Читать книгу The Religions of Japan, from the Dawn of History to the Era of Méiji - William Elliot Griffis - Страница 18

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Further illustrations of far Eastern Animism and Fetichism are seen in forms once vastly more prevalent in Japan than now. Indeed, so far improved off the face of the earth are they, that some are already matters of memory or archæology, and their very existence even in former days is nearly or wholly incredible to the generation born since 1868—when Old Japan began to vanish in dissolving views and New Japan to emerge. What the author has seen with his own eyes, would amaze many Japanese born since 1868 and the readers of the rhapsodies of tourists who study Japan from the jin-riki-sha. Phases of tree and serpent worship are still quite common, and will be probably for generations to come; but the phallic shrines and emblems abolished by the government in 1872 have been so far invisible to most living travellers and natives, that their once general existence and use are now scarcely suspected. Even profound scholars of the Japanese language and literature whose work dates from after the year 1872 have scarcely suspected the universality of phallic worship. Yet what we could say of this cult and its emblems, especially in treating of Shint[=o], the special ethnic faith of Japan, would be from sight of our own eyes besides the testimony of many witnesses.²⁰

The cultus has been known in the Japanese archipelago from Riu Kin to Yezo. Despite official edicts of abolition it is still secretly practised by the "heathen," the inaka of Japan. "Government law lasts three days," is an ancient proverb in Nippon. Sharp eyes have, within three months of the writing of this line, unearthed a phallic shrine within a stone's-throw of Shint[=o]'s most sacred temples at Isé. Formerly, however, these implements of worship were seen numerously—in the cornucopia distributed in the temples, in the matsuris or religious processions and in representation by various plastic material—and all this until 1872, to an extent that is absolutely incredible to all except the eye-witnesses, some of whose written testimonies we possess. What seems to our mind shocking and revolting was once a part of our own ancestors' faith, and until very recently was the perfectly natural and innocent creed of many millions of Japanese and is yet the same for tens of thousands of them.

We may easily see why and how that which to us is a degrading cult was not only closely allied to Shint[=o], but directly fostered by and properly a part of it, as soon as we read the account of the creation of the world, an contained in the national "Book of Ancient Traditions," the "Kojiki." Several of the opening paragraphs of this sacred book of Shint[=o] are phallic myths explaining cosmogony. Yet the myths and the cult are older than the writing and are phases of primitive Japanese faith. The mystery of fatherhood is to the primitive man the mystery of creation also. To him neither the thought nor the word was at hand to put difference and transcendental separation between him and what he worshipped as a god.

Into the details of the former display and carriage of these now obscene symbols in the popular celebrations; of the behavior of even respectable citizens during the excitement and frenzy of the festivals; of their presence in the wayside shrines; of the philosophy, hideousness or pathos of the subject, we cannot here enter. We simply call attention to their existence, and to a form of thought, if not of religion, properly so-called, which has survived all imported systems of faith and which shows what the native or indigenous idea of divinity really is—an idea that profoundly affects the organization of society. To the enlightened Buddhist, Confucian, and even the modern Shintoist the phallus-worshipper is a "heathen," a "pagan," and yet he still practises his faith and rites. It is for us to hint at the powerful influence such persistent ideas have upon Japanese morals and civilization. Still further, we illustrate the basic fact which all foreign religions and all missionaries, Confucian, Buddhist, Mahometan or Christian must deal with, viz.: That the Eastern Asiatic mind runs to pantheism as surely as the body of flesh and blood seeks food.