THE RELIGIONS OF JAPAN.*
IN Japan, as in China, the religion of the majority of the people is complex and eclectic, an amalgam of three ori- ginally distinct systems. "The average Japanese," says Dr, Griffis, "learns about the gods, and draws inspiration for his patriotism from Shinto, maxims for his ethical and social life from Confucius, and his hope of what he regards as salvation from Buddhism" (p. 11). There is, moreover, a vast under- growth of traditionary pantheistic beliefs, fetishism, and animism, acquiesced in, though not formally recognised, by the more respectable book-religions. Dr. Griffis, who has during some years' residence in Japan had the opportunity of observing the extent and influence of the variegated faiths of the people, has attempted, in the course of lectures col- lected in the present volume, to open up the sources and trace the meanderings of the several tributaries, which combined to form the somewhat muddy river of Japanese religion. His account would have been clearer, at least to those readers who are not already familiar with the general history of Japan, if the author had prefaced his work with a brief out- line of that history; or, in other words, had laid out a rough plan of the country through which the religious streams have flowed, and which they fertilised and to some extent created. As it is, we are given here and there patches of the history, which it is difficult to piece together, so as to gain a clear conception of the whole, and see the precise points at which the various religious influences entered in and helped to shape the character and destinies of the nation.
Shinto, or the Way of the Gods, may be regarded as the orthodox religion of Japan. "The ideal of Shinto is to make people pure and clean in all their personal and household arrangements; it is to help them to live simply, honestly, and with mutual goodwill; it is to make the Japanese love their country, honour their imperial house, and obey their Emperor" (p. 97). Personal cleanliness and loyalty are the supreme virtues of this religion. As in the law of Moses, immense stress is laid on the duty of keeping clean. "Pollution was calamity, defilement was sin, and physical purity at least was holiness. Everything that could in any way soil the body or the clothing was looked upon with abhorrence and detestation. Disease, wounds, and death were defiling, and the feeling of disgust prevailed over that of either sympathy or pity. Birth and death were especially polluting. Anciently there were huts built both for the mother about to give birth to a child, or [sic] for the man who was dying or sure to die of disease or wounds. After the birth of the infant, or the death of the patient, these houses were burned" (p. 85). Such "dying houses" are not
• The Beligione of Japan. By W. E. Griffis, D.D. London : Hodder & Stoughton.
peculiar to Japan, but are in use also among the Chinese, even quite lately under British rule at Singapore, as we learn from papers recently laid before Parliament. But, unlike the law of Moses, Shinto is devoid of any code of moral command- ments. "The root-idea of the word tsumi," says Dr. Griffis (p. 78), "which Mr. Satow translated as offence,' is that of pollution. On this basis, of things pure and things defiling, the ancient teachers of Shinto made their classification of what was good and what was bad." This is illustrated by a quotation from one of the ancient liturgies, by which offences were to be washed away. This contains a list of "offences which may be committed in ignorance or out of negligence," such as "breaking the ridges, filling up water-courses," and the like. Next to cleanliness, or above it, Shinto taught the duty of unswerving, blind obedience to the Mikado, who was a god above all the other myriads of gods.
This same idea of loyalty coloured and modified the ethical code of Confucius after it passed over into Japan, and was admitted into the religious currency of the Japanese. As the "Chinese teacher had made filial piety the basis of his system, the Japanese gradually but surely made loyalty (Kun- shin), that is, the allied relations of sovereign and minister, of lord and retainer, and of master and servant, not only first in order, but the chief of all" the human relations. The one idea that dominated all classes in Japan was that of loyalty. "As the Japanese language shows, every faculty of man was subordinated to this idea. Confucianism even conditioned the development of Japanese grammar, by multiplying honorary prefixes and suffixes, and building-up all sociable and polite speech in perpendicular lines " (p. 116). The idea of reciprocity of feeling, of mutual love, between a superior and a subordi- nate was unknown ; liberty, equality, and fraternity were foreign notions that could with difficulty find a footing in Japanese soil. Children are taught not to love their fathers, but to obey them. The despotic power of the father is un- limited, and many a daughter, without hesitation or shame, but rather with a strong sense of dutifulness, sells her body to help pay a father's debts, or to support him in his old age. Again, in the relations between the Sovereign and his Ministers, Kun-shin has had a most remarkable development in the glorification of suicide. "From the pre- historic days," writes Dr. Griffis (p. 119), "when the custom of Junshi, or dying with his master, required the interment of the living retainers with the dead lord, down through all the ages to the Revolution of 1868, when at Sendai and Aidzu scores of men and boys opened their bowels, and mothers slew their infant sons and cut their own throats, there has been flowing through Japanese history a river of suicides' blood, having its springs in the devotion of retainers to masters, and of soldiers to a lost cause, as repre- sented by the feudal superior." Suicide in popular estimation cleared even the criminal from every stain, and gave him the fame of a martyr. The cool and determined manner in which the detective in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables drowned him- self, rather than bear the burden of the memory of a single departure from his strict standard of loyalty to law, resembles the method and motives underlying the common Japanese practice of honourable suicide.
Buddhism was modified even more than Confucianism by its contact with Shinto. It had already lasted a thousand years before it reached Japan, and in that time had put on strange forms, which surely would not have been recognised by its founder. Primitive Buddhism had neither god nor priests; but Northern Buddhism evolved a whole hierarchy of gods, and developed, especially in its Thibetan variety, an equally elaborate hierarchy of priests. Beginning with the personification of Kindness, Wisdom, and Power, it gradually built up a populous Pantheon, and in every country which it entered it showed a marvellous capacity for absorbing local beliefs and local deities, and "thus gained by accretion, until its bulk, both of beliefs and of disciples, was in the inverse ratio of its purity" (p. 173). In Japan the marriage of Shinto and Buddhism was consummated early in the ninth century by a Buddhist monk, named KO-bo, who professed to have received a revelation to the effect that all the Shinto deities were avatars or incarnations of the Buddha :—
" Descending from the shrine of vision and revelation, with a complete scheme of reconciliation, with correlated catalogues of ShintO. and Buddhist gods, with liturgies, with lists of old popular festivals newly named, with the apparatus of art to captivate the senses, KO-b6 forthwith baptised each native Shint5 deity with a new Chinese Buddhistic name. For every Shinto festival he arranged a corresponding Buddhist saints' day or gala time. Then, training up a band of disciples, he sent them forth pro- claiming the new irenicon." (p. 202.) We have no space here to trace the history of Riyobu, or Mixed Buddhism down to 1870, when an attempt was made
by the Government to destroy the Buddhist elements and to restore pure Shinto. Nor can we touch on the interesting questions of the influence which Buddhism had on the art and government of the country. Buddhism has had many sects in Japan, and one of the most curious—as again illus- trating how this religion has evolved the exact opposite of some of its founder's essential doctrines—is the Jodo sect, which teaches justification by faith, instead of by self-effort. At least, the only effort required of the believer is the con- tinual repetition of the prayer to Amide, who is the personi- fication of boundless Light, dwelling in the Western Paradise, where the faithful will be reborn.
Dr. Griffis gives an interesting account of the century of Roman Christianity, when Xavier and his followers made such remarkable progress in converting the Japanese to the Christian faith. Dire persecution followed, persecution which, according to Mr. Lecky (in his History of Rationalism) extirpated Christianity from the country ; but Dr. Griffis points out that, though driven beneath the surface during the two hundred years when Japan shut itself up from all foreign influences, it still survived, and when Japan was again opened in 1859, the Roman Catholic missionaries were sur- prised to find that "there were thousands of people who through the Virgin, worshipped God ; who talked of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit ; and who refused to worship at the pagan shrines." (p. 345.) Naturally, in a work of this kind the author is indebted in large measure to writers who have previously treated his subjects, and although Dr. Griffis frankly and frequently acknowledges his general and particular indebtedness, we have noticed one instance (p. 174) in which, no doubt uninten- tionally, no acknowledgment is made of a passage, extending over nearly half a page, taken almost word for word from Mr. Rhys David's Buddhism. In one clause of this passage, the sense is completely altered by writing "evolves himself out of," Sce., instead of "evolves out of himself." This printer's error should be corrected in any future edition.
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