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"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.
The Nakatomi's functions were specially connected with Shinto rites, and Kamatari must be supposed to have entertained little good-will towards the Soga, who were the leaders of the Buddhist faction, and whose feud with the military party sixty-seven years previously had involved the violent death of Katsumi, then muraji of the Nakatomi.
Whether our dead do or do not continue to dwell without us as well as within us, a question not to be decided in our present undeveloped state of comparative blindness, certain it is that the testimony of cosmic facts accords with one weird belief of Shinto: the belief that all things are determined by the dead, whether by ghosts of men or ghosts of worlds.
It is, like Shinto in Japan, not a religion which has moulded the national character but the national character finding expression in religion.
These: are little figures, made of white paper, representing men, women, and children. They are cut out with a few clever scissors strokes; and the difference of sex is indicated by variations in the shape of the sleeves and the little paper obi. They are sold in the Shinto temples.
More than any other Japanese writer, Hirata has enabled us to understand the hierarchy of Shinto mythology, corresponding closely, as we might have expected, to the ancient ordination of Japanese society. In the lowermost ranks are the spirits of common people, worshipped only at the household shrine or at graves.
The dead art that made the beauty of this place was the art, also, of that faith to which belongs the all-consoling text, 'Verily, even plants and trees, rocks and stones, all shall enter into Nirvana. IN Japan there are two forms of the Religion of the Dead that which belongs to Shinto; and that which belongs to Buddhism. The first is the primitive cult, commonly called ancestor-worship.
Furthermore, by its doctrines of incarnation and transmigration, according to which noble souls might appear and reappear in different worlds and different lands, Buddhism could identify Shinto deities with its own deities of Hindu origin, asserting their pre-incarnation.
No pessimist could profess pure Shintoism. The doctrine is optimistic; and whoever has a generous faith in humanity will have no fault to find with the absence of the idea of implacable evil from its teaching. Now it is just in the recognition of the necessity for propitiating the evil ghosts that the ethically rational character of Shinto reveals itself.
This difference, however, is to be noted between the Shinto ideal social order and the Confucian, or rather that development of Confucian ethics and civics which arose during the Tokugawa Shogunate; Shinto appears to have been, properly speaking, nationalistic, while feudal Confucianism was tribal.
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