50 - Purifying Salt

【清めの塩、kiyome no shio】

Since ancient times, there has been a custom of sprinkling salt on the ground after a funeral or after the return of an unwelcome guest in order to "purify" the area.

This is called "shio-harai (塩払い)", which can also be written as "ushio-harai (潮払い)".

In the past, it was believed that there was another world in the sea where gods lived and that by performing shiogori (seawater ablution), or purification by washing one's body in tidal water, impure things would be washed away to this other world.

In the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), there is a story where Izanagi-no-Mikoto visited the world of the dead, Yomi-no-Kuni, to see his dead wife Izanami-no-Mikoto, but he broke a vow to not look at his wife until they left, and so he found that her body was covered with maggots and fled in fear.

After he managed to return to the surface, Izanagi-no-Mikoto washed his body in seawater and performed a purification ceremony.

Thus, the mythical shiogori was created, but it is thought that as people eventually moved from the seashore to the mountains, they began to use the salt left over from the evaporation of seawater instead to cleanse themselves.

It has also been known since ancient times that salt has antiseptic and sterilizing properties.

When a person dies, the body starts to decompose. It is said that the aforementioned tale from the Kojiki is meant to represent the ancient custom of burying one's relatives and then going to see their corpses.

However, at that time, when the custom of cremation was not as common as it is today, decomposing bodies could cause epidemics and other diseases.

Decomposing bodies were therefore considered to bring about uncleanness, and the decomposing process itself was also considered to be unclean.

The above suggests that salt became an item that purifies the impurity caused by death by mixing the ideas of salt as an agent to control the uncleanliness caused by the decomposition of a corpse and salt as something that washes away impurity.

However, with its world of reincarnation, Buddhism considers death to be something to be accepted as a matter of course, not an impurity, and there is a movement to abolish the use of purifying salt.