Great Purification Prayer

The Great Purification Prayer, known in Japanese as the Oharae no Kotoba, grounds its ritual authority in myth rather than abstract command: it recounts the storm god Susanoo's offenses against his sister Amaterasu and the gods' subsequent expulsion of him, then describes how the resulting impurity was scattered and carried away by a sequence of purifying deities, from mountain streams down to the sea and finally into the underworld. By narrating impurity as something that has already, mythically, been successfully removed once before, the prayer treats the present ritual not as an experiment but as a re-enactment of an established, working pattern. Its language survives because it was written down in the Engishiki, a tenth-century compilation of court law and ceremonial procedure, though the practice of communal purification it describes, called oharae, is generally understood to be considerably older than that written record.

Because so much of early Shinto ritual speech was transmitted orally rather than in texts meant to be read outside ceremonial performance, the Engishiki's preservation of this prayer's full wording is unusually valuable to historians of Japanese religion, offering a rare window onto formal court liturgy from before the medieval period.

Unlike prayers spoken by an individual on their own behalf, the Great Purification Prayer is recited by a Shinto priest on behalf of an entire community, historically the imperial court and today typically a shrine's parishioners, at the twice-yearly oharae ceremonies held at the end of June and the end of December, marking the midpoint and close of the ritual year. Participants at these ceremonies often pass through or step over a large ring made of woven chinowa grass, or pass paper effigies over their bodies to transfer impurity, called kegare, onto the effigy before it is disposed of, actions performed alongside rather than instead of the priest's recitation.

The concept of kegare that the prayer addresses is not primarily moral guilt in the Western theological sense but a kind of accumulated ritual pollution that builds up through ordinary life, including illness, death and various forms of disorder, and that periodic purification is understood to be necessary to clear regardless of individual intention or wrongdoing. This distinguishes the Great Purification Prayer sharply from penitential prayers in traditions built around personal confession, since here the ritual specialist acts for the group and impurity is treated as a condition to be removed rather than a sin to be forgiven.