this Shinto world-view with advancing knowledge of the world,
particularly with the modern scientific conception of the universe.
Anthropology, ethnology, and the doctrine of evolution both cosmic and
human, are all destructive of the primitive Shinto world-view. It
would not be difficult to show, however, that in this world-view
exists a profound element of truth. The Shinto world-conception needs
to be expanded to take the universe and all races of men into its
view; and to see that Japan is not alone the object of divine
solicitude, but that all races likewise owe their origin to that same
divine power, and that even though the Emperor is not more directly
the offspring of the gods than are all men, yet in the providence of
Him who ruleth the affairs of men, the Emperor is in fact the visible
representative of authority and power for the people over whom he
reigns. With this expansion and the consequences that flow from it,
the world-view that has cradled Old Japan will come into accord with
the scientific Christian world-view, and become fitted to be the
foundation for the new and individualistic social order, now arising
in Japan, granting full liberty of thought and action, knowing that
only so can truth come out of error, and assured that truth is the
only ground of permanent welfare.
Throughout the centuries including the present era of Meiji, it is the
Shinto religion that has provided and that still provides religious
sanctions for the social order--even for the new social order that has
come in from the West. It is the belief of the people in the divine
descent of the Emperor, and his consequent divine right, that to-day
unifies the nation and causes it to accept so readily the new social
order; desired by him, they raise no questions, make no opposition,
even though in some respects it brings them trouble and anxiety.
Our study of Buddhism has brought to light its extremely
individualistic nature, and its lack of asocial ideal. Its world-view
we have sufficiently examined in the preceding chapter. We are told
that when Buddhism came to Japan it made little headway until it
adopted the Shinto deities into its theogony. What does this mean?
That only on condition of accepting the Shinto sanctions for the
communal order of society was it able to commend itself to the people
at large. And Buddhism had no difficulty in fulfilling this condition,
because it had no ideal order of society to present and no religious
sanctions for any kind of social order; in this respect Buddhism had
no ground for conflict with Shinto. Shinto had the field to itself;
and Buddhism was perfectly at liberty to adopt, or at least to allow,
any social order that might present itself. Furthermore, by its
doctrines of incarnation and transmigration, according to which noble
souls might appear and reappear in different worlds and different
lands, Buddhism could identify Shinto deities with its own deities of
Hindu origin, asserting their pre-incarnation. Having accepted the
Shinto deities, ideals, and sanctions for the social order, Buddhism
became not only tolerable to the people, but also exceedingly popular.
The Shinto-Buddhistic was in truth a new religion, each of the old
religions supplying an essential element.
One real reason, beside its accommodation to Shintoism, why Buddhism
was so popular was that it brought an indispensable element into the
national life. For the first time emphasis began to be laid on the
individual. Introspection and deliberate meditation were brought into
play. Arts demanding individual skill were fostered. A gorgeous
ritual, elaborate architecture, complex religious organism, letters
and literature, all gave play to individual activity and development
whether in manual, in mental, or in æsthetic lines. The hitherto
cramped and primitive life of the Japanese responded to these appeals
and opportunities with profound joy. The upper classes especially felt
themselves growing in richness and fullness of life. They felt the
stimulus in many directions. The reason, then, why Buddhism flourished
so mightily, and at the same time caused the nation to bloom, was
because it helped develop the individual. The reason, on the other
hand, why it failed to carry the nation on from its first bloom into
full fruitage was because it failed to develop individualism in the
social order. Its religious individualism was, as we have seen, in
reality defective. It was abstract and one-sided. It did not discover
the whole of the individual. It did not know anything of personality,
either human or divine. It accordingly could not recognize the
individual's worth, but only his separateness and his weakness. It
taught an abstract impoverished idea of self, and made, as the whole
aim of the salvation it offered, the final annihilation of all
separateness of this individual self. We can now see that its
individualism was essentially defective in that it poured contempt on
the self, and that if its individualizing salvation were consistently
carried out, it was not only no help to the social order, but a
positive injury to it. Its individualism was of a nature which could
not become an integral part of any social order.
This character led to another inevitable difficulty. Although Buddhism
ostensibly adopted Shinto deities and the Shinto sanctions for the
social order, it could not wholeheartedly accept the sanctions nor
take the deities into full and legitimate partnership. It found no
place in its circle of doctrine to teach the important tenets of
Shintoism.
It left them to survive or perish as chance would have it. In
proportion as Buddhism absorbed the life and love of the people,
Shinto fell into decay and with it its sanctions. Then came the
centuries of civil war during which Imperial power and authority sank
to a minimum, and Japan's ignominy and disorder reached their maximum.
What the land now needed was the re-introduction, first, of social
order, even though it must be by the hand of a dictator, and second,
the development of religious sanctions for the order that should be
established. The first was secured by those three great generals of
Japan, Oda Nobunaga, the Taiko Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. "The
first conceived the idea of centralizing all the authority of the
state in a single person; the second, who has been called the Napoleon
of Japan, actually put the idea into practice," but died before
consolidating his work; the third, by his unsurpassed skill as a
diplomat and administrator, carried the idea completely out, arranging
the details of the new order so that, without special military genius
or power on the part of his successors, the order maintained itself
for 250 years.
Yet it is doubtful if this long maintenance of the social order
introduced by Ieyasu would have been possible had he not found ready
to hand a system of essentially religious sanctions for the social
order he had established by force. Confucianism had lain for a
thousand years a dormant germ, receiving some study from learned men,
but having no special relation to the education of the day or to the
political problems that became each century more pressing. In the
Confucian doctrines of loyalty to ruler and piety to parents, a
doctrine sanctioned by Heaven and by the customs of all the ancients,
Ieyasu, with the insight of a master mind, found just the sanctions he
desired. He had the Confucian classics printed--it is said for the
first time in Japan--"and the whole intellect of the country became
molded by Confucian ideas." The classics, edited with diacritical
marks for Japanese students, "formed the chief vehicle of every boy's
education." These were interpreted by learned Chinese commentators.
The intelligence of the land drank of this stream as the European mind
refreshed itself with the classic waters of the Renaissance. The
Japanese were weary of Buddhistic puerilities and transcendental
doctrines that led nowhere. They demanded sanctions for the moral life
and the social order; in response to this need Buddhism gave them
Nirvana--absolute mental and moral vacuity. Confucianism gave them
principles whose working and whose results they could see and
understand. Its sanctions appealed both to the imagination and to the
reason, antiquity and learning and piety being all in their favor. The
sanctions were also seen to be wholly independent of puerile
superstitions and foolish fears. The Confucian ideals and sanctions,
moreover, coincided with the essential elements of the old Shinto
world-view and sanctions. In a true sense, the doctrines of Confucius
were but the elaborated and succinctly stated implications of their
primitive faith. Confucianism, therefore, swept the land. _It was
_accepted as the groundwork and authority for the most flourishing
feudal order the world has ever seen. Japan bloomed again.[DF]
This difference, however, is to be noted between the Shinto ideal
social order and the Confucian, or rather that development of
Confucian ethics and civics which arose during the Tokugawa Shogunate;
Shinto appears to have been, properly speaking, nationalistic, while
feudal Confucianism was tribal. Although in Confucian theory the
supreme loyalty may have been due the Emperor, in point of fact it was
shown to the local daimyo. Confucian ethics was communal and might
easily have turned in the direction of national communalism; it would
then have coincided completely with Shinto in this respect. But for
various reasons it did not so turn, but developed an intensely local,
a tribal communalism, and pushed loyalty to the Emperor as a vital
reality entirely into the background. This was one of the defects of
feudal Confucianism which finally led to its own overthrow. Shinto,
as we have seen, had long been pushed aside by Buddhism and was
practically forgotten by the people. The zeal for Confucian doctrine
brought, therefore, no immediate revival to the Shinto cultus,
although it did revive the essential elements of the old communal
religion. We might say that the old religion was revived under a new
name; having a new name and a new body, the real and vital connection
between the two was not recognized. We thus discern how the religious
history of Japan was not a series of cataclysms or of disconnected
leaps in the dark, but an orderly development, one step naturally
following the next, as the sun follows the dawn. The different stages
of Japan's religious progress have received different names, because
due to specific stimuli brought from abroad; the religious life
itself, however, has been a continuous development.
Another difference between Shinto and Confucianism as it existed in
Japan should not escape our attention, namely, in regard to their
respective world-views. Shinto was confessedly a religion; it frankly
believed in gods, whom it worshiped and on whose help it relied.
Confucianism, or to use the Japanese name, Bushido, was confessedly
agnostic. It did not assume to understand the universe, as Buddhism
assumed. Nor did it admit the practical existence of gods or their
power in this world, as Shinto believed. It maintained that, "if only
the heart follows the way of truth, the gods will protect one even
though he does not pray." It laid stress on practical moralities,
regardless of their philosophical presumptions, into which it would
not probe. When pressed it would ascribe all to "Heaven," and, as we
have seen, it had many implications that would lead the inquiring mind
to a belief in the personal nature of "Heaven." Had it developed these
implications, Bushido would have become a genuine religion. It was
indeed a system of ethics touched with emotion, it was religious, but
it failed to become the religion it might have become because it
insisted on its agnosticism and refused to worship the highest and
best it knew.
It is interesting to observe that the ideals and sanctions of
Confucianism produced effects which proved its ruin. They did this in
two ways; first, by developing the prolonged peace necessary for a
high grade of scholarship which, turning its attention to ancient
history, discovered that the Shogunate was assuming powers not in
accord with the primitive practice nor in accord with the theory of
the divine descent of the Imperial house. Imperialistic patriots
arose, whose aim was to overthrow the Shogunate and restore the
Emperor. They felt that, doing this, they were right; that is to say,
they became inspired by the Shinto sanctions for a national life. They
thus discovered the defect of the disjointed feudal system sanctioned
by feudal Confucianism. The second cause of its undoing grew out of
the first. The scholarship which led the patriots against the usurper
in political life led them also against all foreign innovations such
as Buddhism and Confucianism, which they scorned as modern and
anti-imperial. The Shinto cultus thus received a powerful revival.
With the overthrow of the Shogunate in 1868 Confucianism naturally
went with it, and for a time Shinto was the state religion. But its
poverty in every line, except the communal sanctions, caused it in a
short time to lose its place.
The two causes just assigned for the fall of Bushido, however, could
hardly have wrought its ruin had it been more than a utilitarian and
agnostic system of morality, calculated to maintain the social
ascendency of a small fraction of the nation. As a religion, Bushido
would have secured a conservative power enabling it to survive, by
adapting itself to a changed social order. As it was, Bushido was
snuffed out by a single breath of the breeze that began to blow from
foreign lands. As an ethical system it has conferred a blessing on
Japan that should never be forgotten. But its identification with a
class and a clan social order rendered it too narrow for the national
and international life into which the nation was forced by
circumstances beyond its control, and its agnostic utilitarianism did
not provide it with sufficient moral power to cope with the problems
of the new individualistic age that had suddenly burst upon it. In all
Japan there remains to the present day only one of those old
Confucian schools with its temple to Confucius. All the rest have
fallen into ruins or have been used for other purposes, while the
gold-covered statues of the once deified teacher have been sold to
curio-dealers or for their bullion value. In the worship of Confucius,
Bushido almost became a religion, but it worshiped the teacher instead
of the Creator, maintaining its agnosticism as to the Creator, as to
"Heaven," to the end, and thus lapsed from the path of religious
evolution.
This brings us down to modern times--into the seventies. Already in
the sixties Japan had discovered herself in a totally new environment.
She found that foreign nations had made great progress in every
direction since she shut them out two hundred and fifty years before.
She discovered her helplessness, she discovered, too, that the social
order of Western peoples was totally distinct from hers. These
discoveries served to break down all the remaining sanctions for her
particular type of social order--Confucianistic feudalism. The whole
nation was eager to know the political systems of the West. So long as
the Shinto ideal of nationalism was not interfered with, the nation
was free to adopt any new social order. Japan's political and
commercial intercourse being with England and America, the social
order of the Anglo-Saxon had the greatest influence on the Japanese
mind. Japan accordingly has become predominantly Anglo-Saxon in its
social ideas. Much has been made of the fact that the new social order
has come in so easily; that the people have gained rights without
fighting for them; and this has been attributed to the peculiarity of
Japanese human nature. This is an error. The real reason for the ease
with which the individualistic Anglo-Saxon social order has been
introduced has been the collapse of the sanctions for the Confucian
order. No one had any ground of duty on which to stand and fight. The
national mind was open to any newcomer that might have appeared. I am
referring, of course, to the thinking classes. All the rest,
accustomed to submissive obedience, never thought of any other course
than to accept the will of superiors.
Furthermore, the new social order in one important respect fell in
with and helped to re-establish the old Shinto ideal, that, namely, of
nationalism. In the treaty negotiations, the West would deal with no
intermediaries, only with the responsible national head. Western
ideals, too, demanded a strong national unity. In this respect, then,
the foreign ideals and foreign social order were powerful influences
in building up the new patriotism, in re-enforcing the old Shinto
social sanctions.
Thus has Japan come to the parting of the ways. What Japan needs
to-day is a religion satisfying the intellect as to its world-view,
and thus justifying the sanctions it holds out. These must be neither
exclusively communal, like those of Shinto, nor exclusively
individual, like those of Buddhism. While maintaining at their full
value the sanctions for the social life, it must add thereto the
sanctions for the individual. It must not look upon the individual as
a being whose salvation depends on his being isolated from, taken out
of the community, as Buddhism did and does, nor yet as a mere fraction
of the community, as Confucianism did, but as a complete, imperishable
unit of infinite worth, necessarily living a double life, partly
inseparable from the social order and partly superior to it. This
religion must provide not only sanctions, but ideals, for a perfect
social order in which, while the most complex organization of society
shall be possible, the freedom and the high development of the
individual's personality shall also be secured.
The fulfillment of such conditions would at first thought seem to be
impossible. How can a religion give sanctions which at the very time
that they authorize the fullest development and organization of
society, apparently making society its chief end, also assume the
fullest liberty and development of the individual, making him and his
salvation its chief end? Are not these ends incompatible? What has
been said already along this general line of thought has prepared us
to see that they are not. The great, though unconscious, need of the
ages, and the unconscious effort of all religious evolution has been
the development of just such a religion. As the "cake" of social
custom was at first the great need for, and afterwards the great
obstacle in the way of, social evolution, so the sanctions of a
communal religion were at first the great need for, and afterwards the
great obstacle in the way of, religious evolution and of personal
development. Through its sanctions religion is the most powerful of
all the factors of the higher human evolution, either helping it
onward or holding it back.
Has, then, any religion secured such a dual development as we have
just seen to be necessary? As a matter of fact, one and only one has
done so, Christianity. This religion clearly attains and maintains the
apparently impossible combination of individualism and communalism by
the nature of its conception of the method of individual salvation.
Its communalism is guaranteed by, because it rests on, its
individualism. At the very moment that it pronounces the individual of
inestimable worth,--a son of God,--it commands him to show that
sonship by loving all God's other sons, and by serving them to the
extent of self-sacrifice, and of death if need be. Its communalism is
thus inseparable from its individualism and its individualism from its
communalism.
Christian individualism embraces and includes thoroughgoing
communalism. True and full Christians are the most devoted patriots.
As the acorn sends forth far-reaching; roots into the soil for
moisture and nourishment, and a mighty trunk and spreading branches
upward for air and sunlight, so the seed of Christian life develops in
two directions, individualism as the root and communalism as the
beautiful tree. They are not contradictory, but supplementary
principles. While his own final gain is a real aim of the individual,
it is only a part of his aim; he also desires and labors for the gain
of all; and even the individual gain, he well knows, can be secured
only through the communal principle, through service to his
fellow-men. His own welfare, whether temporal or eternal, is
inseparably bound up with that of his fellows.
The Christian religion finds the sanctions for any and every social
order that history knows, in the fact that all physical and social
laws and organisms are part of the divine plan. Because any particular
social order is the association of imperfect men and women, it must be
more or less imperfect. But the Christian, even while he is seeking
to reform the social order and to bring it up to his ideal, must be
loyal to it. And for this loyalty to fellow-men and to God, the
highest conceivable sanctions are held out, namely, an endless and
infinite life of conscious, joyous fellowship with souls made perfect
in the Kingdom of God, and with God himself.
A comprehensive study, therefore, of the real nature and the true
function of religion in relation to man's development, whether
individual or communal, shows that Christianity fulfills the
conditions. A comparative study would show that, of all the existing
religions, Christianity alone does this. It alone combines in perfect
proportion the individual and the communal elements, and the requisite
sanctions.
An expansion of communal religion is taking place in modern times. The
community now arising is international in scope, interracial and
universal in character. Cultivated men and women the world around are
beginning to talk of national rights and national duties. Europe is
thought to be justified in suppressing the slave trade and its
accompanying horrors in Africa, and condemned for not preventing the
Turk from carrying on his wholesale slaughter of innocent Armenians.
The Spaniard is despised and condemned for his prolonged inhumanities
in Cuba and the Philippines, and the American is approved in warring
for humanity and justified in interfering with Spain's sovereignty.
The conscience of the world is beginning to discover that no nation,
though sovereign, has an absolute right over its people. Right is only
measured by righteousness. International righteousness, duty and
rights, regardless of military power, are coming to the forefront of
the thinking of advanced nations.
Looked at closely, and studied in its implications, what is this but a
developing form of communal religion? No nation is conceived as
existing apart; each exists as but one fraction of the world-wide
community; in its relations it has both rights and duties. Does this
not mean that appeal has been made from the communal sanctions of
might to the supra-communal sanctions of right? We do not simply ask
what do other nations think of this or that national act, but what is
right, in view of the whole order of the nature which has brought man
into being and set him in families and nations. In other words,
national rights and duties are felt to flow from the supra-mundane
source, God the Creator of heaven and earth and all that in them is.
The sanctions for national rights and duties are religious sanctions
and rest on a religious world-view.
Now the point, of interest for us is the fact that Japan has entered
into this universal community and is feeling the sanctions of this
universal communal religion. The international rights and duties of
Japan are a theme of frequent discourse and conversation. Japan
stoutly maintained that the war with China was a "gi-sen," a righteous
war, waged primarily for the sake of Korea. Many a Japanese waxes
indignant over the cruelty of the Turk, the savage barbarity of the
Spaniard, and the impotence and supineness of England and Europe. I
have already spoken of the young man who became so indignant at
England's compelling China to take Indian opium, that he proposed to
go to England to preach an anti-opium crusade. Japan is beginning to
enter into the larger communal life of the world, although, of course,
she has as yet little perception of its varied implications.