the divine to restore the clean state in which one may rightly stand before the kami. Brief and widely used, it distils the tradition's characteristic conviction that impurity is not a permanent moral stain but a condition that can be washed away and renewed, so that the worshipper returns again and again to a state of purity through the simple, repeated acts of cleansing that pervade Shinto practice.