How a Religion Grew in Japan

Abstract

Great interest attaches to the period of childhood, whether of persons or of institutions, because then the self-expression is most simple and direct, and therefore the nature is most readily comprehensible to others. Children and fools speak the truth; others have learned, for weal or for woe, to conceal it. In the case of religion this childhood is often inaccessible, either because no record at all remains, or because the record has been expurgated, interpreted, and otherwise improved almost beyond recognition. Of all the religions upon earth, Shintoism, the native faith of the Japanese, has been most fortunate in this respect; for its votaries suddenly learned the art of writing from the neighboring Chinese, and were thus enabled to turn its oral traditions and rituals into permanent record while it was still in the days of its youth, early in the seventh century A. D. Had someone done the same for the native British and German faiths, what a welcome light the record would now throw upon our own past! But, in lack of them, we shall turn with all the more interest to the Kojiki or Ancient Records, and Yengishiki or Ceremonial Law, of the early Japanese at a period before either Confucianism or Buddhism had gained a foothold in their land; for the traditions are, of course, vastly older than the record of them, and go back to at least the first century B. C. Both Kojiki and Yengishiki show that the two tap-roots of Shintoism were ancestor-worship and nature-worship, and both of these cults remain alive today, though destined to experience reinterpretation at the hands of science and in the presence of more advanced faiths. The theory supporting ancestorism is that the blessed dead live on in another state, wherein they still need service from the living and can tender ghostly help in return. This phase of the native faith was early appropriated by Buddhism, which used tablets to represent the deceased, and daily offered to them a tiny portion of rice and of