Читать книгу The Religions of Japan, from the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji - William Elliot Griffis - Страница 15

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Glancing at some phases of the actual unwritten religions of Japan we name Shamanism, Mythical Zoölogy, Fetichism, Phallicism, and Tree and Serpent Worship.

In actual Shamanism or Animism there may or there may not be a belief in or conception of a single all-powerful Creator above and beyond all.¹² Usually there is not such a belief, though, even if there be, the actual government of the physical world and its surroundings is believed to lie in the hands of many spirits or gods benevolent and malevolent. Earth, air, water, all things teem with beings that are malevolent and constantly active. In time of disaster, famine, epidemic the universe seems as overcrowded with them as stagnant water seems to be when the solar microscope throw its contents into apparition upon the screen. It is absolutely necessary to propitiate these spirits by magic rites and incantations.

Among the tribes of the northern part of the Chinese Empire and the Ainos of Japan this Shamanism exists as something like an organized cultus. Indeed, it would be hard to find any part of Chinese Asia from Korea to Annam or from Tibet to Formosa, not dominated by this belief in the power and presence of minor spirits. The Ainos of Yezo may be called Shamanists or Animists; that is, their minds are cramped and confused by their belief in a multitude of inferior spirits whom they worship and propitiate by rites and incantations through their medicine-man or sorcerer. How they whittle sticks, keeping on the fringe of curled shavings, and set up these, called inao in places whence evil is suspected to lurk, and how the shaman conducts his exorcisms and works his healings, are told in the works of the traveller and the missionary.¹³ In the wand of shavings thus reared we see the same motive as that which induced the Mikado in the eighth century to build the great monasteries on Hiyéizan, northeast of Ki[=o]to, this being the quarter in which Buddhist superstition locates the path of advancing evil, to ward off malevolence by litanies and incense. Or, the inao is a sort of lightning-rod conductor by which impending mischief may be led harmlessly away.

Yet, besides the Ainos,¹⁴ there are millions of Japanese who are Shamanists, even though they know not the name or organized cult. And if we make use of the term Shamanism instead of the more exact one of Animism, it is for the very purpose of illustrating our contention that the underlying paganisms of the Japanese archipelago, unwritten and unformulated, are older than the religions founded on books; and that these paganisms, still vital and persistent, constantly modify and corrupt the recognized religious. The term Shaman, a Pali word, was originally a pure Buddhist term meaning one who has separated from his family and his passions. One of the designations of the Buddha was Shamana-Gautama. The same word, Shamon, in Japanese still means a bonze, or Buddhist priest. Its appropriation by the sorcerers, medicine-men, and lords of the misrule of superstition in Mongolia and Manchuria shows decisively how indigenous paganism has corrupted the Buddhism of northern Asia even as it has caused its decay in Japan.

As out of Animism or Shamanism grows Fetichism in which a visible object is found for the abode or medium of the spirit, so also, out of the same soil arises what we may call Imaginary Zoölogy. In this mental growth, the nightmare of the diseased imagination or of the mind unable to draw the line between the real and the unreal, Chinese Asia differs notably from the Aryan world. With the mythical monsters of India and Iran we are acquainted, and with those of the Semitic and ancient European cycle of ideas which furnished us with our ancients and classics we are familiar. The lovely presences in human form, the semi-human and bestial creations, sphinxes, naiads, satyrs, fauns, harpies, griffins, with which the fancy of the Mediterranean nations populated glen, grotto, mountain and stream, are probably outnumbered by the less beautiful and even hideous mind-shadows of the Turanian world. Chief among these are what in Chinese literature, so slavishly borrowed by the Japanese, are called the four supernatural or spiritually endowed creatures—the Kirin or Unicorn, the Phoenix, the Tortoise and the Dragon.¹⁵