The Religions of Japan, from the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji. William Elliot Griffis
a part the serpent played in the so-called divine age, how it acted as progenitress of the Mikado's ancestry, and how it afforded means of incarnation for the kami or gods. Ten species of ophidia are known in the Japanese islands, but in the larger number of more or less imaginary varieties which figure in the ancient books we shall find plenty of material for fetich-worship. In perusing the "Kojiki" one scarcely knows, when he begins a story, whether the character which to all appearance is a man or woman is to end as a snake, or whether the mother after delivering her child will or will not glide into the marsh or slide away into the sea, leaving behind a trail of slime. A dragon is three-fourths serpent, and both the dragon and the serpent are prominent figures, perhaps the most prominent of the kami or gods in human or animal form in the "Kojiki" and other early legends of the gods, though the crocodile, crow, deer, dog, and other animals are kami.24 It is therefore no wonder that serpents have been and are still worshipped by the people, that some of their gods and goddesses are liable at any time to slip away in scaly form, that famous temples are built on sites noted as being the abode or visible place of the actual water or land snake of natural history, and that the spot where a serpent is seen to-day is usually marked with a sacred emblem or a shrine.25 We shall see how this snake-worship became not only a part of Shint[=o] but even a notable feature in corrupt Buddhism.
Pantheism's Destruction of Boundaries. 26
In its rudest forms, this pantheism branches out into animism or shamanism, fetichism and phallicism. In its higher forms, it becomes polytheism, idolatry and defective philosophy. Having centuries ago corrupted Buddhism it is the malaria which, unseen and unfelt, is ready to poison and corrupt Christianity. Indeed, it has already given over to disease and spiritual death more than one once hopeful Christian believer, teacher and preacher in the Japan of our decade.
To assault and remove the incubus, to replace and refill the mind, to lift up and enlighten the Japanese peasant, science as already known and faith in one God, Creator and Father of all things, must go hand in hand. Education and civilization will do much for the ignorant inaka or boors, but for the cultured whose minds waver and whose feet flounder, as well as for the unlearned and priest-ridden, there is no surer help and healing than that faith in the Heavenly Father which gives the unifying thought to him who looks into creation.
Keep the boundary line clear between God and his world and all is order and discrimination. Obliterate that boundary and all is pathless morass, black chaos and on the mind the phantasms which belong to the victim of delirium tremens.
There is one Lawgiver. In the beginning, God. In the end, God, all in all.
SHINT[=O]: MYTHS AND RITUAL
"In the great days of old,
When o'er the land the gods held sov'reign sway,
Our fathers lov'd to say
That the bright gods with tender care enfold
The fortunes of Japan,
Blessing the land with many an holy spell:
And what they loved to tell,
We of this later age ourselves do prove;
For every living man
May feast his eyes on tokens of their love."
—Poem of Yamagami-no Okura,
A.D. 733.
Baal: "While I on towers and banging terraces,
In shaft and obelisk, behold my sign.
Creative, shape of first imperious law."
—Bayard Taylor's "Masque of the Gods."
"Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them, and tookest thy broidered garments, and coveredst them: and thou hast set mine oil and mine incense before them. My meat also which I gave thee, fine flour, and oil, and honey, wherewith I fed thee, thou hast even set it before them for a sweet savor: and thus it was, saith the Lord GOD."—Ezekiel.
If it be said (as has been the case), 'Shintoism has nothing in it,' we should be inclined to answer, 'So much the better, there is less error to counteract.' But there is something in it, and that … of a kind of which we may well avail ourselves when making known the second commandment, and the 'fountain of cleansing from all sin.'"—E.W. Syle.
"If Shint[=o] has a dogma, it is purity."—Kaburagi.
"I will wash my hands in innocency, O Lord: and so will I go to thine altar."—Ps. xxvi. 6.
CHAPTER II - SHINT[=O]: MYTHS AND RITUAL
The Japanese a Young Nation.
What impresses us in the study of the history of Japan is that, compared with China and Korea, she is young. Her history is as the story of yesterday. The nation is modern. The Japanese are as younger children in the great family of Asia's historic people. Broadly speaking, Japan is no older than England, and authentic Japanese history no more ancient than British history. In Albion, as in the Honorable Country, there are traditions and mythologies that project their shadows aeons back of genuine records; but if we consider that English history begins in the fifth, and English literature in the eighth century, then there are other reasons besides those commonly given for calling Japan "the England of the East."
No trustworthy traditions exist which carry the known history of Japan farther back than the fifth century. The means for measuring and recording time were probably not in use until the sixth century. The oldest documents in the Japanese language, excepting a few fragments of the seventh century, do not antedate the year 712, and even in these the Chinese characters are in many instances used phonetically, because the meaning of the words thus transliterated had already been forgotten. Hence their interpretation in detail is still largely a matter of conjecture.
Yet the Japanese Archipelago was inhabited long before the dawn of history. The concurrent testimony of the earliest literary monuments, of the indigenous mythology, of folk-lore, of shell-heaps and of kitchen-middens shows that the occupation by human beings of the main islands must be ascribed to times long before the Christian era. Before written records or ritual of worship, religion existed on its active or devotional side, and there were mature growths of thought preserved and expressed orally. Poems, songs, chants and norito or liturgies were kept alive in the human memory, and there was a system of worship, the name of which was given long after the introduction of Buddhism. This descriptive term, Kami no Michi in Japanese, and Shin-t[=o] in the Chinese as pronounced by Japanese, means the Way of the Gods, the t[=o] or final syllable being the same as tao in Taoism. We may say that Shint[=o] means, literally, theoslogos, theology. The customs and practices existed centuries before contact with Chinese letters, and long previous to the Shint[=o] literature which is now extant.
Whether Kami no Michi is wholly the product of Japanese soil, or whether its rudimentary ideas were imported from the neighboring Asian continent and more or less allied to the primitive Chinese religion, is still an open question. The preponderance of argument tends, however, to show that it was an importation as to its origin, for not a few events outlined in the Japanese mythology cast shadows of reminiscence upon Korea or the Asian mainland. In its development, however,