The Shinto Cult E-Book

Milton Spenser Terry

• Herausgeber: E-BOOKARAMA
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

First published in 1910, "The Shinto Cult" by Milton Spenser Terry is the substance of a course of lectures on the old Shinto cult which the author has given for a number of years to his classes in Comparative Religion. They are here condensed and adapted to the purpose of a little manual which, it is believed, may interest many readers, and bring together within a small space information gathered from many sources not easily accessible to ordinary students. 
Originally written as lectures for his comparative religion course, this volume represents Terry’s investigation into the Shinto religion to enlighten missionaries, apologetics students, and interested Christians. This concise work includes observations on Christian interactions with Shinto religion and culture, as well as Shinto’s influences from Buddhism, Confucianism, and recent religious indifference.

Leseprobe

Table of contents

THE SHINTO CULT

Note

1. The Country

2. Is Shinto A Religion?

3. Origin And Relative Age Of The People.

4. Meaning Of The Word Shinto

5. Sources Of Information

6. Japanese Cosmogony And Mythology

7. The Japanese A Self-Centered People

8. Essence Of The Shinto Cult

9. The Great Sanctuaries

10. Five Noteworthy Objects Connected With The Worship

11. The Ancestor Worship

12. Elements Of Animism

13. The Domestic Cult

14. The Communal Cult

15. The National Cult

16. The Harvest Service

17. The Great Purification

18. Other Ritual Services

19. Influence Of China On Japanese Thought

20. Influence Of Buddhism

21. Revival Of Pure Shinto

22. Esoteric Shinto

23. Mingling Of Shinto, Confucianism, And Buddhism

24. Roman Catholicism In Japan

25. Present Religious Indifference

26. Concluding Observations And Suggestions

Select Bibliography

THE SHINTO CULT

Milton Spenser Terry

A Christian Study of the Ancient Religion of Japan

Note

The following pages are the substance of a course of lectures on the old Shinto cult which the author has been giving for a number of years to his classes in Comparative Religion. They are here condensed and adapted to the purpose of a little manual which, it is believed, may interest many readers, and bring together within a small space information gathered from many sources not easily accessible to ordinary students. At the same time it is hoped that this little volume may serve to suggest some valuable hints to the Christian missionary who is to come face to face with the Japanese people in their "beautiful land of the reed plains and the fresh ears of rice." It is possible that some portions, if not every jot and tittle, of this ancient cult may, like the law and the prophets of Israel, find a glorious fulfillment in the pure gospel of Jesus Christ. The principal authorities relied on in the preparation of this essay are named in the Select Bibliography given at the end.

1. The Country

In taking up the study of a religion which has never extended beyond the limits of an easily defined territory, we may appropriately first of all take a hasty glance at the geographical outlines of the system we call Shinto, the primitive faith of the people of Japan. To appreciate the geographical position of Japan, one needs to have before him a map of the world. He may then see at a glance how remarkably the three thousand islands of that Empire stretch for some twenty-five hundred miles along the coast of Asia, from Kamchatka on the north to the island of Formosa on the south, which island is crossed by the tropic of Cancer. It may be called the longest and the narrowest country in the world. It looks like an immense sea-serpent, with its northern tail twisting toward the Aleutian Islands, which our Government acquired from Russia in 1867, and its southern head pointing toward the Philippine Islands, which we acquired from Spain in recent years. It seems to guard the whole eastern coast of Asia, and along with China, on the mainland, is suspected and feared by some European diplomats as embodying some sort of a "Yellow Peril." It may be that its noteworthy contiguity to our Alaskan possessions at one extremity and our Philippine wards at the other bodes some sort of peril to any Western nation that may hereafter presume to enlarge its dominions in the Orient by force of arms.

Attention has often been called to the fact that the British Isles, in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the northwestern coast of Europe, occupy a corresponding geographical relation to the Western world. The islands themselves are comparatively small, but their measuring line has gone out into all the earth, and their civilization is dominating the world. Asia, on the east of the Eastern hemisphere, is a land of innumerable population; Europe, on the west, is a land of new ideas and of hopeful progress. The United States, resting her Atlantean shoulder on the island-empire of Europe, and her Pacific shoulder on the island-empire of the Orient, may be, in the order of God, a mighty mediator, possessed both of a great population and of new and commanding ideas, and destined to bring about the universal peace, the sound knowledge, and the highest prosperity of the world.

We are told that Japan is a country of diversified beauty. Compassed round about with the vast ocean, yet not far from the Asiatic mainland; supplied also with a wonderful inland sea, and with lakes and rivers and fountains of waters; a land of mountains, and valleys, and broad meadows, and all manner of trees and shrubs and fruits and flowers, and charming landscapes, and all varieties of climate; it is no wonder that the people and their poets have called this group of islands "the sun's nest," "the country of the sun-goddess," "the region between heaven and earth," "islands of the congealed drop," "the grand land of the eight isles," "central land of reed-plains," "land of the ears of fresh rice," "land of a thousand autumns," and other similar names indicative of manifold excellence. 1

This island-empire of the Orient is the home of the religious cult called "Shinto," a religion which has never traveled nor sought to propagate itself beyond the dominions of Japan. It has never put itself in a hostile attitude toward any other form of religion, either at home or abroad, except when a foreign cult has entered its ancient home and sought to meddle with affairs of State or to interfere with loyalty to the Emperor.

2. Is Shinto A Religion?

2. Is Shinto A Religion?

At a meeting of the Society of Science, held at Tokyo in 1890, the president of the Imperial University expressed the opinion that Shinto should not be regarded as a religion. He believed it to be an essential element in the existing national thought and feeling of Japan, but destitute of the essential qualities of a strictly religious cult. Others have expressed a similar opinion; but we are disposed to think that this judgment arises from an incorrect concept of religion, and a consequent defective definition of the same. A similar denial has been made of the religious character of other cults and systems. Taoism, Confucianism, and even Buddhism have been said to lack the elements essential to a real religion. But if these systems do not constitute a religion for the peoples who accept them, they are in every case their substitute for religion. Any religion or any form of religion may so involve its thought and its practices with philosophical speculation, or with social customs, or with the political management of the State, as to have the appearance of a philosophical or a political system, rather than a form of religion. But, however it may, in such ways, ignore the religious ideas and practices of other systems, if there be no other religious cult among the people, the philosophy, the ethical policy and the customs, which make up this important element of the civilization and the national life, are as truly tantamount to a religious cult as any form of faith and practice which all men agree to call religion.

3. Origin And Relative Age Of The People.

The main body of the Japanese people are believed to have migrated in old times from the northern central part of Asia, and to have worked their way eastward into Korea, and thence into the islands of Japan. They expelled or subjugated the aborigines of the country, and made themselves masters of the great islands and the inland and surrounding seas. But their origin and early history are involved in dense obscurity. They doubtless brought with them from their earlier dwellings in Asia various myths, legends, and traditions, and these grew and strengthened amid the simple habits of life which they adopted in their new island-world. According to a writer 2 in the Westminster Review of July, 1878, Japan is yet, in more senses than one, a young country. Their language and their institutions "show us a people still in a very early stage of development." W. G. Aston holds that the earliest date of accepted Japanese chronology is A. D. 461, and he says that Japanese history, properly so called, can not be said to exist previous to A. D. 500. He regards Korean history more trustworthy than that of Japan previous to that date. 3 According to Satow, "everything points to the descent of the Japanese people in great part from a race of Turanian origin, who crossed over from the continent by way of the islands Tsushima and Iki, which form the natural stepping-stones from Korea to Japan." 4

But the last twenty-five years have witnessed a most remarkable advance in the use of modern inventions, and more than any other nation of the far East have the Japanese displayed both a willingness and an ambition to improve their condition by means of the ideas and usages of Western civilization. The war with China in 1894, and that with Russia in 1904-1905, displayed a wisdom, tact, and energy which were a great surprise to the world. The self-poise, the generosity, the far-sighted statesmanship exhibited in her concluding terms of peace with her haughty but defeated enemy, have commanded universal admiration. These facts make the study of this people's ancient religious cult, which is still a powerful element in the popular life, a matter of no little interest at the present time. 5

4. Meaning Of The Word Shinto

The word Shinto means the "way of the gods." It came into use when Buddhism was introduced into Japan, and designates the old, ancestral worship as a way of the gods distinct from the way of the Buddhists, or of any other rival way of religious life. The Japanese name is Kami no michi. In its essential elements it is a commingling of Animism and ancestor-worship. Not only are the spirits of departed ancestors reckoned among the gods, but there are innumerable deities of other kind and character. The mountains and valleys, the rivers and the seas, the trees, the wind, the thunder, the fire, all moving things and objects of sense are supposed to have each a deity within. And these deities seem for the most part to have been regarded as beneficent powers, and their worship is of a joyous kind.