United States or Hong Kong ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Millions of Japanese are good Buddhists and good Shintoists at the same time. That such a combination should be possible is due to the essential difference in the character of the two beliefs. The one is extrinsic, the other intrinsic, in its relations to the human soul. Shintoism tells man but little about himself and his hereafter; Buddhism, little but about himself and what he may become.
Although Buddhism ostensibly adopted Shinto deities and the Shinto sanctions for the social order, it could not wholeheartedly accept the sanctions nor take the deities into full and legitimate partnership. It found no place in its circle of doctrine to teach the important tenets of Shintoism. It left them to survive or perish as chance would have it.
Very rarely are images to be seen upon a kamidana: for primitive Shintoism excluded images rigidly as Jewish or Mohammedan law; and all Shinto iconography belongs to a comparatively modern era especially to the period of Ryobu-Shinto and must be considered of Buddhist origin.
But though phallic worship and its accompanying immorality have been extirpated, immorality in connection with religion is still rampant in certain quarters. Not far from the great temples at Ise, the center of Shintoism and the goal for half a million pilgrims yearly, are large and prosperous brothels patronized by and existing for the sake of the pilgrims.
In such a state of unrestricted competition among various religions, the universal law of the survival of the fittest acts freely. Buddhism was the fittest and became the predominant religion. Shintoism was the weakest and sank into helpless desuetude. But with the revival of learning, as Kojiki and other ancient literature were studied with assiduity, Shintoism began to revive.
Francis Xavier in the sixteenth century, and they imagine that the Japan of the twentieth century is only waiting to finally unshackle itself from Shintoism and Buddhism before arraying itself in the garb of Christianity.
You may deny the divinity of Jesus; you may doubt whether he ever existed; you may reject Christianity for Judaism, Mahometanism, Shintoism, or Fire Worship; and the iconolaters, placidly contemptuous, will only classify you as a freethinker or a heathen.
"What moral ideas we have came neither from Shintoism nor Buddhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese classics." Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted religious theory, but if so, then in Japan it has certainly degenerated into a shameless mockery of its former self.
I think that Kaemfer succinctly summed up the Shinto faith in reference to the Japanese people when he remarked, "The more immediate end which they propose to themselves is a state of happiness in this world." In other words, if this assertion be correct, Shintoism preaches utilitarianism.
This cult is the mythological inheritance of the whole eastern seaboard of Asia, from Siam to Kamtchatka. In Japan it is called Shintoism. The word "Shinto" means literally "the way of the gods," and the letter of its name is a true exponent of the spirit of the belief.
Word Of The Day