Shinto: The ancient religion of Japan. W. G. Aston

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ stages of thought being often confounded. In Shakespeare’s Tempest, Iris is at once the rainbow and an anthropomorphic messenger of the gods. Phoebus is not only the sun but a deity distinct from that luminary, though associated with it, as in the story of Phaeton. As the god of music and poetry, his solar function is not obvious. The same is true of the gods of the Vedas.

      Impersonality of Shinto.—The faculty of imagination was not powerful with the ancient Japanese. It was active, and produced many deities of all classes. But they are very feebly characterised. Indeed, most of them may be said to have no characters at all. They are popularly reckoned at eighty myriads, or eight hundred myriads. Though this is a fanciful exaggeration, Shinto is a highly polytheistic religion, and numbers its deities by hundreds, even if we do not go back to that earlier period when the rocks, the trees, and the foam of water had all power of speech. There is a constant depletion in their ranks by the mere force of oblivion, while, on the other hand, new deities come into notice. Different gods are identified with one another, or the same deities may be split up like Musubi into a pair, or a number of distinct persons. The same deity at different places may have different ranks and attributes.

      Spiritism.—The gods of ancient Shinto are, on the whole, as unspiritual beings as the gods of Olympus. Their doings are modelled on those of living men and women, not on those of ghosts. When Izanagi followed his wife Izanami to the land of the dead he found there not a spirit, but a putrefying corpse. Ghosts are as absent from the Kojiki and Nihongi as they are from the Old Testament Scriptures. Herbert Spencer’s ghost-theory of the origin of religion derives no support from the Japanese evidence. There is, however, a spiritual element in Shinto which demands notice. Some of the gods are represented as having mitama (august jewels or souls) which reside invisibly in their temples and are the means of communication between Heaven and this world. The Earth or Kosmos deity Ohonamochi had a mitama (double) which appeared to him in a divine radiance illuminating the sea, and obtained from him a promise that, in consideration of the assistance the latter had rendered in reducing the world to order, he should have a shrine consecrated to him at Mimoro. Susa no wo’s mitama was ‘settled’ at Susa in Idzumo. The element tama (soul) enters into the names of several deities. This implies a more or less spiritual conception of their nature. Sometimes we hear of two mitama, one of a gentle, the other of a violent nature.

      There are only one or two cases of deceased men having mitama. In one of these the mitama takes the shape of a bird. Metamorphoses are frequently mentioned in the old legends.

      Shekinah.—As in the analogous case of the Shekinah of Judaism, the doctrine of the mitama of gods apparently does not arise from that of the separability of the human soul and body. It seems rather to have been invented in order to smooth over the difficulty of conceiving how the gods of Heaven can exercise their power and hear and answer prayer in their shrines on earth. It may, however, owe something to the notion of separate human souls, which, though we do not find it in the older Japanese records, is familiar to races of a much lower degree of civilisation.

      Immortality of the Soul.—This doctrine is nowhere directly taught in the Shinto books. There is a land of Yomi to which we are told that some of the gods retired at death. It is represented as inhabited by various personifications of death and disease, but not by human beings or their ghosts, though the phrase ‘even pass of Yomi,’ like the facilis descensus Averni, seems intended to express the facility with which all we mortal men find our way thither. In one passage of the Nihongi, Yomi is clearly no more than a metaphor for the grave. A brother of Jimmu Tenno, the first Mikado, is said to have gone to the ‘Eternal Land’ at his death, and in a poem of the Manyōshiu, a deceased Mikado is said to have ascended into heaven. The prehistoric custom of sacrificing wives and attendants at the tombs of dead sovereigns may be thought to imply a belief in their continued existence. But there are other motives for this practice than the wish to gratify the deceased by providing him with companions in the other world. The norito or rituals contain no reference to the immortality of the soul.

      Shintai.—The mitama is represented in the shrine by a concrete object termed the Shintai or ‘God-body.’ It may be a mirror, a sword, a tablet with the god’s name, a pillow, a spear, etc. A round stone, which is cheap and durable, is a very common Shintai. The god is sometimes represented as attaching himself to the Shintai, and may be even considered identical with it by the ignorant. The mitama and shintai are frequently confounded. The latter was in many cases originally an offering which, by long association, came ultimately to be looked upon as partaking in some measure of the divine nature.

      Idols.—With a few unimportant exceptions, Shinto has no idols. The Shintai is not in the least anthropomorphic. The pictures of the gods sold at shrines at the present day are due to Chinese or Buddhist influence.

      Functions of Gods.—The two great classes of deities, Nature-gods and Man-gods, have a tendency mutually to encroach on each other’s functions, so that ultimately they become assimilated under the one general term Kami. As we have seen above, the Sun-goddess does not confine herself to her function as a giver of light and heat, but does many things characteristic of a magnified human being. Susa no wo, the Rain-storm, provides mankind with useful trees. He and his wife are regarded as gods of wedlock. Inari, the Grain-god, is a comprehensive answerer of prayer from a petition for a good harvest to one for the restoration of stolen property. On the other hand, a genuine deified man like Temmangu may send rain in time of drought. An obscure deity, known as Suitengu, is worshipped in Tokio at the present day as a protector against the perils of the sea, burglary, and the pains of parturition. Almost any Kami, whatever his origin, may send rain, bestow prosperity in trade, avert sickness, cure sickness or sterility, and so on, without much discrimination of function.

      Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

      Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

      Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

      Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/2wBDAAMCAgMCAgMDAwMEAwMEBQgFBQQEBQoHBwYIDAoMDAsK CwsNDhIQDQ4RDgsLEBYQERMUFRUVDA8XGBYUGBIUFRT/2wBDAQMEBAUEBQkFBQkUDQsNFBQUFBQU FBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBQUFBT/wAARCAWgA4QDASIA AhEBAxEB/8QAHgAAAgICAwEBAAAAAAAAAAAABQYEBwIDAQgJAAr/xABaEAABAwMDAwIDBQYDBgQA AhsBAgMEBQYRABIhBxMxQVEUImEIFTJxgRYjQlKRoQmxwRckM9Hh8FNicvElNEOCkqLSGFW

СКАЧАТЬ