Читать книгу Occult Japan - Percival Lowell - Страница 9

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.