11. THE RELIGIONS OF JAPAN. Pre liminary Remarks.— The religious history of Japan is characterized by incessant influxes of foreign religions. The minds of the people have not remained wholly passive towards these influences, but a free and spontaneous develop ment of religious thought and sentiment was almost impossible. The interest of the history, therefore lies in the manifold aspects of the foreign influences, in their adaptations to the national genius and in the several amalgams,. tions which have resulted from these interfer ences.
In considering the entire history, five periods may be distinguished: (1) The prehistoric re ligion of the Japanese was an unorganized worship of spirits, both of nature and of the dead. It was, toward the dawn of history, developing a form of ancestor-worship, being closely connected with the clan system. (2) The introduction of Buddhism in the.6th cen tury A.D. gave a new turn to the religious development. During the seven centuries fol lowing, various forms and teachings of Bud dhism which were prevalent torevalent in the Asiatic cot tinent were successively imported. But these importations prepared for more • original ex periences of the people. (3) The 13th century is marked by the appearance of new forms of Buddhism which were more or less distinctly Japanese. It was followed by 300 years of con flict, both religious and political. (4) The political peace and national unity which were restored at the beginning of the 17th century brought peace to religion. But the peace was kept by artificial means—by political oppression. This period, on the other hand, gave rise to Confucianism and the revival of the national Shinto religion, while Buddhism slumbered for a long time. (5) The revolution of 1868 shook off all the artificial restraints that had made for peace. The religious sentiment is now growing, and is iri a state of ferment, the new element of Christianity having been added and Buddhism reawakened.
Through all these vicissitudes, no Japanese religion ever organized a firm, exclusive na tional church. Nevertheless, protection by and interferences on the part of the government and the ruling clans always affected the relative positions of the various religions. Every prom inent religious body enjoyed, more or less, a kind of state patronage. Thus the ambition to secure the privilege of being sanctioned and protected by the rulers was responsible for the chief effort of many a religious leader. But
the toleration of various religions and the many attempts at compromise have been character istic of the whole history.
I. Prehistoric Religion (before circa 550 A.D. ) .—The prehistoric religion of the Japanese consisted in the worship of the kami, or spirits and deities. It is usually known by the name Shinto, or The Way of the Kami, but it was not an organized observance or teaching. Both the appellation and the attempts to systematize it are post-Buddhistic. The belief in these kami, whose respective functions and relations to one another were not quite definite, and the simple rituals intended to invoke or to propi tiate them, made up the whole of the religion. Anything which seemed to the uncultured people unusual or mysterious was believed to possess a spirit, either benignant or malevolent, or both. Some of the kami were thought to be in heaven, and others sojourning among aerial phenomena, natural objects or living beings. Men are, or may become, kami by the manifestation of extraordinary powers.
Though there existed no definite theogony and no clear cosmology, a certain system of mythology may be traced. In the primeval chaos, we are told, some pairs of deities were generated spontaneously one after an other. All these seem to have represented productive powers, and the first of them, the High-Producing (Taka-mi-musubi) and the Divine-Producing (Kami-mi-musubi), are in• yoked constantly. The last of these pairs, the Male-Who-Invites (kana-gi) and the Female who-Invite (/zana-mi), generated the islands of the Japanese archipelago and the several ob jects of nature, which are all called kami. But of the male alone were born the two most important deities. One is the Heaven-Shining Deity (Ama-ter-asu), the goddess of light and culture, and the other the Swift-Impetuous (Susa-no-wo), the god of darkness and outrage. The heavenly kami clustered around the former and they drove the latter into exile. The mali cious spirits, on the other hand, did not make a unified force. The contrast of these two deities, as we might expect, did not develop into a dualism, as in the religion of the ancient Persians, with which Shinto has some resem blances. On the contrary, a compromise was made of these two. They were considered to be the conjoint generators of the ruling family.