Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami--four classes of ancestor-worship: the
domestic religion, the religion of the Ujigami, the worship at the
chief shrines [Ichi-no-miya] of the several provinces, and the
national cult at Ise. All these cults are now linked together by
tradition; and the devout Shintoist worships the divinities of all,
collectively, in his daily morning prayer. Occasionally he visits the
chief shrine of his province; and he makes a pilgrimage to Ise if he
can. Every Japanese is expected to visit the shrines of Ise once in
his lifetime, [124] or to send thither a deputy. Inhabitants of
remote districts are not all able, of course, to make the pilgrimage;
but there is no village which does not, at certain intervals, send
pilgrims either to Kitzuki or to Ise on behalf of the community, the
expense of such representation being defrayed by local subscription.
And, furthermore, every Japanese can worship the supreme divinities
of Shinto in his own house, where upon a "god-shelf" (Kamidana) are
tablets inscribed with the assurance of their divine
protection,--holy charms obtained from the priests of Ise or of
Kitzuki. In the case of the Ise cult, such tablets are commonly made
from the wood of the holy shrines themselves, which, according to
primal custom, must be rebuilt every twenty years,--the timber of the
demolished structures being then cut into tablets for distribution
throughout the country.
Another development of ancestor-worship--the cult of gods presiding
over crafts and callings--deserves special study. Unfortunately we
are as yet little informed upon the subject. Anciently this worship
must have been more definitely ordered and maintained than it is now.
Occupations were hereditary; artizans were grouped into
guilds--perhaps we might even say castes;--and each guild or caste
then probably had in patron-deity. In some cases the craft-gods may
have been ancestors [125] of Japanese craftsmen; in other cases they
were perhaps of Korean or Chinese origin,--ancestral gods of
immigrant artizans, who brought their cults with them to Japan. Not
much is known about them. But it is tolerably safe to assume that
most, if not all of the guilds, were at one time religiously
organized, and that apprentices were adopted not only in a craft, but
into a cult. There were corporations of weavers, potters, carpenters,
arrow-makers, bow-makers, smiths, boat-builders, and other tradesmen;
and the past religious organization of these is suggested by the fact
that certain occupations assume a religious character even to-day.
For example, the carpenter still builds according to Shinto
tradition: he dons a priestly costume at a certain stage of the work,
performs rites, and chants invocations, and places the new house
under the protection of the gods. But the occupation of the
swordsmith was in old days the most sacred of crafts: he worked in
priestly garb, and practised Shinto) rites of purification while
engaged in the making of a good blade. Before his smithy was then
suspended the sacred rope of rice-straw (shime-nawa), which is the
oldest symbol of Shinto: none even of his family might enter there,
or speak to him; and he ate only of food cooked with holy fire.
The 195,000 shrines of Shinto represent, however, more than
clan-cults or guild-cults or national-cults .... [126] Many are
dedicated to different spirits of the same god; for Shinto holds that
the spirit of either a man or a god may divide itself into several
spirits, each with a different character. Such separated spirits are
called waka-mi-tama ("august-divided-spirits"). Thus the spirit of
the Goddess of Food, Toyo-uke-bime, separated itself into the God of
Trees, Kukunochi-no-Kami, and into the Goddess of Grasses,
Kayanu-hime-no-Kami. Gods and men were supposed to have also a Rough
Spirit and a Gentle Spirit; and Hirata remarks that the Rough Spirit
of Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami was worshipped at one temple, and his
Gentle Spirit at another.*... Also we have to remember that great
numbers of Ujigami temples are dedicated to the same divinity. These
duplications or multiplications are again offset by the fact that in
some of the principal temples a multitude of different deities are
enshrined. Thus the number of Shinto temples in actual existence
affords no indication whatever of the actual number of gods
worshipped, nor of the variety of their cults. Almost every deity
mentioned in the Ko-ji-ki or Nihongi has a shrine somewhere; and
hundreds of others--including many later apotheoses--have their
temples. Numbers of temples have been dedicated, for example, to
[127] historical personages,--to spirits of great ministers,
captains, rulers, scholars, heroes, and statesmen. The famous
minister of the Empress Jingo, Takeno-uji-no-Sukune,--who served
under six successive sovereigns, and lived to the age of three
hundred years,--is now invoked in many a temple as a giver of long
life and great wisdom. The spirit of Sugiwara-no-Michizane, once
minister to the Emperor Daigo, is worshipped as the god of
calligraphy, under the name of Tenjin, or Temmangu: children
everywhere offer to him the first examples of their handwriting, and
deposit in receptacles, placed before his shrine, their worn-out
writing-brushes. The Soga brothers, victims and heroes of a famous
twelfth-century tragedy, have become gods to whom people pray for the
maintenance of fraternal harmony. Kato Kiyomasa, the determined enemy
of Jesuit Christianity, and Hideyoshi's greatest captain, has been
apotheosized both by Buddhism and by Shinto. Iyeyasu is worshipped
under the appellation of Toshogu. In fact most of the great men of
Japanese history have had temples erected to them; and the spirits of
the daimyo were, in former years, regularly worshipped by the
subjects of their descendants and successors.
[*Even men had the Rough and the Gentle Spirit; but a god had three
distinct spirits,--the Rough, the Gentle, and the
Bestowing,--respectively termed Ara-mi-tama, Nigi-mi-tama, and
Saki-mi-tama.--[See SATOW's Revival of Pure Shintau.]
Besides temples to deities presiding over industries and
agriculture,--or deities especially invoked by the peasants, such as
the goddess of silkworms, [128] the goddess of rice, the gods of wind
and weather,--there are to be found in almost every part of the
country what I may call propitiatory temples. These latter Shinto
shrines have been erected by way of compensation to spirits of
persons who suffered great injustice or misfortune. In these cases
the worship assumes a very curious character, the worshipper always
appealing for protection against the same kind of calamity or trouble
as that from which the apotheosized person suffered during life. In
Izumo, for example, I found a temple dedicated to the spirit of a
woman, once a prince's favourite. She had been driven to suicide by
the intrigues of jealous rivals. The story is that she had very
beautiful hair; but it was not quite black, and her enemies used to
reproach her with its color. Now mothers having children with
brownish hair pray to her that the brown may be changed to black; and
offerings are made to her of tresses of hair and Tokyo coloured
prints, for it is still remembered that she was fond of such prints.
In the same province there is a shrine erected to the spirit of a
young wife, who pined away for grief at the absence of her lord. She
used to climb a hill to watch for his return, and the shrine was
built upon the place where she waited; and wives pray there to her
for the safe return of absent husbands .... An almost similar kind of
propitiatory worship is practised in cemeteries. Public pity seeks to
apotheosize those [129] urged to suicide by cruelty, or those
executed for offences which, although legally criminal, were inspired
by patriotic or other motives commanding sympathy. Before their
graves offerings are laid and prayers are murmured. Spirits of
unhappy lovers are commonly invoked by young people who suffer from
the same cause .... And, among other forms of propitiatory worship I
must mention the old custom of erecting small shrines to spirits of
animals,--chiefly domestic animals,--either in recognition of dumb
service rendered and ill-rewarded, or as a compensation for pain
unjustly inflicted.
Yet another class of tutelar divinities remains to be noticed,--those
who dwell within or about the houses of men. Some are mentioned in
the old mythology, and are probably developments of Japanese
ancestor-worship; some are of alien origin; some do not appear to
have any temples; and some represent little more than what is called
Animism. This class of divinities corresponds rather to the Roman dii
genitales than to the Greek (Greek daemones). Suijin-Sarna, the God
of Wells; Kojin, the God of the Cooking-range (in almost every
kitchen there is either a tiny shrine for him, or a written charm
bearing his name); the gods of the Cauldron and Saucepan,
Kudo-no-Kami and Kobe-no-Kami (anciently called Okitsuhiko and
Okitsuhime); the Master of Ponds, Ike-no-Nushi, [130] supposed to
make apparition in the form of a serpent; the Goddess of the
Rice-pot, O-Kama-Sama; the Gods of the Latrina, who first taught men
how to fertilize their fields (these are commonly represented by
little figures of paper, having the forms of a man and a woman, but
faceless); the Gods of Wood and Fire and Metal; the Gods likewise of
Gardens, Fields, Scarecrows, Bridges, Hills, Woods, and Streams; and
also the Spirits of Trees (for Japanese mythology has its dryads):
most of these are undoubtedly of Shinto. On the other hand, we find
the roads under the protection of Buddhist deities chiefly. I have
not been able to learn anything regarding gods of
boundaries,--termes, as the Latins called them; and one sees only
images of the Buddhas at the limits of village territories. But in
almost every garden, on the north side, there is a little Shinto
shrine, facing what is called the Ki-Mon, or "Demon-Gate,"--that is
to say, the direction from which, according to Chinese teaching, all
evils come; and these little shrines, dedicated to various Shinto
deities, are supposed to protect the home from evil spirits. The
belief in the Ki-Mon is obviously a Chinese importation. One may
doubt, however, if Chinese influence alone developed the belief that
every part of a house,--every beam of it,--and every domestic utensil
has its invisible guardian. Considering this belief, it is not
surprising that the building of a [131] house--unless the house be in
foreign style--is still a religious act, and that the functions of a
master-builder include those of a priest.
This brings us to the subject of Animism. (I doubt whether any
evolutionist of the contemporary school holds to the old-fashioned
notion that animism preceded ancestor-worship,--a theory involving
the assumption that belief in the spirits of inanimate objects was
evolved before the idea of a human ghost had yet been developed.) In
Japan it is now as difficult to draw the line between animistic
beliefs and the lowest forms of Shinto, as to establish a demarcation
between the vegetable and the animal worlds; but the earliest Shinto
literature gives no evidence of such a developed animism as that now
existing. Probably the development was gradual, and largely
influenced by Chinese beliefs. Still, we read in the Ko-ji-ki of
"evil gods who glittered like fireflies or were disorderly as
mayflies," and of "demons who made rocks, and stumps of trees, and
the foam of the green waters to speak,"--showing that animistic or
fetichistic notions were prevalent to some extent before the period
of Chinese influence. And it is significant that where animism is
associated with persistent worship (as in the matter of the reverence
paid to strangely shaped stones or trees), the form of the worship
is, in most cases, Shinto. Before such objects there is usually [132]
to be seen the model of a Shinto gateway,--torii.... With the
development of animism, under Chinese and Korean influence, the man
of Old Japan found himself truly in a world of spirits and demons.
They spoke to him in the sound of tides and of cataracts in the
moaning of wind and the whispers of leafage, in the crying of birds,
and the trilling of insects, in all the voices of nature. For him all
visible motion--whether of waves or grasses or shifting mist or
drifting cloud--was ghostly; and the never moving rocks--nay, the
very stones by the wayside--were informed with viewless and awful
being.
[133]
WORSHIP AND PURIFICATION
We have seen that, in Old Japan, the world of the living was
everywhere ruled by the world of the dead,--that the individual, at
every moment of his existence, was under ghostly supervision. In his
home he was watched by the spirits of his fathers; without it, he was
ruled by the god of his district. All about him, and above him, and
beneath him were invisible powers of life and death. In his
conception of nature all things were ordered by the dead,--light and
darkness, weather and season, winds and tides, mist and rain, growth
and decay, sickness and health. The viewless atmosphere was a
phantom-sea, an ocean of ghost; the soil that he tilled was pervaded
by spirit-essence; the trees were haunted and holy; even the rocks
and the stones were infused with conscious life .... How might he
discharge his duty to the infinite concourse of the invisible?
Few scholars could remember the names of all the greater gods, not to
speak of the lesser; and no mortal could have found time to address
those greater gods by their respective names in his daily [134]
prayer. The later Shinto teachers proposed to simplify the duties of
the faith by prescribing one brief daily prayer to the gods in
general, and special prayers to a few gods in particular; and in thus
doing they were most likely confirming a custom already established
by necessity. Hirata wrote: "As the number of the gods who possess
different functions is very great, it will be convenient to worship
by name the most important only, and to include the rest in a general
petition." He prescribed ten prayers for persons having time to
repeat them, but lightened the duty for busy folk,--observing:
"Persons whose daily affairs are so multitudinous that they have not
time to go through all the prayers, may content themselves with
adoring (1) the residence of the Emperor, (2) the domestic
god-shelf,--kamidana, (3) the spirits of their ancestors, (4) their
local patron-god, Ujigami, (5) the deity of their particular
calling." He advised that the following prayer should be daily
repeated before the "god-shelf":--
"Reverently adoring the great god of the two palaces of Ise in the
first, place,--the eight hundred myriads of celestial gods,--the
eight hundred myriads of terrestrial gods,--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 hundred myriads of gods whom they cause
to serve them, and the gods of branch-palaces and branch-temples,
[135]--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 unwilling faults which,
heard and seen by them, I have committed; and that, blessing and
favouring me according to the powers which they severally wield, they
will cause me to follow the divine example, and to perform good works
in the Way."**
[*Sohodo-no-Kami is the god of scarecrows,--protector of the fields.]
[**Translated by Satow.]
This text is interesting as an example of what Shinto's greatest
expounder thought a Shinto prayer should be; and, excepting the
reference to So-ho-do-no-Kami, the substance of it is that of the
morning prayer still repeated in Japanese households. But the modern
prayer is very much shorter.... In Izumo, the oldest Shinto province,
the customary morning worship offers perhaps the best example of the
ancient rules of devotion. Immediately upon rising, the worshipper
performs his ablutions; and after having washed his face and rinsed
his mouth, he turns to the sun, claps his hands, and with bowed head
reverently utters the simple greeting: "Hail to thee this day, August
One!" In thus adoring the sun he is also fulfilling his duty as a
subject, paying obeisance to the Imperial Ancestor .... The act is
performed out of doors, not kneeling, but standing; and the spectacle
of this simple worship is impressive. I can now see in memory,--
[136] just as plainly as I saw with my eyes many years ago, off the
wild Oki coast,--the naked figure of a young fisherman erect at the
prow of his boat, clapping his hands in salutation to the rising sun,
whose ruddy glow transformed him into a statue of bronze. Also I
retain a vivid memory of pilgrim-figures poised upon the topmost
crags of the summit of Fuji, clapping their hands in prayer, with
faces to the East .... Perhaps ten thousand--twenty thousand-years
ago all humanity so worshipped the Lord of Day ....
After having saluted the sun, the worshipper returns to his house, to
pray before the Kamidana and before the tablets of the ancestors.
Kneeling, he invokes the great gods of Ise or of Izumo, the gods of
the chief temples of his province, the god of his parish-temple also
(Ujigami), and finally all the myriads of the deities of Shinto.
These prayers are not said aloud. The ancestors are thanked for the
foundation of the home; the higher deities are invoked for aid and
protection .... As for the custom of bowing in the direction of the
Emperor's palace, I am not able to say to what extent it survives in
the remoter districts; but I have often seen the reverence performed.
Once, too, I saw reverence done immediately in front of the gates of
the palace in Tokyo by country-folk on a visit to the capital. They
knew me, because I had often sojourned in their village; and on
reaching Tokyo [137] they sought me out, and found me, I took them to
the palace; and before the main entrance they removed their hats, and
bowed, and clapped their hands, just as they would have done when
saluting the gods or the rising sun,--and this with a simple and
dignified reverence that touched me not a little.
The duties of morning worship, which include the placing of offerings
before the tablets, are not the only duties of the domestic cult. In
a Shinto household, where the ancestors and the higher gods are
separately worshipped, the ancestral shrine may be said to correspond
with the Roman lararium; while the "god-shelf," with its taima or
o-nusa (symbols of those higher gods especially revered by the
family), may be compared with the place accorded by Latin custom to
the worship of the Penates. Both Shinto cults have their particular
feast-days; and, in the case of the ancestor-cult, the feast-days are
occasions of religious assembly,--when the relatives of the family
should gather to celebrate the domestic rite .... The Shintoist must
also take part in the celebration of the festivals of the Ujigami,
and must at least aid in the celebration of the nine great national
holidays related to the national cult; these nine, out of a total
eleven, being occasions of imperial ancestor-worship.
The nature of the public rites varied according to [138] the rank of
the gods. Offerings and prayers were made to all; but the greater
deities were worshipped with exceeding ceremony. To-day the offerings
usually consist of food and rice-wine, together with symbolic
articles representing the costlier gifts of woven stuffs presented by
ancient custom. The ceremonies include processions, music, singing,
and dancing. At the very small shrines there are few
ceremonies,--only offerings of food are presented. But at the great
temples there are hierarchies of priests and priestesses
(miko)--usually daughters of priests; and the ceremonies are
elaborate and solemn. It is particularly at the temples of Ise
(where, down to the fourteenth century the high-priestess was a
daughter of emperors), or at the great temple of Izumo, that the
archaic character of the ceremonial can be studied to most advantage.
There, in spite of the passage of that huge wave of Buddhism, which
for a period almost submerged the more ancient faith, all things
remain as they were a score of centuries ago;--Time, in those haunted
precincts, would seem to have slept, as in the enchanted palaces of
fairy-tale. The mere shapes of the buildings, weird and tall, startle
by their unfamiliarity. Within, all is severely plain and pure: there
are no images, no ornaments, no symbols visible--except those strange
paper-cuttings (gohei), suspended to upright rods, which are symbols
of offerings and also tokens of the [139] viewless. By the number of
them in the sanctuary, you know the number of the deities to whom the
place is consecrate. There is nothing imposing but the space, the
silence, and the suggestion of the past. The innermost shrine is
veiled: it contains, perhaps, a mirror of bronze, an ancient sword,
or other object enclosed in multiple wrappings: that is all. For this
faith, older than icons, needs no images: its gods are ghosts; and
the void stillness of its shrines compels more awe than tangible
representation could inspire. Very strange, to Western eyes at least,
are the rites, the forms of the worship, the shapes of sacred
objects. Not by any modern method must the sacred fire be
lighted,--the fire that cooks the food of the gods: it can be kindled
only in the most ancient of ways, with a wooden fire-drill. The chief
priests are robed in the sacred colour,--white,--and wear headdresses
of a shape no longer seen elsewhere: high caps of the kind formerly
worn by lords and princes. Their assistants wear various colours,
according to grade; and the faces of none are completely
shaven;--some wear full beards, others the mustache only. The actions
and attitudes of these hierophants are dignified, yet archaic, in a
degree difficult to describe. Each movement is regulated by
tradition; and to perform well the functions of a Kannushi, a long
disciplinary preparation is necessary. The office is hereditary; the
training begins in boyhood; and [140] the impassive deportment
eventually acquired is really a wonderful thing. Officiating, the
Kannushi seems rather a statue than a man,--an image moved by
invisible strings;--and, like the gods, he never winks. Not at least
observably.... Once, during a great Shinto procession, several
Japanese friends, and I myself, undertook to watch a young priest on
horseback, in order to see how long he could keep from winking; and
none of us were able to detect the slightest movement of eyes or
eyelids, notwithstanding that the priest's horse became restive
during the time that we were watching.
The principal incidents of the festival ceremonies within the great
temples are the presentation of the offerings, the repetition of the
ritual, and the dancing of the priestesses. Each of these
performances retains a special character rigidly fixed by tradition.
The food-offerings are served upon archaic vessels of unglazed
pottery (red earthenware mostly): boiled rice pressed into cones of
the form of a sugar-loaf, various preparations of fish and of edible
sea-weed, fruits and fowls, rice-wine presented in jars of immemorial
shape. These offerings are carried into the temple upon white wooden
trays of curious form, and laid upon white wooden tables of equally
curious form;--the faces of the bearers being covered, below the
eyes, with sheets of white paper, in order that their breath may
[141] not contaminate the food of the gods; and the trays, for like
reason, must be borne at arms' length .... In ancient times the
offerings would seem to have included things much more costly than
food,--if we may credit the testimony of what are probably the oldest
documents extant in the Japanese tongue, the Shinto rituals, or
norito.* The following excerpt from Satow's translation of the ritual
prayer to the Wind-gods of Tatsuta is interesting, not only as a fine
example of the language of the norito, but also as indicating the
character of the great ceremonies in early ages, and the nature of
the offerings:--