W. G. Aston

“ The God of a Tajima shrine says:--
When the sky is clear, and the wind hums in the fir-trees, 'tis the heart of a God who thus reveals himself.
An oracle of Hachiman (the War-God) enjoins on his worshippers to be full of pity and mercy for beggars and lepers, and even for ants and crickets. Those whose pity and charity are wide will have their precious cord (of life) extended immeasurably; their posterity will be spread abroad like the wings of a crane. They will become the upright heart of the Gods of Heaven. ”

“ Each deed thou hast done Dies, revives, goes to work in the world, and is as the sun Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface, Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace The results of his past summer prime--so each ray of thy will, Every flash of thy passion and prowess long over, shall thrill Thy whole people, the countless, with ardour till they too give forth A like cheer to their sons, who in turn fill the south and the north With the radiance thy deed was the germ of----. ”

“ We ought not, for example, to assume that ancestor-worship is necessarily divine worship. It may only mean acts indicating affection and reverence for the dead, common to ourselves with non-Christian peoples, and need not involve any superstitious belief in a supernatural power exercised by dead forefathers or heroes. In modern Japan, ancestor-worship is a comparatively rational cult, and it is surely undesirable that missionaries should create for themselves great and needless difficulties by condemning it indiscriminately. ”

“ If, apart from these, there should be danger of rebellion or riot by savages, or of disturbance by brigands at home, or again of drought, flood or storm, of pestilence or famine such as would cause great disaster to the State or deep sorrow to the people, deign to sweep away and destroy it utterly before it takes form. Be pleased to let the Under-Heaven be free from alarms and all the country enjoy peace by thy help and protection. Grant thy gracious favour to the Sovran Grandchild, guarding his august person by day and by night, firm and enduring as Heaven and Earth, as the Sun and the Moon. ”

“ Because the Great Deity has bestowed on him the lands of the four quarters over which her glance extends as far as where the wall of Heaven rises, as far as where the bounds of Earth stand up, as far as the blue clouds are diffused, as far as where the white clouds settle down opposite, by the blue sea-plain, as far as the prows of ships can go without letting dry their poles and oars ”

“ It is rather, as Schiller called the worship of the gods of Greece, a Wonnedienst, a religion inspired by love and gratitude more than by fear. The three greatest gods, viz. the Sun-goddess, the Food-goddess, and Ohonamochi (a god of Earth, the universal provider) , are all beneficent beings, though they may send a curse when offended by the neglect of their worship or an insult to their shrines. Their worshippers come before them with gladness, addressing them as fathers, parents, or dear divine ancestors, and their festivals are occasions of rejoicing. ”

“ Hereupon Agatamori, the ancestor of the Omi of Kasa, a man of fierce temper and of great bodily strength, stood over the pool of the river-fork and flung into the water three whole calabashes, saying: 'Thou art continually belching up poison and therewithal plaguing travellers. I will kill thee, thou water-dragon. If thou canst sink these calabashes, then will I take myself away, but if thou canst not sink them, then will I cut thy body to pieces.' Now the water-dragon changed itself into a deer and tried to draw down the calabashes, but the calabashes would not sink. ”

“ And when the so-called ancestors of the Japanese race are not actually Nature-gods, they are usually the satellites or children of Nature-gods. In imitation of the Mikados who selected the Sun-goddess as their ancestral deity, the hereditary corporations or clans by whom in ancient times the Government of Japan, central and local, was carried on, chose for themselves, or perhaps invented, nature-deities, or their children or ministers, as their patron-gods, to whom special worship was paid. From this to a belief in their descent from him as an ancestor, the transition was easy. ”

“ If, as Scotus Erigena has well said, "every visible and invisible creature is a theophany or appearance of God," what more striking aspect of Him can there be to the uncultured mind than the Sun? In a later stage of intellectual development men find a fuller revelation of Him in the moral order of the world, in the laws of human progress, and in the spiritual experiences of saints and sages, culminating in a synthesis of all the divine aspects of the universe in one harmonious whole. ”

“ The reason is that we make loving-kindness our shintai.
Hear all men! If you desire to obtain help from the Gods, put away pride. Even a hair of pride shuts you off from the Gods as it were by a great cloud.
Hear all men! The good Kami find their strength and their support in piety. Therefore they love not the offerings of those who practise tedious ceremonies. ”

“ Monotheism was an impossibility in ancient Japan. But we may trace certain tendencies in this direction which are not without interest. A nation may pass from polytheism to monotheism in three ways: Firstly, by singling out one deity and causing him to absorb the functions and the worship of the rest; secondly, by a fresh deification of a wider conception of the universe; and thirdly, by the dethroning of the native deities in favour of a single God of foreign origin. It is this last, the most usual fate of polytheisms, which threatens the old Gods of Japan. ”

“ Oracle of the God of Kashima [341] :--
I am the protector of Japan against foreign violence and break the spear-points of Heavenly demons and Earthly demons. All enjoy my divine power. I derive strength from the multiplication of devout men in the land. Then do the forces of demons melt away like snow in the sun. When devout men are few, my powers dwindle, my heart is distressed and the demon powers gain vigour while the divine power is weakened.
Oracle of the God of Atsuta:--
All ye men who dwell under Heaven. Receive the just commands of the Gods. ”

“ The deification of the Sun and the recognition of the fact that there is love for mankind in the warmth and light which proceed from him was a truly magnificent idea in a world destitute of religion. The Izanagi myth, by which so many of the Gods were assigned a common parentage, was a brilliant conception, paving the way towards monotheism. Musubi, the God of Growth, marks a further stage of progress in this direction. To these may be added such few and vague glimpses as were caught of the truth that offences against our neighbour are also displeasing to the Gods. ”

“ In justification of man-worship, it may also be pleaded that if the nature-deity is truer, the man-deity is nearer to us and more capable of vivid realization. And as it is from the sympathetic recognition of life in our fellow men that we proceed to the recognition of life in the so-called inanimate universe, so it is by the contemplation of the highest types of humanity that we are able to refine and exalt our conception of divinity. ”

“ Usually the cooking furnace is the deity. The Japanese kitchen wench at the present day calls her cooking range Hettsui-sama, the termination sama implying personification and respect. She thinks it unlucky to lay down an edge-tool on it. But the God is also conceived of as detached from the furnace. Thus he is said to have taught the art of cooking to mankind. In that case the kama, or pot, is his shintai, or material representative. There was a Kama-matsuri (pot festival) at Kiōto before the revolution. It was celebrated at the beginning of the year, when Shinto priests read harahi. ”

“ Finding that the bare assertion that they are alive produces little impression, the poet or seer goes a step further, and boldly ascribes to them human form, passions, actions, and character. Myth and metaphor are his instruments. The God has bodily parts, parents, sex, and children. He eats, drinks, is angry or alarmed, loves, fights, weaves, cultivates the ground, fishes, hunts, and dies. With the advance of social organization he is a chief or a king. Sometimes in these metaphors we can trace a special application to the deity's natural functions. ”

“ There is no summer and winter myth in the old Japanese books, no deluge myth, and no eclipse myth. There is, strange to say, no earthquake myth, and but one solitary mention of a God of Earthquakes. There are no astral myths, no "Returning Saviour" myth, and no "Journey of the Dead" beyond the bare mention of an "Even Pass of Yomi," or Hades. The creation of mankind is not accounted for. [Pg 83]
Myth and Ritual.--When a myth and a ceremony relate to the same subject-matter, which comes first in order of time? ”

“ Emotion comprises gratitude, hope, and fear. Thought yields conceptions and beliefs. Religious conduct consists in doing that which is pleasing to the superior powers, and in refraining from acts which are thought to be offensive to them. It includes worship, purity, and morality.
These elements of religion are inseparable. Emotion stimulates and sharpens the intellectual faculties, which in turn provide fresh food for emotion. Each without the other is evanescent and barren. Nothing worthy of the name of religion is possible without a long succession of alternate moods of thought and feeling. ”

“ In the first of these three phases, man-worship is not religion. So long as a man is honoured for those qualities only which he really possesses or possessed, he cannot be called a God. But although rational man-worship is not in itself religion, it is a necessary factor in its development. Our sentiments of gratitude and awe towards the great nature-powers spring up in hearts already prepared by the feelings which we entertain towards our parents, superiors, and other fellow-men. Whether individually or collectively, a man loves his parents before he loves God. ”

“ Great Deity, placing herself at the head of all the deities of the land, stay and ward off, sweep away and expel the enemy before his first arrow is shot. Should his designs ripen so far that his ships must come hither, let them not enter within our borders, but send them back to drift and founder. Suffer not the solid reasons for our country being feared as the Divine Country to be sodden and destroyed. ”

“ The association of the ideas of light, splendour, and brightness with divinity has its origin in a primæval sun-worship. William the Conqueror swore "by the splendour of God." Divine contains the root div, brightness. Milton calls light "of the eternal co-eternal beam." No doubt so long as a nation is hesitating between sun-worship and a higher form of religion there is a reason for treating the former with contempt and aversion. No form of faith is so odious--because of the danger of relapse--as that from which we have emerged with painful effort to something higher. ”

“ To the people even Tenshōdaijin (the Sun Goddess) is nothing more than the great providential deity who resides at Ise. Her solar quality is practically forgotten. Men, on the other hand, may be exalted to such a height by the ascription to them of nature-powers that their original humanity is much obscured.
It is sometimes difficult to determine to which of the two currents of religious thought a particular deity belongs. For example, we find a sword worshipped as a deity. ”

“ The manner of creation is variously represented. In no case is anything made out of nothing. The first act of creation was the formation of an island out of the drippings of the brine of the chaos-ocean from a spear. The other parts of Japan and many of the deities were produced by the ordinary process of generation. The functions of Izanagi and Izanami are elsewhere described as "putting in order and fully consolidating" the floating land beneath. This is precisely what Ohonamochi is represented as doing several generations of Gods later. ”

“ Izanagi and Izanami belong to that stage of religious progress in which the conception has been reached of powerful sentient beings separate from external nature. Untrue in itself, it has served a useful purpose. It is obviously easier for nations with little scientific knowledge to conceive of the same being as a ruler or parent of the Sun, Moon, and Earth, with all its human concerns, than to recognize in these phenomena a harmonious living whole. ”

“ It is only by exception that the child, the savage, and the primitive man attribute life to inanimate things. This requires imagination, a faculty which is notoriously feebler with them than with the adult civilized man. The progress of humanity is from a sporadic towards a general recognition of will in or behind the material universe, from fitful and sportive fancies involving this idea to an earnest and steady conviction of its truth, and from the fragmentary personification of the part as animated to the conception of a living, universal whole. ”

“ The unknown author or authors of 'Cinderella' surely need not be credited with a belief that pumpkins can be converted into coaches by the stroke of a fairy wand; the inventor of the story of the birth of Minerva from the brain of Jupiter knew quite well that such obstetrical operations were not feasible; and it is unnecessary to believe that the myth-makers of the Kojiki and Nihongi thought that children could be produced by crunching jewels in the mouth and spitting them out.
There is, however, an exception to the rule that a storyteller does not believe in the truth of his own inventions. ”

“ When they are told that the Sun is a goddess, who walks, weaves, wears armour, sows rice, and so on, they take these statements literally, combining an implicit belief in them with the worship of the Sun itself. Even Motoöri says that it is the actual Sun in Heaven which we worship as Ama-terasu no Oho-Kami (the Heaven-shining-great Deity) , while he believes at the same time that the Sun-myth of the Kojiki is real history. A time comes when it is objected that the Sun has no arms or legs necessary for the performance of the actions attributed to her. ”

“ Inspiration.--Such knowledge as we possess of the divine will and nature comes in the first place to the nobler individuals of our race, men in whom high intellectual powers are harmoniously allied to keen and healthy emotional susceptibilities and ripened by long years of experience and reflection. They it is--the seers, inspired prophets, men of genius, or by whatever name we may call them--who furnish the material out of which religion is developed, not the vulgar, with their superstitions which are only a product of its decay. ”

“ I would rather describe his mental attitude as a piecemeal conception of the universe as alive, just as he looks on his fellow man as alive without analyzing him into the two distinct entities of body and soul. A dog knows quite well the difference between alive and dead; but the distinction between body and soul is far beyond his intellectual capacity.
In Japan the process of spiritualizing the Gods has not gone very far. Like the Gods of the Homeric Olympus, [9] the Shinto deities are, on the whole, unspiritual beings. ”

“ To the lower class of Japanese at the present day, and especially to women and children, O tentō sama is the actual sun--sexless, mythless, and unencumbered by any formal cult, but looked up to as a moral being who rewards the good, punishes the wicked, and enforces oaths made in his name. In his 'Religions of Japan,' Dr. Griffis says: "To the common people the Sun is actually a God, as none can doubt who sees them worshipping it morning and evening. ”

“ There is nothing spiritual about these two deities. All their actions are modelled not on those of ghosts, but on those of living men. Even when Izanami dies and goes down to the land of Yomi, she does not become a ghost, but a putrefying corpse. ”