Reconstructing the eternal. The lesson from the Ise Shrine on how not to lose sight of the sacred

The holiest shrine in the Japanese Shinto tradition is the Ise Shrine. Founded around 690, it is completely dismantled and rebuilt every twenty years. In 2033, the shrine will be rebuilt for its sixty-third rededication. The structures are built from Japanese cypress, still using the same techniques employed when it was first constructed.

The most apparent reason for this practice is quite obvious; it relates to the idea of the transience of all things and the need for spiritual renewal, for an end and a rebirth. At the same time, this event, which takes place every twenty years, has a ‘technical’ significance. Twenty years roughly marks a generational span—the time required to pass on practical skills and spiritual guidance from one cohort to the next, ensuring that the structure can continue to be built and handed down through the generations. Because the sanctuary is constructed using a specific type of cypress, its design is planned to last approximately two hundred years—the time needed for the trees to mature in the forest where it stands.

In this ritual—so technical and so deeply rooted in time and programming, as if it were the blueprint of a colossal enterprise—there lies, paradoxically, an attempt, difficult for us to grasp, to immortalise human activity, or rather, to seek the eternal within human activity. To bring forth that which is eternal, even if only a pale reflection of it, within this perpetual regeneration. What could the eternal be, if not that which is constantly regenerating itself and, in so doing, remains identical to itself? After all, for us, who are entirely temporal beings, it is impossible to conceive of the ‘timelessness’ of the eternal, if only because, for better or worse, everything we perceive exists in time and space – but in time, first and foremost.

This temporalisation of existence also seems to underpin our radical secularisation (after all, what is a century if not time?). Our marvellous churches, our cathedrals of marble and stone, certainly remain as a testament to the human aspiration to draw closer to the divine, to give it a home in which it might make its appearance, to reveal its ‘eternal face’ through the permanence of those solid materials. And yet the museum-like aspect, the wonder of their construction and form, now seem to be all that remains, for us, of the divine that they are meant to contain, and which should provide the ultimate meaning and beauty to those, albeit astonishing, architectural structures.

Churches, our temples, now appear increasingly like archaeological sites overcrowded with tourists, demeaned by the fleeting visit that stands as a crass testament to the now inevitable impermanence of the divine in those places. If the divine loved to hide in ancient times, imagine where it must have rightly fled to today. From this naturally arises the idea that, even if we might regret it, mere conservation is not in itself a winning strategy if it becomes purely reactive, if it does not continually undergo the cleansing process of renewal which, inevitably, must also be destructive. Only in this way can rituals and ceremonies once again be imbued with meaning. Only in this way can temples hope to once again become abodes where the divine may reappear.

Solid buildings are prone to collapse, and their fall seems irreparable, just as the loss of the divine seems irreparable to us today. The endeavour to steadfastly rebuild the sacred – of which the Shinto ritual of rebuilding the Ise Shrine is a formidable example – appears to be an ancient yet, at the same time, thoroughly modern challenge to our desperate and inevitable attempt to relate to that which is most alien to us, and yet towards which we cannot help but strive: namely, the eternal.

An endeavour inevitably shaped by ceaseless human activity which itself becomes a ritual, which itself becomes sacred, and which reveals itself as the only way to attempt to create that space in which, over time, that which is, in fact, eminently timeless, may emerge.