Engishiki

The ritsuryo state of classical Japan governed by written codes, and the shiki were the procedural supplements that made the codes workable. The Engishiki, commissioned in 905 under Emperor Daigo and completed in 927 by a commission headed by Fujiwara no Tadahira, gathered and superseded earlier compilations, and its arrangement honoured the state's own priorities: the opening ten volumes belong to the Jingikan, the Department of Divinities, which stood formally beside the Council of State at the government's summit. These volumes regulate the liturgical year in exact detail, the prayers for good harvest in spring, the Kanname and Niiname harvest offerings, the June and December great purifications, the fire-pacifying and gate-blessing rites, and the tsukinami monthly offerings, specifying for each the offerings of cloth, sake, rice and weapons down to counted lengths and measures. They set the rules of the Saigu, the imperial princess sent as priestess to Ise, and of the Kamo priestess in the capital; they prescribe the Daijosai, the once-in-a-reign Great Food Offering by which a new emperor communes with the deities; and they administer the personnel, lands and taboo-words of the shrine system. The ambition throughout is completeness: worship of the kami rendered as procedure, so that the court's relationship with the divine order could be performed correctly forever.

Two portions of the Engishiki's Jingikan volumes have lived far beyond the Heian bureaucracy that produced them. The register of deities, the jinmyocho filling volumes nine and ten, lists the 2,861 shrines, enshrining 3,132 seats of kami, that received offerings from the court or the provinces, ranked into greater and lesser and annotated with their festivals' privileges. When the register was compiled it was an administrative roll; it became a patent of nobility. A shrine able to identify itself with an entry is a shikinaisha, a shrine within the Procedures, and the title remains a living distinction among Japanese shrines eleven centuries later, cited on shrine signboards and in local histories, the register serving historians meanwhile as a unique map of where and how the kami were worshipped in classical Japan.

Volume eight preserves the norito, twenty seven formal prayers in Old Japanese, among them the grand prayer for the harvest, the great purification formula with its catalogue of heavenly and earthly offences swept away to the sea, and the blessing of the palace. Their solemn parallel phrasing is the oldest surviving liturgical language of Shinto, still the model for prayers composed today. The full Engishiki, implemented in 967, remained a reference through the medieval collapse of the system it described, and modern Shinto studies, which take the text as a foundation document, read in it a religion already inseparable from the state that wrote it down.