Prayers and chants:

music and poetry to the spiritual purification

Abstract

The Amatsu Norito and Zenguen Sandji prayers are used by Sekai Kyusei-Kyo, a new Japanese religion founded in Japan in the 1930s by Mokichi Okada. Starting from the comparison between the meanings of these prayers for the Japanese (understood as the group of non-Christian traditional Japanese people) and Western people (in the group of Christians) a hermeneutic approach of their context was made from the perspective of religion as a dimension of human spiritual life. Regarding the matter of health, Okada creates the concept of Johrei as a purifying act for both the body and the spirit, in a way that - silently - the purifying force of these prayers act precisely and beyond the liturgical moment.