Shintō

Shintō. The indigenous religion of Japan. This is not so much an organized, unified religion as a cultural complex of religious myths and rituals carried out originally by clan and village groups and centring on tutelary deities called kami. These kami can be thought of as deities with names and life-stories attached to them, as in the case of the sun goddess Amaterasu; as personifications of forces of nature; or as the spirit animating awe-inspiring natural features such as waterfalls, stones, mountains, or large and ancient trees. Later in Japanese recorded history, with the successful claim of the Yamato family to rule all of Japan, state-sponsored temples and cults arose to honour and petition kami that transcended familial and local concerns, and imperial/national rituals added a new layer to Shintō practice. The Yamato family was in the process of consolidating their power in the 6th century when Buddhism arrived in Japan. Thereafter, various proposals were made and decisions taken on the question of how to relate the foreign religion to the native one, or how Buddhas and Bodhisattvas were to relate to kami. The shinbutsu shūgō movement, beginning in the late 7th century, proposed that the kami were to be the guardians of the new religion, or, alternatively, that the kami, while powerful enough to answer certain petitions, were themselves caught in the cycle of suffering and in need of Buddhist teaching. Finally, the honji-suijaku theory identified the kami with the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, claiming them as particularized, local manifestations of their original and universal natures. Such theories paved the way for the combination of Shintō and Buddhism at the institutional level with the founding of jingūji, or ‘shrine-temples’ where both Shintō priests and Buddhist monks worked side by side, although with the Shintō functionaries generally in the subordinate position.

Buddhism also stimulated more philosophical reflection among Shintō priestly families. For example, Yoshida Shintō, founded in the 15th century by Urabe Kanetomo (1435–1511), proposed a cosmology according to which a great Shintō deity created the universe and all that was in it, including Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Later, in the Edo period (1603–1867), Shintō thinkers made use of new Neo-Confucian (see confucianism) ideas from China to bolster a philosophical system sophisticated enough to compete with Buddhism. Shintō also provided the rallying point for restoration of the imperial family to political power, since Amaterasu was both the kami of the nation and the tutelary god of the Yamato clan, and since the ruling warlords (Jap., shōgun) had made much use of Buddhist temples in their administration. Within this situation, it became easy to associate Shintō with the emperor and Buddhism with the warlords. When the Meiji emperor came to power in 1868 (see Meiji Restoration), he declared a policy of sundering the connection between Shintō and Buddhism (this split is called shinbutsu bunri in Japanese). This put an end to syncretism between Shintō and Buddhism, although many of the new religions that have appeared in Japan since the early 1800s, while ostensibly basing themselves on either Buddhism or Shintō, have in fact mixed elements of the two in a new synthesis.