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Henceforth, in the domain of imagination the Japanese intellect busied itself with assimilating or re-working the abundant material imported by Buddhism. Ancient Customs and Usages. In the ancient god-way the temple or shrine was called a miya. After the advent of Buddhism the keepers of the shrine were called kannushi, that is, shrine keepers or wardens of the god.
Phallic Symbols. To form one's impression of the Kami no Michi wholly from the poetic liturgies, the austere simplicity of the miyas or shrines, or the worship at the palace or capital, would be as misleading as to gather our ideas of the status of popular education from knowing only of the scholars at court. Among the common people the real basis of the god-way was ancestor-worship.
Did his love then spring from the God-will or the man-will? Must there not be some God-way of the thing, all right and nothing wrong? But he could not compass it, and the marvel to himself was that all the time he was able to go on preaching, and that with some sense of honesty and joy in his work.
History, however, gives no uncertain answer as to what actually did take place. Of this, we shall speak in another lecture. Probably by the twelfth century the pure rites of the god-way were celebrated, and the unmixed traditions maintained, in families and temples, so few as to be counted on the fingers.
Then the high priest says: Hear all of you how he leads forth the horse, as a thing that erects its ears towards the plain of high heaven, and deigns to sweep away and purify with the general purification, as the evening sun goes down on the last day of the watery moon of this year. Mikadoism Usurps the Primitive God-way.
It is to be noted that in the god-way the origin of evil is to be ascribed to evil gods. These kami pollute, and pollution is iniquity. From this iniquity the people are to be purged by the gods of purification, to whom offerings are duly made. He who would understand the passion for cleanliness which characterizes the Japanese must look for its source in their ancient religion.
Modern taste has removed from sight what were once the common people's symbols of the god-way, that is of ancestor worship. The extent of the phallus cult and its close and even vital connection with the god-way, and the general and innocent use of the now prohibited emblems, tax severely the credulity of the Occidental reader.
Its organic connection with the god-way may be clearly shown. To go farther back in point of time than the "Kojiki," we find that even before the development of art in very ancient Japan, the male gods were represented by a symbol which thus became an image of the deity himself.
Evidently these men of the god-way had passed the "stone age," and, probably without going through the intermediate bronze age, were artificers of iron and skilled in its use. Most of the names of metals and of many other substances, and the terms used in the arts and sciences, betray by their tell-tale etymology their Chinese origin.
It is nearly certain that the prehistoric Japanese did not borrow the literary forms of the god-way from China, as any one familiar with the short, evenly balanced and antithetical sentences of Chinese style can see at once. The norito are expressions, in the rhythmical and rhetorical form of worship, of the articles of faith set forth in the historic summary which we have given.
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