[23. Mingling of Shinto, Confucianism, and Buddhism.] The noteworthy fact that Shinto, Confucianism, and Buddhism have for more than a thousand years mixed with each other in Japan demonstrates the susceptibility of the Japanese people to foreign influence and teaching, and their natural hospitality toward the various religious cults. The ethical teachings of Confucius prepared the way for Buddhism, and, in spite of antipathy and wars between the nations, maintain a powerful hold upon the thoughtful Japanese to-day. Still more remarkable is it that millions of the Japanese appear to accept both Shintoism and Buddhism, and good Shintoists and good Buddhists may be found worshiping in some temples at one and the same time.[41] A Japanese scholar, speaking at the Chicago "Parliament of Religions" on the "Future of Religion in Japan," declared that the three systems named "are not only living together on friendly terms with one another, but, in fact, they are blended together in the minds of the people. One and the same Japanese is at once a Shintoist, a Confucianist, and a Buddhist. Our religion may be likened to a triangle. One angle is Shintoism, another is Confucianism, and a third is Buddhism, all of which make up the religion of the ordinary Japanese. Shintoism furnishes the objects, Confucianism offers the rules of life, while Buddhism supplies the way of salvation."[42]
[24. Roman Catholicism in Japan.] We must not omit altogether a notice of the introduction of Roman Catholic Christianity into Japan about the middle of the sixteenth century. It was in 1549 that the famous Jesuit, Francis Xavier, landed at Kagoshima, and began his marvelous missionary work through Japanese interpreters, and in two years of strenuous toil he succeeded in winning many converts from all classes of the people. Fifty years thereafter the Christian converts throughout the country are said to have numbered nearly a million. But the Jesuit habit and policy of meddling with affairs of State, their intolerance of other cults, and at length their crusade against the ancient national faith and their burning of Buddhist temples and slaughter of Buddhist priests, aroused the bitter reaction and bloody persecutions, which, after some forty years of struggle, succeeded in obliterating every public sign of Christianity from every province of the empire. And for over two hundred years Japan closed her doors to all foreign influences and appeals. It was not until 1873 that the edicts against Christianity were withdrawn. Of the Protestant missionary movements in the island empire since that date, it is not the purpose of this essay to speak.
[25. Present Religious Indifference.] Much is said nowadays about the apparent religious indifference of the Japanese. Some writers seem to think that the Japanese and the Chinese people are alike inferior and defective in religious nature. Mr. Gulick, in his "Evolution of the Japanese," reports Marquis Ito, Japan's most illustrious statesman, as having said: "I regard religion itself as quite unnecessary for a nation's life; science is far above superstition, and what is religion—Buddhism or Christianity—but superstition, and therefore a possible source of weakness to a nation? I do not regret the tendency to free thought and atheism, which is almost universal in Japan, because I do not regard it as a source of danger to the community." And yet this same distinguished statesman is reported on the same page (288) to have given utterance to the following much more recent statement: "The only true civilization is that which rests on Christian principles, and consequently, as Japan must attain her civilization on these principles, those young men who receive Christian education will be the main factors in the development of future Japan." Possibly these two discrepant statements may be reconciled by supposing that, in the first case, Ito's thought was turned especially to the superstitions and temporary phases incident to all religious cults, and in his later remark he spoke of Christianity as somehow synonymous with Western civilization. But in any case it would seem that one who deems the Japanese either irreligious, or non-religious, or deficient in religious sense, ought to explain the manifold facts of the Shinto cult, such as the "god shelf," the ancestral tablets, the daily offerings, and the family worship in almost every household of that Eastern island-empire. What mean the hundreds of thousands of white-robed pilgrims who annually visit the numerous sacred shrines? And is there no element of religion in the devout patriotism that is ever ready to sacrifice life and all that men hold dear for the faith and inheritance of their beloved "central land of Reed-Plains" given long ago to the care of the "Sovran Grandchild" by the celestial deities?
It is only a one-sided concept of religion, and a too prevalent failure to distinguish between its local temporary phases and its deeper essentials as grounded in the spiritual nature of man, that have led superficial observers to deny the profound religious element in the Shinto and Buddhist worship of Japan. If Paul, waiting at Athens, and beholding the city full of idols, could truly say, "I perceive, O Athenians, that in all things ye are very religious," just as truly may we say, in view of the 195,000 temples and the innumerable deities of the Shinto cult, that the Japanese are exceedingly religious.
Let me add the testimony of Mr. Gulick himself, who spent years in the country: "The universality of the tokens of family religion, and the constant and loving care bestowed upon them, are striking testimony to the universality of religion in Japan. The pathos of life is often revealed by the family devotion of the mother to these silent representatives of divine beings, and departed ancestors or children. I have no hesitation in saying that, so far as external appearances go, the average home in Japan is far more religious than the average home in enlightened England or America, especially when compared with such as have no family worship. There may be a genuine religious life in these Western homes, but it does not appear to the casual visitor. Yet no casual visitor can enter a Japanese home, without seeing at once the evidences of some sort of religious life."[43]
It is to be remarked that in the history and evolution of religion, where there has been obvious evolution, periods of long peace and repose, marked by formalism, skepticism, and indifference to religious obligation, are generally followed by great revivals and reforms. Some new light breaks in; some great prophet appears; new ideas and hopes take hold on the popular mind, and thereupon a new era opens in civilization. The renaissance in Japan of the last fifty years may be the prelude to an epoch-making revival of the Orient.
[26. Concluding Observations and Suggestions.] Our study of Shinto has led us over a somewhat unfamiliar field of thought. The mythology and the records of the Ko-ji-ki and the Nihongi are far apart from all our Western legends and ideals of the early world, and in great part seem like monstrosities of fantastic speculation. It is affirmed by some that the Japanese people have been halting for two millenniums in a state of childhood, receiving nothing from Confucianism or from Buddhism to quicken or change the national life; but with the introduction of Western thought and enterprise they have suddenly leaped into comparative maturity, and their new departure from a dreamy past is likely to astonish the whole world. It is very obvious that the introduction of modern science into her thousands of elementary schools must sooner or later undermine all faith in the traditional cosmogony, and, along with that, a whole world of notions bound up with the Shinto cult must needs be overthrown. Eminent Japanese scholars say that Western learning has sounded the knell and signed the death warrant of the ancient religion of their island-world.
It is for us very easy, in the light of our New Testament revelation, to point out defects in the Shinto system. Some four or five of these we may briefly mention as matters which a Christian missionary should keep in view as evincing the need of preaching among these people the deeper demands of the religion of Jesus Christ. (1) The first and fundamental defect in Shinto as a religious system is its lack of any clear or helpful concept of one God and Father of all. The doctrine of God is fundamental in any cult, and where the idea is vague and imperfect the entire system of doctrine and practice must needs possess an element of uncertainty and weakness. (2) Another defect is its want of a clear concept of sin as a moral disease of the heart. The Japanese mind needs to be turned inward to a deeper sense of the real sinfulness of sin. (3) Another serious fault in the Japanese civilization is its low estimate of womanhood. Here as in China woman has not attained her proper sphere. She is subjected to three forms of obedience, which in actual life are too abject for her higher development—she must bow to her parents, to her husband, and to her son in a manner that involves what we should call a humiliating form of domestic slavery. Japan needs the practice of a monogamy of the highest Christian type in order to rectify this inferior and one-sided view of the male and female constitution of humanity. (4) There is also in Japan an apparently low estimate of human life. It is probably due largely to the communal and feudal system which has for a long time ruled the people. The individual is nothing; the community is everything. These and other defects show our grounds for believing that the old order and system must sometime change. But it is no strange or unheard of thing in our world for an old order to change and give place to something new and higher. Western civilization has seen not a few examples of such changes; but, as touching religious evolution, what a monumental example we have in the transition from the Old Testament Judaism to the New Testament kingdom of heaven! The main contents and scope of the Epistle to the Hebrews point out the fact that the old covenant, with its sanctuary and altars and tables and sacrifices and priests, could not make their worshipers perfect. Notwithstanding its long and glorious history, it waxed old, and when the Epistle was written it was nigh unto vanishing away (Heb. viii, 13). It did pass away and give place to a more spiritual cult, the gospel of peace on earth and universal love. May not the national cult of Japan—with its faith in the unseen, its rituals of purification, its concepts of a heavenly ancestry, and its intimations of deification after death—be made to give way before a superior cult that may have the wisdom to offer a higher and more rational presentation of the essential truths embodied in the Shinto worship? Whatever men may think or say about the mystical and legendary elements in the Hebrew Scriptures, no one familiar with the literatures of the nations can hesitate for a moment to acknowledge the immense superiority of the Old Testament law and prophets and psalms over the contents of the Ko-ji-ki and the Nihongi. If, then, the covenants and the rituals of Judaism waxed old and vanished away before the clearer light and truth of the teachings of Jesus Christ, much more should we expect that the same superior "Light of the world" must needs, sometime, supersede and supplant the rituals of the Shinto cult.
Accordingly, I shall venture to specify sundry elements of ancient Shinto, which, to use the language of Jesus, are not to be destroyed, but rather fulfilled, in the higher and more universal truths of the kingdom of Christ. Fulfilled, I say for I look upon all the religious longings, and prayers, and penitential psalms of the nations, and their inquiries after the Unseen and Eternal, as so many foregleams of a coming Light, destined to enlighten every man that cometh into the world.