Occult Japan/Shintō

by Percival Lowell

 

SHINTŌ.

I.

HINTŌ, or the Way of the Gods, is the name of the oldest religious belief of the Japanese people. The belief itself indefinitely antedates its name, for it has come down to us from a time when sole possession of the field precluded denomination. It knew no christening till Buddhism was adopted from China in the sixth century of our era, and was then first called Shintō, or the Way of the Gods, to distinguish it from Butsudō, or the Way of Buddha.

If it thus acquired a name, it largely lost local habitation. For Buddhism proceeded to appropriate its possessions, temporal and spiritual. It had been both church and state. Buddhism became the state, and assumed the greater part of the churches; paying Shintō the compliment of incorporating, without acknowledgment, such as it fancied of the Shintō rites, and of kindly recognizing the more popular Shintō gods for lower avatars of its own. Under this generous adoption on the one hand, and relegation to an inferior place in the national pantheon on the other, very little, ostensibly, was left of Shintō,—just enough to swear by.

Lost in the splendor of Buddhist show, Shintō lay obscured thus for a millenium; lingering chiefly as a twilight of popular superstition. At last, however, a new era dawned. A long peace, following the firm establishing of the Shogunate, turned men's thoughts to criticism, and begot the commentators, a line of literati, who, beginning with Mabuchi, in the early part of the eighteenth century, devoted themselves to a study of the past, and continued to comment, for a century and a half, upon the old Japanese traditions buried in the archaic language of the Kojiki and the Nihongi, the history-bibles of the race. As science, the commentators' elucidations are chiefly comic, but their practical outcome was immense. Criticism of the past begot criticism of the present, and started a chauvinistic movement, which overthrew the Shogunate and restored the Mikado—with all the irony of fate, since these littérateurs owed their existence to the patronage of those they overthrew. This was the restoration of 1868. Shintō came back as part and parcel of the old. The temples Buddhism had usurped were purified; that is, they were stripped of Buddhist ornament, and handed over again to the Shintō priests. The faith of the nation's springtime entered upon the Indian summer of its life.

This happy state of things was not to last. Buddhism, and especially the great wave of western ideas, proved submerging. From filling one half the government, spiritual affairs were degraded, first to a department, then to a bureau, and then to a sub-bureau. The Japanese upper classes had found a new faith; and Herbert Spencer was its prophet.

But in the nation's heart the Shintō sentiment throbbed on as strong as ever. A Japanese cabinet minister found this out to his cost. In 1887, Mori Arinori, one of the most advanced Japanese new-lights, then minister of state for education, went on a certain occasion to the Shrines of Ise, and studiously treated them with disrespect. It was alleged, and apparently on good authority, that he trod with his boots on the mat outside the portal of the palisade, and then poked the curtain apart with his walking-stick. He was assassinated in consequence; the assassin was cut down by the guards, and then Japan rose in a body to do honor, not to the murdered man, but to his murderer. Even the muzzled press managed to hint on which side it was, by some as curious editorials as were ever penned. As for the people, there were no two ways about it; you had thought the murderer some great patriot dying for his country. Folk by thousands flocked with flowers to his grave, and pilgrimages were made to it, as to some shrine. It is still kept green; still to-day the singing-girls bring it their branches of plum blossoms, with a prayer to the gods that a little of the spirit of him who lies buried there may become theirs: that spirit which they call so proudly the Yamato Kokoro, the heart of old Japan.

For in truth Shintō is so Japanese it will not down. It is the faith of these people's birthright, not of their adoption. Its folklore is what they learned at the knee of the race-mother, not what they were taught from abroad. Buddhist they are by virtue of belief; Shintō by virtue of being.

Shintō is the Japanese conception of the cosmos. It is a combination of the worship of nature and of their own ancestors. But the character of the combination is ethnologically instructive. For a lack of psychic development has enabled these seemingly diverse elements to fuse into a homogeneous whole. Both, of course, are aboriginal instincts. Next to the fear of natural phenomena, in point of primitiveness, comes the fear of one's father, as children and savages show. But races, like individuals, tend to differentiate the two as they develop. Now, the suggestive thing about the Japanese is, that they did not do so. Filial respect lasted, and by virtue of not becoming less, became more, till it filled not only the whole sphere of morals, but expanded into the sphere of cosmogony. To the Japanese eye, the universe itself took on the paternal look. Awe of their parents, which these people could comprehend, lent explanation to dread of nature, which they could not. Quite cogently, to their minds, the thunder and the typhoon, the sunshine and the earthquake, were the work not only of anthropomorphic beings, but of beings ancestrally related to themselves. In short, Shintō, their explanation of things in general, is simply the patriarchal principle projected without perspective into the past, dilating with distance into deity.

That their dead should thus definitely live on to them is nothing strange. It is paralleled by the way in which the dead live on in the thought of the young generally. Actual personal immortality is the instant inevitable inference of the child-mind. The dead do thus survive in the memories of the living, and it is the natural deduction to clothe this subjective idea with objective existence.

Shintō is thus an adoration of family wraiths, or of imputed family wraiths; imaginaries of the first and the second order in the analysis of the universe. Buddhism with its ultimate Nirvana is in a sense the antithesis of this. For while simple Shintō regards the dead as spiritually living, philosophic Buddhism regards the living as spiritually dead; two aspects of the same shield.

The Japanese thus conceive themselves the great-grandchildren of their own gods. Their Mikado they look upon as the lineal descendant of Niniginomikoto, the first God Emperor of Japan. And the gods live in heaven much as men, their children, do on earth. The concrete quality of the Japanese mind has barred abstractions on the subject. The gods have never so much as laid down a moral code. "Obey the Mikado," and otherwise "follow your own heart" is the sum of their commands; as parental injunctions as could well be framed. So is the attitude of the Japanese toward their gods filially familiar, an attitude which shocks more teleologic faiths, but in which they themselves see nothing irreverent. In the same way their conception of a future life is that of a definite immaterial extension of the present one.

To foreign students in consequence, Shintō has seemed little better than the ghost of a belief, far too insubstantial a body of faith to hold a heart. To ticket its gods and pigeon-hole its folk-lore has appeared to be the end of a study of its cult.

Nor is its outward appearance less uninvitingly skeleton-like. With a barn of a building for temple, a scant set of paraphernalia, and priests who are laymen most of the time, its appearance certainly leaves something to be desired. For in all save good Puritan souls, the religious idea craves sensuous setting. Feeling lies at the root of faith, and a fine mass at the root of feeling. Sense may not be vital to religion, but incense is.

II.

In but one thing is Shintō patently rich—in gods. It has as much to worship as it has little to worship with. It has more gods than its devotees know what to do with. From the Goddess of the Sun to the gods of rice and agriculture, few things in heaven or earth stand unrepresented in its catholic pantheon. Biblical biography puts the number roundly at eighty myriads, but in Japanese speech "eighty" and "myriad" are neither of them mathematical terms, the one being a mystic number and the other a conventional confession of arithmetical incompetency; both expressions being rigorously rendered in English by the phrase "no end." Nobody ever pretended to count the gods. Indeed, to do so would be pious labor lost; for the roll is being constantly increased by promotions from the ranks. Any one at death may become a god, and it is of the entailed responsibilities of greatness that the very exalted must do so.

Of course no merely finite man can possibly worship so infinite a number of deities, though time be to him of oriental limitlessness. So each makes his choice of intimates, and clubs the rest in a general petition, from time to time, to prevent accidents.

His first choice is made for him by his parents. A week after birth the babe is presented at the temple (miya mairi) and put under the protection of some special deity. The god's preference is not consulted in the affair; he becomes tutelary god on notification, as a matter of course.

Next in importance to the tutelary god is the patron god. For every branch of human industry is specially superintended by some god. Men may deem it beneath them to be in business, but the gods do not. Each has his trade, and spends much time looking after his apprentices. But it is work without worry, befitting the easy-going East; the god of honest labor being portrayed as a jolly, fat fisherman, very comfortably seated, chuckling at having just caught a carp.

Pleasures, too, have their special gods with whom perforce their votaries are on peculiarly intimate terms, inasmuch as such gods are very boon-companion patrons of the sport. Furthermore, every one chooses his gods for a general compatibility of temper with himself. He thus lives under congenial guardianship all his life.

Simple as such conceptions are, there is something fine in their sweet simplicity. The very barrenness of the faith's buildings has a beauty of its own, touched as it is by Japanese taste. Through those gracefully plain portals a simple life here passes to a yet simpler one beyond; and the solemn cryptomerea lend it all the natural grandeur that so fittingly canopies the old.

So are the few Shintō rites perfect in effect. Finished fashionings from a far past, they are so beautifully complete, that one forgets the frailty of the conception in the rounded perfection of the form.

One sees at once how aboriginal all this is. Childish conceptions embalmed in an exquisite etiquette; so Shintō might have been ticketed.

III.

But the mythologic mummy showed no evidence of soul. By the soul of a faith, as opposed to its mere body of belief, I mean that informing spirit vouchsafed by direct communion between god and man which all faiths proclaim of themselves, and pooh-pooh of all the others. It was this soul that so unexpectedly revealed itself to me upon Ontaké.

We must now see what the Japanese conceive this soul to be. Now Shintō philosophy is not the faith's strong point. The Japanese are artists, not scientists. And in their revelations their gods show the same simple and attractive character. If, therefore, the Shintō scheme of things seem at times incompatible with itself, the gods themselves are responsible, not I, errors and omissions on my part excepted. For I have it all from one whose authority is nothing short of the god's own words, vouchsafed to him in trance, my friend the high priest of the Shinshiu sect. So that my knowledge of the subject is but second-hand divine, much nearer the source of inspiration than I can ever hope in reason to come again.

To begin with, then, all things in heaven and earth are composed of three elements, (gotai or karada) body, (shinki) mind or spirit, and (tamashii) soul. Stocks and stones, plants, animals, and some men have no soul, being made up entirely of body and mind. The behavior of some men seems to lend support to this theory. Gods, on the other hand, are bodiless and consist of spirit and soul, except the supreme god, Ame-no-minaka-nashi-no-mikoto, who is all soul.

Shinki, lit. god-spirit, is related to tamashii, soul, much as a substance with its attributes is related to the same substance without them. If you can manage the conception of the first of these philosophic vacuities, you will find no difficulty with the second. Furthermore, spirit and soul may coexist separately in one body. As the spirit clarifies, that is, becomes more and more blank, it approaches soul and finally becomes it.

The one thing common, therefore, to all things, both of this world and the next, is spirit. Everything, from gods to granite, has its god-spirit. Each spirit is as separate and particular as the body it inhabits; yet it is capable of indefinite expansion or contraction, of permeating matter and of going and coming according to laws of its own. It may, perhaps, be looked upon provisionally as a gas.

Spirit never dies, it only circulates. When a man or animal or plant dies its body duly decays, but its spirit either lives on alone or returns to those two great reservoirs of spirit, the gods Takami-musubi-no-kami and Kami-musubi-no-kami. From them a continual circulation of spirit is kept up through the universe. Whether a spirit's personality persist or not is a matter decided by the supreme god, and depends upon the greatness or the goodness of the defunct. For example, Kan Shojo, the god of calligraphy, has persisted thus posthumously for almost a thousand years. It is to be hoped for the sake of Japan's beautiful brushmanship, that he will continue to survive and be worshiped for some time yet.

Spirit is by no means necessarily good. It is manifest that, viewed from the human standpoint, some things are harmful, some harmless, both among plants, animals, and men. The harmful ones are therefore bad; the harmless ones may or may not be good. Why certain inoffensive animals, for example, have got a bad name, or even a good one, is as inscrutable as the cause of the gender of Latin nouns. They are given a bad name, and that is cause enough. It will be observed that in this system of ethics man has no monopoly of original sin.

Similarly the gods themselves are divided into the sheep and the goats, but by a merciful dispensation of something or other the good gods are mightier than the bad. Indeed, a certain evolutionary process is going on throughout the universe, by which the bad spirits grow good and the good better. It is described as a continued clarification, terminating in total blankness.

Spirit not only circulates after death; it may do so during life. Usually it does not wander in this way, simply because it is at home where it is and inertia keeps it there. But in some cases it is not so wedded to the body with which it is associated, and the purer it becomes the more is it given to occasional volatilizing.

Now esoteric Shintō consists in compelling this spirit to circulate for particular ends. This is not a difficult matter, if it be properly undertaken. It is accomplished through self-purification. For the degree of purity determines the degree of possession. Possession is simply the entrance into one body of another body's spirit, and the simultaneous expulsion or subjugation of the spirit originally there.

This shift of spirit may take place between any two bodies in nature. Nor does such interchange differ in kind, no matter what the bodies be. But for the sake of psychology rather than religion, we may profitably consider it under the two aspects of god-possession of things and god-possession of people. The one gives rise to the miracles; the other to the incarnations. Both kinds of possession occurred spontaneously, that is, at the will of the gods, in olden times, and presumably so occur at the present day; but the gods have also graciously granted pure men the power to pray for them acceptedly.

In the case of people the act of possession is nowadays known as kami-oroshi, kami-utsushi or kami-utsuri, that is, "the causing of the god to come down," "the causing the god to transform" or "god transformation." The first two names thus view the thing from the human standpoint, the last from the divine. But this is matter of the temporary point of view, all three expressions, with others such as nori-utsuri, "to change vehicles," being used indifferently according to the speaker's preference.

Possession may be partial, complete, or intermediary, that is, the alien spirit may share the head of the person with the native spirit, or it may drive it out, or it may drive it down into the belly. But such degrees of tenancy are grades rather of the proficiency attained during novitiate into the cult. In actual possessions the chief distinction consists in the character of the god who comes.

Possession of things are in like manner possible through purity in the person who would bring them about. They are called kamiwasa or god-arts, because originally only the gods, and now only the gods and the godly, can perform them.

IV.

Before entering upon the miracles, it is necessary to explain the present position of Shintō with regard to these esoteric practices generally. For, though as we shall see when we look later into their history, it is probable that originally they were the common property of all Shintōists, they are not so to-day.

Of the present ten sects that compose the Shintō church, only two practice the possession-cult, the Shinshiu and the Mitaké sects. That they do so while the others do not is not matter of creed, but of tradition. Though called sects, the Shintō sects are not properly so much sects as sections. For they differ not by differently worshiping an identical god, but by identically worshiping different gods. Each of them likewise worships, though with less assiduity, all the others' gods. Each looks specially to the great shrine dedicated to its special gods; and all but two, one of which is a sort of general bureau of church organism, make pilgrimages to their shrine once or twice a year.

These sects date only from since the time of the revival of pure Shintō twenty years ago. But under another name the professors of the cult hold it in unbroken practice from the far past. Whether during the time of Shintō's long eclipse the possession cult was kept up by the few remaining pure Shintōists, if indeed there can be said to have been any pure Shintōists then at all, is doubtful, although the priests to-day assert that it was always practiced by the pious in secret. Certain it is, however, that during the lapse of Shintō from national regard practice of the cult passed to all intents and purposes to a hybrid of Shintō and Buddhism known as Ryōbu or Both, because it was indeed manufactured of both creeds.

The great Kōbō Daishi is the reputed father of Ryōbu. This worthy soul—who by the way was never called Kōbō Daishi while he was called anything; he was known as Kūkai so long as he was known at all—was the founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism in Japan. He seems to have been singularly energetic. The peaks he climbed, the pictures he painted, and the divers deeds of one sort and another which he accomplished, would have kept Methuselah on the jump for the whole of his millennial life. Nevertheless, he found time amid it all to invent Ryōbu. His invention consisted in a judicious hodge-podge of Shintō and Buddhist popularities. His diligence met its reward. The newly invented faith instantly became very popular, because it let everybody in. It was essentially an open air faith, much given to mountaineering, a trait it might be supposed to have inherited from its father, were it not instinctive in a Japanese to climb.

Ryōbu has more than one sect, but it was only the Ontaké sect of the belief that practiced god-possession. It kept the cult alive for a thousand years, and then, when pure Shintō was revived at the time of the Restoration, and hybrids were abolished by imperial edict, the Ontaké Ryōbuists came back again into the Shintō fold.

Besides Ryōbu, some of the Buddhist sects early saw the advantage of being intimate with deity, and Kōbō Daishi, after being taught the means to it by the Shintō Emperor Sanga, so it is said, not satisfied with inventing Ryobu and incorporating it in that, boldly took it for his own Shingon sect of Buddhism. And the Shingon sect still practices the cult to-day. Denkyō Daishi, the founder of the Tendai sect, was likewise captivated by it and incorporated it into his belief. Lastly, the Nichiren sect learned the art and indulges in it now more than either of the other two.

We thus find at the present time among the professors of the cult some Shintōists, some Ryōbuists, and some Buddhists; each faith claiming it stoutly for its own.