Shinto (Kojiki + Nihongi) — Core Principles (core-principle)

Minimal value set synthesized from the five-segment Age-of-the-Gods distillation (N=1; Kojiki Preface + Sects. I–XVIII; 15 segment principles), cross-attested against the Nihongi (Aston, 1896). Primary source: Chamberlain, Kojiki (1882). Method: 00-methodology.md. This is one structured reading, not authoritative (no within-tradition reviewer secured). Each principle carries a cross-tradition note — the claim that may converge vs the warrant (foundation) that may diverge — to feed the cross-tradition Atlas.

Read this first — the non-doctrinal limitation (restated)

Shinto (神道, "the way of the kami") has no founder, no creed, and no systematic ethical code. Its classical "scriptures" are imperial mytho-histories — they tell a story and presuppose a practice; they do not make doctrinal claims. Therefore this principle set is, by design, thinner and more inferred than the other Plan 010 traditions:

These are enacted or presupposed values, drawn from what the myths do and the rites they describe — not asserted doctrine. (When Izanagi calls the land of the dead "polluted" and washes, the text does not teach "pollution is bad"; it enacts the value. We extract the enacted value and label it as such.)
Where the other traditions yield 10–15 principles, Shinto honestly yields 8. Fewer is the correct result, not a coverage failure. The absence of doctrine is itself recorded as data (see structural-analysis.md).
We do not read later systematic ethics (Motoori, Hirata, Confucian/Buddhist syncretism, State Shinto) back into the eighth-century myths. Such readings are flagged LATER-READING, never counted as text-internal.
Imposing any propositional principle structure on a practice-centred tradition is already an outsider's move. It is owned here explicitly. Do not over-read systematic ethics into myth.

Three historical phases the reader must disentangle (anti-fabrication framing)

Any Western reader who has encountered "Shintō" via histories of WWII-era Japan, popular comparative-religion surveys, or modern shrine-tourism guides carries LATER-READING baggage that the 8th-century Kojiki/Nihongi corpus cannot bear. Three distinct historical phases must be held apart from one another and from the classical narrative substrate this distillation extracts:

Pre-Meiji shinbutsu-shūgō 神仏習合 (roughly Nara through Edo, ~1,000 years) — Shintō and Buddhism were institutionally fused; the honji suijaku 本地垂迹 doctrine (kami as local traces of buddhas) was the dominant interpretive lens (Kuroda, "Shinto in the History of Japanese Religion," JJS 7:1, 1981; Breen & Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
State Shinto (1868–1945) — the Meiji-era shinbutsu-bunri 神仏分離 (1868) separation of Shintō from Buddhism, the Jingikan / Ise system, nationalist mobilization, imperial-descent ideology — largely dismantled by the SCAP Shinto Directive of 15 December 1945 (Hardacre, Shinto: A History, OUP, 2017, chs. 9–13).
Postwar Shrine Shintō + Sect Shintō (Kyōha, 1945–present) — the Jinja Honchō (Association of Shintō Shrines) federation; the 13 Kyōha (Sect) Shintō streams (Tenrikyō, Konkōkyō, Kurozumikyō, etc.) that the State Shinto period had administratively distinguished from "non-religious" shrine cult (Hardacre 2017, ch. 11).

The 8th-century Age-of-the-Gods corpus predates all three. This distillation is neither the Nara–Edo Buddhist-fused practice, nor the Meiji-State imperial cult, nor postwar shrine federation — it is the classical narrative substrate that all three drew from. Reading any of these later layers back into the Kojiki/Nihongi is precisely the methodological error Kuroda 1981 named as constitutive of the modern "Shinto" construct.

Why 8

8 emerged from clustering the 15 segment principles by intent. The center of gravity is practice and presence, not belief: the densest threads are kami-presence in nature (P1), purity/misogi (P3), and communal ritual/matsuri (P6). No principle here functions as a creed; even P7 (sincerity/makoto) is the nearest the tradition comes to a "cardinal virtue," and it is inferred more than stated.

The 8 principles

P1 — Kami pervade the natural world as specific, named, located presences; nature is sacred presence

Sea, wind, mountains, rivers, trees, moors, the sun, the very islands of the land — each is born as a kami and bears an honorific name. To live among nature is to live among sacred presences. Reverence for the natural world is therefore basic, not derived. Crucially: kami are specific, named, often anthropomorphic, located presences — Amaterasu, Susano-o, Ōkuninushi are kami, as are the Mountain-deity and the River-deity. The cosmos is not undifferentiated nature-spirit, not pantheist "divinity of nature," and not Western neo-pagan animism — it is a populated pantheon-of-presences, each enacted in its place (Hardacre, Shinto: A History, OUP, 2017, ch. 1; Breen & Teeuwen 2010, ch. 1). Reverence-for-nature is therefore a practice (reverencing these presences, here), not the belief-claim that "nature is divine."

Covers: S2-P1, Pf-P1 (in part) · Evidence: Kojiki V–VI; cross-attested Nihongi I
Untranslatable: kami — sacred presence/power in nature, ancestors, and awe-inspiring things; not "god" in the monotheistic sense, not a systematic pantheon, not undifferentiated nature-spirit, not Western neo-pagan animism — specific, named, located presences (Chamberlain flattens kami to "Deity," which loses the specific-presence register).
Cross-tradition note: strong convergence candidate at the claim level (reverence/care for the natural world). The warrant diverges sharply: nature is reverenced not as a transcendent God's creation but as itself kami — and not as monistic nature-spirit either, but as a plurality of specific presences. Claim (nature is sacred and to be revered) converges; warrant (nature is a populated field of specific kami, neither created by a transcendent God nor reducible to undifferentiated divinity-of-nature) diverges from both creation-ex-nihilo traditions and Western nature-spirituality framings.

P2 — The cosmos is born, not made (musubi); life is endlessly generative

Reality is a self-generating becoming: the first kami "are born," life "sprouts like a reed-shoot," and the two primal creator deities are named for musubi — the producing/binding power. Generativity persists even through death and decay: kami are born from the dying Izanami, food-plants spring from a slain kami's body, and for every thousand who die, fifteen hundred are born.

Covers: S1-P1, S2-P3, S3-P3, Pf-P1 · Evidence: Kojiki I, VII, IX; cross-attested Nihongi I
Untranslatable: musubi — the generative, binding, life-producing power, present in the very names of the first creator kami (Taka-mi-musubi, Kami-musubi).
Cross-tradition note: Shinto's sharpest divergence — its anattā-grade case. A born, non-created cosmos with no creator directly contradicts Abrahamic creation ex nihilo. Claim (reverence for origins and the generativity of life; life affirmed over death) loosely converges; warrant (a generative, non-creator cosmos in which kami arise within nature) diverges fundamentally.

P3 — Purity matters; pollution (kegare) is to be cleansed, not punished

Contact with death and decay produces kegare — a clouding, burdening pollution. The response is purification (misogi/harae), characteristically by water: Izanagi, returning from the land of the dead, plunges into the stream and washes. Crucially, kegare is a state to be washed away, not a moral sin incurring guilt before a judging God.

Covers: S3-P1, Pf-P2 · Evidence: Kojiki IX–X; doubly cross-attested Nihongi I
Untranslatable: kegare (pollution/defilement, lit. "withering," esp. of death/decay); tsumi (offence/blemish to be removed, closer to "blockage" than "sin"); harae/misogi (purification rite / water-ablution — the central Shinto act).
Cross-tradition note: WEAK-distinctive jewel. Claim ("cleanliness/freshness matters and can be ritually restored") loosely echoes purity codes elsewhere (Levitical tahor/tamei, Islamic wudu); the warrant diverges sharply — a same-word/different-referent case. Kegare is an existential-ritual state centred on death/decay, removable by water, not a moral guilt; there is no doctrine of sin-as-disobedience. Purity ≠ moral purity; pollution ≠ sin.

P4 — Purification is generative — from cleansing come light and life

Purification is not merely negative removal. From Izanagi's misogi the greatest kami are born, including the Sun-Goddess Amaterasu. Cleansing renews and produces; purity and brightness are themselves sources of life and order.

Covers: S3-P2 · Evidence: Kojiki X–XI; cross-attested Nihongi I
Untranslatable: misogi (water-purification); Takama-no-hara (the Plain of High Heaven, the domain Amaterasu is charged to rule).
Cross-tradition note: tightly bound to P3 — kept separate because the positive/generative face of purity (cleansing yields light, not just the absence of stain) is a distinctive Shinto emphasis. Claim (renewal/freshness as life-giving) converges loosely; warrant (purity as cosmogonically productive) is frame-specific. Note: more inferred than asserted — the text enacts it in the birth-from-washing, never states it as doctrine.

P5 — Reverence for origins, ancestry, and lineage; kinship with the kami

Creation is "the ancestors of all things"; humans, nature, and the kami share a generative descent. The myths are framed (in Yasumaro's Preface) as the transmission of true ancient matters across generations, and the great kami are charged each with a proper domain to pass on.

Covers: Pf-P1, S3-P4 (in part), S1-P2 (descent/charge) · Evidence: Kojiki Preface, I, X–XI; cross-attested Nihongi I
Untranslatable: kami (here as honoured ancestral presence); musubi (the binding descent).
Cross-tradition note: more inferred than the others — flagged. The classical texts assert imperial descent (their political purpose), not a general "honour your ancestors" ethic; the broad ancestor-reverence so central to lived Shinto (household kamidana, ancestral rites) is largely a LATER-READING / practice-layer value, only loosely grounded in the eighth-century narrative. Claim (reverence for ancestors and origins) converges very widely; the text-internal warrant here is thin and is honestly marked as such.

P6 — Harmony and light are restored through joyful communal ritual (matsuri)

When the Sun-Goddess withdraws into the Rock-Dwelling and the world darkens, the kami do not coerce her out — they gather and perform a rite: assembly, divination, a mirror and jewels, a sacred tree, offerings, recited liturgy (norito), and the dance and laughter of Ame-no-Uzume that draw the light back. This is the template of matsuri: community + ritual + festal joy restores harmony.

Covers: S4-P1, S2-P2, Pf-P2 (ritual) · Evidence: Kojiki XVI; cross-attested Nihongi I
Untranslatable: matsuri (festival/worship/service to the kami — the lived heart of the tradition); norito (recited liturgy).
Cross-tradition note: structurally central to Shinto and a key Atlas datum. Claim (communal worship sustains the community) converges with liturgical traditions; the warrant is distinctive — ritual here is effective and relational toward the kami, and festal/joyful, not primarily obedience to a moral law or atonement for sin. Shinto's emphasis falls on celebratory communal practice, not doctrine or guilt-resolution.

P7 — Sincerity and a true, bright heart (makoto); truth over falsehood

The nearest Shinto has to a cardinal virtue: a true, bright, undivided heart (akaki kokoro). The Kojiki exists to "erase falsehood" and "determine the truth," and right ritual succeeds when performed sincerely and in proper order. Sincerity of heart, not creed, is what is asked.

Covers: Pf-P3, S2-P2 (sincere observance) · Evidence: Kojiki Preface, IV–V; (Nihongi has no parallel preface)
Untranslatable: makoto — sincerity / a true, bright, undivided heart.
Cross-tradition note: strong convergence candidate — claim (sincerity, truthfulness, integrity of heart) converges very widely (cf. prophetic critiques of empty ritual, Confucian cheng). Warrant differs: makoto is an aesthetic-moral brightness/purity of heart, continuous with P3's purity, not obedience to a revealed law. Note: the only place the tradition speaks about a value rather than enacting it — and even there, framed as imperial record-keeping.

P8 — Right ordering of roles; the strong protect the vulnerable; sustenance is sacred gift

Refusing one's charged role brings woe and expulsion (Susano-o's disorder); the same strength, rightly turned, protects the weak (slaying the serpent to save the daughter). Food — the staple grains born from a kami's body — is received as gift, grounding gratitude and the harvest festivals. Aid is owed to "all living people… when they fall into troublous circumstances."

Covers: S4-P2, S4-P3, S3-P4, S1-P2 · Evidence: Kojiki III, IX, XII, XVII, XVIII; cross-attested Nihongi I
Untranslatable: kami (the giver of sustenance); (matsuri — esp. harvest/rice-offering — as the lived form of gratitude).
Cross-tradition note: broad convergence at the claim level (keep your role; protect the weak; gratitude for sustenance; relieve the distressed). Warrant: relational harmony and gift-gratitude toward the kami and community, not a commanded moral code. A composite, supporting principle — it gathers the more diffuse relational/ethical motifs that the narrative carries by story rather than rule (the methodology's MOTIF tier), and is the most loosely bound of the eight.

Convergence/divergence summary (Atlas preview)

Likely cross-tradition convergence (claim level)	Likely divergence (warrant/foundation)
P1 reverence for nature · P7 sincerity/truthfulness · P6 communal worship sustains community · P8 protect the weak / gratitude for food · P2 (life over death)	P2 musubi (born, non-created cosmos, no creator) · P3 kegare (pollution ≠ sin; removed by water, not forgiven) · P4 purity as cosmogonically generative · P6 ritual as festal/relational not atoning

These are hypotheses for the Atlas to test via the claim-vs-warrant method, not settled findings.

Quality

Source coverage: all 15 segment principles across the 5 N=1 files map to ≥1 core-principle principle (the genealogical/annalistic remainder of the Kojiki and Nihongi is out of scope by design — principle-thin).
Traceability: each core-principle principle lists covered segment principles + evidence sections.
Standalone comprehension: each principle stated to be intelligible to an outsider, with the frame-specific warrant flagged separately.
Under-claim check: each principle re-examined for over-reading systematic doctrine into myth. P4, P5, and P8 are explicitly flagged as more inferred / thinner / partly LATER-READING than P1–P3, P6–P7.
Scope note: classical Age-of-the-Gods myths only. The norito (liturgical) layer, the lived household/shrine practice layer, and post-classical (medieval, sectarian, State) Shinto are deferred to supplementary and would chiefly sharpen P3, P5, P6 — not add new doctrine (the tradition has none to add).
Quotes verified Phase 7 R2 char-for-char audit — 12/12 PASS post-NEEDS_REVIEW closure (1 Kojiki §XII shalt→shall fix; 1 Nihongi misogi parallel quoted in full).
Structural-completeness (structural-completeness Phase 3, 2026-05-30): PASS (12/12 canonical taxonomies covered against the canonical theme-taxonomy list; honest-thinness framing HOLDS; N=8 unchanged — 0 standalone-new, 0 missing).
- Standalone principles (0 new): the existing N=8 already covers the constituents of every text-internal canonical structure — kami (P1), musubi (P2), kegare/misogi (P3/P4), the assembly+festival template (P6), makoto (P7), the relational-ethical motifs (P8). The structural-completeness audit (audit-deep-shinto.md) and Phase 2.5 cross-check (audit-deep-shinto-crosscheck.md) both confirmed 0 MISSING.
- Sub-elements (clearly anchored): (i) Yaoyorozu no kami 八百万の神 ("the eight-million kami") is a sub-element of P1 (kami-in-nature) + P6 (matsuri / Rock-Dwelling) — a quantitative-poetic idiom for the uncountable plurality of kami, structurally enacted by P6's Kojiki §XVI Rock-Dwelling assembly ("the eight hundred myriad Deities assemble in a divine assembly") and presupposed throughout P1's nature-kami enumeration; promoting a count to a doctrinal principle would misclassify a poetic idiom. (ii) Ise vs. Izumo lineages (Kojiki §§XX–XXVII Izumo cycle vs the Amaterasu-Yamato line) is a sub-element of 00-methodology.md canon-selection note + structurally P1 (kami plurality across places) — composite-canon evidence that "Shinto" is multiple shrine traditions, structurally reflected by structural-analysis.md's loose-decentralized-web finding. (iii) The constituents of the Kami / Makoto / Kegare-Harae triad (Picken's pedagogical bundle) are each standalone — kami anchors P1, makoto is P7, kegare/harae is P3/P4; only the bundled-as-system claim defers as cat-3. (iv) The constituents of the "Four Shintō Virtues" (Picken's didactic synthesis): makoto is P7; kannagara 惟神 is enacted by P1+P6; wa 和 is enacted by P6 (matsuri restoring harmony) and the diffuse-ethical P8; kokoro 心 is partly in P7 (akaki kokoro 明き心) and partly the affective register of the whole compass; only the four-as-synthetic-bundle defers as cat-3.
- Deferrals (explicit, with category): (a) Tenson Kōrin 天孫降臨 (the descent of the heavenly grandchild) — deferred under category 2 (out of textual focus): Kojiki §§XXXIII–XXXIV are explicitly outside the corpus's N=1 scope (Preface + §§I–XVIII, per books/00-index.md); the descent of Ninigi belongs to the regnal-imperial cycle. Per Hardacre 2017 and Breen-Teeuwen 2010, Tenson Kōrin is a narrative template, not an ethical schema, and is politically load-bearing in ways the State-Shinto period (1868–1945) amplified — flag for LATER-READING political amplification. No R4 follow-on warranted at present. (b) Kami / Makoto / Kegare-Harae triad as a bundled system — deferred under category 3 (non-essential per scholarship): per Picken, Essentials of Shinto (Greenwood, 1994), the triad is a Western-scholarly distillation, not something a pre-modern Shintō priest would have recited; its constituents are each present in N=8, the bundling is post-hoc. (c) Ujigami / ancestor-kami distinction — deferred under category 3 (non-essential per scholarship), with R4 follow-on candidate: per Hardacre 2017, the ujigami (clan tutelary kami) vs household ancestor-kami contrast is largely a modern ethnographic categorization; lived-central but post-classical as an explicit taxonomy. R4 follow-on: norito / Engishiki liturgical-layer expansion (already in the supplementary scope note) would sharpen. (d) Jingi 神祇 vs Jinja 神社 — deferred under category 3 (non-essential per scholarship — anachronistic for the classical texts): per Hardacre 2017 chs. 9–11, the terms are old (Jingikan = the classical-state Council of Divinities; jinja = shrines) but the modern hard taxonomic distinction belongs to the Meiji-era Department of Divinities and the shinbutsu-bunri (神仏分離, 1868) separation — importing it would read the post-1868 institutional separation back into the 8th-century texts (the classical methodological error per Kuroda 1981). (e) "State Shinto" vs Shrine Shintō — deferred under category 3 (non-essential per scholarship — entirely post-classical construct): a 19th–20th-century construct, retrospectively imposed; "State Shinto" was largely dismantled by the SCAP Shinto Directive (15 December 1945). Mention forestalls confusion; distilling it as doctrine would falsify the tradition. (f) Shinbutsu-shūgō 神仏習合 (Buddhist-Shintō syncretism) — deferred under category 3 (non-essential per scholarship for the classical texts): per Kuroda 1981 and Breen-Teeuwen 2010, for ~1,000 years (roughly Nara through Edo) Shintō and Buddhism were institutionally fused; the honji suijaku 本地垂迹 doctrine (kami as local traces of buddhas) was the dominant interpretive lens. The corpus's source-texts (Kojiki 712, Nihongi 720) predate the explicit articulation of shinbutsu-shūgō as doctrine (crystallized in the Heian-Kamakura period); the distillation is honest to its sources by not retrojecting honji suijaku. Framing addressed in the three-phase historical-layering disambiguator above. (g) "The Four Shintō Virtues" (makoto / kannagara / wa / kokoro) as a synthetic bundle — deferred under category 3 (non-essential per scholarship): per Picken 1994, a 20th-century didactic synthesis crafted to present Shintō as comparable to other world religions' virtue lists; not a pre-modern internal taxonomy. The four constituents are each present in N=8 (see sub-element item iv above); only the four-as-bundle defers. (h) Misogi / Harae as a systematic "purification system" (ōharae / misogi-harae / imi etc.) — deferred under category 3 (non-essential per scholarship), with R4 follow-on candidate: per Picken 1994 and Hardacre 2017, the practices are ancient and centrally anchored in P3/P4; the systematic taxonomy of types of harae — ōharae (great purification), misogi-harae (individual purification), imi (abstention), exorcism — is a liturgical-scholarly classification, not a doctrinal one. R4 follow-on: norito / Engishiki liturgical-layer expansion (already in the supplementary scope note) would surface the ōharae no kotoba and the structure of harae as practice-elaboration of P3/P4. (i) Sect Shintō (Kyōha) streams — Tenrikyō, Konkōkyō, Kurozumikyō, etc. — deferred under category 2 (out of textual focus): the 13 Kyōha streams are 19th-century revelations (Nakayama Miki's Ofudesaki for Tenrikyō, Konkō Daijin for Konkōkyō) with founders, scriptures, and systematic teachings — a different category from the classical mytho-histories. The Plan 010 canon-selection was Kojiki + Nihongi (classical Age-of-the-Gods); Sect Shintō would warrant a parallel-corpus distillation, not absorption here. Cite Hardacre 2017 ch. 11. R4 follow-on: parallel Kyōha distillation if the union compass scope expands. (This deferral is flagged here in the Phase 3 closure as a Phase-7 reviewer-packet item for explicit naming; see audit-deep-shinto.md §10 Recommendation 3 and structural-completeness Phase 3 closure note.)
- Cross-tradition consistency: Shinto's WEAK-distinctive jewels (kegare as withering ≠ moral guilt; musubi as born-non-created cosmos; matsuri as festal-joyful rite rather than atonement; makoto as bright-heart sincerity) remain the corpus's primary Atlas contributions — preserved for structural-completeness Phase 4 re-attestation and the Phase 5 union-compass refresh as same-word/different-referent and same-form/different-substance findings. The structural-form divergence (loose-decentralized-web; hubs-are-practices-not-claims) is itself a primary structural-analysis Atlas finding.