$Unique_ID{bob00789} $Pretitle{} $Title{History Of Religions Chapter I: Part II} $Subtitle{} $Author{Foot Moore, George} $Affiliation{} $Subject{gods japanese shinto religion worship emperor ancient chinese offerings dead} $Date{1913} $Log{} Title: History Of Religions Book: Religions Of Japan Author: Foot Moore, George Date: 1913 Chapter I: Part II A regulation of the eighth century divided the festivals observed by the state according to their importance into three classes. In the greatest of all, standing alone in the first rank, is the Daijowe, celebrated by each new emperor in the eleventh month of the year of his accession, or, if that did not give time for the prolonged preparations, a year later. The emperor with his own hand offered to the gods as the first-fruits of his reign the newly harvested rice and fresh-brewed beer. The grain must be grown on two pieces of land selected by divination, and every step of the operations, from the designation of the fields on, was conducted in accordance with the minutely prescribed ritual. For the offering itself new buildings were erected with many ceremonies in a suburb of the capital; in them, on a carpet of reed mats, was laid a large cushion, the "deity seat." Emperor and people prepared themselves for the great occasion by avoiding for a month, and still more strictly for three days preceding the festival, various sources of uncleanness. The recitation of the liturgy, an address of congratulation and benediction to the emperor by members of an ancient noble family of Idzumo, was accompanied by a present of jewels of different colours. The ceremonies, which are in substance an elaboration of the annual festival of first-fruits, served as the solemn religious inauguration of the new reign. The festivals of the second class were observed annually, and were all connected with agriculture. At the first the gods were implored to protect the growing crops against injury by wind or rain and to give abundant increase; in the autumn several harvest festivals were celebrated with offerings of first-fruits at the temples - for example, to the two goddesses in Ise - and at court. In one of the latter the emperor offered new rice to all the gods and partook of it himself. The prayers for harvest in the second month, when the rice is sown, take in part the form of a vow of the emperor to make large offerings to the gods of the harvest if they give large crops this year. The greater part of the liturgy for this occasion has, however, nothing particular to do with the harvest or the harvest gods, but is addressed to several other classes of deities, and seems to have been originally composed for the half-yearly (in early times, monthly) festivals of a general character. Among the minor festivals are those in which the god of waters is invoked to avert destroying floods of rain; the wind gods, that storms may not rage; the fire god, that conflagrations may not break out; for protection against pestilence; for the long life of the emperor; to drive away evil spirits, and the like. Besides festivals and offerings such as those thus far described, by which the favour and protection of the gods were sought or gratitude expressed for blessings already received, piacular offerings and rites of purification have a prominent place in the old Japanese religion. Individuals who had incurred guilt by some offence had to make expiatory offerings; those who had contracted uncleanness, for instance, from a dead body, purified themselves by ablution. But inasmuch as the guilt or defilement of the individual might infect the whole community, a general purification of the land and people was also necessary. In earlier times such rites seem to have been occasional, being ordered when there was special reason; but from the beginning of the eighth century they were performed at the close of each half-year. ^1 The ritual of these days, the so-called Great Purification (Oho-harahe), is of peculiar interest for the insight it gives into the religious and moral conceptions of ancient Shinto. [Footnote 1: Like the semiannual days of atonement in Ezekiel.] To the thinking of the natural man, all the world over, defilement, disease, and guilt, with no sharp lines of demarcation, are contagious evils, physically transmissible and physically removable; they may be transferred to an animal or a human scapegoat, or to some inanimate object, and sent away bodily. On a higher religious plane the gods are invoked to take away these evils, and offerings, propitiatory or expiatory, are made to induce them to do so; but the old physical means of disposing of sin as a substance are often conserved - the higher conception does not supplant the lower, but is superimposed upon it. The ceremonies of the Jewish Day of Atonement represent such a fusion of diverse notions and rites, and so does the ritual of the Shinto days of atonement. The offerings of food are propitiatory, and the priest declares that the gods, hearing the potent words of the liturgy, will remove both physical and moral uncleanness; but the "purification offerings" proper are sent off in a boat and cast into the depths of the sea. The catalogue of offences distinguishes between heavenly misdeeds - so-called because they are like those perpetrated by Susa no wo in the myth ^1 - and earthly misdeeds; but it makes no distinction between crimes against person or property, skin diseases, and calamities such as being struck by lightning. [Footnote 1: See above, pp. 98 f.] Now of the various faults and transgressions to be committed by the celestial race destined more and more to people this land of his peaceful rule, some are of heaven, to wit, the breaking down of divisions between rice-fields, filling up of irrigation channels, removing water-pipes, sowing seed over again, planting skewers, flaying alive, flaying backwards. These are distinguished as heavenly offences. Earthly offences which will be committed are the cutting of living bodies, the cutting of dead bodies; leprosy, kokumi [a disease]; incest of a man with his mother or daughter, with his mother-in-law or step-daughter, bestiality; calamities from creeping things, from the high gods and from high birds, killing animals, bewitchments. So persistent are the primitive notions that in relatively modern times they have given rise to a new custom quite in the ancient spirit. A few days before the semiannual Oho-harahe, a man or woman who wishes to be purified procures from the temple a small piece of white paper cut rudely in the shape of a shirt. On this he writes his name, sex, the year and month of his birth, rubs the paper over his whole body, and breathes into it, thus transferring to it his sins or ailments, and brings it back to the temple, where the collection is deposited on a black table during the purification ceremony, and at the end is sent off in a boat and thrown into the water. It is a commonplace with writers on Shinto that it has no ethics. The enthusiasts of "Pure Shinto" made a virtue out of this defect: moral precepts and ethical systems are made necessary only by depravity; the Chinese needed them, but the ancient Japanese were good by pure nature, and therefore did not have to talk about goodness. Western students have commented on the absence of moral teaching in a less favourable sense, but have been equally positive about the fact. It is doubtless true that Shinto had no ethical doctrine to be compared with Confucianism or Buddhism; equally true that we should look in vain in the Kojiki and Nihongi or in the ritual books for either moral instruction or moralising reflections on history. Nevertheless, the ancient Japanese had a customary morality corresponding to their plane of culture, and that to this morality religion gave its effective sanction the Great Purification itself is sufficient proof. The function of religion in the stage in which Shinto was in the age which produced its oldest literary monuments never goes beyond such a sanction. Here, as in other things, the early introduction of the standards of a higher civilisation forestalled the development which would doubtless have taken place if Japan had gone its independent way. To ward off ills caused by demons, especially the demons of disease, the ancient Japanese sought the protection of a particular group of gods, the Sahe no Kami, or "preventive deities", who are invoked in an old liturgical text to defend the worshippers against the "hostile and savage beings of the root country," such as the "hags of Hades" who pursued Izanagi. These deities were represented by phalli, often of gigantic size, which were set up along highways and especially at cross-roads to bar the passage against malignant beings who sought to pass. In the liturgy referred to, one of these gods is called "No Thoroughfare" (Kunado, or Funado), the name of the staff which Izanagi threw down to prevent his pursuing spouse from breaking out from Hades into the world above; two others are the prince and princess of the eight cross-roads. They had no temples, and were worshipped at the end of the sixth and twelfth months - the time of the semiannual lustration - and on occasion at other times, for example, on the outbreak of a pestilence. The phallic form of the end post of a balustrade or a bridge has a similar meaning; it keeps evil influence from passing. The apotropaic virtue of this symbol - a virtue which it has in many other countries, notably among the ancient Greeks - is due to the association of virility with manly strength, power to overcome invisible foes as well as visible, and to protect those in need of help. Standing as they did on the roadside and at cross-roads, these gods became the protectors of the wayfarers; travellers prayed to them before setting out on a journey and made a little offering of hemp leaves and rice to each one they passed. These gods had nothing to do, so far as the evidence shows, with fertility or the reproductive functions; ^1 no peculiar rites were observed in their worship, and however objectionable to the taste of a more refined age, the cult was in no sense immoral or conducive to immorality. In modern times, out of regard to the prejudices of Europeans who connected obscene notions with them, they have been generally removed from the roads, remaining only in out-of-the-way corners of the empire. [Footnote 1: In a kind of Japanese Lupercalia described by a writer of the Middle Ages, the boys in the imperial palace used on the first full moon of the year to go about striking the younger women with the pot-sticks used in stirring the gruel made for the festival. This was believed to promote fertility. The festival is said to have been for the Sahe no Kami; but the association of this magical performance with these deities is perhaps secondary, induced by their phallic form. Phallic shrines in brothels have probably, as in Greece, an origin independent of the wayside gods.] The ancient Japanese buried their dead; and this custom only slowly gave way under Buddhist influence to burning, which became universal in the course of the ninth century; from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries even the bodies of the emperors were burned. In the modern revival of Shinto the effort was made to return in this respect also to the old way; but the masses of the people continue to burn their dead with Buddhist rites. The tombs of the rulers and nobles were megalithic vaults covered by great mounds of earth, in which food, utensils, arms, and ornaments were deposited - evidence, if evidence were needed, that the Japanese entertained the universal belief in the survival of the dead under conditions and with needs similar to those of this life. The Nihongi narrates that in the year 2 B.C., ^1 at the funeral of a brother of the emperor, his personal attendants were "all buried alive, upright, in the precinct of the tomb," and that the Mikado was so affected by their sufferings that when, in the following year, the empress died, he forbade a repetition of the barbarous custom, ordaining that in future clay images of men, horses, and other objects should be set up in the tumuli instead of living creatures. ^2 The common people were merely interred in some piece of waste land at a distance from the habitations of men, and the provision for their needs was correspondingly simple - a little rice and water. [Footnote 1: The reader need hardly be reminded that the chronology is not historical.] [Footnote 2: Similar substitution in China, p. 76; cf. Egypt, pp. 157 f., 173.] The story of Izanagi's descent to Hades shows that by the side of this primitive belief in a continued existence in the tomb was the notion of an abode of the dead in the depths of the earth or beneath the sea, a place of darkness and loathsome corruption, imagined like the interior of some great tomb filled with decaying bodies. There are the "ugly hags of Hades," perhaps a kind of ghoul. To this "root country, the bottom country," as the remotest end of the world whence there is no return, the sins and uncleanness of the people are sent off in the great ritual of purification. A different conception seems to be implied in the myths which make Susa no wo the ruler of the nether world: the land that Ohonamochi visits is a counterpart of this earth, with trees and moors and a great palace of the god; it does not appear, however, that the dead go thither. There is no notion of retribution beyond this life; Buddhism, with its whole system of heavens and of hells, left neither need nor room for a development which might otherwise, perhaps, have taken place in Shinto. The cult of the dead had no such prominence in the old Japanese religion as in China. It may be assumed from the world-wide prevalence of the custom that food was from time to time set out at the tombs; such pious provision for the wants of the departed, however, even when conjoined with the fear that the neglected dead may work mischief to the living, is not to be confounded with offerings to the forefathers for protection and prosperity, the motive which alone makes them in the proper sense religious. Before the sixth century there is no evidence of the worship of even the ancestors of the Mikado; in the Kojiki and the Nihongi (eighth century) references to such worship are rare. By the time of the Yengishiki (tenth century) the ritual of worship to deceased emperors was prescribed, and offerings like those to the gods were periodically made to them; but among the ancient liturgical texts (norito) there is none that belongs to this cult, and it is significant that the care of the imperial tombs was not assigned to the ministry of religion. The inference can hardly be avoided that the religious worship of the imperial ancestors is not an original feature of Japanese religion, but a result of Chinese influence. It is to be observed also that, though assimilated to the worship of the nature deities, the imperial ancestors never actually take their place among them as they do in China, where they rank immediately after Heaven, the Supreme Emperor, himself, taking precedence of all other gods. A few emperors have become in their individual capacity great gods; the most conspicuous instance being the Mikado Ojin, son of the militant empress Jingo, who under the name Hachiman has become the god of war; but precisely in this case foreign influence - Chinese, Buddhist - is peculiarly plain; it was as Hachiman Dai-bosatsu that he was worshipped by mediaeval warriors. Since the restoration, in 1868, increased honour is paid to the deceased Mikados. Four annual services now have a place in the calendar of court observances, viz., the anniversary of the death of the last emperor; the commemoration of the death of Jimmu Tenno, the first emperor; and two, in the spring and autumn respectively, in memory of all the imperial ancestors. The living emperor, who claims direct descent in unbroken line from the sun goddess, is called the "Heavenly Grandchild"; in decrees he may describe himself as "manifest deity"; the heir apparent is entitled "August Child of the Sun." These magniloquent titles, which have many parallels in other countries, do not prove that the Mikado was believed to have divine powers, but that he was entitled to divine reverence; religious worship was, in fact, not paid to him any more than to the emperor of China, who, as the designated Son of Heaven, had actually a higher place in the religion of the state than the Mikado in Japan. The homage paid by the masses of the people to the ancestors of their own family resembles at a distance the religious veneration of the Chinese, of which it is obviously an imitation. In most modern households the ancestral tablets bearing the posthumous Buddha-names of the deceased stand on the Buddha-shelf (Butsu-dan); only the strictest sort of reformed Shintoists put similar, but plain, unpainted tablets, bearing the real name, on a shelf by themselves; never on the same shelf with the gods, and, if possible, not in the same room. At stated times food is offered to them, and prayers recited. The worship of the Uji-gami (literally, "surname gods"), or reputed progenitors of the clan, is not true ancestor worship; many of these first forefathers - originally, it seems, all of them - are gods belonging to the pantheon of religion or mythology; others are probably merely imaginary figures. With time they have become no more than the tutelary deities of a man's birthplace, at whose shrine infants are presented soon after birth, as in Christian countries at the parish church. ^1 The common people in ancient times had no Uji-gami; they had no surnames, and made no pretence of divine parentage. [Footnote 1: Compare also the registration of children in the phratry at the Athenian Apaturia.] The prevailing notion that Shinto was, like the old Chinese religion, from the beginning a fusion of nature worship and ancestor worship can appeal to the authority of many modern Japanese students, including some of the Shinto reformers. A learned jurist, Hozumi, has shown how it underlies the laws of marriage and succession and of adoption; inasmuch, however, as the earliest Japanese codes are framed on Chinese models, this does not prove that ancestor worship in the proper sense was a constitutive factor of primitive Japanese society as it is in China, and there are many indications that it was not. The domestic rites of Shinto are simple: in a corner of one of the rooms - usually the living-room - of the house is a shelf on which stand tablets or strips of paper inscribed with the names of the gods peculiarly venerated, especially the sun goddess and other deities of Ise, and the tutelary god of the owner's calling, or one or more small, unpainted wooden shrines for the habitation of the gods; images, introduced in the Middle Ages by imitation of Buddhist statues, are also not infrequently found on this "god-shelf." It is hardly to be doubted that the tablets and the shrines are borrowed from the Chinese. To the furniture of the shelf belong, further, two jars for rice whisky (sake), a pair of vases to hold flowers or a twig of Sakaki, and a miniature lamp, lighted, except in very poor households, every evening. The sake and the flowers or twigs are renewed on the first, fifteenth, and twenty-eighth of each month. On New Year's the shelf is adorned also with the sacred straw-rope, and cakes of peculiar form are offered to the gods. Worshippers bring home pieces of the gohei from the temple and place them on the shelf, in the belief that the spirit of the deities has taken lodgment in it. Besides visits to near-by temples, either to present to the deity a private petition or to participate in a festival, pilgrimages are made to distant shrines; for instance, to Ise, or to the Kasuga temple at Nara, or to Fujiyama. Like pilgrims to "ferne halwes" in countries nearer home, the Japanese combine the pleasures of a grand excursion with the profit of a visit to the sacred places. The worship at these places was not of a sort to damp the spirits of the visitors by gloomy solemnity; Buddhism took the dark side of life and the dark prospects of the hereafter for its province, and left to Shinto the more joyous aspects of existence. So it has retained through all the centuries something of the spirit of happy childhood. It has been observed above that for a thousand years Shinto hardly existed except in combination with Buddhism. With the re-establishment of peace and order under the strong rule of the first Tokugawa Shoguns came a revival of the national consciousness, one manifestation of which was a zealous study of the national history and an endeavour to promote Japanese literature and learning, which had long been neglected for Chinese studies. From one thing these students of antiquity went to another, till they convinced themselves of the vast superiority of the native Japanese character and culture to all foreign peoples, particularly the Chinese; the golden age of Japan was before the influx of Chinese ideas and customs, which have been in every sphere a cause of declension and corruption. Of the scholars who thus endeavoured to dispel the illusion of their countrymen that China was the fountain of wisdom and culture, the greatest were Mabuchi (1697-1769 A. D.), Motoori (1730-1801), and Hirata (1776-1843), and these are also the chief names in the revival of Pure Shinto. The first two contented themselves with showing from the ancient books what the native religion was, and how much better it was in its original purity than all foreign religions and philosophies. It alone was in truth the "Way of the Gods" (Kami no michi), established by Izanagi and Izanami, delivered by them to the sun goddess, and by her to the people over whom her descendants rule. That men have been turned aside from it to Buddhism and Chinese philosophy is the work of demons ("spirits of crookedness"). ^1 Motoori has no thought of a reformation by which the ancient religion, freed from all alien admixture, should be established as the religion of the present time; for according to his deterministic theory the actual religion is what it is by the will of the gods, and it is not for men to be wiser than the gods. [Footnote 1: There is a noticeable dualistic strain in these authors.] Hirata was of a different temper. His ideal was the restoration of Pure Shinto as the religion of rulers and people, to the exclusion of both Buddhism and Confucianism; and he composed, among other works, forms of prayer suitable for the worship of reformed Shintoists. Despite Hirata's antipathy for all things Chinese, he could not divest himself of his education. He was too much of a thinker to be able to do without philosophy in his theology; and his ethics, in particular, are based on the worship of ancestors and the filial piety which this veneration cultivates, quite after the Confucian model. Hirata's efforts for a revival of Pure Shinto in practice had not much more immediate effect than the antiquarian restoration of his predecessors; but the writings of these scholars, with their enthusiasm for native Japanese culture literature and religion, their highly idealised pictures of the good old days, and the prominence they gave to the divine origin and right of the Mikado, contributed not a little to the movement which resulted in the political restoration of 1868.