You may already know that shintō sanctuaries are places dedicated to one or more deities, the kami. In Japanese, one calls them jinja or jingū, or gū. They are easily distinguishable from Buddhist temples, as there are often many objects painted in red vermilion and the entrance is adorned with a torii, a kind of portico that tells you that once you cross it, you enter a sacred land.
And it is not the first time I explain to you that a torii hasn’t its place in a Japanese garden. I let you consult one of my other articles on this subject…
But what I learned recently (yes, we all learn things every day), is that symbolically, this torii represents the lower half of a woman’s body, standing on her two legs, and the upper part representing her sexual organs …! Wow, wow, wow … I see from here the face of some good-big “sexists” that one can meet in the field of the “landscape”. But may be the opportunity to finishing once time for all with the torii in the so-called western “Japanese gardens” !!!
Once the torii has been crossed, the path leading to the sanctuary is called sandō, the homonym of the same word which literally means “the path of childbirth”. The ideogram 宮 which be reading gū and that one finds in the word jingū 神宮 is the same kanji used in the word shikyū 子宮 which signifies “uterus”.
So when you go into a sanctuary, you enter a pure and sacred place, where life is conceived, and once purified, when you come out, it is like a birth and the beginning of a new life. Somehow a rebirth…
A great thank you to CCFJT of Toulouse for all these interesting details.