Asian Religions, page 25
7 For an overview, see Charles Prebish and Kenneth Tanaka, eds., The Faces of Buddhism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Charles Prebish, Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Robert Bluck, British Buddhism: Teachings, Practice and Development (London: Routledge, 2006).
8 Perhaps the most influential of the feminist critiques from within the Buddhist tradition can be found in the work of Rita Gross, a scholar-practitioner. See especially her Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). See also Karma Lekshe Tsomo, ed., Buddhist Women across Cultures: Realizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). For a contemporary response from an Asian Buddhist scholar, see Wei-yi Cheng, Buddhist Nuns in Taiwan and Sri Lanka: A Critique of the Feminist Perspective (London: Routledge, 2007).
9 See, for example, Hilda Gutierrez Baldoquin, ed., Dharma, Color, and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism (Berkeley, CA: Paralax Press, 2004).
10 There are many good recent books describing the practices and goals of Engaged Buddhism. Here are just two: Arnold Kotler, ed., Engaged Buddhist Reader: Ten Years of Engaged Buddhist Publishing (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1996); Stephanie Kaza, ed., Hooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2011).
11 For a background, see Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values, and Issues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
12 See the English writings or translations of Thich Nhat Hanh, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Maha Ghosananda, A. T. Ariyaratne, and Master Hsing Yun.
Part VII
Japanese Religions
27
Japanese Religion and Culture
In the eighteenth century, in response to foreign religion, culture, and trade, a nativistic movement developed among Japanese intellectuals to “restore” an indigenous, home-grown religious tradition, which they dated to a period in Japanese history prior to the importation of Chinese characters and cultural influence. This indigenous tradition was Shintō. Partly authentic and partly an invented tradition, Shintō came to represent the essence and core of Japanese culture. Claiming purely Japanese roots, Shintō can be said to be the native, indigenous, or autochthonous religion of Japan.
The name Shintō (神道) is derived from the Chinese “Way” (道, Dao) of the sacred (神, shen). Shintō is the so-called “Chinese pronunciation” of the characters 神道, which in purely Japanese pronunciation are rendered as kami-no-michi (神の道), “the Way of the Kami”.1 What is the meaning of the word kami? What is the Japanese understanding of its own native religious tradition? How is “the sacred” conceptionalized in Japanese culture?
Kami-no-michi is conventionally translated as “the Way of the Gods.” So kami are the gods of Japan, and Shintō describes the traditional beliefs and practices associated with these gods. But kami has other meanings too – it is a more complex semantic entity. It can be understood as a concrete noun – in which case it relates to a polytheistic conception of “gods” – or as an abstract noun, meaning “the sacred” – in which capacity it names a sacred quality of existence. Based upon this continuum, we can identify four kinds of kami:
1 mythological creators;
2 exceptional persons;
3 extraordinary things;
4 natural objects and implements.
Moving from top to bottom, from concrete to abstract, Shintō is both a polytheistic religion affirming the presence of many gods and an animistic religion affirming the sacred quality of all things Japanese. The present chapter will examine these various meanings of the word kami.
Mythological creators
A reconstructed history of Japan called the Kojiki (古事記, The Record of Ancient Things) describes the creation of the Oya-shima-no-kuni (大八洲国, Country of the Eight Great Islands) from the formless sea. The creators were the male god Izanagi (イザナギ) and the female god Izanami (イザナミ) (see Figure 27.1) who, performing a sacred dance in the clouds above the waves, grasped a spear with which they stirred the waters, then drew it up and formed the Japanese islands from the precipitate dripping from its point. The last drops shaped the highest place, Mt. Fuji – the axis mundi, central axis of the known world.
Figure 27.1 Izanagi and Izanami, by Kobayashi Eitaku, circa 1885. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, USA / William Sturgis Bigelow Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library.
Among the many gods and goddesses to which the creator gods gave birth was a daughter, Amaterasu 天照 (Sun's Brilliance), who emerges from an east-facing cave every morning, holding a circular mirror with which she guides the sun along its course. Her daily greeting gives Japan its name: the word “Japan” is the English equivalent of a Portuguese mispronunciation of the Japanese Nihon (日本), “Land of the Rising Sun.” Amaterasu is represented at the Grand Shrine at Ise simply by a large mirror, a material symbol of Shintō. She is an ōmi-kami (大神), a “great kami,” one of many ōmi-kami associated with the natural environment of the Japanese islands. This is the first type of kami: gods and goddesses who confer upon Japan the status of a sanctified place.
Exceptional persons: imperial descent from Amaterasu
The second type of kami is that of exceptional persons such as personal ancestors (mitama み霊, the family dead), who are worshipped in a kamidana (神棚) – a small shrine within the home. The family dead are kami, and in the Japanese context “ancestors” are indistinguishable from “gods.”
Stemming from the establishment of Shintō as the state religion in the eighteenth century, the emperors were themselves regarded as kami, “ancestors of the nation,” and therefore as divine beings. So kami include the ancestral line of the imperial family, from the first emperor, Jinmu (神武, r. 660–585 bce), to the 124th, Hirohito (裕仁), the longest reigning emperor in Japanese history (1926–1989). The divine status of the emperor is ritualized at his coronation, called the Daijosai (大嘗祭). In the course of this ceremony the new emperor enters a special chamber of the Grand Shrine at Ise and symbolically impregnates the goddess Amaterasu, who ultimately gives birth to the next emperor in the imperial line. Thus, symbolically at least, the emperor has sexual relations with the goddess, who is his own mother, and the imperial line passes from father to son. A succession crisis has occurred in recent years, as Crown Prince Naruhito (德仁), grandson of Emperor Hirohito and son of the current Emperor Akihito (明仁), has only one child with his wife, Princess Masako (雅子) – namely a girl named Aiko (愛子). Suffering from stress and depression attributed to the lack of a male heir, Princess Masako has withdrawn from the public eye since 2003. Time will tell whether Aiko (born in 2001) or Prince Naruhito's younger brother's son (born in 2006) will succeed to the Chrysanthemum Throne.
This question is politically insignificant, however, as Japan was forced to repudiate the divine status of the emperor at the conclusion of the Pacific War and as a condition of Japan's surrender to the Allied Powers. The document that formalized the separation between Shintō and the state in 1945 is entitled “The Directive for the Disestablishment of State Shintō” and was signed by Corporal Allen on behalf of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.2 Two elements from this document should be emphasized: first, the separation between Shintō and the imperial state, modeled upon the Disestablishment Clause of the US Constitution; and, second, the preservation of religious freedom at the level of the individual and the community. That is, the post-war Japanese constitution prohibits State Shintō while protecting Shrine Shintō (Shrine Shintō will be the subject of Chapter 28). While Emperor Hirohito emphasized his divine right to wage war against Japan's enemies – defended at the end of the war by young pilots called kamikaze (神風, “wind of the kami”) – his son Akihito, the current emperor, denies his divine status and is in fact a symbolic ruler with no political power.
Nevertheless, when Akihito ascended to the imperial throne in 1990, a Daijosai was performed, inciting protests both at home and abroad. A contemporary press release describes why:
Japan's Emperor Akihito, in the role of a Shintō chief priest, performed a controversial religious rite Thursday night, sparking protests around the country.
Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, American Vice President Dan Quayle, King Baudouin of Belgium, King Carl Gustav XVI of Sweden, President Suharto of Indonesia, and President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines observed Akihito's enthronement in gala public ceremonies last week. Last night, 900 Japanese dignitaries waited in darkness as Akihito, hidden from view, offered sacred rice to ancestral gods in an all-night communion ritual that critics say violates constitutional separation of state and religion.
Several thousand people in Tokyo, Osaka, and other cities demonstrated against the ceremony in the emperor's Tokyo palace, which was guarded by 30,000 police.
Despite security precautions, suspected leftist radicals set fire to four railway stations and three Shintō shrines around the country at about midnight Thursday. In addition, suspected radicals launched six rockets at the Katsura imperial palace in Kyoto. No injuries were reported.
Palace aides said the Daijosai would cost a total of $20 million in taxes. More than half went toward constructing a temporary shrine in the style of a 7th century Japanese palace, to be torn down in the coming weeks.3
In violation of the constitutional separation of church and state, government officials still worship at Yasukuni Shrine (靖国神社), the Shintō shrine to war heroes. Whenever a prime minister visits the shrine – which houses the spirits of executed war criminals as well as the tens of thousands of soldiers who died in the Japanese war of aggression in China and Southeast Asia – cries of outrage are heard from the governments of China, Korea, and others. A museum adjacent to Yasukuni Shrine, the Yūshūkan (遊就館), is a fascinating example of revisionist history, as it attempts to persuade the viewer, through 18 rooms of emotional display, that the Pacific War was in fact a defensive response to Western colonialism and a last-ditch effort to avoid annihilation at the hands of the United States and its allies. While the sentiments expressed at Yasukuni Shrine represent a small minority of Japanese opinion, they symbolize a remnant of State Shintō and the religious support for state power. For the most part, however, State Shintō and the idea of the divine status of the emperor (the emperor as kami) represent a relatively brief period of Japan's imperial past.
Extraordinary things: the cult of Mt. Fuji
The third type of kami consists of extraordinary things, especially those extraordinary things in nature associated with the Japanese landscape. A large boulder in a flowing stream, a stand of bamboo within a deciduous forest, a fox or a deer appearing and disappearing through the trees, all are kami – less “gods” per se than objects of sacred power, animae (“spirits”) of the mystical natural environment. Best known among these sacred things is Mt. Fuji (富士山, Figure 27.2), Japan's primary symbol, a sacred mountain rising mysteriously from the Kantō Plain. It is a visual “mystery,” though geologically explicable: Fuji is a dormant volcano, part of the Ring of Fire of the western Pacific Rim. So sacred is Fuji that its very appearance inspires reverence and awe, and sightings of the mountain are eagerly anticipated on the Shinkansen (新幹線, “new trunk line” – a high-speed train) between Tokyo and Osaka. Once when I was travelling on the Tokyo–Osaka Express, the train announcer made a public apology to the passengers because Fuji was obscured from view by clouds and rain. Not only do most Japanese hope to have a glimpse of Fuji, but many also aspire to climb it, though these days most visitors take busses to the seventh stage of the mountain and ascend in the early morning hours to the tenth – the summit. Once a year a matsuri (temple festival) is held at the foot of Mt. Fuji. It is a fire festival that marks the end of the climbing season and the beginning of fall, when ascent of the mountain is made impossibly dangerous by wind and cold. Even in fall and winter, however, Fuji Worship Societies conduct fire rites or stage ritual ascents of a miniature Fuji in Tokyo. As Japan's national symbol, Fuji's sacred status represents the sacred status of Japan as a whole.
Figure 27.2 “South Wind Clear Sky” (凱風快晴). From Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji (富嶽三十六景, Fugaku Sanjūroku-kei), by Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾 北斎), 1760–1849. Private Collection / The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library.
Natural objects and implements
The final type of kami is represented by natural objects and implements, especially those associated uniquely with Japan. This category includes the most ordinary things:
o-mizu お水 (water, esp. spring water);
o-cha お茶 (tea);
o-sake お酒 (rice wine);
go-han ご飯 (cooked rice);
o-furo お風呂 (the communal bath);
o-genki お元気 (the body, personal health);
o-sumo お相撲 (sumo wrestling) … and so on.
The Japanese language marks grammatically the “sacred quality” of these things with the help of the “honorifics” go and o – as in the sequence gohan o taberu (ご飯を食べる, “to eat rice”) or in the question ogenki desu ka? (お元気ですか, “how are you?” – or, more literally, “how is your honored body?”). As natural things originating in the sacred land of Japan, the life-sustaining foods and implements listed above are sanctified and sanctifying, bringing a sacred quality of existence to everyday life.
The sacred things associated with Japan are often personified. It is in this sense that Shintō can be described as an animistic religion: it gives anthropomorphic qualities to material things. In a book on the preparation of sushi, for example, notice the personification of the rice that forms the sushi base:
The rice cannot be just squeezed. Instead it must be molded. Squeezing the rice into a wad ruins the sushi base. Instead, the grains are invited to cling with just the right amount of pressure. It takes years to learn how to do it right.4
Even chopsticks (hashi, 箸【はし】) have a sacred quality. A popular Japanese dietician and food writer has described children today as hashi nashi zoku (箸無し族【はし なし ぞく】), “chopstickless culture” – because of their preference for Western fast food, which is eaten with one's hands. While chopsticks encourage communal dining around a common meal, family unity and sharing, and a healthy diet, the diminished use of chopsticks has had numerous ill effects: “chopstickless” eating is individualized, fast-paced, and unhealthy. For the author, Asako Aramaki, a Japanese “chopstickless culture” is out of touch with its social–cultural roots and has created a desacralized environment.5
Characteristics of Kami
The word kami is often translated simply as “gods,” and the word Shintō as “the Way of the Gods”; but kami includes more abstract conceptions of purity, mystery, sanctity, and sacrality. Shintō is both a polytheistic and an animistic, immanentalist religion – that is, it affirms a sacred quality of existence contained within the natural world of Japan and of the Japanese people. Shintō is, first and foremost, a “nature religion”; but, because Japanese culture is so closely associated with its natural environment, nature and culture are unified as one. As a result, even though the emperor has been divested of his divine status and State Shintō has been annulled constitutionally, it is still impossible to conceive of Shintō outside of Japan.
Unlike the Abrahamic God, who is a God of history overseeing the significant events of His people, the Shintō kami are immanent, present, resident. Though they are associated with a mythical past – the creation of “the eight great islands” of Japan – that past is perennially re-created, with Amaterasu's daily greeting of the sun. As an animistic religion, Shintō recognizes a divine quality in the most ordinary things; this is a religious conception that rejects the Western “spirit–body” dichotomy and asserts the presence of a sacred quality in natural objects – a “material spirituality” or “spiritualized materiality.” Japan is a divine land not in the sense that God acts in history, but rather in the sense that its rivers, mountains, springs, and harvests are imbued with a numinous quality: they are kami, “sacred.”
In today's world of commercialism and artificiality, Shintō has lost many of its adherents and much of its naturalistic appeal. Still, it is felt with a Japanese sense of uniqueness, safety and security of the home, and affirmation of natural instincts and impulses. Japanese idealize nature,6 including human nature: unlike Buddhism, Shintō celebrates sexuality, the body, fecundity, and natural processes. In fact Shintō festivals contain an element of bacchanalian celebration with drinking, dancing and singing, the parading of immense phalluses, and an unusual license given to young men and women. Within Japanese culture as a whole, naturalism and spontaneity are valued as a counterbalancing force to communal social ethics, in the same way that Chinese balance Confucian ethical norms with Taoist-inspired individualism.
Though modern Shintō is a product of the late imperial period, it claims to have its roots in the fog of prehistory. Imagine a religion that sees gods or godlike qualities in water, tea, food, mountains, and streams. Imagine a religion that celebrates nature and human nature, including springtime, seeding and sprouting, birth, childhood and adolescence, sexuality and physical pleasures, drinking and carousing, and communal effervescence. Imagine a religion that celebrates the sacred quality of home, from the local landscape to the people that inhabit it, and feels the presence of the gods within the domestic sphere as well as in the temple or at the shrine. Such a religion is Shintō.
