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A mile or two through the smooth and level streets and the hopeful and sanguine "riksha" man dumps me out at another temple. Fancying that, perchance, he might have brought me to something extraordinary, I follow him wearily in. A graduate in the Shinto religion would no doubt find something different about these temples, but to the ordinary, every-day human, to see one is to see them all.
And the figure of a fox in stone sits before the Name of the August Spirit-of-Food. The miya or Shinto temple itself is quite small smaller than most of the temples in the neighbourhood, and dingy, and begrimed with age. Yet, next to Kitzuki, this is the most famous of Izumo shrines.
By his writings we are taught the nature of the struggle waged throughout the Tokugawa period between Chinese philosophy and Japanese ethics, and we are enabled, also, to reach a lucid understanding of the Shinto cult as understood by the Japanese themselves.
They are essentially of Shinto, and exemplify that intimate sense of relation between the visible and invisible worlds which is the special religious characteristic of Japan among all civilized countries. To Japanese thought the dead are not less real than the living. They take part in the daily life of the people, sharing the humblest sorrows and the humblest joys.
Trusting to know something of that Oriental soul in whose joyous love of nature and of life even the unlearned may discern a strange likeness to the soul of the old Greek race, I trust also that I may presume some day to speak of the great living power of that faith now called Shinto, but more anciently Kami-no-michi, or 'The Way of the Gods.
The room is neat and spacious; Shinto kakemono from Kitzuki are suspended in the toko and upon the walls; and in one corner I see a very handsome Zen-but-sudan, or household shrine. I could not have believed there were so many people in Kaka-ura. In a Japanese house, during the hot season, everything is thrown open to the breeze.
They wash their faces and hands and rinse their mouths the customary ablution preliminary to Shinto prayer. Then they turn their faces to the sunrise and clap their hands four times and pray.
Certainly the expansion of the popular mind through education, the influences of modern science, must compel modification or abandonment of many ancient Shinto conceptions; but the ethics of Shinto will surely endure. For Shinto signifies character in the higher sense courage, courtesy, honour, and above all things, loyalty.
Even to this day Shinto belief represents the pre-Homeric stage of imagination as regards the supernatural. Among the Indo-European races likewise there appeared to have been at first no difference between gods and ghosts, nor any ranking of gods as greater and lesser. These distinctions were gradually developed. "The spirits of the dead," says Mr.
Then from Japan we get Shinto; still less a system of metaphysics or dogma. The Shinto temple, empty but for air, is symbolic of the creed whose keynotes are purity and simplicity. Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto are the three great native creations, in religion, of what I shall call the Altaic mind.
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