antiquity is here cited; and translations have also been made into
German.]
"As the great offerings set up for the Youth-god, I set up various
sorts of offerings: for Clothes, bright cloth, glittering cloth, soft
cloth, and coarse cloth,--and the five kinds of things, a mantlet, a
spear, a horse furnished with a saddle;--for the Maiden-god I set up
various sorts of offerings--providing Clothes, a golden thread-box, a
golden tatari, a golden skein-holder, bright cloth, glittering cloth,
soft cloth, and coarse cloth, and the five kinds of things, a horse
furnished with a saddle;--as to Liquor, I raise high the beer-jars,
fill and range-in-a-row the bellies of the beer-jars; soft grain and
coarse grain;--as to things which dwell in the hills, things soft of
hair and things coarse of hair;--as to things which grow in the great
field--plain, sweet herbs and bitter herbs;--as to things which dwell
in the blue sea-plain, things broad of fin and things narrow of
fin--down to the weeds of the offing and weeds of the [142] shore.
And if the sovran gods will take these great offerings which I set
up,--piling them up like a range of hills,--peacefully in their
hearts, as peaceful offerings and satisfactory offerings; and if the
sovran gods, deigning not to visit the things produced by, the great
People of the region under heaven with bad winds and rough waters,
will open and bless them,--I will at the autumn service set up the
first fruits, raising high the beer-jars, filling and ranging-in-rows
the bellies of the beer-jars,--and drawing them hither in juice and
in ear, in many hundred rice-plants and a thousand rice-plants. And
for this purpose the princes and councillors and all the
functionaries, the servants of the six farms of the country of
Yamato--even to the males and females of them--have all come and
assembled in the fourth month of this year, and, plunging down the
root of the neck cormorant-wise in the presence of the sovran gods,
fulfil their praise as the Sun of to-day rises in glory."...
The offerings are no longer piled up "like a range of hills," nor do
they include all things dwelling in the mountains and in the sea; but
the imposing ritual remains, and the ceremony is always impressive.
Not the least interesting part of it is the sacred dance. While the
gods are supposed to be partaking of the food and wine set out before
their shrines, the girl-priestesses, robed in crimson and white, move
gracefully to the sound of drums and flutes,--waving fans, or shaking
bunches of tiny bells as they circle about the sanctuary. According
to our Western notions. the performance of the [143] miko could
scarcely be called dancing; but it is a graceful spectacle, and very
curious,--for every step and attitude is regulated by traditions of
unknown antiquity. As for the plaintive music, no Western ear can
discern in it anything resembling a real melody; but the gods should
find delight in it, because it is certainly performed for them to-day
exactly as it used to be performed twenty centuries ago.
I speak of the ceremonies especially as I have witnessed them in
Izumo: they vary somewhat according to cult and province. At the
shrines of Ise, Kasuga, Kompira, and several others which I visited,
the ordinary priestesses are children; and when they have reached the
nubile age, they retire from the service. At Kitzuki the priestesses
are grown-up women: their office is hereditary; and they are
permitted to retain it even after marriage.
Formerly the Miko was more than a mere officiant: the songs which she
is still obliged to learn indicate that she was originally offered to
the gods as a bride. Even yet her touch is holy; the grain sown by
her hand is blessed. At some time in the past she seems to have been
also a pythoness: the spirits of the gods possessed her and spoke
through her lips. All the poetry of this most ancient of religions
centres in the figure of its little Vestal,--child-bride of
ghosts,--as she flutters, [144] like some wonderful white-and-crimson
butterfly, before the shrine of the Invisible. Even in these years of
change, when she must go to the public school, she continues to
represent all that is delightful in Japanese girlhood; for her
special home-training keeps her reverent, innocent, dainty in all her
little ways, and worthy to remain the pet of the gods.
The history of the higher forms of ancestor-worship in other
countries would lead us to suppose that the public ceremonies of the
Shinto-cult must include some rite of purification. As a matter of
fact, the most important of all Shinto ceremonies is the ceremony of
purification,--o-harai, as it is called, which term signifies the
casting-out or expulsion of evils .... In ancient Athens a
corresponding ceremony took place every year; in Rome, every four
years. The o-harai is performed twice every year,--in the sixth month
and the twelfth month by the ancient calendar. It used to be not less
obligatory than the Roman lustration; and the idea behind the
obligation was the same as that which inspired the Roman laws on the
subject .... So long as men believe that the welfare of the living
depends upon the will of the dead,--that all happenings in the world
are ordered by spirits of different characters, evil as well as
good,--that every bad action lends additional power to the viewless
[145] forces of destruction, and therefore endangers the public
prosperity,--so long will the necessity of a public purification
remain an article of common faith. The presence in any community of
even one person who has offended the gods, consciously or
unwillingly, is a public misfortune, a public peril. Yet it is not
possible for all men to live so well as never to vex the gods by
thought, word, or deed,--through passion or ignorance or
carelessness. "Every one," declares Hirata, "is certain to commit
accidental offences, however careful he may be... Evil acts and words
are of two kinds: those of which we are conscious, and those of which
we are not conscious .... It is better to assume that we have
committed such unconscious offences." Now it should be remembered
that for the man of Old Japan,--as for the Greek or the Roman citizen
of early times,--religion consisted chiefly in the exact observance
of multitudinous custom; and that it was therefore difficult to know
whether, in performing the duties of the several cults, one had not
inadvertently displeased the Unseen. As a means of maintaining and
assuring the religious purity of the people periodical lustration was
consequently deemed indispensable.
From the earliest period Shinto exacted scrupulous cleanliness
--indeed, we might say that it regarded physical impurity as
identical with moral impurity, and intolerable to the gods. It has
[146] always been, and still remains, a religion of ablutions. The
Japanese love of cleanliness--indicated by the universal practice of
daily bathing, and by the irreproachable condition of their homes has
been maintained, and was probably initiated, by their religion.
Spotless cleanliness being required by the rites of
ancestor-worship,--in the temple, in the person of the officiant, and
in the home,--this rule of purity was naturally extended by degrees
to all the conditions of existence. And besides the great periodical
ceremonies of purification, a multitude of minor lustrations were
exacted by the cult. This was the case also, it will be remembered in
the early Greek and Roman civilizations--the citizen had to submit
to purification upon almost every important occasion of existence.
There were lustrations indispensable at birth, marriage, and death;
lustrations on the eve of battle; lustrations at regular periods, of
the dwelling, estate, district, or city. And, as in Japan, no one
could approach a temple without a preliminary washing of hands. But
ancient Shinto exacted more than the Greek or the Roman cult: it
required the erection of special houses for birth,
--"parturition-houses"; special houses for the consummation of
marriage,--"nuptial-huts"; and special buildings for the
dead,--"mourning-houses." Formerly women were obliged during the
period of menstruation, as well as during the time of confinement, to
live apart. These harsher archaic customs [147] have almost
disappeared, except in one or two remote districts, and in the case
of certain priestly families; but the general rules as to
purification, and as to the times and circumstances forbidding
approach to holy places, are still everywhere obeyed. Purity of heart
is not less insisted upon than physical purity; and the great rite of
lustration, performed every six months, is of course a moral
purification. It is performed not only at the great temples, and at
all the Ujigami, but likewise in every home
_________________________________________________________________
[*On the kamidana, "or god-shelf," there is usually placed a kind
of oblong paper-box containing fragments of the wands used by the
priests of Ise at the great national purification-ceremony, or
o-harai. This box is commonly called by the name of the
ceremony, o-harai, or "august purification," and is inscribed
with the names of the great gods of Ise. The presence of this
object is supposed to protect the home; but it should be replaced
by a new o-harai at the expiration of six months; for the virtue
of the charm is supposed to last only during the interval between
two official purifications. This distribution to thousands of
homes of fragments of the wands, used to "drive away evils" at
the time of the Ise lustration, represents of course the supposed
extension of the high-priest's protection to those homes until
the time of the next o-harai.
The modern domestic form of the harai is very simple. Each
Shinto parish-temple furnishes to all its Ujiko, or parishioners,
small paper-cuttings called hitogata ("mankind-shapes"),
representing figures of men, women, and children as in
silhouette,--only that the paper is white, and folded curiously.
Each household receives a number of hitogata corresponding to the
number of its members,--"men-shapes" for the men and boys,
"women-shapes"]
_________________________________________________________________
[148] for the women and girls. Each person in the house touches his
head, face, limbs, and body with one of these hitogata; repeating the
while a Shinto invocation, and praying that any misfortune or
sickness incurred by reason of offences involuntarily committed
against the gods (for in Shinto belief sickness and misfortune are
divine punishments) may be mercifully taken away. Upon each hitogata
is then written the age and sex (not the name) of the person for whom
it was furnished; and when this has been done, all are returned to
the parish-temple, and there burnt, with rites of purification. Thus
the community is "lustrated" every six Months.
In the old Greek and Latin cities lustration was accompanied with
registration. The attendance of every citizen at the ceremony was
held to be so necessary that one who wilfully failed to attend might
be whipped and sold as a slave. Non-attendance involved loss of civic
rights. It would seem that in Old Japan also every member of a
community was obliged to be present at the rite; but I have not been
able to learn whether any registration was made upon such occasions.
Probably it would have been superfluous: the Japanese individual was
not officially recognized; the family-group alone was responsible,
and the attendance of the several members would have been assured by
the responsibility of the group. The use of the hitogata, on which
the name is not written, but only the sex and age [149] of the
worshipper, is probably modern, and of Chinese origin. Official
registration existed, even in early times; but it appears to have had
no particular relation to the o-harai; and the registers were kept,
it seems, not by the Shinto, but by the Buddhist parish-priests ....
In concluding these remarks about the o-harai, I need scarcely add
that special rites were performed in cases of accidental religious
defilement, and that any person judged to have sinned against the
rules of the public cult had to submit to ceremonial purification.
Closely related by origin to the rites of purification are sundry
ascetic practices of Shinto. It is not an essentially ascetic
religion: it offers flesh and wine to its gods; and it prescribes
only such forms of self-denial as ancient custom and decency require.
Nevertheless, some of its votaries perform extraordinary austerities
on special occasions,--austerities which always include much
cold-water bathing. It is not uncommon for the very fervent
worshipper to invoke the gods as he stands naked under the ice-cold
rush of a cataract in midwinter .... But the most curious phase of
this Shinto asceticism is represented by a custom still prevalent in
remote districts. According to this custom a community yearly
appoints one of its citizens to devote himself wholly to the gods on
behalf of the rest. During the term of his consecration, this
communal representative [150] must separate from his family, must not
approach women, must avoid all places of amusement, must eat only
food cooked with sacred fire, must abstain from wine, must bathe in
fresh cold water several times a day, must repeat particular prayers
at certain hours, and must keep vigil upon certain nights. When he
has performed these duties of abstinence and purification for the
specified time, he becomes religiously free; and another man is then
elected to take his place. The prosperity of the settlement is
supposed to depend upon the exact observance by its representative of
the duties prescribed: should any public misfortune occur, he would
be suspected of having broken his vows. Anciently, in the case of a
common misfortune, the representative was put to death. In the little
town of Mionoseki, where I first learned of this custom, the communal
representative is called ichi-nen-gannushi ("one-year god-master");
and his full term of vicarious atonement is twelve months. I was told
that elders are usually appointed for this duty,--young men very
seldom. In ancient times such a communal representative was called by
a name signifying "abstainer." References to the custom have been
found in Chinese notices of Japan dating from a time before the
beginning of Japanese authentic history.
Every persistent form of ancestor-worship has its [151] system or
systems of divination; and Shinto exemplifies the general law.
Whether divination ever obtained in ancient Japan the official
importance which it assumed among the Greeks and the Romans is at
present doubtful. But long before the introduction of Chinese
astrology, magic, and fortune-telling, the Japanese practised various
kinds of divination, as is proved by their ancient poetry, their
records, and their rituals. We find mention also of official
diviners, attached to the great cults. There was divination by bones,
by birds, by rice, by barley-gruel, by footprints, by rods planted in
the ground, and by listening in public ways to the speech of people
passing by. Nearly all--probably all--of these old methods of
divination are still in popular use. But the earliest form of
official divination was performed by scorching the shoulder-blade of
a deer, or other animal, and observing the cracks produced by the
heat.* Tortoise-shells were afterwards used for the same purpose.
Diviners were especially attached, it appears, to the imperial
palace; and Motowori, writing in the latter half of the eighteenth
century, speaks of divination as still being, in that epoch, a part
of the imperial function. "To the end of time," he said, "the Mikado
is the child of the Sun-goddess. His mind is in perfect harmony of
thought and feeling with hers. He does not seek out new inventions;
but he rules in accordance with precedents which date from the Age of
the Gods; and if he is ever in doubt, he has recourse to divination,
which reveals to him the mind of the great goddess."
[*Concerning this form of divination, Satow remarks that it was
practised by the Mongols in the time of Genghis Khan, and is still
practised by the Khirghiz Tartars,--facts of strong interest in view
of the probable origin of the early Japanese tribes. For instances of
ancient official divination see Aston's translation of the Nihongi,
Vol. I, pp. 157, 189, 227, 299, 237.]
[152] Within historic times at least, divination would not seem to
have been much used in warfare,--certainly not to the extent that it
was used by the Greek and Roman armies. The greatest Japanese
captains,--such as Hideyoshi and Nobunaga--were decidedly irreverent
as to omens. Probably the Japanese, at an early period of their long
military history, learned by experience that the general who conducts
his campaign according to omens must always be at a hopeless
disadvantage in dealing with a skilful enemy who cares nothing about
omens.
Among the ancient popular forms of divination which still survive,
the most commonly practised in households is divination by dry rice.
For the public, Chinese divination is still in great favour; but it
is interesting to observe that the Japanese fortune-teller invariably
invokes the Shinto gods before consulting his Chinese books, and
maintains a Shinto shrine in his reception-room.
[153] We have seen that the developments of ancestor-worship in Japan
present remarkable analogies with the developments of
ancestor-worship in ancient Europe,--especially in regard to the
public cult, with its obligatory rites of purification.
But Shinto seems nevertheless to represent conditions of
ancestor-worship less developed than those which we are accustomed to
associate with early Greek and Roman life; and the coercion which it
exercised appears to have been proportionally more rigid. The
existence of the individual worshipper was ordered not merely in
relation to the family and the community, but even in relation to
inanimate things. Whatever his occupation might be, some god presided
over it; whatever tools he might use, they had to be used in such
manner as tradition prescribed for all admitted to the craft-cult. It
was necessary that the carpenter should so perform his work as to
honour the deity of carpenters,--that the smith should fulfil his
daily task so as to honour the god of the bellows,--that the farmer
should never fail in respect to the earth-god, and the food-god, and
the scare-crow god, and the spirits of the trees--about his
habitation. Even the domestic utensils were sacred: the servant could
not dare to forget the presence of the deities of the cooking-range,
the hearth, the cauldron, the brazier,--or the supreme necessity of
keeping the fire pure. The professions, not less [154] than the
trades, were under divine patronage: the physician, the teacher, the
artist--each had his religious duties to observe, his special
traditions to obey. The scholar, for example, could not dare to treat
his writing-implements with disrespect, or put written paper to
vulgar uses: such conduct would offend the god of calligraphy. Nor
were women ruled less religiously than men in their various
occupations: the spinners and weaving-maidens were bound to revere
the Weaving-goddess and the Goddess of Silkworms; the sewing-girl was
taught to respect her needles; and in all homes there was observed a
certain holiday upon which offerings were made to the Spirits of
Needles. In Samurai families the warrior was commanded to consider
his armour and his weapons as holy things: to keep them in beautiful
order was an obligation of which the neglect might bring misfortune
in the time of combat; and on certain days offerings were set before
the bows and spears, arrows and swords, and other war-implements, in
the alcove of the family guest-room. Gardens, too, were holy; and
there were rules to be observed in their management, lest offence
should be given to the gods of trees and flowers. Carefulness,
cleanliness, dustlessness, were everywhere enforced as religious
obligations.
... It has often been remarked in these latter days that the Japanese
do not keep their public offices, their railway stations, their new
factory-buildings, [155] thus scrupulously clean. But edifices built
foreign style, with foreign material, under foreign supervision, and
contrary to every local tradition, must seem to old-fashioned
thinking God-forsaken places; and servants amid such unhallowed
surroundings do not feel the invisible about them, the weight of
pious custom, the silent claim of beautiful and simple things to
human respect.
[156]
[157]
THE RULE OF THE DEAD
It should now be evident to the reader that the ethics of Shinto were
all comprised in the doctrine of unqualified obedience to customs
originating, for the most part, in the family cult. Ethics were not
different from religion; religion was not different from government;
and the very word for government signified "matters-of-religion." All
government ceremonies were preceded by prayer and sacrifice; and from
the highest rank of society to the lowest every person was subject to
the law of tradition. To obey was piety; to disobey was impious; and
the rule of obedience was enforced upon each individual by the will
of the community to which he belonged. Ancient morality consisted in
the minute observance of rules of conduct regarding the household,
the community, and the higher authority.
But these rules of behaviour mostly represented the outcome of social
experience; and it was scarcely possible to obey them faithfully, and
yet to remain a bad man. They commanded reverence toward the Unseen,
respect for authority, affection to parents, [158] tenderness to wife
and children, kindness to neighbours, kindness to dependants,
diligence and exactitude in labour, thrift and cleanliness in habit.
Though at first morality signified no more than obedience to
tradition, tradition itself gradually became identified with true
morality. To imagine the consequent social condition is, of course,
somewhat difficult for the modern mind. Among ourselves, religious
ethics and social ethics have long been practically dissociated; and
the latter have become, with the gradual weakening of faith, more
imperative and important than the former. Most of us learn, sooner or
later in life, that it is not enough to keep the ten commandments,
and that it is much less dangerous to break most of the commandments
in a quiet way than to violate social custom. But in Old Japan there
was no distinction tolerated between ethics and custom--between moral
requirements and social obligations: convention identified both, and
to conceal a breach of either was impossible,--as privacy did not
exist. Moreover the unwritten commandments were not limited to ten;
they were numbered by hundreds, and the least infringement was
punishable, not merely as a blunder, but as a sin. Neither in his own
home nor anywhere else could the ordinary person do as he pleased;
and the extraordinary person was under the surveillance of zealous
dependants whose constant duty was to reprove any breach of usage.
The religion capable [159] of regulating every act of existence by
the force of common opinion requires no catechism.