SHINTO PRIEST.
The ancient religion of the Japanese is called “Kami no michi,” way, or doctrine of the gods. The Chinese form of the same is Shinto, and from this foreigners have called it Shintoism. In its purity the chief characteristic of this religion is the worship of ancestors and the deification of emperors, heroes, and scholars. The adoration of the personified forces of nature enters largely into it. It employs no idols, images, or effigies in its worship, and teaches no doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Shinto has no moral code, and no accurately defined system of ethics or belief. The leading principle of its adherents is imitation of the illustrious deeds of their ancestors, and they are to prove themselves worthy of their descent by the purity of their lives. The priests of Shinto are designated according to their rank. Sometimes they receive titles from the emperor, and the higher ranks of the priesthood are court nobles. Ordinarily they dress like other people, but are robed in white when officiating, or in court dress when in court. They marry, rear families, and do not shave their heads. The office is usually hereditary.
After all the research of foreign scholars, many hesitate to decide whether Shinto is a native Japanese product or whether it is not closely allied with the ancient religion of China which existed before the period of Confucius. The weight of opinion inclines to the latter belief. The Kojiki is the Bible of Shintoism. It is full of narrations, but it lays down no precepts, teaches no morals or doctrines, prescribes no ritual. Shinto has very few of the characteristics of a religion as understood by us. The most learned native commentators and exponents of the faith expressly maintain the view that Shinto has no moral code. Motoori, the great modern revivalist of Shinto, teaches with emphasis that morals were invented by the Chinese because they were an immoral people, but in Japan there was no necessity for any system of morals, as every Japanese acted aright if he only consulted his own heart. The duty of a good Japanese, he says, consists in obeying the commands of the mikado without questioning whether these commands are right or wrong. It was only immoral people like the Chinese who presumed to discuss the character of their sovereign. The opinion of most scholars from America and Europe, studying Shinto on its own soil, has been that the faith was little more than an influence for reducing the people to a condition of mental slavery. Its influence is weakening every year.
The outlines of Buddhism in its Chinese forms have been indicated in a foregoing chapter. It is well, however, to take another glance at it here in connection with its Japanese significance. This religion reached the Japanese empire about the middle of the sixth century after Christ, twelve centuries after its establishment. Buddhism originated as a pure atheistic humanitarianism, with a lofty philosophy and a code of morals higher perhaps than any heathen religion had reached before or has since attained. First preached in India, a land accursed by secular and spiritual oppression, it acknowledged no caste and declared all men equally sinful and miserable, and all equally capable of being freed from sin and misery through knowledge. It taught that the souls of all men had lived in a previous state of existence and that all the sorrows of this life are punishments for sins committed in a previous state. After death the soul must migrate for ages through stages of life inferior or superior, until perchance it arrived at last in Nirvana or absorption in Buddha. The true estate of the human soul, according to the Buddhist, was blissful annihilation.
JAPANESE TROOPS LANDING AT CHEMULPO. September 9th.
The morals of Buddhism are superior to its metaphysics. Its commandments are the dictates of the most refined morality. Such was Buddhism in its early purity. Beside its moral code and philosophical doctrines it had almost nothing. But in the twelve centuries which passed while it swept through India, Birmah, Siam, China, Thibet, Manchooria, Corea, and Siberia, it acquired the apparel with which Asiatic imagination and priestly necessity had clothed and adorned the original doctrines of Buddha. The ideas of Buddha had been expanded into a complete theological system, with all the appurtenances of a stock religion. Japan was ready for the introduction of any religion as attractive as Buddhism, for prior to that time nothing existed except Shinto, of which there was little but the dogma of the divinity of the mikado, the duty of all Japanese to obey him implicitly, and some Confucian morals.
Buddhism came to touch the heart, to fire the imagination, to feed the intellect, to offer a code of lofty morals, to point out a pure life through self-denial, to awe the ignorant, and to terrify the doubting. With this explanation of the field which Buddhism found and what it offered, it is sufficient to say that the faith spread with marvelous rapidity until the Japanese empire was a Buddhist land. This did not necessarily exclude Shinto from the minds of the same people, and the two faiths have existed side by side in harmony. Of late years, however, the Japanese have not only been losing faith in their own religions but in all others, and to-day they are said by many to form a nation of atheists. This does not apply to the common people so truly as to the educated ones, and of course is not nearly as general a truth as has been often assumed. In no country of Asia has Christianity made such rapid and permanent advance as in Japan. It is the only oriental country having a government of its own in which there is absolute freedom in religious belief and practice, and in which there is no state religion and no state support.
STREET SCENES.—From a Japanese Album.