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Shinto

INTRODUCTION

Prince Shotoku,¹ the first Japanese envoy to China during the Sui Dynasty and the man credited with introducing Buddhism to Japan, coined the following famous analogy to describe Japanese religious practices (see Appendix D):

• Shinto: the roots of a tree; imbedded in the very heart of the Japanese people

• Confucianism: the trunk and branches; politics, morality, and education

• Buddhism: the flowers; religious feelings bloom as flowers

Shinto thus forms the bedrock layer of the multilayered, syncretic religious and philosophical belief system of Japan. Its origins are obscure and lie in the nation’s prehistory—when the Japanese first became aware of themselves as a people, it was already there. The term Shinto (“The Way of the Gods”) was coined at a later stage in Japanese history in order to distinguish the wide range of animistic practices² and numerous local cults native to Japan from the newly adopted Buddhist religion (c. 6th century AD).

Characteristic of all forms of Animism is their attribution of conscious life to nature or natural objects, and a belief in the existence of innumerable spirits which are thought to inhabit sacred places and which are intimately involved in human affairs. These nature spirits are thought to sanction human beings for neglect of ritual or breaking taboos, but not usually with regard to moral codes. Ceremonies are important, not in the sense of communicating with a divine creator, nor in terms of metaphysics or even how to lead a moral or ethical life, but are mostly concerned with the practicalities of daily life: securing food, curing illness, averting danger, obtaining profit, etc. The intervention of the spirit world is typically achieved through ceremonial offerings and ritual prayers.

IMPORTANT CONCEPTS

Shinto comprises a set of animistic religious practices based on the worship of kami (spirits or gods), which can be natural phenomena (e.g., the sun, mountains, trees, water, rocks, etc.), mythological beings (e.g., the Sun Goddess), human beings such as ancestors, and even ideas. To the early Japanese the visible and invisible worlds were filled with powerful influences, and people believed in a vague way that all natural objects harbored a spirit, that all perceptible objects were in some way living (Sansom, 1976, p. 25). The term kami simply means “superior” or “above,” and at one end of its spectrum of meaning is the Sun Goddess; at the other, even mud or vermin can be kami (ibid., p. 47). Although these early Japanese thought of the universe as composed of myriad sentient parts, it was a rather cloudy and unformulated conception (Sansom, 1976, p. 46). They believed in a great number of kami, both good and evil: “The chronicles tell of [kami] who swarmed and buzzed like flies, and of trees and herbs and rocks and streams that could all speak” (ibid., p. 25). However, the characters of these kami were “confused and shadowy, their power ill-defined, and their habitation either unknown or undistinguishable from ordinary beings” (ibid., p. 47). The fact that they were rarely depicted by idols or pictures is an indication of their nebulous quality in people’s minds (ibid.).

Chozubachi