Shinto

Hear all men! If you desire to obtain help from the Gods, put away pride. Even a hair of pride shuts you off from the Gods as it were by a great cloud.

Hear all men! The good Kami find their strength and their support in piety. Therefore they love not the offerings of those who practise tedious ceremonies.

The Deity of Matsunowo says: -

Any one who makes a single obeisance to one Kami will receive infinite help: much more so any one who makes pure his heart and enters the great way of single-minded uprightness.

Oracle of Temman tenjin, the deified Minister Sugahara no Michizane[339 - See above, p. 179. (#Page_179)]: -

All ye who come before me hoping to attain the accomplishment of your desires, pray with hearts pure from falsehood, clean within and without, reflecting the truth like a mirror. If those who are falsely accused of crime[340 - As Sugahara himself was.]come to me for help, within seven days their prayer will be granted, or else call me not a God.

An oracle of Mume no miya promises that if an offering of sand is made help will be given to women in child-birth, and children to those who have none.

An oracle of Atago (the Fire-God) denounces his vengeance on those who pollute fire, and on the wealthy who do not assist their poorer neighbours.

Leave the things of this world and come to me daily and monthly with pure bodies and pure hearts. You will then enjoy paradise in this world and have all your desires accomplished.

Oracle of the God of Kashima[341 - See above, p. 155. (#FNanchor_123_123)]: -

I am the protector of Japan against foreign violence and break the spear-points of Heavenly demons and Earthly demons. All enjoy my divine power. I derive strength from the multiplication of devout men in the land. Then do the forces of demons melt away like snow in the sun. When devout men are few, my powers dwindle, my heart is distressed and the demon powers gain vigour while the divine power is weakened.

Oracle of the God of Atsuta: -

All ye men who dwell under Heaven. Receive the just commands of the Gods. Regard Heaven as your father, Earth as your mother, and all things as your brothers and sisters. You will then enjoy this divine country which excels all others, free from hate and sorrow. Obey the instructions of the Heaven-shining Deity and honour the Mikado. If any are rebellious, come before me and name their names. I will surely crush the foe and yield you satisfaction.

An oracle of the God of Suha[342 - See above, p. 177. (#pgepubid00017)] promises to hear the prayers of all true worshippers, even though they may have eaten flesh. No outward purity avails a whit.

Oracle of Tatsuta (the Wind-God): -

All ye of high and low degree, rather than pray to Heaven-and-Earth, rather than pray to all the Kami, dutifully serve your parents. For your parents are the Gods of without and within.[343 - Alluding to the inner and outer shrines of Ise.]If that which is within is not bright it is useless to pray only for that which is without.

An oracle of Inari, near Kioto, speaks of this polluted world (a Buddhist phrase), and recommends the reading of Sutras and Dharani.

The following sentiments are ascribed to the God of Fujiyama: -

Ye men of mine. Shun desire. If you shun desire you will ascend to a level with the Gods. Every little yielding to anxiety is a step away from the natural heart of man. If one leaves the natural heart of man, he becomes a beast. That men should be made so, is to me intolerable pain and unending sorrow.

A son of a Mikado received the following inspiration in a dream: -

It is the upright heart of all men which is identical with the highest of the high, and therefore the God of Gods. There is no room in Heaven-and-Earth for the false and crooked person.

The following poem was revealed in a dream to the Mikado Seiwa: -

If we keep unperverted the human heart, which is like unto Heaven and received from Earth, that is God. The Gods have their abode in the heart. Amongst the various ordinances none is more excellent than that of religious meditation.

The God of a Tajima shrine says: -

When the sky is clear, and the wind hums in the fir-trees, 'tis the heart of a God who thus reveals himself.

An oracle of Hachiman (the War-God) enjoins on his worshippers to be full of pity and mercy for beggars and lepers, and even for ants and crickets. Those whose pity and charity are wide will have their precious cord (of life) extended immeasurably; their posterity will be spread abroad like the wings of a crane. They will become the upright heart of the Gods of Heaven.

Another oracle of Hachiman: -

All men's love of children and love of self are heinous crimes. Nothing is more admirable than to sever, were it only for a time, all earthly relations.

If men will have upright hearts they must be neither foolish nor clever, they must indulge neither in grief nor in hate, but be as the flowers which unfold under the genial warmth of a vernal sun.

If there be any who, having studied the books of China or practised the teachings of India, despise the instructions of the Gods of our own Japan, I will go to their houses and either slay their infant children or visit them with sore disease, or turn away from them their followers, or by the God of Fire destroy their dwellings. This is not because I hate the doctrines of China or India, but because it is rejecting the root for the branches.

Oracle of Itsukushima in Aki: -

Of old the people of my country knew not my name. Therefore I was born into the visible world and endured a base existence. In highest Heaven I am the Deity of the Sun, in the mid-sky I show my doings. I hide in the great Earth and produce all things: in the midst of the Ocean I am the eight Dragon-kings, and my power pervades the four seas. If the poorest of mankind come here once for worship, show me their faces and declare their wishes, within seven days, fourteen days, twenty-one days, or it may be three years or seven years, according to the person and the importance of his prayer, I will surely grant their heart's desire. But the wicked of heart must not apply to me. Those who do not abandon mercy will not be abandoned by me.

Revival of Pure Shinto. – The seventeenth century witnessed a great revival of Chinese learning in Japan. It embraced not only the renewed study of the ancient classics of Confucius and Mencius, but the philosophical writings of Chu-hi and other sceptical writers of the Sung Dynasty (960-1278). The Samurai, or governing caste of the nation, devoted themselves to these studies with amazing zeal and enthusiasm, to the great neglect of Buddhism, which from this time forward was left mainly to the common people. This movement reached a climax in the eighteenth century, when a reaction set in. Kada, Mabuchi, and other patriotic scholars, resenting the undue preponderance allowed to Chinese thought, did their utmost, by commentaries and exegetical treatises, to recall attention to the monuments of the ancient national literature, such as the Kojiki, Nihongi, and Manyōshiu, which had been so long neglected that they were in great part unintelligible even to educated men. Under their pupil and successor Motoöri (1730-1801), this movement assumed a religious character. His patriotic prejudices were offended by the foreign elements which he found in the Ryōbu and other prevailing forms of Shinto, while the Sung doctrine of a "Great Absolute" was not only odious to him on account of its alien origin, but failed to satisfy his soul-hunger for a more personal object of worship. He therefore turned back to the older form of Shinto. To its propagation by lectures and books he devoted many years of his life, and not without success. He had numerous followers among the more educated classes.

Motoöri's principal work is the Kojiki den, a commentary on the Kojiki, in which he loses no opportunity of attacking everything Chinese and of exalting the old Japanese customs, language, and religion in a spirit of ardent and undiscriminating patriotism. He seems to have been wholly blind to the fact that the exotic faiths and philosophies, whose intrusion into Shinto he so bitterly resented, contain elements far otherwise valuable to mankind than the ritual of the Yengishiki and the old-world myths of the Kojiki.

His pupil Hirata (1776-1843) was less of a literary man and more of a theologian than his master. In a long life he wrote numbers of books, amounting to hundreds of volumes, and delivered innumerable lectures urging the claims of the old Shinto. His teaching was so successful that it at last drew upon him the attention of the Shōgun's Government, who, finding that their own authority was being undermined by the prominence given to the de jure sovereign rights of the Sun-Goddess's descendants, forbade his lectures and banished him to his native province of Dewa. Hirata's anti-foreign prejudices did not prevent him from believing in the immortality of the soul-a doctrine of Buddhist origin-or from borrowing from China a worship of ancestors quite different from anything in the old Shinto. He adopts the Chinese duty of "filial piety," and makes strenuous but unavailing efforts to find countenance for it in the Kojiki and Nihongi. Though he says that the Kami detest Buddhism because it teaches us to abandon lord and parent, wife and child, and is therefore destructive of morality, and because its adherents are filthy beggars, who boast of wearing cast-off rags and eating food given in charity, in another place he goes so far as to admit Buddha to his Shinto Pantheon, on condition that he shall be content with an inferior position. He tacitly accepts the moral code of China, while protesting that such things are unnecessary, as we are endowed by nature with an intuitive knowledge of right and wrong.

The agitation for the revival of Pure Shinto was a retrograde movement, which could only end in failure. It contributed substantially, however, to the success of the political revolution which in 1868 brought about the restoration of the Mikado to the sovereign position which was the logical outcome of Motoöri's and Hirata's teachings. The Shinto reformation of the same date, when the Buddhist priests were removed from the Ryōbu shrines, and a certain purification of ritual and ornaments was effected, was also due to their influence.[344 - For a full account of the Revival of Pure Shinto, see Sir E. Satow's papers contributed to the T. A. S. J. in 1875. Our knowledge of Shinto dates from this time.]

Shingaku. – A school of preachers who called their doctrine shingaku or "heart-learning," and professed to combine Shinto with Buddhism and Confucianism, had some vogue in the first half of the nineteenth century. These men were in reality rationalists, who took the maxims of Confucius and Mencius as the basis of their doctrines. Any Shinto element which they may contain is quite inappreciable. Their sermons, of which a good number have been printed, are in the colloquial dialect. They are very entertaining and, despite an occasional bit of indecency, not unedifying.

Tenrikyô,[345 - An interesting account of this sect is given in a paper by Dr. Greene in the T. A. S. J., December, 1895.] or the "teaching of the Heavenly Reason," is a modern sect. The founder was a woman named Omiki, who was born in the province of Yamato in 1798, and died in 1887. Her religion owes much to the Shingaku and Ryōbu doctrines. While professing to worship Kunitokotachi, Izanagi, Izanami, and seven other Shinto deities, practically Izanagi and Izanami are her only Gods. The former (identified with the sun) is taken to represent the male, and the latter the female principle, corresponding in nature to Heaven and Earth, and in human society to husband and wife. These Gods are spiritual beings, chiefly revealed in the heart of man, and are endowed with personal attributes. Tenrikyô has high moral aims, and has made rapid progress. In 1894 there were claimed for it 10,000 priests and preachers, and 1,400,000 adherents.

Remmonkyô.[346 - See papers by Dr. Greene and Rev. A. Lloyd in the T. A. S. J., 1901.] – The name of this sect implies that, like the spotless lotus-flower, which has its roots in the mud, it attains to purity in the midst of a wicked world. It is stated to have originated with a certain Yanagita Ichibeimon, but its real founder was his disciple, a woman named Shimamura Mitsuko, who was still alive and preaching in 1901.

The Remmonkyô professes to be a reformed Shinto, but in reality it owes little to this source beyond the names of the Gods Ame no minaka nushi, Taka-musubi, and Kami-musubi, who are termed the three Creator Deities. They are considered, however, to be only manifestations of the Ji no Myôhô, or "Wonderful Law of Things," and the real God of the sect is the personified Myôhô (wonderful law) a conception borrowed from the Buddhist Nichiren sect. The followers of Shimamura call her an ikigami (live God), and regard her as identical with the Myôhô. How often in Japanese religious history do we meet with this idea of the incarnation of the God in his priest or prophet!

The shintai, or material representative of the Myôhô, is a slip of paper bearing the words "Ji no Myôhô," written by the founder herself. It is sold as a charm against disease and danger. Faith-healing is a practice of this sect, as it is of the Tenrikyô. Their moral code is of the ordinary Confucian type.

The last-named two sects are not likely to play an important part in religious history. The founders of both were ignorant women, and their doctrines are a mere jumble of conflicting ideas borrowed from various sources, and inspired by no great central thought. We may, perhaps, compare their position in Japan to that of the Salvation Army or the Plymouth Brethren in this country.

Official Shinto. – The official cult of the present day is substantially the "Pure Shinto" of Motoöri and Hirata. But it has little vitality. A rudimentary religion of this kind is quite inadequate for the spiritual sustenance of a nation which in these latter days has raised itself to so high a pitch of enlightenment and civilization. No doubt some religious enthusiasm is excited by the great festivals of Ise, Idzumo, and a few other shrines, and by the annual pilgrimages-which, however, have other raisons d'être. The reverence paid to the Mikado is not devoid of a religious quality which has its source in Shinto. But the main stream of Japanese piety has cut out for itself new channels. It has turned to Buddhism, which, at the time of the Restoration in a languishing state, is now showing signs of renewed life and activity. Another and still more formidable rival has appeared, to whose progress, daily increasing in momentum, what limit shall be prescribed?

As a national religion, Shinto is almost extinct. But it will long continue to survive in folk-lore and custom, and in that lively sensibility to the divine in its simpler and more material aspects which characterizes the people of Japan.

THE END

notes

1

At the festival of Nifu Miōjin in Kiī, when the procession bearing offerings arrives before the shrine, the village chief calls out in a loud voice, "According to our annual custom, let us all laugh." To which a hearty response is given. This is because this God does not go to Idzumo for an annual visit like the others.

2

'Sociology,' p. 153.