[Transcriber's Note: Page numbers are retained in square brackets.]
JAPAN
AN ATTEMPT AT INTERPRETATION
BY LAFCADIO HEARN
1904
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. DIFFICULTIES.........................1
II. STRANGENESS AND CHARM................5
III. THE ANCIENT CULT....................21
IV. THE RELIGION OF THE HOME............33
V. THE JAPANESE FAMILY.................55
VI. THE COMMUNAL CULT...................81
VII. DEVELOPMENTS OF SHINTO.............107
VIII. WORSHIP AND PURIFICATION...........133
IX. THE RULE OF THE DEAD...............157
X. THE INTRODUCTION OF BUDDHISM.......183
XI. THE HIGHER BUDDHISM................207
XII. THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION............229
XIII. THE RISE OF THE MILITARY POWER.....259
XIV. THE RELIGION OF LOYALTY............283
XV. THE JESUIT PERIL...................303
XVI. FEUDAL INTEGRATION.................343
XVII. THE SHINTO REVIVAL.................367
XVIII. SURVIVALS..........................381
XIX. MODERN RESTRAINTS..................395
XX. OFFICIAL EDUCATION.................419
XXI. INDUSTRIAL DANGER..................443
XXII. REFLECTIONS........................457
APPENDIX...........................481
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES..............487
INDEX..............................489
"Perhaps all very marked national characters can be traced back
to a time of rigid and pervading discipline"--WALTER BAGEHOT.
[1]
DIFFICULTIES
A thousand books have been written about Japan; but among
these,--setting aside artistic publications and works of a purely
special character,--the really precious volumes will be found to
number scarcely a score. This fact is due to the immense difficulty
of perceiving and comprehending what underlies the surface of
Japanese life. No work fully interpreting that life,--no work
picturing Japan within and without, historically and socially,
psychologically and ethically,--can be written for at least another
fifty years. So vast and intricate the subject that the united labour
of a generation of scholars could not exhaust it, and so difficult
that the number of scholars willing to devote their time to it must
always be small. Even among the Japanese themselves, no scientific
knowledge of their own history is yet possible; because the means of
obtaining that knowledge have not yet been prepared,--though
mountains of material have been collected. The want of any good
history upon a modern plan is but one of many discouraging wants.
Data for the study of sociology [2] are still inaccessible to the
Western investigator. The early state of the family and the clan; the
history of the differentiation of classes; the history of the
differentiation of political from religious law; the history of
restraints, and of their influence upon custom; the history of
regulative and cooperative conditions in the development of industry;
the history of ethics and aesthetics,--all these and many other
matters remain obscure.
This essay of mine can serve in one direction only as a contribution
to the Western knowledge of Japan. But this direction is not one of
the least important. Hitherto the subject of Japanese religion has
been written of chiefly by the sworn enemies of that religion: by
others it has been almost entirely ignored. Yet while it continues to
be ignored and misrepresented, no real knowledge of Japan is
possible. Any true comprehension of social conditions requires more
than a superficial acquaintance with religious conditions. Even the
industrial history of a people cannot be understood without some
knowledge of those religious traditions and customs which regulate
industrial life during the earlier stages of its development .... Or
take the subject of art. Art in Japan is so intimately associated
with religion that any attempt to study it without extensive
knowledge of the [3] beliefs which it reflects, were mere waste of
time. By art I do not mean only painting and sculpture, but every
kind of decoration, and most kinds of pictorial representation,--the
image on a boy's kite or a girl's battledore, not less than the
design upon a lacquered casket or enamelled vase,--the figures upon a
workman's towel not less than the pattern of the girdle of a
princess,--the shape of the paper-dog or the wooden rattle bought for
a baby, not less than the forms of those colossal Ni-O who guard the
gateways of Buddhist temples .... And surely there can never be any
just estimate made of Japanese literature, until a study of that
literature shall have been made by some scholar, not only able to
understand Japanese beliefs, but able also to sympathize with them to
at least the same extent that our great humanists can sympathize with
the religion of Euripides, of Pindar, and of Theocritus. Let us ask
ourselves how much of English or French or German or Italian
literature could be fully understood without the slightest knowledge
of the ancient and modern religions of the Occident. I do not refer
to distinctly religious creators,--to poets like Milton or
Dante,--but only to the fact that even one of Shakespeare's plays
must remain incomprehensible to a person knowing nothing either of
Christian beliefs or of the beliefs which preceded them. The real
mastery of any European tongue is impossible [4] without a knowledge
of European religion. The language of even the unlettered is full of
religious meaning: the proverbs and household-phrases of the poor,
the songs of the street, the speech of the workshop,--all are infused
with significations unimaginable by any one ignorant of the faith of
the people. Nobody knows this better than a man who has passed many
years in trying to teach English in Japan, to pupils whose faith is
utterly unlike our own, and whose ethics have been shaped by a
totally different social experience.
[5]
STRANGENESS AND CHARM
The majority of the first impressions of Japan recorded by travellers
are pleasurable impressions. Indeed, there must be something lacking,
or something very harsh, in the nature to which Japan can make no
emotional appeal. The appeal itself is the clue to a problem; and
that problem is the character of a race and of its civilization.
My own first impressions of Japan,--Japan as seen in the white
sunshine of a perfect spring day,--had doubtless much in common with
the average of such experiences. I remember especially the wonder and
the delight of the vision. The wonder and the delight have never
passed away: they are often revived for me even now, by some chance
happening, after fourteen years of sojourn. But the reason of these
feelings was difficult to learn,--or at least to guess; for I cannot
yet claim to know much about Japan .... Long ago the best and dearest
Japanese friend I ever had said to me, a little before his death:
"When you find, in four or five years more, that you cannot
understand the Japanese at [6] all, then you will begin to know
something about them." After having realized the truth of my friend's
prediction,--after having discovered that I cannot understand the
Japanese at all,--I feel better qualified to attempt this essay.
As first perceived, the outward strangeness of things in Japan
produces (in certain minds, at least) a queer thrill impossible to
describe,--a feeling of weirdness which comes to us only with the
perception of the totally unfamiliar. You find yourself moving
through queer small streets full of odd small people, wearing robes
and sandals of extraordinary shapes; and you can scarcely distinguish
the sexes at sight. The houses are constructed and furnished in ways
alien to all your experience; and you are astonished to find that you
cannot conceive the use or meaning of numberless things on display in
the shops. Food-stuffs of unimaginable derivation; utensils of
enigmatic forms; emblems incomprehensible of some mysterious belief;
strange masks and toys that commemorate legends of gods or demons;
odd figures, too, of the gods themselves, with monstrous ears and
smiling faces,--all these you may perceive as you wander about;
though you must also notice telegraph-poles and type-writers,
electric lamps and sewing machines. Everywhere on signs and hangings,
and on the backs of people passing by, you will observe wonderful
Chinese [7] characters; and the wizardry of all these texts makes the
dominant tone of the spectacle.
Further acquaintance with this fantastic world will in nowise
diminish the sense of strangeness evoked by the first vision of it.
You will soon observe that even the physical actions of the people
are unfamiliar,--that their work is done in ways the opposite of
Western ways. Tools are of surprising shapes, and are handled after
surprising methods: the blacksmith squats at his anvil, wielding a
hammer such as no Western smith could use without long practice; the
carpenter pulls, instead of pushing, his extraordinary plane and saw.
Always the left is the right side, and the right side the wrong; and
keys must be turned, to open or close a lock, in what we are
accustomed to think the wrong direction. Mr. Percival Lowell has
truthfully observed that the Japanese speak backwards, read
backwards, write backwards,--and that this is "only the abc of their
contrariety." For the habit of writing backwards there are obvious
evolutional reasons; and the requirements of Japanese calligraphy
sufficiently explain why the artist pushes his brush or pencil
instead of pulling it. But why, instead of putting the thread through
the eye of the needle, should the Japanese maiden slip the eye of the
needle over the point of the thread? Perhaps the most remarkable, out
of a hundred possible examples of antipodal action, is furnished by
the Japanese art of fencing. The [8] swordsman, delivering his blow
with both hands, does not pull the blade towards him in the moment of
striking, but pushes it from him. He uses it, indeed, as other
Asiatics do, not on the principle of the wedge, but of the saw; yet
there is a pushing motion where we should expect a pulling motion in
the stroke .... These and other forms of unfamiliar action are
strange enough to suggest the notion of a humanity even physically as
little related to us as might be the population of another
planet,--the notion of some anatomical unlikeness. No such
unlikeness, however, appears to exist; and all this oppositeness
probably implies, not so much the outcome of a human experience
entirely independent of Aryan experience, as the outcome of an
experience evolutionally younger than our own.
Yet that experience has been one of no mean order. Its
manifestations do not merely startle: they also delight. The delicate
perfection of workmanship, the light strength and grace of objects,
the power manifest to obtain the best results with the least
material, the achieving of mechanical ends by the simplest possible
means, the comprehension of irregularity as aesthetic value, the
shapeliness and perfect taste of everything, the sense displayed of
harmony in tints or colours,--all this must convince you at once that
our Occident has much to learn from this remote civilization, not
only in matters of art and taste, but in matters likewise of [9]
economy and utility. It is no barbarian fancy that appeals to you in
those amazing porcelains, those astonishing embroideries, those
wonders of lacquer and ivory and bronze, which educate imagination in
unfamiliar ways. No: these are the products of a civilization which
became, within its own limits, so exquisite that none but an artist
is capable of judging its manufactures,--a civilization that can be
termed imperfect only by those who would also term imperfect the
Greek civilization of three thousand years ago.
But the underlying strangeness of this world,--the psychological
strangeness,--is much more startling than the visible and
superficial. You begin to suspect the range of it after having
discovered that no adult Occidental can perfectly master the
language. East and West the fundamental parts of human nature--the
emotional bases of it--are much the same: the mental difference
between a Japanese and a European child is mainly potential. But with
growth the difference rapidly develops and widens, till it becomes,
in adult life, inexpressible. The whole of the Japanese mental
superstructure evolves into forms having nothing in common with
Western psychological development: the expression of thought becomes
regulated, and the expression of emotion inhibited in ways that
bewilder and astound. The ideas of this people are not our [10]
ideas; their sentiments are not our sentiments their ethical life
represents for us regions of thought and emotion yet unexplored, or
perhaps long forgotten. Any one of their ordinary phrases, translated
into Western speech, makes hopeless nonsense; and the literal
rendering into Japanese of the simplest English sentence would
scarcely be comprehended by any Japanese who had never studied a
European tongue. Could you learn all the words in a Japanese
dictionary, your acquisition would not help you in the least to make
yourself understood in speaking, unless you had learned also to think
like a Japanese,--that is to say, to think backwards, to think
upside-down and inside-out, to think in directions totally foreign to
Aryan habit. Experience in the acquisition of European languages can
help you to learn Japanese about as much as it could help you to
acquire the language spoken by the inhabitants of Mars. To be able to
use the Japanese tongue as a Japanese uses it, one would need to be
born again, and to have one's mind completely reconstructed, from the
foundation upwards. It is possible that a person of European
parentage, born in Japan, and accustomed from infancy to use the
vernacular, might retain in after-life that instinctive knowledge
which could alone enable him to adapt his mental relations to the
relations of any Japanese environment. There is actually an
Englishman named Black, born in Japan, whose proficiency [11] in the
language is proved by the fact that he is able to earn a fair income
as a professional storyteller (hanashika). But this is an
extraordinary case .... As for the literary language, I need only
observe that to make acquaintance with it requires very much more
than a knowledge of several thousand Chinese characters. It is safe
to say that no Occidental can undertake to render at sight any
literary text laid before him--indeed the number of native scholars
able to do so is very small;--and although the learning displayed in
this direction by various Europeans may justly compel our admiration,
the work of none could have been given to the world without Japanese
help.
But as the outward strangeness of Japan proves to be full of beauty,
so the inward strangeness appears to have its charm,--an ethical
charm reflected in the common life of the people. The attractive
aspects of that life do not indeed imply, to the ordinary observer, a
psychological differentiation measurable by scores of centuries: only
a scientific mind, like that of Mr. Percival Lowell, immediately
perceives the problem presented. The less gifted stranger, if
naturally sympathetic, is merely pleased and puzzled, and tries to
explain, by his own experience of happy life on the other side of the
world, the social conditions that charm him. Let us suppose that he
has the good fortune of being able to [12] live for six months or a
year in some old-fashioned town of the interior. From the beginning
of this sojourn he can scarcely fail to be impressed by the apparent
kindliness and joyousness of the existence about him. In the
relations of the people to each other, as well as in all their
relations to himself, he will find a constant amenity, a tact, a
good-nature such as he will elsewhere have met with only in the
friendship of exclusive circles. Everybody greets everybody with
happy looks and pleasant words; faces are always smiling; the
commonest incidents of everyday life are transfigured by a courtesy
at once so artless and so faultless that it appears to spring
directly from the heart, without any teaching. Under all
circumstances a certain outward cheerfulness never falls: no matter
what troubles may come,--storm or fire, flood or earthquake,--the
laughter of greeting voices, the bright smile and graceful bow, the
kindly inquiry and the wish to please, continue to make existence
beautiful. Religion brings no gloom into this sunshine: before the
Buddhas and the gods folk smile as they pray; the temple-courts are
playgrounds for the children; and within the enclosure of the great
public shrines--which are places of festivity rather than of
solemnity--dancing-platforms are erected. Family existence would seem
to be everywhere characterized by gentleness: there is no visible
quarrelling, no loud harshness, no tears and reproaches. Cruelty,
even [13] to animals, appears to be unknown: one sees farmers, coming
to town, trudging patiently beside their horses or oxen, aiding their
dumb companions to bear the burden, and using no whips or goads.
Drivers or pullers of carts will turn out of their way, under the
most provoking circumstances, rather than overrun a lazy dog or a
stupid chicken .... For no inconsiderable time one may live in the
midst of appearances like these, and perceive nothing to spoil the
pleasure of the experience.
Of course the conditions of which I speak are now passing away; but
they are still to be found in the remoter districts. I have lived in
districts where no case of theft had occurred for hundreds of
years,--where the newly-built prisons of Meiji remained empty and
useless,--where the people left their doors unfastened by night as
well as by day. These facts are familiar to every Japanese. In such a
district, you might recognize that the kindness shown to you, as a
stranger, is the consequence of official command; but how explain the
goodness of the people to each other? When you discover no harshness,
no rudeness, no dishonesty, no breaking of laws, and learn that this
social condition has been the same for centuries, you are tempted to
believe that you have entered into the domain of a morally superior
humanity. All this soft urbanity, impeccable honesty, ingenuous
kindliness of speech and act, you might naturally interpret [14] as
conduct directed by perfect goodness of heart. And the simplicity
that delights you is no simplicity of barbarism. Here every one has
been taught; every one knows how to write and speak beautifully, how
to compose poetry, how to behave politely; there is everywhere
cleanliness and good taste; interiors are bright and pure; the daily
use of the hot bath is universal. How refuse to be charmed by a
civilization in which every relation appears to be governed by
altruism, every action directed by duty, and every object shaped by
art? You cannot help being delighted by such conditions, or feeling
indignant at hearing them denounced as "heathen." And according to
the degree of altruism within yourself, these good folk will be able,
without any apparent effort, to make you happy. The mere sensation of
the milieu is a placid happiness: it is like the sensation of a dream
in which people greet us exactly as we like to be greeted, and say to
us all that we like to hear, and do for us all that we wish to have
done,--people moving soundlessly through spaces of perfect repose,
all bathed in vapoury light. Yes--for no little time these fairy-folk
can give you all the soft bliss of sleep. But sooner or later, if you
dwell long with them, your contentment will prove to have much in
common with the happiness of dreams. You will never forget the
dream,--never; but it will lift at last, like those vapours of spring
which lend preternatural [15] loveliness to a Japanese landscape in
the forenoon of radiant days. Really you are happy because you have
entered bodily into Fairyland,--into a world that is not, and never
could be your own. You have been transported out of your own
century--over spaces enormous of perished time--into an era
forgotten, into a vanished age,--back to something ancient as Egypt
or Nineveh. That is the secret of the strangeness and beauty of
things,--the secret of the thrill they give,--the secret of the
elfish charm of the people and their ways. Fortunate mortal! the tide
of Time has turned for you! But remember that here all is
enchantment,--that you have fallen under the spell of the dead,--that
the lights and the colours and the voices must fade away at last into
emptiness and silence.
* * * * * *
Some of us, at least, have often wished that it were possible to live
for a season in the beautiful vanished world of Greek culture.
Inspired by our first acquaintance with the charm of Greek art and
thought, this wish comes to us even before we are capable of
imagining the true conditions of the antique civilization. If the
wish could be realized, we should certainly find it impossible to
accommodate ourselves to those conditions,--not so much because of
the difficulty of learning the environment, as because of the much
greater difficulty of feeling just as people used to feel some thirty
centuries [16] ago. In spite of all that has been done for Greek
studies since the Renaissance, we are still unable to understand many
aspects of the old Greek life: no modern mind can really feel, for
example, those sentiments and emotions to which the great tragedy of
Oedipus made appeal. Nevertheless we are much in advance of our
forefathers of the eighteenth century, as regards the knowledge of
Greek civilization. In the time of the French revolution, it was
thought possible to reestablish in France the conditions of a Greek
republic, and to educate children according to the system of Sparta.
To-day we are well aware that no mind developed by modern
civilization could find happiness under any of those socialistic
despotisms which existed in all the cities of the ancient world
before the Roman conquest. We could no more mingle with the old Greek
life, if it were resurrected for us,--no more become a part of
it,--than we could change our mental identities. But how much would
we not give for the delight of beholding it,--for the joy of
attending one festival in Corinth, or of witnessing the Pan-Hellenic
games? ... And yet, to witness the revival of some perished Greek
civilization,--to walk about the very Crotona of Pythagoras,--to
wander through the Syracuse of Theocritus,--were not any more of a
privilege than is the opportunity actually afforded us to study
Japanese life. Indeed, from the evolutional [17] point of view, it
were less of a privilege,--since Japan offers us the living spectacle
of conditions older, and psychologically much farther away from us,
than those of any Greek period with which art and literature have
made us closely acquainted.
The reader scarcely needs to be reminded that a civilization less
evolved than our own, and intellectually remote from us, is not on
that account to be regarded as necessarily inferior in all respects.
Hellenic civilization at its best represented an early stage of
sociological evolution; yet the arts which it developed still furnish
our supreme and unapproachable ideals of beauty. So, too, this much
more archaic civilization of Old Japan attained an average of
aesthetic and moral culture well worthy of our wonder and praise.
Only a shallow mind--a very shallow mind--will pronounce the best of
that culture inferior. But Japanese civilization is peculiar to a
degree for which there is perhaps no Western parallel, since it
offers us the spectacle of many successive layers of alien culture
superimposed above the simple indigenous basis, and forming a very
bewilderment of complexity. Most of this alien culture is Chinese,
and bears but an indirect relation to the real subject of these
studies. The peculiar and surprising fact is that, in spite of all
superimposition, the original character of the people and of their
society should still remain recognizable. [18] The wonder of Japan is
not to be sought in the countless borrowings with which she has
clothed herself,--much as a princess of the olden time would don
twelve ceremonial robes, of divers colours and qualities, folded one
upon the other so as to show their many-tinted edges at throat and
sleeves and skirt;--no, the real wonder is the Wearer. For the
interest of the costume is much less in its beauty of form and tint
than in its significance as idea,--as representing something of the
mind that devised or adopted it. And the supreme interest of the
old--Japanese civilization lies in what it expresses of the
race-character,--that character which yet remains essentially
unchanged by all the changes of Meiji.
"Suggests" were perhaps a better word than "expresses," for this
race-character is rather to be divined than recognized. Our
comprehension of it might be helped by some definite knowledge of
origins; but such knowledge we do not yet possess. Ethnologists are
agreed that the Japanese race has been formed by a mingling of
peoples, and that the dominant element is Mongolian; but this
dominant element is represented in two very different types,--one
slender and almost feminine of aspect; the other, squat and powerful.
Chinese and Korean elements are known to exist in the populations of
certain districts; and, there appears to have been a large infusion
of Aino blood. Whether there be [19] any Malay or Polynesian element
also has not been decided. Thus much only can be safely
affirmed,--that the race, like all good races, is a mixed one; and
that the peoples who originally united to form it have been so
blended together as to develop, under long social discipline, a
tolerably uniform type of character. This character, though
immediately recognizable in some of Its aspects, presents us with
many enigmas that are very difficult to explain.
Nevertheless, to understand it better has become a matter of
importance. Japan has entered into the world's competitive struggle;
and the worth of any people in that struggle depends upon character
quite as much as upon force. We can learn something about Japanese
character if we are able to ascertain the nature of the conditions
which shaped it,--the great general facts of the moral experience of
the race. And these facts we should find expressed or suggested in
the history of the national beliefs, and in the history of those
social institutions derived from and developed by religion.
[20]
[21]
THE ANCIENT CULT
The real religion of Japan, the religion still professed in one form
or other, by the entire nation, is that cult which has been the
foundation of all civilized religion, and of all civilized
society,--Ancestor-worship. In the course of thousands of years this
original cult has undergone modifications, and has assumed various
shapes; but everywhere in Japan its fundamental character remains
unchanged. Without including the different Buddhist forms of
ancestor-worship, we find three distinct rites of purely Japanese
origin, subsequently modified to some degree by Chinese influence and
ceremonial. These Japanese forms of the cult are all classed together
under the name of "Shinto," which signifies, "The Way of the Gods."
It is not an ancient term; and it was first adopted only to
distinguish the native religion, or "Way" from the foreign religion
of Buddhism called "Butsudo," or "The Way of the Buddha." The three
forms of the Shinto worship of ancestors are the Domestic Cult, the
Communal Cult, and the State Cult;--or, in other words, the worship
of family ancestors, the worship of clan or tribal ancestors, [22]
and the worship of imperial ancestors. The first is the religion of
the home; the second is the religion of the local divinity, or
tutelar god; the third is the national religion. There are various
other forms of Shinto worship; but they need not be considered for
the present.
Of the three forms of ancestor-worship above mentioned, the
family-cult is the first in evolutional order,--the others being
later developments. But, in speaking of the family-cult as the
oldest, I do not mean the home-religion as it exists to-day;--neither
do I mean by "family" anything corresponding to the term "household."
The Japanese family in early times meant very much more than
"household": it might include a hundred or a thousand households: it
was something like the Greek (Greek genos); or the Roman gens,--the
patriarchal family in the largest sense of the term. In prehistoric
Japan the domestic cult of the house-ancestor probably did not
exist;--the family-rites would appear to have been performed only at
the burial-place. But the later domestic cult, having been developed
out of the primal family-rite, indirectly represents the most ancient
form of the religion, and should therefore be considered first in any
study of Japanese social evolution.
The evolutional history of ancestor-worship has been very much the
same in all countries; and that [23] of the Japanese cult offers
remarkable evidence in support of Herbert Spencer's exposition of the
law of religious development. To comprehend this general law, we
must, however, go back to the origin of religious beliefs. One should
bear in mind that, from a sociological point of view, it is no more
correct to speak of the existing ancestor-cult in Japan as
"primitive," than it would be to speak of the domestic cult of the
Athenians in the time of Pericles as "primitive." No persistent form
of ancestor-worship is primitive; and every established domestic cult
has been developed out of some irregular and non-domestic
family-cult, which, again, must have grown out of still more ancient
funeral-rites.
Our knowledge of ancestor-worship, as regards the early European
civilizations, cannot be said to extend to the primitive form of the
cult. In the case of the Greeks and the Romans, our knowledge of the
subject dates from a period at which a domestic religion had long
been established; and we have documentary evidence as to the
character of that religion. But of the earlier cult that must have
preceded the home-worship, we have little testimony; and we can
surmise its nature only by study of the natural history of
ancestor-worship among peoples not yet arrived at a state of
civilization. The true domestic cult begins with a settled
civilization. Now when the Japanese race first established itself in
Japan, it does not appear to have [24] brought with it any
civilization of the kind which we would call settled, nor any
well-developed ancestor-cult. The cult certainly existed; but its
ceremonies would seem to have been irregularly performed at graves
only. The domestic cult proper may not have been established until
about the eighth century, when the spirit-tablet is supposed to have
been introduced from China. The earliest ancestor-cult, as we shall
presently see, was developed out of the primitive funeral-rites and
propitiatory ceremonies.
The existing family religion is therefore a comparatively modern
development; but it is at least as old as the true civilization of
the country, and it conserves beliefs and ideas which are indubitably
primitive, as well as ideas and beliefs derived from these. Before
treating further of the cult itself, it will be necessary to consider
some of these older beliefs.
The earliest ancestor-worship,--"the root of all religions," as
Herbert Spencer calls it,--was probably coeval with the earliest
definite belief in ghosts. As soon as men were able to conceive the
idea of a shadowy inner self, or double, so soon, doubtless, the
propitiatory cult of spirits began. But this earliest ghost-worship
must have long preceded that period of mental development in which
men first became capable of forming abstract ideas. The [25]
primitive ancestor-worshippers could not have formed the notion of a
supreme deity; and all evidence existing as to the first forms of
their worship tends to show that there primarily existed no
difference whatever between the conception of ghosts and the
conception of gods. There were, consequently, no definite beliefs in
any future state of reward or of punishment,--no ideas of any heaven
or hell. Even the notion of a shadowy underworld, or Hades, was of
much later evolution. At first the dead were thought of only as
dwelling in the tombs provided for them,--whence they could issue,
from time to time, to visit their former habitations, or to make
apparition in the dreams of the living. Their real world was the
place of burial,--the grave, the tumulus. Afterwards there slowly
developed the idea of an underworld, connected in some mysterious way
with the place of sepulture. Only at a much later time did this dim
underworld of imagination expand and divide into regions of ghostly
bliss and woe .... It is a noteworthy fact that Japanese mythology
never evolved the ideas of an Elysium or a Tartarus,--never developed
the notion of a heaven or a hell. Even to this day Shinto belief
represents the pre-Homeric stage of imagination as regards the
supernatural.
Among the Indo-European races likewise there appeared to have been at
first no difference between gods and ghosts, nor any ranking of gods
as greater [26] and lesser. These distinctions were gradually
developed. "The spirits of the dead," says Mr. Spencer, "forming, in
a primitive tribe, an ideal group the members of which are but little
distinguished from one another, will grow more and more
distinguished;--and as societies advance, and as traditions, local
and general, accumulate and complicate, these once similar human
souls, acquiring in the popular mind differences of character and
importance, will diverge--until their original community of nature
becomes scarcely recognizable." So in antique Europe, and so in the
Far East, were the greater gods of nations evolved from ghost-cults;
but those ethics of ancestor-worship which shaped alike the earliest
societies of West and East, date from a period before the time of the
greater gods,--from the period when all the dead were supposed to
become gods, with no distinction of rank.
No more than the primitive ancestor-worshippers of Aryan race did the
early Japanese think of their dead as ascending to some extra-mundane
region of light and bliss, or as descending into some realm of
torment. They thought of their dead as still inhabiting this world,
or at least as maintaining with it a constant communication. Their
earliest sacred records do, indeed, make mention of an underworld,
where mysterious Thunder-gods and evil goblins dwelt in corruption;
but this vague world of the dead communicated with the world of the
living; [27] and the spirit there, though in some sort attached to
its decaying envelope, could still receive upon earth the homage and
the offerings of men. Before the advent of Buddhism, there was no
idea of a heaven or a hell. The ghosts of the departed were thought
of as constant presences, needing propitiation, and able in some way
to share the pleasures and the pains of the living. They required
food and drink and light; and in return for these; they could confer
benefits. Their bodies had melted into earth; but their spirit-power
still lingered in the upper world, thrilled its substance, moved in
its winds and waters. By death they had acquired mysterious
force;--they had become "superior ones," Kami, gods.
That is to say, gods in the oldest Greek and Roman sense. Be it
observed that there were no moral distinctions, East or West, in this
deification. "All the dead become gods," wrote the great Shinto
commentator, Hirata. So likewise, in the thought of the early Greeks
and even of the late Romans, all the dead became gods. M. de
Coulanges observes, in La Cite Antique: "This kind of apotheosis was
not the privilege of the great alone. no distinction was made .... It
was not even necessary to have been a virtuous man: the wicked man
became a god as well as the good man,--only that in this
after-existence, he retained the evil inclinations of his former
life." Such also [28] was the case in Shinto belief: the good man
became a beneficent divinity, the bad man an evil deity,--but all
alike became Kami. "And since there are bad as well as good gods,"
wrote Motowori, "it is necessary to propitiate them with offerings of
agreeable food, playing the harp, blowing the flute, singing and
dancing and whatever is likely to put them in a good humour." The
Latins called the maleficent ghosts of the dead, Larvae, and called
the beneficent or harmless ghosts, Lares, or Manes, or Genii,
according to Apuleius. But all alike were gods,--dii-manes; and
Cicero admonished his readers to render to all dii-manes the rightful
worship: "They are men," he declared, "who have departed from this
life;-consider them divine beings ...."
In Shinto, as in old Greek belief, to die was to enter into the
possession of superhuman power, to become capable of conferring
benefit or of inflicting misfortune by supernatural means .... But
yesterday, such or such a man was a common toiler, a person of no
importance;--to-day, being dead, he becomes a divine power, and his
children pray to him for the prosperity of their undertakings. Thus
also we find the personages of Greek tragedy, such as Alcestis,
suddenly transformed into divinities by death, and addressed in the
language of worship or prayer. But, in despite of their supernatural
[29] power, the dead are still dependent upon the living for
happiness. Though viewless, save in dreams, they need earthly
nourishment and homage,--food and drink, and the reverence of their
descendants. Each ghost must rely for such comfort upon its living
kindred;--only through the devotion of that kindred can it ever find
repose. Each ghost must have shelter,--a fitting tomb;--each must
have offerings. While honourably sheltered and properly nourished the
spirit is pleased, and will aid in maintaining the good-fortune of
its propitiators. But if refused the sepulchral home, the funeral
rites, the offerings of food and fire and drink, the spirit will
suffer from hunger and cold and thirst, and, becoming angered, will
act malevolently and contrive misfortune for those by whom it has
been neglected .... Such were the ideas of the old Greeks regarding
the dead; and such were the ideas of the old Japanese.
Although the religion of ghosts was once the religion of our own
forefathers--whether of Northern or Southern Europe,--and although
practices derived from it, such as the custom of decorating graves
with flowers, persist to-day among our most advanced
communities,--our modes of thought have so changed under the
influences of modern civilization that it is difficult for us to
imagine how people could ever have supposed that the happiness of the
dead depended upon material food. But it [30] is probable that the
real belief in ancient European societies was much like the belief as
it exists in modern Japan. The dead are not supposed to consume the
substance of the food, but only to absorb the invisible essence of
it. In the early period of ancestor-worship the food-offerings were
large; later on they were made smaller and smaller as the idea grew
up that the spirits required but little sustenance of even the most
vapoury kind. But, however small the offerings, it was essential that
they should be made regularly. Upon these shadowy repasts depended
the well-being of the dead; and upon the well-being of the dead
depended the fortunes of the living. Neither could dispense with the
help of the other. the visible and the invisible worlds were forever
united by bonds innumerable of mutual necessity; and no single
relation of that union could be broken without the direst
consequences.
The history of all religious sacrifices can be traced back to this
ancient custom of offerings made to ghosts; and the whole Indo-Aryan
race had at one time no other religion than this religion of spirits.
In fact, every advanced human society has, at some period of its
history, passed through the stage of ancestor-worship; but it is to
the Far East that we must took to-day in order to find the cult
coexisting with an elaborate civilization. Now the Japanese
ancestor-cult--though representing the beliefs of a [31] non-Aryan
people, and offering in the history of its development various
interesting peculiarities--still embodies much that is characteristic
of ancestor-worship in general. There survive in it especially these
three beliefs, which underlie all forms of persistent
ancestor-worship in all climes and countries:--
I.--The dead remain in this world,--haunting their tombs, and also
their former homes, and sharing invisibly in the life of their living
descendants;--
II.--All the dead become gods, in the sense of acquiring supernatural
power; but they retain the characters which distinguished them during
life;--
III.--The happiness of the dead depends upon the respectful service
rendered them by the living; and the happiness of the living depends
upon the fulfilment of pious duty to the dead.
To these very early beliefs may be added the following, probably of
later development, which at one time must have exercised immense
influence:--
IV.--Every event in the world, good or evil,--fair seasons or
plentiful harvests,--flood and famine,--tempest and tidal-wave and
earthquake,--is the work of the dead.
V.--All human actions, good or bad, are controlled by the dead.
The first three beliefs survive from the dawn of civilization, or
before it,--from the time in which [32] the dead were the only gods,
without distinctions of power. The latter two would seem rather of
the period in which a true mythology--an enormous polytheism--had
been developed out of the primitive ghost-worship. There is nothing
simple in these beliefs: they are awful, tremendous beliefs; and
before Buddhism helped to dissipate them, their pressure upon the
mind of a people dwelling in a land of cataclysms, must have been
like an endless weight of nightmare. But the elder beliefs, in
softened form, are yet a fundamental part of the existing cult.
Though Japanese ancestor-worship has undergone many modifications in
the past two thousand years, these modifications have not transformed
its essential character in relation to conduct; and the whole
framework of society rests upon it, as on a moral foundation. The
history of Japan is really the history of her religion. No single
fact in this connection is more significant than the fact that the
ancient Japanese term for government--matsuri-goto--signifies
liberally "matters of worship." Later on we shall find that not only
government, but almost everything in Japanese society, derives
directly or indirectly from this ancestor-cult; and that in all
matters the dead, rather than the living, have been the rulers of the
nation and--the shapers of its destinies.
[33]
THE RELIGION OF THE HOME
Three stages of ancestor-worship are to be distinguished in the
general course of religious and social evolution; and each of these
finds illustration in the history of Japanese society. The first
stage is that which exists before the establishment of a settled
civilization, when there is yet no national ruler, and when the unit
of society is the great patriarchal family, with its elders or
war-chiefs for lords. Under these conditions, the spirits of the
family-ancestors only are worshipped;--each family propitiating its
own dead, and recognizing no other form of worship. As the
patriarchal families, later on, become grouped into tribal clans,
there grows up the custom of tribal sacrifice to the spirits of the
clan-rulers;--this cult being superadded to the family-cult, and
marking the second stage of ancestor-worship. Finally, with the union
of all the clans or tribes under one supreme head, there is developed
the custom of propitiating the spirits of national, rulers. This
third form of the cult becomes the obligatory religion [34] of the
country; but it does not replace either of the preceding cults: the
three continue to exist together.
Though, in the present state of our knowledge, the evolution in Japan
of these three stages of ancestor-worship is but faintly traceable,
we can divine tolerably well, from various records, how the permanent
forms of the cult were first developed out of the earlier
funeral-rites. Between the ancient Japanese funeral customs and those
of antique Europe, there was a vast difference,--a difference
indicating, as regards Japan, a far more primitive social condition.
In Greece and in Italy it was an early custom to bury the family dead
within the limits of the family estate; and the Greek and Roman laws
of property grew out of this practice. Sometimes the dead were buried
close to the house. The author of 'La Cite Antique' cites, among
other ancient texts bearing upon the subject, an interesting
invocation from the tragedy of Helen, by Euripides:--"All hail! my
father's tomb! I buried thee, Proteus, at the place where men pass
out, that I might often greet thee; and so, even as I go out and in,
I, thy son Theoclymenus, call upon thee, father! ..." But in ancient
Japan, men fled from the neighbourhood of death. It was long the
custom to abandon, either temporarily, or permanently, the house in
which a death occurred; [35] and we can scarcely suppose that, at any
time, it was thought desirable to bury the dead close to the
habitation of the surviving members of the household. Some Japanese
authorities declare that in the very earliest ages there was no
burial, and that corpses were merely conveyed to desolate places, and
there abandoned to wild creatures. Be this as it may, we have
documentary evidence, of an unmistakable sort, concerning the early
funeral-rites as they existed when the custom of burying had become
established,--rites weird and strange, and having nothing in common
with the practices of settled civilization. There is reason to
believe that the family-dwelling was at first permanently, not
temporarily, abandoned to the dead; and in view of the fact that the
dwelling was a wooden hut of very simple structure, there is nothing
improbable in the supposition. At all events the corpse was left for
a certain period, called the period of mourning, either in the
abandoned house where the death occurred, or in a shelter especially
built for the purpose; and, during the mourning period, offerings of
food and drink were set before the dead, and ceremonies performed
without the house. One of these ceremonies consisted in the recital
of poems in praise of the dead,--which poems were called shinobigoto.
There was music also of flutes and drums, and dancing; and at night a
fire was kept burning before the house. After all this had been [36]
done for the fixed period of mourning--eight days, according to some
authorities, fourteen according to others--the corpse was interred.
It is probable that the deserted house may thereafter have become an
ancestral temple, or ghost-house,--prototype of the Shinto miya.
At an early time,--though when we do not know,--it certainly became
the custom to erect a moya, or "mourning-house" in the event of a
death; and the rites were performed at the mourning-house prior to
the interment. The manner of burial was very simple: there were yet
no tombs in the literal meaning of the term, and no tombstones. Only
a mound was thrown up over the grave; and the size of the mound
varied according to the rank of the dead.