ignorance or out of negligence by heaven's increasing people,
who shall come into being in the country, which the Sovran
GRANDCHILD'S augustness, hiding in the fresh RESIDENCE, built by
stoutly planting the HOUSE-pillars on the bottom-most rocks, and
exalting the cross-beams to the plain of high heaven, as his
SHADE from the heavens and SHADE from the sun, shall tranquilly
ruin as a peaceful country, namely, the country of great Yamato,
where the sun is soon on high, which he fixed upon as a peaceful
country, as the centre of the countries of the four quarters
thus bestowed upon him--breaking the ridges, filling up
water-courses, opening sluices, double-sowing, planting stakes,
flaying alive, flaying backwards, and dunging; many of such
offences are distinguished as heavenly offences, and as earthly
offences; cutting living flesh, cutting dead flesh, leprosy,
proud-flesh, ... calamities of crawling worms, calamities of a
god on high, calamities of birds on high, the offences of
killing beasts and using incantations; many of such offences may
be disclosed.
When he has thus repeated it, the heavenly gods will push open
heaven's eternal gates, and cleaving a path with might through
the manifold clouds of heaven, will hear; and the country gods,
ascending to the tops of the high mountains, and to the tops of
the low hills, and tearing asunder the mists of the high
mountains and the mists of the low hills, will hear.
And when they have thus heard, the
Maiden-of-Descent-into-the-Current, who dwells in the current of
the swift stream which boils down the ravines from the tops of
the high mountains, and the tops of the low hills, shall carry
out to the great sea plain the offences which are cleared away
and purified, so that there be no remaining offence; like as
Shinato's wind blows apart the manifold clouds of heaven, as the
morning wind and the evening wind blow away the morning mist and
the evening mist, as the great ships which lie on the shore of a
great port loosen their prows, and loosen their sterns to push
out into the great sea-plain; as the trunks of the forest trees,
far and near, are cleared away by the sharp sickle, the sickle
forged with fire: so that there ceased to be any offence called
an offence in the court of the Sovran GRANDCHILD'S augustness to
begin with, and in the countries of the four quarters of the
region under heaven.
And when she thus carries them out and away, the deity called
the Maiden-of-the-Swift-cleansing, who dwells in the
multitudinous meetings of the sea waters, the multitudinous
currents of rough sea-waters shall gulp them down.
And when she has thus gulped them down, the lord of the
Breath-blowing-place, who dwells in the Breath-blowing-place,
shall utterly blow them away with his breath to the
Root-country, the Bottom-country.
And when he has thus blown them away, the deity called the
Maiden-of-Swift-Banishment, who dwells in the Root-country, the
Bottom-country, shall completely banish them, and get rid of
them.
And when they have thus been got rid of, there shall from this
day onwards be no offence which is called offence, with regard
to the men of the offices who serve in the court of the Sovran,
nor in the four quarters of the region under heaven.
Then the high priest says:
Hear all of you how he leads forth the horse, as a thing that
erects its ears towards the plain of high heaven, and deigns to
sweep away and purify with the general purification, as the
evening sun goes down on the last day of the watery moon of this
year.
O diviners of the four countries, take (the sacrifices) away out
to the river highway, and sweep them away.
Mikadoism Usurps the Primitive God-way.
A further proof of the transformation of the primitive god-way in the
interest of practical politics, is shown by Professor Kumi in the fact
that some of the festivals now directly connected with the Mikado's
house, and even in his honor, were originally festivals with which he
had nothing to do, except as leader of the worship, for the honor was
paid to Heaven, and not to his ancestors. Professor Kumi maintains that
the thanksgivings of the court were originally to Heaven itself, and not
in honor of Amatérasŭ, the sun-goddess, as is now popularly believed.
It is related in the Kojiki that Amatérasŭ herself celebrated the
feast of Niinamé. So also, the temple of Isé, the Mecca of Shintō,
and the Holy shrine in the imperial palace were originally temples for
the worship of Heaven. The inferior gods of earthly origin form no part
of primitive Shintō.
Not one of the first Mikados was deified after death, the deification of
emperors dating from the corruption which Shintō underwent after the
introduction of Buddhism. Only by degrees was the ruler of the country
given a place in the worship, and this connection was made by
attributing to him descent from Heaven. In a word, the contention of
Professor Kumi is, that the ancient religion of at least a portion of
the Japanese and especially of those in central Japan, was a rude sort
of monotheism, coupled, as in ancient China, with the worship of
subordinate spirits.
It is needless to say that such applications of the higher criticism to
the ancient sacred documents proved to be no safer for the applier than
if he had lived in the United States of America. The orthodox
Shintōists were roused to wrath and charged the learned critic with
"degrading Shintō to a mere branch of Christianity." The government,
which, despite its Constitution and Diet, is in the eyes of the people
really based on the myths of the Kojiki, quickly put the professor on
the retired list.[25]
It is probably correct to say that the arguments adduced by Professor
Kumi, confirm our theory of the substitution in the simple god-way, of
Mikadoism, the centre of the primitive worship being the sun and nature
rather than Heaven.
Between the ancient Chinese religion with its abstract idea of Heaven
and its personal term for God, and the more poetic and childlike system
of the god-way, there seems to be as much difference as there is
racially between the people of the Middle Kingdom and those of the Land
Where the Day Begins. Indeed, the entrance of Chinese philosophical and
abstract ideas seemed to paralyze the Japanese imagination. Not only did
myth-making, on its purely æsthetic and non-utilitarian side cease
almost at once, but such myths as were formed were for direct business
purposes and with a transparent tendency. Henceforth, in the domain of
imagination the Japanese intellect busied itself with assimilating or
re-working the abundant material imported by Buddhism.
Ancient Customs and Usages.
In the ancient god-way the temple or shrine was called a miya. After the
advent of Buddhism the keepers of the shrine were called kannushi, that
is, shrine keepers or wardens of the god. These men were usually
descendants of the god in whose honor the temples were built. The gods
being nothing more than human founders of families, reverence was paid
to them as ancestors, and so the basis of Shintō is ancestor worship.
The model of the miya, in modern as in ancient times, is the primitive
hut as it was before Buddhism introduced Indian and Chinese
architecture. The posts, stuck in the ground, and not laid upon stones
as in after times, supported the walls and roof, the latter being of
thatch. The rafters, crossed at the top, were tied along the ridge-pole
with the fibres of creepers or wistaria vines. No paint, lacquer,
gilding, or ornaments of any sort existed in the ancient shrine, and
even to-day the modern Shintō temple must be of pure hinoki or
sun-wood, and thatched, while the use of metal is as far as possible
avoided. To the gods, as the norito show, offerings of various kinds
were made, consisting of the fruits of the soil, the products of the
sea, and the fabrics of the loom.
Inside modern temples one often sees a mirror, in which foreigners with
lively imaginations read a great deal that is only the shadow of their
own mind, but which probably was never known in Shintō temples until
after Buddhist times. They also see in front of the unpainted wooden
closets or casements, wands or sticks of wood from which depend masses
or strips of white paper, cut and notched in a particular way.
Foreigners, whose fancy is nimble, have read in these the symbols of
lightning, the abode of the spirits and various forthshadowings unknown
either to the Japanese or the ancient writings. In reality these
_gohei_, or honorable offerings, are nothing more than the paper
representatives of the ancient offerings of cloth which were woven, as
the arts progressed, of bark, of hemp and of silk.
The chief Shintō ministers of religion and shrine-keepers belonged to
particular families, which were often honored with titles and offices by
the emperor. In ordinary life they dressed like others of their own rank
or station, but when engaged in their sacred office were robed in white
or in a special official costume, wearing upon their heads the _éboshi_
or peculiar cap which we associate with Japanese archæology. They knew
nothing of celibacy; but married, reared families and kept their scalps
free from the razor, though some of the lower order of shrine-keepers
dressed their hair in ordinary style, that is, with shaven poll and
topknot. At some of the more important shrines, like those at Isé, there
were virgin priestesses who acted as custodians both of the shrines and
of the relics.[26]
In front of the miyas stood what we should suppose on first seeing was a
gateway. This was the _torii_ or bird-perch, and anciently was made only
of unpainted wood. Two upright tree-trunks held crosswise on a smooth
tree-trunk the ends of which projected somewhat over the supports, while
under this was a smaller beam inserted between the two uprights. On the
torii, the birds, generally barn-yard fowls which were sacred to the
gods, roosted. These creatures were not offered up as sacrifices, but
were chanticleers to give notice of day-break and the rising of the sun.
The cock holds a prominent place in Japanese myth, legend, art and
symbolism. How this feature of pure Japanese architecture, the torii,
afterward lost its meaning, we shall show in our lecture on Riyōbu or
mixed Buddhism.
Shintō's Emphasis on Cleanliness.
One of the most remarkable features of Shintō was the emphasis laid
on cleanliness. Pollution was calamity, defilement was sin, and physical
purity at least, was holiness. Everything that could in any way soil the
body or the clothing was looked upon with abhorrence and detestation.
Disease, wounds and death were defiling, and the feeling of disgust
prevailed over that of either sympathy or pity. Birth and death were
especially polluting. Anciently there were huts built both for the
mother about to give birth to a child, or for the man who was dying or
sure to die of disease or wounds. After the birth of the infant or the
death of the patient these houses were burned. Cruel as this system was
to the woman at a time when she needed most care and comfort, and brutal
as it seems in regard to the sick and dying, yet this ancient custom was
continued in a few remote places in Japan as late as the year 1878.[27]
In modern days with equal knowledge of danger and defilement, tenderness
and compassion temper the feeling of disgust, and prevail over it.
Horror of uncleanliness was so great that the priests bathed and put on
clean garments before making the sacred offerings or chanting the
liturgies, and were accustomed to bind a slip of paper over their mouths
lest their breath should pollute the offering. Numerous were the special
festivals, observed simply for purification. Salt also was commonly used
to sprinkle over the ground, and those who attended a funeral must free
themselves from contamination by the use of salt.[28] Purification by
water was habitual and in varied forms. The ancient emperors and priests
actually performed the ablution of the people or made public lustration
in their behalf.
Afterwards, and probably because population increased and towns sprang
up, we find it was customary at the festivals of purification to perform
public ablution, vicariously, as it were, by means of paper mannikins
instead of making applications of water to the human cuticle. Twice a
year paper figures representing the people were thrown into the river,
the typical meaning of which was that the nation was thereby cleansed
from the sins, that is, the defilements, of the previous half-year.
Still later, the Mikado made the chief minister of religion at Kiōto
his deputy to perform the symbolical act for the people of the whole
country.
Prayers to Myriads of Gods.
In prayer, the worshipper, approaching the temple but not entering it,
pulls a rope usually made of white material and attached to a
peculiar-shaped bell hung over the shrine, calling the attention of the
deity to his devotions. Having washed his hands and rinsed out his
mouth, he places his hands reverently together and offers his petition.
Concerning the method and words of prayer, Hirata, a famous exponent of
Shintō, thus writes:
As the number of the gods who possess different functions is so
great, it will be convenient to worship by name only the most
important and to include the rest in a general petition. Those
whose daily affairs are so multitudinous that they have not time
to go through the whole of the following morning prayers, may
content themselves with adoring the residence of the emperor,
the domestic kami-dana, the spirits of their ancestors, their
local patron god and the deity of their particular calling in
life.
In praying to the gods the blessings which each has it in his
power to bestow are to be mentioned in a few words, and they are
not to be annoyed with greedy petitions, for the Mikado in his
palace offers up petitions daily on behalf of his people, which
are far more effectual than those of his subjects.
Rising early in the morning, wash your face and hands, rinse out
the mouth and cleanse the body. Then turn toward the province of
Yamato, strike the palms of the hands together twice, and
worship, bowing the head to the ground. The proper posture is
that of kneeling on the heels, which is ordinarily assumed in
saluting a superior.
PRAYER.
From a distance I reverently worship with awe before Amé no
Mi-hashira (Heaven-pillar) and Kuni no Mi-hashira
(Country-pillar), also called Shinatsu-hiko no kami and
Shinatsu-himé no kami, to whom is consecrated the Palace built
with stout pillars at Tatsuta no Tachinu in the department of
Héguri in the province of Yamato.
I say with awe, deign to bless me by correcting the unwitting
faults which, seen and heard by you, I have committed, by
blowing off and clearing away the calamities which evil gods
might inflict, by causing me to live long like the hard and
lasting rock, and by repeating to the gods of heavenly origin
and to the gods of earthly origin the petitions which I present
every day, along with your breath, that they may hear with the
sharp-earedness of the forth-galloping colt.
To the common people the sun is actually a god, as none can doubt who
sees them worshipping it morning and evening. The writer can never
forget one of many similar scenes in Tōkiō, when late one
afternoon after O Tentō Sama (the sun-Lord of Heaven), which had been
hidden behind clouds for a fortnight, shone out on the muddy streets. In
a moment, as with the promptness of a military drill, scores of people
rushed out of their houses and with faces westward, kneeling, squatting,
began prayer and worship before the great luminary. Besides all the
gods, supreme, subordinate and local, there is in nearly every house the
Kami-dana or god-shelf. This is usually over the door inside. It
contains images with little paper-covered wooden tablets having the
god's name on them. Offerings are made by day and a little lamp is
lighted at night. The following is one of several prayers which are
addressed to this kami-dana.
Reverently adoring the great god of the two palaces of Isé, in
the first place, the eight hundred myriads of celestial gods,
the eight hundred myriads of terrestrial gods, all the fifteen
hundred myriads of gods to whom are consecrated the great and
small temples in all provinces, all islands and all places of
the Great Land of Eight Islands, the fifteen hundreds of myriads
of gods whom they cause to serve them, and the gods of branch
palaces and branch temples, and Sohodo no kami, whom I have
invited to the shrine set up on this divine shelf, and to whom I
offer praises day by day, I pray with awe that they will deign
to correct the unwitting faults, which, heard and seen by them,
I have committed, and blessing and favoring me according to the
powers which they severally wield, cause me to follow the divine
example, and to perform good works in the Way.
Shintō Left in a State of Arrested Development.
Thus from the emperor to the humblest believer, the god-way is founded
on ancestor worship, and has had grafted upon its ritual system nature
worship, even to phallicism.[29] In one sense it is a self-made religion
of the Japanese. Its leading characteristics are seen in the traits of
the normal Japanese character of to-day. Its power for good and evil may
be traced in the education of the Japanese through many centuries.
Knowing Shintō, we to a large degree know the Japanese, their virtues
and their failings.
What Shintō might have become in its full evolution had it been left
alone, we cannot tell. Whether in the growth of the nation and without
the pressure of Buddhism, Confucianism or other powerful influences from
outside, the scattered and fragmentary mythology might have become
organized into a harmonious system, or codes of ethics have been
formulated, or the doctrines of a future life and the idea of a Supreme
Being with personal attributes have been conceived and perfected, are
questions the discussion of which may seem to be vain. History, however,
gives no uncertain answer as to what actually did take place. We do but
state what is unchallenged fact, when we say, that after commitment to
writing of the myths, poems and liturgies which may be called the basis
of Shintō, there came a great flood of Chinese and Buddhistic
literature and a tremendous expansion of Buddhist missionary activity,
which checked further literary growth of the kami system. These prepared
the way for the absorption of the indigenous into the foreign cultus
under the form called by an enthusiastic emperor, Riyōbu Shintō,
or the "two-fold divine doctrine." Of this, we shall speak in another
lecture.
Suffice it here to say that by the scheme of syncretism propounded by
Kōbō in the ninth century, Shintō was practically overlaid by
the new faith from India, and largely forgotten as a distinct religion
by the Japanese people. As late as A.D. 927, there were three thousand
one hundred and thirty-two enumerated metropolitan and provincial
temples, besides many more unenumerated village and hamlet shrines of
Shintō. These are referred to in the revised codes of ceremonial law
set forth by imperial authority early in the tenth century. Probably by
the twelfth century the pure rites of the god-way were celebrated, and
the unmixed traditions maintained, in families and temples, so few as to
be counted on the fingers. The ancient language in which the archaic
forms had been preserved was so nearly lost and buried, that out of the
ooze of centuries of oblivion, it had to be rescued by the skilled
divers of the seventeenth century. Mabuchi, Motöri and the other
revivalists of pure Shintō, like the plungers after orient pearls,
persevered until they had first recovered much that had been supposed
irretrievably lost. These scholars deciphered and interpreted the
ancient scriptures, poetry, prose, history, law and ritual, and once
more set forth the ancient faith, as they believed, in its purity.
Whether, however, men can exactly reproduce and think for themselves the
thoughts of others who have been dead for a millennium, is an open
question. The new system is apt to be transparent. Just as it is nearly
impossible for us to restore the religious life, thoughts and orthodoxy
of the men who lived before the flood, so in the writings of the
revivalists of pure Shintō we detect the thoughts of Dutchmen, of
Chinese, and of very modern Japanese. Unconsciously, those who would
breathe into the dry bones of dead Shintō the breath of the
nineteenth century, find themselves compelled to use an oxygen and
nitrogen generator made in Holland and mounted with Chinese apparatus;
withal, lacquered and decorated with the art of to-day. To change from
metaphor to matter of fact, modern "pure Shintō" is mainly a mass of
speculation and philosophy, with a tendency of which the ancient god-way
knew nothing.
The Modern Revivalists of Kami no Michi.
Passing by further mention of the fifteen or more corrupt sects of
Shintōists, we name with honor the native scholars of the
seventeenth century, who followed the illustrious example of Iyéyasŭ,
the political unifier of Japan. They ransacked the country and purchased
from temples, mansions and farmhouses, old manuscripts and books, and
forming libraries began anew the study of ancient language and history.
Kéichu (1640-1701), a Buddhist priest, explored and illumined the poems
of the Manyōshu. Kada Adzumarō, born in 1669 near Kiōto, the
son of a shrine-keeper at Inari, attempted the mastery of the whole
archaic native language and literature. He made a grand beginning. He is
unquestionably the founder of the school of Pure Shintō. He died in
1736. His successor and pupil was Mabuchi (1697-1769), who claimed
direct descent from that god which in the form of a colossal crow had
guided the first chief of the Yamato tribe as he led his invaders
through the country to found the line of Mikados. After Mabuchi came
Motoöri (1730-1801) a remarkable scholar and critic, who, with erudition
and acuteness, analyzed the ancient literature and showed what were
Chinese or imported elements and what was of native origin. He
summarized the principles of the ancient religion, reasserted and
illuminated with amazing learning and voluminous commentary the archaic
documents, expounded and defended the ancient cosmogony, and in the
usual style of Japanese polemics preached anew the doctrines of
Shintō. With wonderful naïveté and enthusiasm, Motoöri taught that
Japan was the first part of the earth created, and that it is therefore
The Land of the Gods, the Country of the Holy Spirits. The stars were
created from the muck which fell from the spear of Izanagi as he thrust
it into the warm earth, while the other countries were formed by the
spontaneous consolidation of the foam of the sea. Morals were invented
by the Chinese because they were an immoral people, but in Japan there
is no necessity for any system of morals, as every Japanese acts aright
if he only consults his own heart. The duty of a good Japanese consists
in obeying the Mikado, without questioning whether his commands are
right or wrong. The Mikado is god and vicar of all the gods, hence
government and religion are the same, the Mikado being the centre of
Church and State, which are one. Did the foreign nations know their duty
they would at once hasten to pay tribute to the Son of Heaven in
Kiōto.
It is needless here to dwell upon the tremendous power of Shintō as a
political system, especially when wedded with the forces, generated in
the minds of the educated Japanese by modern Confucianism. The Chinese
ethical system, expanded into a philosophy as fascinating as the English
materialistic school of to-day, entered Japan contemporaneously with the
revival of the Way of the Gods and of native learning. In full rampancy
of their vigor, in the seventeenth century these two systems began that
generation of national energy, which in the eighteenth century was
consolidated and which in the nineteenth century, though unknown and
unsuspected by Europeans or Americans, was all ready for phenomenal
manifestation and tremendous eruption, even while Perry's fleet was
bearing the olive branch to Japan. As we all know, this consolidation of
forces from the inside, on meeting, not with collision but with union,
the exterior forces of western civilization, formed a resultant in the
energies which have made New Japan.
The Great Purification of 1870.
In 1870, with the Shōgun of Yedo deposed, the dual system abolished,
feudalism in its last gasp and Shintō in full political power, with
the ancient council of the gods (Jin Gi Kuan) once more established, and
purified Shintō again the religion of state, thousands of Riyōbu
Shintō temples were at once purged of all their Buddhist ornaments,
furniture, ritual, and everything that might remind the Japanese of
foreign elements. Then began, logically and actually, the persecution of
those Christians, who through all the centuries of repression and
prohibition had continued their existence, and kept their faith however
mixed and clouded. Theoretically, ancient belief was re-established, yet
it was both physically and morally impossible to return wholly to the
baldness and austere simplicity of those early ages, in which art and
literature were unknown. For a while it seemed as though the miracle
would be performed, of turning back the dial of the ages and of plunging
Japan into the fountain of her own youth. Propaganda was instituted, and
the attempts made to convert all the Japanese to Shintō tenets and
practice were for a while more lively than edifying; but the scheme was
on the whole a splendid failure, and bitter disappointment succeeded the
first exultation of victory. Confronted by modern problems of society
and government, the Mikado's ministers found themselves unable, if
indeed willing, to entomb politics in religion, as in the ancient ages.
For a little while, in 1868, the Jin Gi Kuan, or Council of the Gods of
Heaven and Earth, held equal authority with the Dai Jō Kuan, or Great
Council of the Government. Pretty soon the first step downward was
taken, and from a supreme council it was made one of the ten departments
of the government. In less than a year followed another retrograde
movement and the department was called a board. Finally, in 1877, the
board became a bureau. Now, it is hard to tell what rank the Shintō
cultus occupies in the government, except as a system of guardianship
over the imperial tombs, a mode of official etiquette, and as one of the
acknowledged religions of the country.
Nevertheless, as an element in that amalgam of religions which forms the
creed of most Japanese, Shintō is a living force, and shares with
Buddhism the arena against advancing Christianity, still supplying much
of the spring and motive to patriotism.
The Shintō lecturers with unblushing plagiarism rifled the
storehouses of Chinese ethics. They enforced their lessons from the
Confucian classics. Indeed, most of their homiletical and illustrative
material is still derived directly therefrom. Their three main official
theses and commandments were:
1. Thou shalt honor the Gods and love thy country.
2. Thou shalt clearly understand the principles of Heaven, and
the duty of man.
3. Thou shalt revere the Emperor as thy sovereign and obey the
will of his Court.
For nearly twenty years this deliverance of the Japanese Government,
which still finds its strongest support in the national traditions and
the reverence of the people for the throne, sufficed for the necessities
of the case. Then the copious infusion of foreign ideas, the
disintegration of the old framework of society, and the weakening of the
old ties of obedience and loyalty, with the flood of shallow knowledge
and education which gave especially children and young people just
enough of foreign ideas to make them dangerous, brought about a
condition of affairs which alarmed the conservative and patriotic. Like
fungus upon a dead tree strange growths had appeared, among others that
of a class of violently patriotic and half-educated young men and boys,
called _Soshí_. These hot-headed youths took it upon themselves to
dictate national policy to cabinet ministers, and to reconstruct
society, religion and politics. Something like a mania broke out all
over the country which, in certain respects, reminds us of the
Children's Crusade, that once afflicted Europe and the children
themselves. Even Christianity did not escape the craze for
reconstruction. Some of the young believers and pupils of the
missionaries seemed determined to make Christianity all over so as to
suit themselves. This phase of brain-swelling is not yet wholly over.
One could not tell but that something like the Tai Ping rebellion, which
disturbed and devastated China, might break out.
These portentous signs on the social horizon called forth, in 1892, from
the government an Imperial Rescript, which required that the emperor's
photograph be exhibited in every school, and saluted by all teachers and
scholars whatever their religious tenets and scruples might be. Most
Christians as well as Buddhists, saw nothing in this at which to
scruple. A few, however, finding in it an offence to conscience,
resigned their positions. They considered the mandate an unwarrantable
interference with their rights as conferred by the constitution of 1889,
which in theory is the gift of the emperor to his people.
The radical Shintōist, to this day, believes that all political
rights which Japanese enjoy or can enjoy are by virtue of the Mikado's
grace and benevolence. It is certain that all Japanese, whatever may be
their religious convictions, consider that the constitution depends for
its safeguards and its validity largely upon the oath which the Mikado
swore at the shrine of his heavenly ancestors, that he would himself be
obedient to it and preserve its provisions inviolate. For this solemn
ceremony a special norito or liturgy was composed and recited.
Summary of Shintō.
Of Shintō as a system we have long ago given our opinion. In its
higher forms, "Shintō is simply a cultured and intellectual atheism;
in its lower forms it is blind obedience to governmental and priestly
dictates." "Shintō," says Mr. Ernest Satow, "as expounded by Motoöri
is nothing more than an engine for reducing the people to a condition of
mental slavery." Japan being a country of very striking natural
phenomena, the very soil and air lend themselves to support in the
native mind this system of worship of heroes and of the forces of
nature. In spite, however, of the conservative power of the ancestral
influences, the patriotic incentives and the easy morals of Shintō
under which lying and licentiousness shelter themselves, it is doubtful
whether with the pressure of Buddhism, and the spread of popular
education and Christianity, Shintō can retain its hold upon the
Japanese people. Yet although this is our opinion, it is but fair, and
it is our duty, to judge every religion by its ideals and not by its
failings. The ideal of Shintō is to make people pure and clean in all
their personal and household arrangements; it is to help them to live
simply, honestly and with mutual good will; it is to make the Japanese
love their country, honor their imperial house and obey their emperor.
Narrow and local as this religion is, it has had grand exemplars in
noble lives and winning characters.
So far as Shintō is a religion, Christianity meets it not as
destroyer but fulfiller, for it too believes that cleanliness is not
only next to godliness but a part of it. Jesus as perfect man and
patriot, Captain of our salvation and Prince of peace, would not destroy
the Yamato damashii--the spirit of unconquerable Japan--but rather
enlarge, broaden, and deepen it, making it love for all humanity.
Reverence for ancestral virtue and example, so far from being weakened,
is strengthened, and as for devotion to king and ruler, law and society,
Christianity lends nobler motives and grander sanctions, while
showing clearly, not indeed the way of the eight million or more gods,
but the way to God--the one living, only and true, even through Him who
said "I am the Way."
CHAPTER IV - THE CHINESE ETHICAL SYSTEM IN JAPAN
"Things being investigated, knowledge became complete; knowledge
being complete, thoughts were sincere; thoughts being sincere,
hearts were rectified; hearts being rectified, persons were
cultivated; persons being cultivated, families were regulated;
families being regulated, states were rightly governed; states
being rightly governed, the whole nation was made tranquil and
happy."
"When you know a thing to hold that you know it; and when you do
not know a thing to allow that you do not know it; this is
knowledge."
"Old age sometimes becomes second childhood; why should not
filial piety become parental love?"
"The superior man accords with the course of the mean. Though he
may be all unknown, unregarded by the world, he feels no regret.
He is only the sage who is able for this."--Sayings of
Confucius.
"There is, in a word, no bringing down of God to men in
Confucianism in order to lift them up to Him. Their moral
shortcomings, when brought home to them, may produce a feeling
of shame, but hardly a conviction of guilt."--James Legge.
"Do not to others what you would not have them do to you."--The
Silver Rule.
"All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye
even so to them."--The Golden Rule.
"In respect to revenging injury done to master or father, it is
granted by the wise and virtuous (Confucius) that you and the
injurer cannot live together under the canopy of
heaven."--Legacy of Iyéyasŭ, Cap. iii, Lowder's translation.
"But I say unto you forgive your enemies."--Jesus.
"Thou, O Lord, art our father, our redeemer, thy name is from
everlasting."--Isaiah.
CHAPTER IV - THE CHINESE ETHICAL SYSTEM IN JAPAN
Confucius a Historical Character.
If the greatness of a teacher is to be determined by the number of his
disciples, or to be measured by the extent and diversity of his
influence, then the foremost place among all the teachers of mankind
must be awarded to The Master Kung (or Confucius, as the Jesuit scholars
of the seventeenth century Latinized the name). Certainly, he of all
truly historic personages is to-day, and for twenty-three centuries has
been, honored by the largest number of followers.
Of the many systems of religion in the world, but few are based upon the
teachings of one person. The reputed founders of some of them are not
known in history with any certainty, and of others--as in the case of
Buddhism--have become almost as shadows among a great throng of
imaginary Buddhas or other beings which have sprung from the fancies of
the brain and become incorporated into the systems, although the
original teachers may indeed have been historical.
Confucius is a clear and distinct historic person. His parentage, place
of birth, public life, offices, work and teaching, are well known and
properly authenticated. He used the pen freely, and not only compiled,
edited and transmitted the writings of his predecessors, but composed an
historical and interpretative book. He originated nothing, however, but
on the contrary disowned any purpose of introducing new ideas, or of
expressing thoughts of his own not based upon or in perfect harmony with
the teaching of the ancients. He was not an original thinker. He was a
compiler, an editor, a defender and reproclaimer of the ancient
religion, and an exemplar of the wisdom and writings of the Chinese
fathers. He felt that his duty was exactly that which some Christian
theologians of to-day conscientiously feel to be theirs--to receive
intact a certain "deposit" or "system" and, adding nothing to it, simply
to teach, illuminate, defend, enforce and strongly maintain it as "the
truth." He gloried in absolute freedom from all novelty, anticipating in
this respect a certain illustrious American who made it a matter for
boasting, that his school had never originated a new idea.[1] Whether or
not the Master Kung did nevertheless, either consciously or
unconsciously, modify the ancient system by abbreviating or enlarging
it, we cannot now inquire.
Confucius wan born into the world in the year 551 B.C., during that
wonderful century of religious revival which saw the birth of Ezra,
Gautama, and Lao Tsze, and in boyhood he displayed an unusually sedate
temperament which made him seem to be what we would now call an
"old-fashioned child." The period during which he lived was that of
feudal China. From the ago of twenty-two, while holding an office in the
state of Lu within the modern province of Shan-Tung, he gathered around
him young men as pupils with whom, like Socrates, he conversed in
question and answer. He made the teachings of the ancients the subjects
of his research, and he was at all times a diligent student of the
primeval records. These sacred books are called King, or Kiō in
Japanese, and are: Shu King, a collection of historic documents; Shih
King, or Book of Odes; Hsiao King, or Classic of Filial Piety, and Yi
King, or Book of Changes.[2] This division of the old sacred canon,
resembles the Christian or non-Jewish arrangement of the Old Testament
scriptures in the four parts of Law, History, Poetry and Prophesy,
though in the Chinese we have History, Poetry, Ethics and Divination.[3]
His own table-talk, conversations, discussions and notes were compiled
by his pupils, and are preserved in the work entitled in English, "The
Confucian Analects," which is one of the four books constituting the
most sacred portion of Chinese philosophy and instruction. He also wrote
a work named "Spring and Autumn, or Chronicles of his Native State of Lu
from 722 B.C., to 481[4] B.C." He "changed his world," as the Buddhists
say, in the year 478 B.C., having lived seventy-three years.
Primitive Chinese Faith.
The pre-Confucian or primitive faith was monotheistic, the forefathers
of the Chinese nation having been believers in one Supreme Spiritual
Being. There is an almost universal agreement among scholars in
translating the term "Shang Ti" as God, and in reading from these
classics that the forefathers "in the ceremonies at the altars of Heaven
and earth ... served God." Concurrently with the worship of one Supreme
God there was also a belief in subordinate spirits and in the idea of
revelation or the communication of God with men. This restricted worship
of God was accompanied by reverence for ancestors and the honoring of
spirits by prayers and sacrifices, which resulted, however, neither in
deification nor polytheism. But, as the European mediæval schoolmen have
done with the Bible, so, after the death of Confucius the Chinese
scholastics by metaphysical reasoning and commentary, created systems of
interpretation which greatly altered the apparent form and contents of
his own and of the ancient texts. Thus, the original monotheism of the
pre-Confucian documents has been completely obscured by the later webs
of sophistry which have been woven about the original scriptures. The
ancient simplicity of doctrine has been lost in the mountains of
commentary which were piled upon the primitive texts. Throughout the
centuries, the Confucian system has been conditioned and greatly
modified by Taoism, Buddhism and the speculations of the Chinese wise
men.
Confucius, however, did not change or seriously modify the ancient
religion except that, as is more than probable, he may have laid
unnecessary emphasis upon social and political duties, and may not have
been sufficiently interested in the honor to be paid to Shang Ti or God.
He practically ignored the God-ward side of man's duties. His teachings
relate chiefly to duties between man and man, to propriety and
etiquette, and to ceremony and usage. He said that "To give one's self
to the duties due to men and while respecting spiritual beings to keep
aloof from them, may be called wisdom."[5]
We think that Confucius cut the tap-root of all true progress, and
therefore is largely responsible for the arrested development of China.
He avoided the personal term, God (Ti), and instead, made use of the
abstract term, Heaven (Tien). His teaching, which is so often quoted by
Japanese gentlemen, was, "Honor the Gods and keep them far from you."
His image stands in thousands of temples and in every school, in China,
but he is only revered and never deified.
China has for ages suffered from agnosticism; for no normal Confucianist
can love God, though he may learn to reverence him. The Emperor
periodically worships for his people, at the great marble altar to
Heaven in Peking, with vast holocausts, and the prayers which are
offered may possibly amount to this: "Our Father who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be thy name." But there, as it seems to a Christian, Chinese
imperial worship stops. The people at large, cut off by this restricted
worship from direct access to God, have wandered away into every sort of
polytheism and idolatry, while the religion of the educated Chinese is a
mediæval philosophy based upon Confucianism, of which we shall speak
hereafter.
The Confucian system as a religion, like a giant with a child's head, is
exaggerated on its moral and ceremonial side as compared with its
spiritual development. Some deny that it is a religion at all, and call
it only a code. However, let us examine the Confucian ethics which
formed the basis and norm of all government in the family and nation,
and are summed up in the doctrine of the "Five Relations." These are:
Sovereign and Minister; Father and Son; Husband and Wife; Elder Brother
and Younger Brother; and Friends. The relation being stated, the
correlative duty arises at once. It may perhaps be truly said by
Christians that Confucius might have made a religion of his system of
ethics, by adding a sixth and supreme relation--that between God and
man. This he declined to do, and so left his people without any
aspiration toward the Infinite. By setting before them only a finite
goal he sapped the principles of progress.[6]
Vicissitudes of Confucianism.
After the death of Confucius (478 B.C.) the teachings of the great
master were neglected, but still later they were re-enforced and
expounded in the time (372-289 B.C.) of Meng Ko, or Mencius (as the name
has been Latinized) who was likewise a native of the State of Lu. At one
time a Chinese Emperor attempted in vain to destroy not only the
writings of Confucius but also the ancient classics. Taoism increased as
a power in the religion of China, especially after the fall of its
feudal system. The doctrine of ancestral worship as commended by the
sage had in it much of good, both for kings and nobles. The common
people, however, found that Taoism was more satisfying. About the
beginning of the Christian era Buddhism entered the Middle Kingdom, and,
rapidly becoming popular, supplied needs for which simple Confucianism
was not adequate. It may be said that in the sixth century--which
concerns us especially--although Confucianism continued to be highly
esteemed, Buddhism had become supreme in China--that venerable State
which is the mother of civilization in all Asia cast of the Ganges, and
the Middle Kingdom among pupil nations.
Confucianism overflowed from China into Korea, where to this day it is
predominant even over Buddhism. Thence, it was carried beyond sea to the
Japanese Archipelago, where for possibly fifteen hundred years it has
shaped and moulded the character of a brave and chivalrous people. Let
us now turn from China and trace its influence and modifications in the
Land of the Rising Sun.
It must be remembered that in the sixth century of the Christian Era,
Confucianism was by no means the fully developed philosophy that it is
now and has been for five hundred years. In former times, the system of
Confucius had been received in China not only as a praiseworthy
compendium of ceremonial observances, but also as an inheritance from
the ancients, illumined by the discourses of the great sage and
illustrated by his life and example. It was, however, very far from
being what it is at present--the religion of the educated men of the
nation, and, by excellence, the religion of Chinese Asia. But in those
early centuries it did not fully satisfy the Chinese mind, which turned
to the philosophy of Taoism and to the teachings of the Buddhist for
intellectual food, for comfort and for inspiration.
The time when Chinese learning entered Japan, by the way of Korea, has
not been precisely ascertained.[7] It is possible that letters[8] and
writings were known in some parts of the country as early as the fourth
century, but it is nearly certain, that, outside the Court of the
Emperor, there was scarcely even a sporadic knowledge of the literature
of China until the Korean missionaries of Buddhism had obtained a
lodgement in the Mikado's capital. Buddhism was the real purveyor of the
foreign learning and became the vehicle by means of which Confucianism,
or the Chinese ethical principles, reached the common people of Japan.
The first missionaries in Japan were heartily in sympathy with the
Confucian ethics, from which no effort was made to alienate them. They
were close allies, and for a thousand years wrought as one force in the
national life. They were not estranged until the introduction, in the
seventeenth century, of the metaphysical and scholastic forms given to
the ancient system by the Chinese schoolmen of the Sung dynasty (A.D.
960-1333).
Japanese Confucianism and Feudalism Contemporary.
The intellectual history of the Japanese prior to their recent contact
with Christendom, may be divided into three eras:
1. The period of early insular or purely native thought, from before the
Christian era until the eighth century; by which time, Shintō, or the
indigenous system of worship--its ritual, poetry and legend having been
committed to writing and its life absorbed in Buddhism--had been, as a
system, relegated from the nation and the people to a small circle of
scholars and archæologists.
2. The period from 800 A.D. to the beginning of the seventeenth century;
during which time Buddhism furnished to the nation its religion,
philosophy and culture.
3. From about 1630 A.D. until the present time; during which period the
developed Confucian philosophy, as set forth by Chu Hi in the twelfth
century, has been the creed of a majority of the educated men of Japan.
The political history of the Japanese may also be divided into three
eras:
1. The first extends from the dawn of history until the seventh century.
During this period the system of government was that of rude feudalism.
The conquering tribe of Yamato, having gradually obtained a rather
imperfect supremacy over the other tribes in the middle and southern
portions of the country now called the Empire of Japan, ruled them in
the name of the Mikado.
2. The second period begins in the seventh century, when the Japanese,
copying the Chinese model, adopted a system of centralization. The
country was divided into provinces and was ruled through boards or
ministries at the capital, with governors sent out from Kiōto for
stated periods, directly from the emperor. During this time literature
was chiefly the work of the Buddhist priests and of the women of the
imperial court.
While armies in the field brought into subjection the outlying tribes
and certain noble families rose to prominence at the court, there was
being formed that remarkable class of men called the Samurai, or
servants of the Mikado, which for more than ten centuries has exercised
a profound influence upon the development of Japan.
In China, the pen and the sword have been kept apart; the civilian and
the soldier, the man of letters and the man of arms, have been distinct
and separate. This was also true in old Loo Choo (now Riu Kiu), that
part of Japan most like China. In Japan, however, the pen and the sword,
letters and arms, the civilian and the soldier, have intermingled. The
unique product of this union is seen in the Samurai, or servant of the
Mikado. Military-literati, are unknown in China, but in Japan they
carried the sword and the pen in the same girdle.
3. This class of men had become fully formed by the end of the twelfth
century, and then began the new feudal system, which lasted until the
epochal year 1868 A.D.--a year of several revolutions, rather than of
restoration pure and simple. After nearly seven hundred years of
feudalism, supreme magistracy, with power vastly increased beyond that
possessed in ancient times, was restored to the emperor. Then also was
abolished the duarchy of Throne and Camp, of Mikado and Shōgun, and
of the two capitals Kiōto and Yedo, with the fountain of honor and
authority in one and the fountain of power and execution in the other.
Thereupon, Japan once more presented to the world, unity.
Practically, therefore, the period of the prevalence of the Confucian
ethics and their universal acceptance by the people of Japan nearly
coincides with the period of Japanese feudalism or the dominance of the
military classes.
Although the same ideograph, or rather logogram, was used to designate
the Chinese scholar and the Japanese warrior as well, yet the former was
man of the pen only, while the latter was man of the pen and of two
swords. This historical fact, more than any other, accounts for the
striking differences between Chinese and Japanese Confucianism. Under
this state of things the ethical system of the sage of China suffered a
change, as does almost everything that is imported into Japan and
borrowed by the islanders, but whether for the better or for the worse
we shall not inquire too carefully. The point upon which we now lay
emphasis is this: that, although the Chinese teacher had made filial
piety the basis of his system, the Japanese gradually but surely made
loyalty (Kun-Shin), that is, the allied relations of sovereign and
minister, of lord and retainer, and of master and servant, not only
first in order but the chief of all. They also infused into this term
ideas and associations which are foreign to the Chinese mind. In the
place of filial piety was Kun-shin, that new growth in the garden of
Japanese ethics, out of which arose the white flower of loyalty that
blooms perennial in history.
In Japan, Loyalty Displaces Filial Piety.
This slow but sure adaptation of the exotic to its new environment, took
place during the centuries previous to the seventeenth of the Christian
era. The completed product presented a growth so strikingly different
from the original as to compel the wonder of those Chinese refugee
scholars, who, at Mito[9] and Yedo, taught the later dogmas which are
orthodox but not historically Confucian.
Herein lies the difference between Chinese and Japanese ethical
philosophy. In old Japan, loyalty was above filial obedience, and the
man who deserted parents, wife and children for the feudal lord,
received unstinted praise. The corner-stone of the Japanese edifice of
personal righteousness and public weal, is loyalty. On the other hand,
filial piety is the basis of Chinese order and the secret of the amazing
national longevity, which is one of the moral wonders of the world, and
sure proof of the fulfilment of that promise which was made on Sinai and
wrapped up in the fourth commandment.
This master passion of the typical Samurai of old Japan made him regard
life as infinitely less than nothing, whenever duty demanded a display
of the virtue of loyalty. "The doctrines of Koshi and Moshi" (Confucius
and Mencius) formed, and possibly even yet form, the gospel and the
quintessence of all wordly wisdom to the Japanese gentleman; they became
the basis of his education and the ideal which inspired his conceptions
of duty and honor; but, crowning all his doctrines and aspirations was
his desire to be loyal. There might abide loyal, marital, filial,
fraternal and various other relations, but the greatest of all these was
loyalty. Hence the Japanese calendar of saints is not filled with
reformers, alms-givers and founders of hospitals or orphanages, but is
over-crowded with canonized suicides and committers of _hara-kiri_. Even
today, no man more quickly wins the popular regard during his life or
more surely draws homage to his tomb, securing even apotheosis, than the
suicide, though he may have committed a crime. In this era of Meiji or
enlightened peace, most appalling is the list of assassinations
beginning with the murder in Kiōto of Yokoi Héishiro, who was slain
for recommending the toleration of Christianity, down to the last
cabinet minister who has been knifed or dynamited. Yet in every case the
murderers considered themselves consecrated men and ministers of
Heaven's righteous vengeance.[10] For centuries, and until
constitutional times, the government of Japan was "despotism tempered by
assassination." The old-fashioned way of moving a vote of censure upon
the king's ministers was to take off their heads. Now, however, election
by ballot has been substituted for this, and two million swords have
become bric-à-brac.
A thousand years of training in the ethics of Confucius--which always
admirably lends itself to the possessors of absolute power, whether
emperors, feudal lords, masters, fathers, or older brothers--have so
tinged and colored every conception of the Japanese mind, so dominated
their avenues of understanding and shaped their modes of thought, that
to-day, notwithstanding the recent marvellous development of their
language, which within the last two decades has made it almost a new
tongue,[11] it is impossible with perfect accuracy to translate into
English the ordinary Japanese terms which are congregated under the
general idea of Kun-shin.
Herein may be seen the great benefit of carefully studying the minds of
those whom we seek to convert. The Christian preacher in Japan who uses
our terms "heaven," "home," "mother," "father," "family," "wife,"
"people," "love," "reverence," "virtue," "chastity," etc., will find
that his hearers may indeed receive them, but not at all with the same
mental images and associations, nor with the same proportion and depth,
that these words command in western thought and hearing. One must be
exceedingly careful, not only in translating terms which have been used
by Confucius in the Chinese texts, but also in selecting and rendering
the current expressions of the Japanese teachers and philosophers. In
order to understand each other, Orientals and Occidentals need a great
deal of mutual intellectual drilling, without which there will be waste
of money, of time, of brains and of life.
The Five Relations.
Let us now glance at the fundamentals of the Confucian ethics--the Five
Relations--as they were taught in the comparatively simple system which
prevailed before the new orthodoxy was proclaimed by Sung schoolmen.
First. Although each of the Chinese and Japanese emperors is supposed to
be, and is called, "father of the people," yet it would be entirely
wrong to imagine that the phrase implies any such relation, as that of
William the Silent to the Dutch, or of Washington to the American
nation. In order to see how far the emperor was removed from the people
during a thousand years, one needs but to look upon a brilliant painting
of the Yamato-Tosa school, in which the Mikado is represented as sitting
behind a cloud of gold or a thick curtain of fine bamboo, with no one
before the matting-throne but his prime ministers or the empress and his
concubines. For centuries, it was supposed that the Mikado did not touch
the ground with his feet. He went abroad in a curtained car; and he was
not only as mysterious and invisible to the public eye as a dragon, but
he was called such. The attributes of that monster with many powers and
functions, were applied to him, with an amazing wealth of rhetoric and
vocabulary. As well might the common folks to-day presume to pray unto
one of the transcendent Buddhas, between whom and the needy suppliant
there may be hosts upon hosts of interlopers or mediators, as for an
ordinary subject to petition the emperor or even to gaze upon his dragon
countenance. The change in the constitutional Japan of our day is seen
in the fact that the term "Mikado" is now obsolete. This description of
the relation of sovereign and minister (inaccurately characterised by
some writers on Confucianism as that of "King and subject," a phrase
which might almost fit the constitutional monarchy of to-day) shows the
relation, as it did exist for nearly a thousand years of Japanese
history. We find the same imitation of procedure, even when imperialism
became only a shadow in the government and the great Shōgun who
called himself "Tycoon," the ruler in Yedo, aping the majesty of
Kiōto, became so powerful as to be also a dragon. Between the Yedo
Shōgun and the people rose a great staircase of numberless
subordinates, and should a subject attempt to offer a petition in person
he must pay for it by crucifixion.[12]
As, under the emperor there were court ministers, heads of departments,
governors and functionaries of all kinds before the people were reached,
so, under the Shōgun in the feudal days, there were the Daimiōs or
great lords and the Shomiōs or small lords with their retainers in
graduated subordination, and below these were the servants and general
humanity. Even after the status of man was reached, there were
gradations and degradations through fractions down to ciphers and indeed
to minus quantities, for there existed in the Country of Brave Warriors
some tens of thousands of human beings bearing the names of _eta_
(pariah) and _hī-nin_ (non-human), who were far below the pale of
humanity.
The Paramount Idea of Loyalty.
The one idea which dominated all of these classes,[13]--in Old Japan
there were no masses but only many classes--was that of loyalty. As the
Japanese language shows, every faculty of man was subordinated to this
idea. Confucianism even conditioned the development of Japanese grammar,
as it also did that of the Koreans, by multiplying honorary prefixes and
suffixes and building up all sociable and polite speech on perpendicular
lines. Personality was next to nothing and individuality was in a
certain sense unknown. In European languages, the pronoun shows how
clearly the ideas of personality and of individuality have been
developed; but in the Japanese language there really are no pronouns, in
the sense of the word as used by the Germanic nations, at least,
although there are hundreds of impersonal and topographical substitutes
for them.[14] The mirror, of the language itself, reflects more truth
upon this point of inquiry than do patriotic assertions, or the protests
of those who in the days of this Meiji era so handsomely employ the
Japanese language as the medium of thought. Strictly speaking, the ego
disappears in ordinary conversation and action, and instead, it is the
servant speaking reverently to his master; or it is the master
condescending to the object which is "before his hand" or "to the side"
or "below" where his inferior kneels; or it is the "honorable right"
addressing the "esteemed left."
All the terms which a foreigner might use in speaking of the duties of
sovereign and minister, of lord and retainer and of master and servant,
are comprehended in the Japanese word, Kun-shin, in which is
crystallized but one thought, though it may relate to three grades of
society. The testimony of history and of the language shows, that the
feelings which we call loyalty and reverence are always directed upward,
while those which we term benevolence and love invariably look downward.
Note herein the difference between the teachings of Christ and those of
the Chinese sage. According to the latter, if there be love in the
relation of the master and servant, it is the master who loves, and not
the servant who may only reverence. It would be inharmonious for the
Japanese servant to love his master; he never even talks of it. And in
family life, while the parent may love the child, the child is not
expected to love the parent but rather to reverence him. So also the
Japanese wife, as in our old scriptural versions, is to "see that she
_reverence_ her husband." Love (not _agapé_, but _eros_) is indeed a
theme of the poets and of that part of life and of literature which is,
strictly speaking, outside of the marriage relation, but the thought
that dominates in marital life, is reverence from the wife and
benevolence from the husband. The Christian conception, which requires
that a woman should love her husband, does not strictly accord with the
Confucian idea.
Christianity has taught us that when a man loves a woman purely and
makes her his wife, he should also have reverence for her, and that this
element should be an integral part of his love. Christianity also
teaches a reverence for children; and Wordsworth has but followed the
spirit of his great master, Christ, when expressing this beautiful
sentiment in his melodious numbers. Such ideas as these, however, are
discords in Japanese social life of the old order. So also the Christian
preaching of love to God, sounds outlandish to the men of Chinese mind
in the middle or the pupil kingdom, who seem to think that it can only
come from the lips of those who have not been properly trained. To "love
God" appears to them as being an unwarrantable patronage of, and
familiarity with "Heaven," or the King of Kings. The same difficulty,
which to-day troubles Christian preachers and translators, existed among
the Roman Catholic missionaries three centuries ago.[15] The moulds of
thought were not then, nor are they even now, entirely ready for the
full truth of Christian revelation.
Suicide Made Honorable.
In the long story of the Honorable Country, there are to be found many
shining examples of loyalty, which is the one theme oftenest illustrated
in popular fiction and romance. Its well-attested instances on the
crimson thread of Japanese history are more numerous than the beads on
many rosaries. The most famous of all, perhaps, is the episode of the
Forty-Seven Rōnins, which is a constant favorite in the theatres, and
has been so graphically narrated or pictured by scores of native poets,
authors, artists, sculptors and dramatists, and told in English by
Mitford, Dickens and Grecy.[16]
These forty-seven men hated wife, child, society, name, fame, food and
comfort for the sake of avenging the death of their master. In a certain
sense, they ceased to be persons in order to become the impersonal
instruments of Heaven's retribution. They gave up every thing--houses,
lands, kinsmen--that they might have in this life the hundred-fold
reward of vengeance, and in the world-life of humanity throughout the
centuries, fame and honor. Feeding the hunger of their hearts upon the
hope of glutting that hunger with the life-blood of their victim, they
waited long years. When once their swords had drunk the consecrated
blood, they laid the severed head upon their master's tomb and then
gladly, even rapturously, delivered themselves up, and ripping open
their bowels they died by that judicially ordered seppuku which cleansed
their memory from every stain, and gave to them the martyr's fame and
crown forever. The tombs of these men, on the hillside overlooking the
Bay of Yedo, are to this day ever fragrant with fresh flowers, and to
the cemetery where their ashes lie and their memorials stand, thousands
of pilgrims annually wend their way. No dramas are more permanently
popular on the stage than those which display the virtues of these
heroes, who are commonly spoken of as "The righteous Samurai." Their
tombs have stood for two centuries, as mighty magnets drawing others to
self-impalement on the sword--as multipliers of suicides.
Yet this alphabetic number, this _i-ro-ha_ of self-murder, is but one of
a thousand instances in the Land of Noble Suicides. From the
pre-historic days when the custom of _Jun-shi_, or dying with the
master, required the interment of the living retainers with the dead
lord, down through all the ages to the Revolution of 1868, when at
Sendai and Aidzu scores of men and boys opened their bowels, and mothers
slew their infant sons and cut their own throats, there has been flowing
through Japanese history a river of suicides' blood[17] having its
springs in the devotion of retainers to masters, and of soldiers to a
lost cause as represented by the feudal superior. Shigémori, the son of
the prime minister Kiyomori, who protected the emperor even against his
own father, is a model of that Japanese kun-shin which placed fidelity
to the sovereign above filial obedience; though even yet Shigémori's
name is the synonym of both virtues. Kusunoki Masashigé,[18] the white
flower of Japanese chivalry, is but one, typical not only of a thousand
but of thousands of thousands of soldiers, who hated parents, wife,
child, friend in order to be disciple to the supreme loyalty. He sealed
his creed by emptying his own veins. Kiyomori,[19] like King David of
Israel, on his dying bed ordered the assassination of his personal
enemy.
The common Japanese novels read like records of slaughter-houses. No
Moloch or Shiva has won more victims to his shrine than has this idea of
Japanese loyalty which is so beautiful in theory and so hideous in
practice. Despite the military clamps and frightful despotism of Yedo,
which for two hundred and fifty years gave to the world a delusive idea
of profound quiet in the Country of Peaceful Shores, there was in fact a
chronic unrest which amounted at many times and in many places to
anarchy. The calm of despotism was, indeed, rudely broken by the aliens
in the "black ships" with the "flowery flag"; but, without regarding
influences from the West, the indications of history as now read,
pointed in 1850 toward the bloodiest of Japan's many civil wars. Could
the statistics of the suicides during this long period be collected,
their publication would excite in Christendom the utmost incredulity.
Nevertheless, this qualifying statement should be made. A study of the
origin and development of the national method of self-destruction shows
that suicide by seppuku, or opening of the abdomen, was first a custom,
and then a privilege. It took, among men of honor, the place of the
public executions, the massacres in battle and siege, decimation of
rebels and similar means of killing at the hands of others, which so
often mar the historical records of western nations. Undoubtedly,
therefore, in the minds of most Japanese, there are many instances of
_hara-kiri_ which should not be classed as suicide, but technically as
execution of judicial sentence. And yet no sentence or process of death
known in western lands had such influence in glorifying the victim, as
had seppuku in Japan.
The Family Idea.
The Second Relation is that of father and son, thus preceding what we
should suppose to be the first of human relations--husband and wife--but
the arrangement entirely accords with the Oriental conception that the
family, the house, is more important than the individual. In Old Japan
the paramount idea in marriage, was not that of love or companionship,
or of mutual assistance with children, but was almost wholly that of
offspring, and of maintaining the family line.[20] The individual might
perish but the house must live on.
Very different from the family of Christendom, is the family in Old
Japan, in which we find elements that would not be recognized where
monogamy prevails and children are born in the home and not in the herd.
Instead of father, mother and children, there are father, wife,
concubines, and various sorts of children who are born of the wife or of
the concubine, or have been adopted into the family. With us, adoption
is the exception, but in Japan it is the invariable rule whenever either
convenience or necessity requires it of the house. Indeed it is rare to
find a set of brothers bearing the same family name. Adoption and
concubinage keep the house unbroken.[21] It is the house, the name,
which must continue, although not necessarily by a blood line. The name,
a social trade-mark, lives on for ages. The line of Japanese emperors,
which, in the Constitution of 1889, by adding mythology to history is
said to rule "unbroken from ages eternal," is not one of fathers and
sons, but has been made continuous by concubinage and adoption. In this
view, it is possibly as old as the line of the popes.
It is very evident that our terms and usages do not have in such a home
the place or meaning which one not familiar with the real life of Old
Japan would suppose. The father is an absolute ruler. There is in Old
Japan hardly any such thing as "parents," for practically there is only
one parent, as the woman counts for little. The wife is honored if she
becomes a mother, but if childless she is very probably neglected. Our
idea of fatherhood implies that the child has rights and that he should
love as well as be loved. Our customs excite not only the merriment but
even the contempt of the old-school Japanese. The kiss and the embrace,
the linking of the child's arm around its father's neck, the address on
letters "My dear Wife" or "My beloved Mother" seem to them like
caricatures of propriety. On the other hand, it is undoubtedly true that
in reverence toward parents--or at least toward one of the parents--a
Japanese child is apt to excel the one born even in a Christian home.
This so-called filial "piety" becomes in practice, however, a horrible
outrage upon humanity and especially upon womanhood. During centuries
the despotic power of the father enabled him to put an end to the life
of his child, whether boy or girl.
Under this abominable despotism there is no protection for the daughter,
who is bound to sell her body, while youth or beauty last or perhaps for
life, to help pay her father's debts, to support an aged parent or even
to gratify his mere caprice. In hundreds of Japanese romances the
daughter, who for the sake of her parents has sold herself to shame, is
made the theme of the story and an object of praise. In the minds of the
people there may be indeed a feeling of pity that the girl has been
obliged to give up her home life for the brothel, but no one ever thinks
of questioning the right of the parent to make the sale of the girl's
body, any more than he would allow the daughter to rebel against it.
This idea still lingers and the institution remains,[22] although the
system has received stunning blows from the teaching of Christian
ethics, the preaching of a better gospel and the improvements in the law
of the land.
The Marital Relation.
The Third Relation is that of husband and wife. The meaning of these
words, however, is not the same with the Japanese as with us. In
Confucius there is not only male and female, but also superior and
inferior, master and servant.[23] Without any love-making or courtship
by those most interested, a marriage between two young people is
arranged by their parents through the medium of what is called a
"go-between." The bride leaves her father's house forever--that is, when
she is not to be subsequently divorced--and entering into that of her
husband must be subordinate not only to him but also to his parents, and
must obey them as her own father and mother. Having all her life under
her father's roof reverenced her superiors, she is expected to bring
reverence to her new domicile, but not love. She must always obey but
never be jealous. She must not be angry, no matter whom her husband may
introduce into his household. She must wait upon him at his meals and
must walk behind him, but not with him. When she dies her children go to
her funeral, but not her husband.
A foreigner, hearing the Japanese translate our word chastity by the
term _téiso_ or _misao_, may imagine that the latter represents mutual
obligation and personal purity for man and wife alike, but on looking
into the dictionary he will find that _téiso_ means "Womanly duties." A
circumlocution is needed to express the idea of a chaste man.
Jealousy is a horrible sin, but is always supposed to be a womanish
fault, and so an exhibition of folly and weakness. Therefore, to apply
such a term to God--to say "a jealous God"--outrages the good sense of a
Confucianist,[24] almost as much as the statement that God "cannot lie"
did that of the Pundit, who wondered how God could be Omnipotent if He
could not lie.
How great the need in Japanese social life of some purifying principle
higher than Confucianism can afford, is shown in the little book
entitled "The Japanese Bride,"[25] written by a native, and scarcely
less in the storm of native criticism it called forth. Under the system
which has ruled Japan for a millennium and a half, divorce has been
almost entirely in the hands of the husband, and the document of
separation, entitled in common parlance the "three lines and a half,"
was invariably written by the man. A woman might indeed nominally obtain
a divorce from her husband, but not actually; for the severance of the
marital tie would be the work of the house or relatives, rather than the
act of the wife, who was not "a person" in the case. Indeed, in the
olden time a woman was not a person in the eye of the law, but rather a
chattel. The case is somewhat different under the new codes,[26] but the
looseness of the marriage tie is still a scandal to thinking Japanese.
Since the breaking up of the feudal system and the disarrangement of the
old social and moral standards, the statistics made annually from the
official census show that the ratio of divorce to marriage is very
nearly as one to three.[27]
The Elder and the Younger Brother.
The Fourth Relation is that of Elder Brother and Younger Brother. As we
have said, foreigners in translating some of the Chinese and Japanese
terms used in the system of Confucius are often led into errors by
supposing that the Christian conception of family life prevails also in
Chinese Asia. By many writers this relation is translated "brother to
brother;" but really in the Japanese language there is no term meaning
simply "brother" or "sister,"[28] and a circumlocution is necessary to
express the ideas which we convey by these words. It is always "older
brother" or "younger brother," and "older sister" or "younger
sister"--the male or female "_kiyodai_" as the case may be. With
us--excepting in lands where the law of primogeniture still
prevails--all the brothers are practically equal, and it would be
considered a violation of Christian righteousness for a parent to show
more favor to one child than to another. In this respect the "wisdom
that cometh from above" is "without partiality." The Chinese ethical
system, however, disregards the principle of mutual rights and duties,
and builds up the family on the theory of the subordination of the
younger brother to the elder brother, the predominant idea being not
mutual love, but, far more than in the Christian household, that of rank
and order. The attitude of the heir of the family toward the other
children is one of condescension, and they, as well as the widowed
mother, regard the oldest son with reverence. It is as though the
commandment given on Sinai should read, "Honor thy father and thy elder
brother."
The mother is an instrument rather than a person in the life of the
house, and the older brother is the one on whom rests the responsibility
of continuing the family line. The younger brothers serve as subjects
for adoption into other families, especially those where there are
daughters to be married and family names to be continued. In a word, the
name belongs to the house and not to the individual. The habit of naming
children after relatives or friends of the parents, or illustrious men
and women, is unknown in Old Japan, though an approach to this common
custom among us is made by conferring or making use of part of a name,
usually by the transferrence of one ideograph forming the name-word.
Such a practice lays stress upon personality, and so has no place in the
country without pronouns, where the idea of continuing the personal
house or semi-personal family, is predominant. The customs prevalent in
life are strong even in death, and the elder brother or sister, in some
provinces, did not go to the funeral of the younger. This state of
affairs is reflected in Japanese literature, and produces in romance as
well as in history many situations and episodes which seem almost
incredible to the Western mind.
In the lands ruled by Confucius the grown-up children usually live under
the parental roof, and there are few independent homes as we understand
them. The so-called family is composed both of the living and of the
dead, and constitutes the unit of society.
Friendship and Humanity.
The Fifth Relation--Friends. Here, again, a mistake is often made by
those who import ideas of Christendom into the terms used in Chinese
Asia, and who strive to make exact equivalent in exchanging the coins of
speech. Occidental writers are prone to translate the term for the fifth
relation into the English phrase "man to man," which leads the Western
reader to suppose that Confucius taught that universal love for man, as
man, which was instilled and exemplified by Jesus Christ. In translating
Confucius they often make the same mistake that some have done who read
in Terence's "Self-Tormentor" the line, "I am a man, and nothing human
is foreign to me,"[29] and imagine that this is the sentiment of an
enlightened Christian, although the context shows that it is only the
boast of a busybody and parasite. What Confucius taught under the fifth
relation is not universality, and, as compared to the teachings of
Jesus, is moonlight, not sunlight. The doctrine of the sage is clearly
expressed in the Analects, and amounts only to courtesy and propriety.
He taught, indeed, that the stranger is to be treated as a friend; and
although in both Chinese and Japanese history there are illustrious
proofs that Confucius had interpreters nobler than himself, yet it is
probable that the doctrine of the stranger's receiving treatment as a
friend, does not extend to the foreigner. Confucius framed something
like the Golden Rule--though it were better called a Silver Rule, or
possibly a Gilded Rule, since it is in the negative instead of being
definitely placed in the positive and indicative form. One may search
his writings in vain for anything approaching the parable of the Good
Samaritan, or the words of Him who commended Elijah for replenishing the
cruse and barrel of the widow of Sarepta, and Elisha for healing Naaman
the Syrian leper, and Jonah for preaching the good news of God to the
Assyrians who had been aliens and oppressors. Lao Tsze, however, went so
far as to teach "return good for evil." When one of the pupils of
Confucius interrogated his Master concerning this, the sage answered;
"What then will you return for good? Recompense injury with justice, and
return good for good."
But if we do good only to those who do good to us, what thanks have we?
Do not the publicans the same? Behold how the Heavenly Father does good
alike unto all, sending rain upon the just and unjust!
How Old Japan treated the foreigner is seen in the repeated repulse,
with powder and ball, of the relief ships which, under the friendly
stars and stripes, attempted to bring back to her shores the shipwrecked
natives of Nippon.[30] Granted that this action may have been purely
political and the Government alone responsible for it--just as our
un-Christian anti-Chinese legislation is similarly explained--yet it is
certain that the sentiment of the only men in Japan who made public
opinion,--the Samurai of that day,--was in favor of this method of
meeting the alien.
In 1852 the American expedition was despatched to Japan for the purpose
of opening a lucrative trade and of extending American influence and
glory, but also unquestionably with the idea of restoring shipwrecked
Japanese as well as securing kind treatment for shipwrecked American
sailors, thereby promoting the cause of humanity and international
courtesy; in short, with motives that were manifestly mixed.[31] In the
treaty pavilion there ensued an interesting discussion between Commodore
Perry and Professor Hayashi upon this very subject.
Perry truthfully complained that the dictates of humanity had not been
followed by the Japanese, that unnecessary cruelty had been used against
shipwrecked men, and that Japan's attitude toward her neighbors and the
whole world was that of an enemy and not of a friend.
Hayashi, who was then probably the leading Confucianist in Japan, warmly
defended his countrymen and superiors against the charge of intentional
cruelty, and denounced the lawless character of many of the foreign
sailors. Like most Japanese of his school and age, he wound up with
panegyrics on the pre-eminence in virtue and humanity, above all
nations, of the Country Ruled by a Theocratic Dynasty, and on the glory
and goodness of the great Tokugawa family, which had given peace to the
land during two centuries or more.[32]
It is manifest, however, that so far as this hostility to foreigners,
and this blind bigotry of "patriotism" were based on Chinese codes of
morals, as officially taught in Yedo, they belonged as much to the old
Confucianism as to the new. Wherever the narrow philosophy of the sage
has dominated, it has made Asia Chinese and nations hermits. As a rule,
the only way in which foreigners could come peacefully into China or the
countries which she intellectually dominated was as vassals,
tribute-bearers, or "barbarians." The mental attitude of China, Korea,
Annam and Japan has for ages been that of the Jews in Herodian times,
who set up, between the Court of Israel and the Court of the Gentiles,
their graven stones of warning which read:[33]
"No foreigner to proceed within the partition wall and enclosure
around the sanctuary; whoever is caught in the same will on that
account be liable to incur death."
CHAPTER V - CONFUCIANISM IN ITS PHILOSOPHICAL FORM
"After a thousand years the pine decays; the flower has its
glory in blooming for a day."--Hakkyoi, Chinese Poet of the Tang
Dynasty.
"The morning-glory of an hour differs not in heart from the
pine-tree of a thousand years."--Matsunaga of Japan.
"The pine's heart is not of a thousand years, nor the
morning-glory's of an hour, but only that they may fulfil their
destiny."
"Since Iyéyasú, his hair brushed by the wind, his body anointed
with rain, with lifelong labor caused confusion to cease and
order to prevail, for more than a hundred years there has been
no war. The waves of the four seas have been unruffled and no
one has failed of the blessing of peace. The common folk must
speak with reverence, yet it is the duty of scholars to
celebrate the virtue of the Government."--Kyūso of Yedo.
"A ruler must have faithful ministers. He who sees the error of
his lord and remonstrates, not fearing his wrath, is braver than
he who bears the foremost spear in battle."--Iyéyasú.
"The choice of the Chinese philosophy and the rejection of
Buddhism was not because of any inherent quality in the Japanese
mind. It was not the rejection of supernaturalism or the
miraculous. The Chinese philosophy is as supernaturalistic as
some forms of Buddhism. The distinction is not between the
natural and the supernatural in either system, but between the
seen and the unseen."
"The Chinese philosophy is as religious as the original teaching
of Gautama. Neither Shushi nor Gautama believed in a Creator,
but both believed in gods and demons.... It has little place for
prayer, but has a vivid sense of the Infinite and the Unseen,
and fervently believes that right conduct is in accord with the
'eternal verities.'"--George William Knox.
"In him is the yea."--Paul.
CHAPTER V - CONFUCIANISM IN ITS PHILOSOPHICAL FORM
Japan's Millennium of Simple Confucianism.
Having seen the practical working of the ethics of Confucianism,
especially in the old and simple system, let us now glance at the
developed and philosophical forms, which, by giving the educated man of
Japan a creed, made him break away from Buddhism and despise it, while
becoming often fanatically Confucian.
For a thousand years (from 600 to 1600 A.D.) the Buddhist religious
teachers assisted in promulgating the ethics of Confucius; for during
all this time there was harmony between the various Buddhisms imported
from India, Tibet, China and Korea, and the simple undeveloped system of
Chinese Confucianism. Slight modifications were made by individual
teachers, and emphasis was laid upon this or that feature, while out of
the soil of Japanese feudalism were growths of certain virtues as phases
of loyalty, phenomenal beyond those in China. Nevertheless, during all
this time, the Japanese teachers of the Chinese ethic were as students
who did but recite what they learned. They simply transmitted, without
attempting to expand or improve.
Though the apparatus of distribution was early known, block printing
having been borrowed from the Chinese after the ninth century, and
movable types learned from the Koreans and made use of in the sixteenth
century,[1] the Chinese classics were not printed as a body until after
the great peace of Genna (1615). Nor during this period were
translations made of the classics or commentaries, into the Japanese
vernacular. Indeed, between the tenth and sixteenth centuries there was
little direct intercourse, commercial, diplomatic or intellectual,
between Japan and China, as compared with the previous eras, or the
decades since 1870.
Suddenly in the seventeenth century the intellect of Japan, all ready
for new surprises in the profound peace inaugurated by Iyéyasŭ,
received, as it were, an electric thrill. The great warrior, becoming
first a unifier by arms and statecraft, determined also to become the
architect of the national culture. Gathering up, from all parts of the
country, books, manuscripts, and the appliances of intellectual
discipline, he encouraged scholars and stimulated education. Under his
supervision the Chinese classics were printed, and were soon widely
circulated. A college was established in Yedo, and immediately there
began a critical study of the texts and principal commentaries. The fall
of the Ming dynasty in China, and the accession of the Manchiu Tartars,
became the signal for a great exodus of learned Chinese, who fled to
Japan. These received a warm welcome, both at the capital and in Yedo,
as well as in some of the castle towns of the Daimiōs, among whom
stand illustrious those of the province of Mito.[2]
These men from the west brought not only ethics but philosophy; and the
fertilizing influences of these scholars of the Dispersion, may be
likened to those of the exodus of the Greek learned men after the
capture of Constantinople by the Turks. Confucian schools were
established in most of the chief provincial cities. For over two hundred
years this discipline in the Chinese ethics, literature and history
constituted the education of the boys and men of Japan. Almost every
member of the Samurai classes was thoroughly drilled in this curriculum.
All Japanese social, official, intellectual and literary life was
permeated with the new spirit. Their "world" was that of the Chinese,
and all outside of it belonged to "barbarians." The matrices of thought
became so fixed and the Japanese language has been so moulded, that even
now, despite the intense and prolonged efforts of thirty years of acute
and laborious scholarship, it is impossible, as we have said, to find
English equivalents for terms which were used for a century or two past
in every-day Japanese speech. Those who know most about these facts, are
most modest in attempting with English words to do justice to Japanese
thought; while those who know the least seem to be most glib, fluent and
voluminous in showing to their own satisfaction, that there is little
difference between the ethics of Chinese Asia and those of Christendom.
Survey of the Intellectual History of China.
The Confucianism of the last quarter-millennium in Japan is not that of
her early centuries. While the Japanese for a thousand years only
repeated and recited--merely talking aloud in their intellectual sleep
but not reflecting--China was awake and thinking hard. Japan's continued
civil wars, which caused the almost total destruction of books and
manuscripts, secured also the triumph of Buddhism which meant the
atrophy of the national intellect. When, after the long feuds and
battles of the middle ages, Confucianism stepped the second time into
the Land of _Brave_ Scholars, it was no longer with the simple rules of
conduct and ceremonial of the ancient days, nor was it as the ally of
Buddhism. It came like an armed man in full panoply of harness and
weapons. It entered to drive Buddhism out, and to defend the intellect
of the educated against the wiles of priestcraft. It was a full-blown
system of pantheistic rationalism, with a scheme of philosophy that to
the far-Oriental mind seemed perfect as a rule both of faith and
practice. It came in a form that was received as religion, for it was
not only morality "touched" but infused with motion. Nor were the
emotions kindled, those of the partisan only, but rather also those of
the devotee and the martyr. Henceforth Buddhism, with its inventions,
its fables, and its endless dogmatism, was for the common people, for
women and children, but not for the Samurai. The new Confucianism came
to Japan as the system of Chu Hi. For three centuries this system had
already held sway over the intellect of China. For two centuries and a
half it has dominated the minds of the Samurai so that the majority of
them to-day, even with the new name Shizoku, are Confucianists so far as
they are anything.
To understand the origin of Buddhism we must know something of the
history and the previous religious and philosophical systems of India,
and so, if we are to appreciate modern "orthodox" Confucianism, we must
review the history of China, and see, in outline, at least, its
literature, politics and philosophy during the middle ages.
"Four great stages of literary and national development may be pointed
to as intervening (in the fifteen hundred years) between the great sage
and the age called that of the Sung-Ju,"[3] from the tenth to the
fourteenth century, in which the Confucian system received its modern
form. Each of them embraced the course of three or four centuries.
I. From the sixth to the third century before Christ the struggle was
for Confucian and orthodox doctrine, led by Mencius against various
speculators in morals and politics, with Taoist doctrine continually
increasing in acceptance.
II. The Han age (from B.C. 206 to A.D. 190) was rich in critical
expositors and commentators of the classics, but "the tone of
speculation was predominantly Taoist."
III. The period of the Six Dynasties (from A.D. 221 to A.D. 618) was the
golden age of Buddhism, when the science and philosophy of India
enriched the Chinese mind, and the wealth of the country was lavished on
Buddhist temples and monasteries. The faith of Shaka became nearly
universal and the Buddhists led in philosophy and literature, founding a
native school of Indian philosophy.
IV. The Tang period (from A.D. 618 to 905) marked by luxury and poetry,
was an age of mental inaction and enervating prosperity.
V. The fifth epoch, beginning with the Sung Dynasty (from A.D. 960 to
1333) and lasting to our own time, was ushered in by a period of intense
mental energy. Strange to say (and most interesting is the fact to
Americans of this generation), the immediate occasion of the recension
and expansion of the old Confucianism was a Populist movement.[4] During
the Tang era of national prosperity, Chinese socialists questioned the
foundations of society and of government, and there grew up a new school
of interpreters as well as of politicians. In the tenth century the
contest between the old Confucianism and the new notions, broke out with
a violence that threatened anarchy to the whole empire.
One set of politicians, led by Wang (1021-1086), urged an extension of
administrative functions, including agricultural loans, while the
brothers Cheng (1032-1085, 1033-1107) reaffirmed, with fresh
intellectual power, the old orthodoxy.
The school of writers and party agitators, led by Szma Kwaug
(1009-1086)[5] the historian, contended that the ancient principles of
the sages should be put in force. Others, the Populists of that age and
land, demanded the entire overthrow of existing institutions.
In the bitter contest which ensued, the Radicals and Reformers
temporarily won the day and held power. For a decade the experiment of
innovation was tried. Men turned things social and political upside down
to see how they looked in that position. So these stood or oscillated
for thirteen years, when the people demanded the old order again. The
Conservatives rose to power. There was no civil war, but the Radicals
were banished beyond the frontier, and the country returned to normal
government.
This controversy raised a landmark in the intellectual history of
China.[6] The thoughts of men were turned toward deep and acute inquiry
into the nature and use of things in general. This thinking resulted in
a literature which to-day is the basis of the opinions of the educated
men in all Chinese Asia. Instead of a sapling we now have a mighty tree.
The chief of the Chinese writers, the Calvin of Asiatic orthodoxy, who
may be said to have wrought Confucianism into a developed philosophy,
and who may be called the greatest teacher of the mind, of modern China,
Korea and Japan, is Chu Hi, who reverently adopted the criticisms on the
Chinese classics of the brothers Cheng.[7] It is evident that in Chu
Hi's system, we have a body of thought which may be called the result of
Chinese reflection during a millennium and a half. It is the ethics of
Confucius transfused with the mystical elements of Taoism and the
speculations of Buddhism. As the common people of China made an amalgam
of the three religions and consider them one, so the philosophers have
out of these three systems made one, calling that one Confucianism. The
dominant philosophy in Japan to-day is based upon the writings of Chu Hi
(in Japanese, Shu Shi) and called the system of Téi-Shu, which is the
Japanese pronunciation of the names of the Cheng brothers and of Chu
(Hi). It is a medley which the ancient sage could no more recognize than
would Jesus know much of the Christianity that casts out devils in his
name.
Contrast between the Chinese and Japanese Intellect.
Here we must draw a contrast between the Chinese and Japanese intellect
to the credit of the former; China made, Japan borrowed. While history
shows that the Chinese mind, once at least, possessed mental initiative,
and the power of thinking out a system of philosophy which to-day
satisfies largely, if not wholly, the needs of the educated Chinaman,
there has been in the Japanese mind, as shown by its history, apparently
no such vigor or fruitfulness. From the literary and philosophical
points of view, Confucianism, as it entered Japan, in the sixth century,
remained practically stationary for a thousand years. Modifications,
indeed, were made upon the Chinese system, and these were striking and
profound, but they were less developments of the intellect than
necessities of the case. The modifications were made, as molten metal
poured into a mould shaped by other hands than the artist's own, rather
than as clay made plastic under the hand of a designer. Buddhism, being
the dominant force in the thoughts of the Japanese for at least eight
hundred years, furnished the food for the requirements of man on his
intellectual and religious side.
Broadly speaking, it may be said that the Japanese, receiving passively
the Chinese classics, were content simply to copy and to recite what
they had learned. As compared with their audacity in not only going
beyond the teachings of Buddha, but in inventing systems of Buddhism
which neither Gautama nor his first disciples could recognize, the
docile and almost slavish adherence to ancient Confucianism is one of
the astonishing things in the history of religions in Japan. In the
field of Buddhism we have a luxuriant growth of new and strange species
of colossal weeds that overtower and seem to have choked out whatever
furze of original Buddhism there was in Japan, while in the domain of
Confucianism there is a barren heath. Whereas, in China, the voluminous
literature created by commentators on Confucius and the commentaries on
the commentators suggests the hyperbole used by the author of John's
Gospel,[8] yet there is probably nothing on Confucianism from the
Japanese pen in the thousand years under our review which is worth the
reading or the translation.[9] In this respect the Japanese genius
showed its vast capabilities of imitation, adoption and assimilation.
As of old, Confucianism again furnished a Chinese wall, within which the
Japanese could move, and wherein they might find food for the mind in
all the relations of life and along all the lines of achievement
permitted them. The philosophy imported from China, as shown again and
again in that land of oft-changing dynasties, harmonizing with arbitrary
government, accorded perfectly with the despotism of the Tokugawas, the
"Tycoons" who in Yedo ruled from 1603 to 1868. Nothing new was
permitted, and any attempt at modification, enlargement, or improvement
was not only frowned and hissed down as impious innovation, but usually
brought upon the daring innovator the ban of the censor, imprisonment,
banishment, or death by enforced suicide.[10] In Yedo, the centre of
Chinese learning, and in other parts of the country, there were, indeed,
thinkers whose philosophy did not always tally with what was taught by
the orthodox,[11] but as a rule even when these men escaped the ban of
the censor, or the sword of the executioner, they were but us voices
crying in the wilderness. The great mass of the gentry was orthodox,
according to the standards of the Séido College, while the common people
remained faithful to Buddhism. In the conduct of daily life they
followed the precepts which had for centuries been taught them by their
fathers.
Philosophical Confucianism the Religion of the Samurai.
What were the features of this modern Confucian philosophy, which the
Japanese Samurai exalted to a religion?[12] We say philosophy and
religion, because while the teachings of the great sage lay at the
bottom of the system, yet it is not true since the early seventeenth
century, that the thinking men of Japan have been satisfied with only
the original simple ethical rules of the ancient master. Though they
have craved a richer mental pabulum, yet they have enjoyed less the
study of the original text, than acquaintance with the commentaries and
communion with the great philosophical exponents, of the master. What,
then, we ask, are the features of the developed philosophy, which,
imported from China, served the Japanese Samurai not only as morals but
for such religion as he possessed or professed?
We answer: The system was not agnostic, as many modern and western
writers assert that it is, and as Confucius, transmitting and probably
modifying the old religion, had made the body of his teachings to be.
Agnostic, indeed, in regard to many things wherein a Christian has
faith, modern Confucianism, besides being bitterly polemic and hostile
to Buddhism, is pantheistic.
Certain it is that during the revival of Pure Shintō in the
eighteenth century, the scholars of the Shintō school, and those of
its great rival, the Chinese, agreed in making loyalty[13] take the
place of filial duty in the Confucian system. To serve the cause of the
Emperor became the most essential duty to those with cultivated minds.
The newer Chinese philosophy mightily influenced the historians, Rai
Sanyo and those of the Mito school, whose works, now classic, really
began the revolution of 1868. By forming and setting in motion the
public opinion, which finally overthrew the Shōgun and feudalism,
restored the Emperor to supreme power, and unified the nation, they
helped, with modern ideas, to make the New Japan of our day. The
Shintō and the Chinese teachings became amalgamated in a common
cause, and thus the philosophy of Chu Hi, mingling with the nationalism
and patriotism inculcated by Shintō, brought about a remarkable
result. As a native scholar and philosopher observes, "It certainly is
strange to see the Tokugawa rule much shaken, if not actually
overthrown, by that doctrine which generations of able Shōguns and
their ministers had earnestly encouraged and protected. It is perhaps
still more remarkable to see the Mito clan, under many able and active
chiefs, become the centre of the Kinno[14] movement, which was to result
in the overthrow of the Tokugawa family, of which it was itself a
branch."
A Medley of Pantheism.
The philosophy of modern Confucianism is wholly pantheistic. There is in
it no such thing or being as God. The orthodox pantheism of Old Japan
means that everything in general is god, but nothing in particular is
God; that All is god, but not that God is all. It is a "pantheistic
medley."[15]
Chu Hi and his Japanese successors, especially Kyū-so, argue finely
and discourse volubly about _Ki_[16] or spirit; but it is not Spirit, or
spiritual in the sense of Him who taught even a woman at the well-curb
at Sychar. It is in the air. It is in the earth, the trees, the flowers.
It comes to consciousness in man. His _Ri_ is the Tao of Lao Tsze, the
Way, Reason, Law. It is formless, invisible.
"Ri is not separate from Ki, for then it were an empty abstract
thing. It is joined to Ki, and may be called, by nature, one
decreed, changeless Norm. It is the rule of Ki, the very centre,
the reason why Ki is Ki."
Ten or Heaven is not God or the abode of God, but an abstraction, a sort
of Unknowable, or Primordial Necessity.
"The doctrine of the Sages knows and worships Heaven, and
without faith in it there is no truth. For men and things, the
universe, are born and nourished by Heaven, and the 'Way,' the
'ri,' that is in all, is the 'Way,' the 'ri' of Heaven.
Distinguishing root and branch, the heart is the root of Heaven
and the appearance, the revolution of the sun and moon, the
order of the stars, is the branch. The books of the sages teach
us to conform to the heart of Heaven and deal not with
appearances."
"The teaching of the sages is the original truth and, given to
men, it forms both their nature and their relationships. With it
complete, naught else is needed for the perfect following of the
'Way.' Let then the child make its parents Heaven, the retainer,
his Lord, the wife her husband, and let each give up life for
righteousness. Thus will each serve for Heaven. But if we exalt
Heaven above parent or Lord, we shall come to think we can serve
it though they be disobeyed and like tiger or wolf shall rejoice
to kill them. To such fearful end does the Western learning
lead.... Let each one die for duty, there is naught else we can
do."
Thus wrote Ohashi Junzo, as late as 1857 A.D., the same year in which
Townsend Harris entered Yedo to teach the practical philosophy of
Christendom, and the brotherhood of man as expressed in diplomacy.
Ohashi Junzo bitterly opposed the opening of Japan to modern
civilization and the ideas of Christendom. His book was the swan-song of
the dying Japanese Confucianism. Slow as is the dying, and hard as its
death may be, the mind of new Japan has laid away to dust and oblivion
the Téi-shu philosophy. "At present they (the Chinese classics) have
fallen into almost total neglect, though phrases and allusions borrowed
from them still pass current in literature, and even to some extent in
the language of every-day life." Séido, the great temple of Confucius in
Tokyo, is now utilized as an educational Museum.[17]
A study of this subject and of comparative religion, is of immediate
practical benefit to the Christian teacher. The preacher, addressing an
audience made up of educated Japanese, who speaks of God without
describing his personality, character, or attributes as illustrated in
Revelation, will find that his hearers receive his term as the
expression for a bundle of abstract principles, or a system of laws, or
some kind of regulated force. They do, indeed, make some reference to a
"creator" by using a rare word. Occasionally, their language seems to
touch the boundary line on the other side of which is conscious
intelligence, but nothing approaching the clearness and definiteness of
the early Chinese monotheism of the pre-Confucian classics is to be
distinguished.[18] The modern Japanese long ago heard joyfully the
words, "Honor the gods, but keep them far from you," and he has done it.
To love God would no more occur to a Japanese gentleman than to have his
child embrace and kiss him. Whether the source and fountain of life of
which they speak has any Divine Spirit, is very uncertain, but whether
it has, or has not, man need not obey, much less worship him. The
universe is one, the essence is the same. Man must seek to know his
place in the universe; he is but one in an endless chain; let him find
his part and fulfil that part; all else is vanity. One need not inquire
into the origins or the ultimates. Man is moved by a power greater than
himself; he has no real independence of his own; everything has its rank
and place; indeed, its rank and place is its sole title to a separate
existence. If a man mistakes his place he is a fool, he deserves
punishment.
The Ideals of a Samurai.
Out of his place, man is not man. Duty is more important than being.
Nearly everything in our life is fixed by fate; there may seem to be
exceptions, because some wicked men are prosperous and some righteous
men are wretched, but these are not real exceptions to the general rule
that we are made for our environment and fitted to it. And then, again,
it may be that our judgments are not correct. Let the heart be right and
all is well. Let man be obedient and his outward circumstance is
nothing, having no relation to his joy or happiness. Even when as to his
earthly body man passes away, he is not destroyed; the drop again
becomes part of the sea, the spark re-enters the flame, and his life
continues, though it be not a conscious life. In this way man is in
harmony with the original principle of all things. He outlasts the
universe itself.
Hence to a conscientious Samurai there is nothing in this world better
than obedience, in the ideal of a true man. What he fears most and hates
most is that his memory may perish, that he shall have no seed, that he
shall be forgotten or die under a cloud and be thought treacherous or
cowardly or base, when in reality his life was pure and his motives
high. "Better," sang Yoshida Shoin, the dying martyr for his principles,
"to be a crystal and to be broken, than to be a tile upon the housetop
and remain."
So, indeed, on a hundred curtained execution grounds, with the dirk of
the suicide firmly grasped and about to shed their own life-blood, have
sung the martyrs who died willingly for their faith in their idea of
Yamato Damashii.[19] In untold instances in the national history, men
have died willingly and cheerfully, and women also by thousands, as
brave, as unflinching as the men, so that the story of Japanese chivalry
is almost incredible in its awful suicides. History reveals a state of
society in which cool determination, desperate courage and fearlessness
of death in the face of duty were quite unique, and which must have had
their base in some powerful though abnormal code of ethics.
This leads us to consider again the things emphasized by Japanese as
distinct from Chinese and Korean[20] Confucianism, and to call attention
to its fruits, while at the same time we note its defects, and show
wherein it failed. We shall then show how this old system has already
waxed old and is passing away. Christ has come to Japan, and behold a
new heaven and a new earth!
New Japan Makes Revision.
First. For sovereign and minister, there are coming into vogue new
interpretations. This relation, if it is to remain as the first, will
become that of the ruler and the ruled. Constitutional government has
begun; and codes of law have been framed which are recognizing the
rights of the individual and of the people. Even a woman has rights
before the law, in relation to husband, parents, brothers, sisters and
children. It is even beginning to be thought that children have rights.
Let us hope that as the rights are better understood the duties will be
equally clear.
It is coming to pass in Japan that even in government, the sovereign
must consult with his people on all questions pertaining to their
welfare. Although, thus far the constitutional government makes the
ministers responsible to the Sovereign instead of to the Diet, yet the
contention of the enlightened men and the liberal parties is, that the
ministers shall be responsible to the Diet. The time seems at hand when
the sovereign's power over his people will not rest on traditions more
or less uncertain, on history manufactured by governmental order, on
mythological claims based upon the so-called "eternal ages," on
prerogatives upheld by the sword, or on the supposed grace of the gods,
but will be "broad-based upon the people's will." The power of the
rulers will be derived from the consent of the governed. The Emperor
will become the first and chief servant of the nation.
Revision and improvement of the Second Relation will make filial piety
something more real than that unto which China has attained, or Japan
has yet seen, or which is yet universally known in Christendom. The
tyranny of the father and of the older brother, and the sale of
daughters to shame, will pass away; and there will arise in the Japanese
house, the Christian home.
It would be hard to say what Confucianism has done for woman. It is
probable that all civilizations, and systems of philosophy, ethics and
religion, can be well tested by this criterion--the position of woman.
Confucianism virtually admits two standards of morality, one for man,
another for woman.[21] In Chinese Asia adultery is indeed branded as one
of the vilest of crimes, but in common idea and parlance it is a woman's
crime, not man's. So, on the other hand, chastity is a female virtue, it
is part of womanly duty, it has little or no relation to man personally.
Right revision and improvement of the Third Relation will abolish
concubinage. It will reform divorce. It will make love the basis of
marriage. It will change the state of things truthfully pictured in such
books as the Genji Monogatari, or Romance of Prince Genji, with its
examples of horrible lust and incests; the Kojiki or Ethnic scripture,
with its naïve accounts of filthiness among the gods; the Onna Dai Gaku,
Woman's Great Study, with its amazing subordination and moral slavery of
wife and daughter; and The Japanese Bride, of yesterday--all truthful
pictures of Japanese life, for the epoch in which each was written.
These books will become the forgotten curiosities of literature, known
only to the archæologist.
Improvement and revision of the Fourth Relation, will bring into the
Japanese home more justice, righteousness, love and enjoyment of life.
It will make possible, also, the cheerful acceptance and glad practice
of those codes of law common in Christendom, which are based upon the
rights of the individual and upon the idea of the greatest good to the
greatest number. It will help to abolish the evils which come from
primogeniture and to release the clutch of the dead hand upon the
living. It will decrease the power of the graveyard, and make thought
and care for the living the rule of life. It will abolish sham and
fiction, and promote the cause of truth. It will hasten the reign of
righteousness and love, and beneath propriety and etiquette lay the
basis of "charity toward all, malice toward none."
Revision with improvement of the Fifth Relation hastens the reign of
universal brotherhood. It lifts up the fallen, the down-trodden and the
outcast. It says to the slave "be free," and after having said "be
free," educates, trains, and lifts up the brother once in servitude, and
helps him to forget his old estate and to know his rights as well as his
duties, and develops in him the image of God. It says to the hinin or
not-human, "be a man, be a citizen, accept the protection of the law."
It says to the eta, "come into humanity and society, receive the
protection of law, and the welcome of your fellows; let memory forget
the past and charity make a new future." It will bring Japan into the
fraternity of nations, making her people one with the peoples of
Christendom, not through the empty forms of diplomacy, or by the craft
of her envoys, or by the power of her armies and navies reconstructed on
modern principles, but by patient education and unflinching loyalty to
high ideals. Thus will Japan become worthy of all the honors, which the
highest humanity on this planet can bestow.
The Ideal of Yamato Damashii Enlarged.
In this our time it is not only the alien from Christendom, with his
hostile eye and mordant criticism, who is helping to undermine that
system of ethics which permitted the sale of the daughter to shame, the
introduction of the concubine into the family and the reduction of
woman, even though wife and mother, to nearly a cipher. It is not only
the foreigner who assaults that philosophy which glorified the vendetta,
kept alive private war, made revenge in murder the sweetest joy of the
Samurai and suicide the gate to honor and fame, subordinated the family
to the house, and suppressed individuality and personality. It is the
native Japanese, no longer a hermit, a "frog in the well, that knows not
the great ocean" but a student, an inquirer, and a critic, who assaults
the old ethical and philosophical system, and calls for a new way
between heaven and earth, and a new kind of Heaven in which shall be a
Creator, a Father and a Saviour. The brain and pen of New Japan, as well
as its heart, demand that the family shall be more than the house and
that the living members shall have greater rights as well as duties,
than the dead ancestors. They claim that the wife shall share
responsibility with the husband, and that the relation of husband and
wife shall take precedence of that of the father and son; that the
mother shall possess equal authority with the father; that the wife,
whether she be mother or not, shall not be compelled to share her home
with the concubine; and that the child in Japan shall be born in the
home and not in the herd. The sudden introduction of the Christian ideas
of personality and individuality has undoubtedly wrought peril to the
framework of a society which is built according to the Confucian
principles; but faith in God, love in the home, and absolute equality
before the law will bring about a reign of righteousness such as Japan
has never known, but toward the realization of which Christian nations
are ever advancing.
Even the old ideal of the Samurai embodied in the formula Yamato
Damashii will be enlarged and improved from its narrow limits and
ferocious aspects, when the tap-root of all progress is allowed to
strike into deeper truth, and the Sixth Relation, or rather the first
relation of all, is taught, namely, that of God to Man, and of Man to
God. That this relation is understood, and that the Samurai ideal,
purified and enlarged, is held by increasing numbers of Japan's
brightest men and noblest women, is shown in that superb Christian
literature which pours from the pens of the native men and women in the
Japanese Christian churches. Under this flood of truth the old obstacles
to a nobler society are washed away, while out of the enriched soil
rises the new Japan which is to be a part of the better Christendom that
is to come. Christ in Japan, as everywhere, means not destruction, but
fulfilment.
CHAPTER VI - THE BUDDHISM OF NORTHERN ASIA
"Life is a dream is what the pilgrim learns,
Nor asks for more, but straightway home returns."
--Japanese medieval lyric drama.
"The purpose of Buddha's preaching was to bring into light the
permanent truth, to reveal the root of all suffering and thus to
lead all sentient beings into the perfect emancipation from all
passions."--Outlines of the Mahayana.
"Buddhism will stand forth as the embodiment of the eternal
verity that as a man sows he will reap, associated with the
duties of mastery over self and kindness to all men, and
quickened into a popular religion by the example of a noble and
beautiful life."--Dharmapala of Ceylon.
"Buddhism teaches the right path of cause and effect, and
nothing which can supersede the idea of cause and effect will be
accepted and believed. Buddha himself cannot contradict this law
which is the Buddha, of Buddhas, and no omnipotent power except
this law is believed to be existent in the universe.
"Buddhism does not quarrel with other religions about the truth
... Buddhism is truth common to every religion regardless of the
outside garment."--Horin Toki, of Japan.
"Death we can face; but knowing, as some of us do, what is human
life, which of us is it that without shuddering could (if we
were summoned) face the hour of birth?" -De Quinccy.
The prayer of Buddhism, "Deliver us from existence."
The prayer of the Christian, "Deliver us from evil."
"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the
earth."--Genesis.
"I am come that they might have life and that they might have it
more abundantly."--Jesus.
CHAPTER VI - THE BUDDHISM OF NORTHERN ASIA
Pre-Buddhistic India.
Does the name of Gautama, the Buddha, stand for a sun-myth or for a
historic personage? One set of scholars and writers, represented by
Professor Kern,[1] of Leyden, thinks the Buddha a mythical personage.
Another school, represented by Professor T. Rhys Davids,[2] declares
that he lived in human flesh and breathed the air of earth. We accept
the historical view as best explaining the facts.
In order to understand a religion, in its origin at least, we must know
some of the conditions out of which it arose. Buddhism is one of the
protestantisms of the world. Yet, is not every religion, in one sense,
protestant? Is it not a protest against something to which it opposes a
difference? Every new religion, like a growing plant, ignores or rejects
certain elements in the soil out of which it springs. It takes up and
assimilates, also, other elements not used before, in order to produce a
flower or fruit different from other growths out of the same soil. Yet
whether the new religion be considered as a development, fulfilment, or
protest, we must know its historical perspective or background. To
understand the origin of Buddhism, one of the best preparations is to
read the history of India and especially of the thought of her many
generations; for the landmarks of the civilizations of India, as a Hindu
may proudly say, are its mighty literatures. At these let us glance.[3]
The age of the Vedas extends from the year 2000 to 1400 B.C., and the
history of this early India is wonderfully like that of America. During
this era, the Hindus, one of the seven Aryan tribes of which the
Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Sclav and Teutonic form the other six,
descending from the mid-Asian plateau, settled the Punjab in Northwest
India. They drove the dark-skinned aborigines before them and reclaimed
forest and swamp to civilization, making the land of the seven rivers
bright with agriculture and brilliant with cities. This was the glorious
heroic age of joyous life and conquest, when men who believed in a
Heavenly Father[4] made the first epoch of Hindu history.
Then followed the epic age, 1400-1000 B.C., when the area of
civilization was extended still farther down the Ganges Valley, the
splendor of wealth, learning, military prowess and social life excelling
that of the ancestral seats in the Punjab. Amid differences of wars and
diplomacy with rivalries and jealousies, a common sacred language,
literature and religion with similar social and religious institutions,
united the various nations together. In this time the old Vedas were
compiled into bodies or collections, and the Brahmanas and the
Upanishads, besides the great epic poems, the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana were composed.
The next, or rationalistic epoch, covers the period from 1000 B.C. to
320 B.C., when the Hindu expansion had covered all India, that is, the
peninsula from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin. Then, all India, including
Ceylon, was Hinduized, though in differing degrees; the purest Aryan
civilization being in the north, the less pure in the Ganges Valley and
south and east, while the least Aryan and more Dravidian was in Bengal,
Orissa, and India south of the Kistna River.
This story of the spread of Hindu civilization is a brilliant one, and
seems as wonderful as the later European conquest of the land, and of
the other "Indians" of North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Beside the conquests in material civilization of these our fellow-Aryans
(who were the real Indians, and who spoke the language which is the
common ancestor of our own and of most European tongues), what impresses
us most of all, in these Aryans, is their intellectual energy. The
Hindus of the rationalistic age made original discoveries. They invented
grammar, geometry, arithmetic, decimal notation, and they elaborated
astronomy, medicine, mental philosophy and logic (with syllogism) before
these sciences were known or perfected in Greece. In the seventh century
before Christ, Kapila taught a system of philosophy, of which that of
the Europeans, Schopenhaur and Hartmann, seems largely a reproduction.
Following this agnostic scheme of thought, came, several centuries
later, the dualistic Yoga[5] system in which the chief feature is the
conception of Deity as a means of final emancipation of the human soul
from further transmigration, and of union with the Universal Spirit or
World Soul. There is, however, perhaps no sadder chapter in the history
of human thought than the story of the later degeneration of the Yoga
system into one of bloody and cruel rites in India, and of superstition
in China.
Still other systems followed: one by Gautama, of the same clan or family
of the later Buddha, who develops inference by the construction of
syllogism; while Kanada follows the atomic philosophy in which the atoms
are eternal, but the aggregates perishable by disintegration.
Against these schools, which seemed to be dangerous "new departures,"
orthodox Hindus, anxious for their ancient beliefs and practices as laid
down in the Vedas, started fresh systems of philosophy, avowedly more in
consonances with their ancestral faith. One system insisted on the
primitive Vedic ritual, and another laid emphasis on the belief in a
Universal Soul first inculcated in the Upanishads.
Conditions out of which Buddhism Arose.