Temples and Shrines

Temple is used to refer to a Buddhist place of worship and shrine is used if the place is Shinto (called Kami no michi, the Way of the Gods, in Japanese). It is actually fairly easy to tell the difference.

Shrines have a torii at the main entrance. You can see part of one is the last picture of me that I posted. There are two vertical posts with a cross brace toward the top and a beam that extends past the posts at the top. There is often a tasseled rope strung between the uprights. (You can see this just over my head.) The word torii is constructed from two Chinese characters (called kanji in Japanese). The first pronounced tori means 'bird' or 'birds' and the second i means 'exist or reside', a torii is a place where birds reside.

Temples will have some kind of a gate at the main entrance, but there will not be a torii. At larger temples the sides of the gates will contain large spaces in which there are larger-than-life carvings of warriors who protect the temple from evil.

There a few, and I do mean a very few, temples that have torii. In this case the enshrined Shinto god has been adopted into the Buddhist pantheon and is considered to be one of the myriad of Buddhist gods. Since the god was originally Shinto, much of the Shinto symbolism is retained.