Week 8: Religious History
Author: Reading: Important points:
Helen Hardacre Shintoism
1. In the earliest times, the Japanese people have worshipped Kami.
- Kami may be the spirits of a particular place or natural forces like wind, rivers, and
mountains.
- Kamis such as Inari which is associated with agriculture and commercial success, grew out
of communal customs and have no textual basis.
- Some kami originated as the deified spirits of human being; in the early modern era, feudal
lords were even being deified as kami.
- Every time new settlements were founded, a shrine would be erected for the spirits of that
place as a way of honoring them and gaining their protection. The motivation for building a
shrine stems from the idea that the Kami are everywhere
- Shinto encompasses doctrines, institutions, ritual, and communal life based on Kami
worship, including representations of Kami in the arts.
2. Writing the History of Shinto
- Before the surrender, the Japanese government administered Shinto shrine ceremonies,
using them to unite the people behind the regime, specifying minutely what rites were to be
performed, when, by what rank of priests, at what kinds of shrines, and with what kind of
offerings.
- Shinto seen to be the indigenous faith of the Japanese people; they worshipped kami as an
expression of their native racial faith which arose in the mystic days of remote antiquity.
- Ono asserts that the Japanese people are unified in their worship of the Kami, even though
he was aware that many Japanese reject Shinto entirely
- Shinto is said to have emerged with or through the unification of the people under the
Yamato dynasty.
- Historian Kuroda Toshio has demonstrated persuasively how conceptualizing Shinto as
Japan’s timeless, indigenous faith cannot be sustained. In place of romanticized images, he
proposed instead that from ancient times Shinto had been cocooned within Japanese
 Buddhism, so much so that it is nearly impossible to discern its separate existence for most
of Japanese history.

3. The organization of this study

- Most enduring themes running through Shinto’s history is the rhetoric of the ‘indigenous’
- The first dichotomy is between the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘foreign’
- The second dichotomy is between the ‘public’ and the private’
- The idea of jingi arose to distinguish the sovereign’s worship of Kami, regarded as
“indigenous,” from his court’s Buddhist rites. An annual calendar of Kami rituals was
embodied in a distinct law code called Jingiryō, while separate codes governed Buddhism.
A branch of government called the Jingikan, literally the jingi ministry, or Ministry of
Divinities, was formed to oversee Kami-related affairs at court and at provincial shrines.
- Main elements of the ‘indigenous’ consists of the Kami, a divine monarch and publicly
authorized ritualists.
- Modern Shinto now refers to ‘State Shinto’  describes Japanese government’s takeover of
shrine affairs that began in the Meiji period, but a variety of problems has been raised
regarding the term  Alternative term of ‘state management’ of religion now being
proposed
- A new formula holding that shrines represent “the nation’s rites and creed” (kokka no sōshi)
explained that shrines are not religious. A powerful ideal of Shinto providing state ritual
through which the populace would unite to glorify the nation and its sovereign emerged.
- Shrines devoted to Kami other than those connected to the throne found their deities
replaced by government decree  kind of a state management of religion
- Many new shrines were built with popular support, some for imperial loyalists from history,
the Yasukuni Shrine for the war dead of the Restoration, and numerous shrines in Hokkaidō,
which was being settled on a large scale by Japanese pioneers from the main islands. The
post-Restoration creation of these shrines initiated new relations among shrines,
government, and the people, depending heavily on local fundraising, burnishing the image
of local boosters, and producing significant business opportunities. These new relationships,
 as well as government administration of shrines, went considerably beyond the parameters
of “state management,” involving the people much more, and extending further into the
realm of ideology than that bland phrase suggests  Shrines built with popular support +
move away from state management of religion but the production of significant business
opportunities makes one think if the shrines also constructed with an economic goal in mind

4. Permeation of daily life with Shinto rituals

- The government enforces students in school to comply with school ceremonies, and requires
students to participate in visits to local shrines to perform volunteer labor and from the
1930s orchestrated school trips to the Ise shrines.
- School ceremonies have also become a focus for stigmatizing anyone who dissented from
the required observances, especially Christians
- The combination of these and other compulsory or semi-compulsory ceremonies has
resulted in the permeation of daily life with Shinto ritual.
- Shrines have become potent symbols of home, duty, ethnic identity, the nation and self-
sacrifice.

William E. Deal A Cultural History of 1. Japanese Buddhist thought and language should not be treated as part of a unitary and
and Brian Japanese Buddhism unchanging cognitive complex. Instead, they are differernt Japanese Buddhist discourses.
Ruppert 2. Japanese Buddhists ‘performed’ Japanese Buddhism at both the state and local levels,
utilized material objects as a means of ritual exchange and enactment, and undertook
multiple interpretations that utilized Buddhist language toward different and sometimes
competing religious, social, and political ends.
3. Nara and Heian periods were significant because of the ruling family’s huge support of
Buddhist monastics and temples as well as supporting the spread and propagation of
Buddhism beyond the circle of court families.
- Construction of temples like the Todaiji
- Ritual significance of sutra-copying bureaus
- Monastic hierarchy
- Increased closeness in the relationship between court families and Buddhist clerics
- Increasing prominence of Buddhist rituals performed for the protection of the ruling class
4. Early Medieval Buddhism (950-1300)
- This period saw the rise of importance in Pure Land Buddhist practices and discourses,
important temples and pilgrimage sites, the role of Buddhas and bodhisattvas in Japanese
religious lives
- Marked the seminal beginnings of ‘New Kamakura Buddhisms’
- Changing relationship between Buddhism and kami worship in this time period
5. Late Medieval Buddhism (1300-1467)
- This period was marked by the temporal disintergration of the royal family and its
splintering into the northern and southern courts and the establishment of the Ashikaga
shogunate
- This period would also culminate in the devastating Ōnin war  a lot of political instability
and chaos
- But this chaos contributed to the ease in which monks were able to travel throughout Japan
and they founded temples in locations throughout eastern and western Japan
- Monks of warrior background also took on an increasingly prominent role within Buddhist
culture
- Zen monks began to specialize in performing funerals for parishioners, which contributed to
the wider dissemination of Buddhism to the populace.
- A series of arts informed by Buddhist themes and practices became increasingly prominent
among warriors, aristocrats, and, in some cases, the larger populace.
- Women also became more prominent in Buddhism
- Wars also led to the rise of Buddhism  chaos will cause people to look for peace and a
refuge; religion is usually the way and Buddhism promoted the way of peace

6. Buddhism and the Transition to the Modern Era (1467-1800)

- The invention of mass printing allowed for a new level of dissemination of Buddhist texts;
 even so-called ‘sacred’ works of Japanese Buddhist traditions came to be commonly
purchased
- Allowed Buddhism to become more accessible to the public
- Strong support of the shogunate for Buddhism esp. during this Edo period
- We will see that although the head-branch system and the temple affiliation system 0idan;
alt. danka seido) seem to have initially developed prior to the Edo shogunate and partially in
reaction to local needs, it was the shogunate that consolidated these trends. It was the
shogunate that especially promoted reclassification of lineages to promote clearer social
categories among Buddhists, including application of Kogi and Shingi Shingon as modes of
Shingon organization, increased use of the "Tendai" sectarian label for both Enryakuji
(Hiei)-a tliated and Onjoji (Miidera)-a iliated lineages, and undertook novel policies
designed generally to weaken the authority of traditional kenmitsu monasteries over
organizations of itinerant religious practitioners.
- Buddhists as a whole experienced a revival and a renaissance of learning in the Edo period.
The strict regulations undertaken by the regime actually helped to promote vital interest in
Buddhist studies.

Confucianism as 1. The formulation of Confucianism in Japan and the formation of the Japanese state were
cultural capital thereby concurrent and symbiotic processes
2. The Kojiki, one of the two core early texts legitimizing the Japanese state, opens with an
introduction that is modeled exactly on the style of the introduction to the Wujing Zhengyi,
which was a collection of the Confucian classics from the Tang period
3. The structure of the Nihon Shoki, another text that legitimized the early Japanese state, was
also based on Chinese dynastic histories which were part of the Confucian canon  shows
how Confucianism already infiltrated Japan since the early periods.
4. Non-Japanese, at this time meaning any peoples on the archipelago not willing to submit to
the authority of the Yamato sovereign, were referred to in Nihon Shoki as “barbarians”
using the same phrasing employed in the Chinese Confucian classic The Book of Rites.
Early Japanese state documents also mimic Confucian tradition in narrating the world in
terms of a unipolar imperial order of civilization. They narrate the conduct of state
 ceremonies involving subjugated “barbarian” peoples and surrounding states along the lines
of this logic. In this sense, Confucian universalism was used in Japan to justify ideas of
cultural superiority and military domination.
5. Culture and civilization in the Confucian sense were deeply rooted in a brutal politics of
submission that transcended ethnicity and allowed for the institutionlization of a strict class
and status system.

6. Reach of influence of Confucianism in Japan

- Confucianism clearly influenced the form of the earliest and most important Japanese
historical documents such as the state histories discussed earlier.
- The entire legal and administrative structure of the imperial state was based on Chinese
models were heavily influenced by Confucian thought
- But Confucian practice limited to spheres of government education but less central to the
religious practices that was used to authenticate and legitimize imperial rule
- But there is also a lack of indigenous Japanese Confucian writing compared to the number
of Japanese Buddhist treatises and Japanese and Chinese works of poetry
- Seen more to be a teaching/moral teaching rather than a religion
- Confucianism was valued more as a source of knowledge than a religious or philosophical
system that could answer people’s questions on human existence.
- The reason why Confucianism was so weak in its reach and influence was because it
reached only to state institutions and engaged only a limited number of the lower to mid-
level ranks of the state functionaries  so Confucianism faded when the imperial state
structures faded because it had no influence and no reach outside them

7. Medieval Confucianism
- Confucianism in medieval Japan manifested itself in a vibrant literary culture associated
with Zen monasticism
- This movement was based in the new Zen monasteries which were established and
popularized by Japanese samurai-led shogunal states between the 13th and 15th centuries
- Medieval Japanese Confucianism’s positioning in the new vibrant cultural milieu of Five
 Mountains Zen culture gave it a comparatively more socially integrated, creative and
transnational character. The Five Mountains Zen culture it was associated with represented a
new force of continental cultural influence and individual Buddhist practice in Japan.

8. Zen Bridge to China

- There was a regular flow of Zen monks moving between Japan and China through the 13th
and 14th centuries and Japan, by carrying out active trade with China under the Muromachi
and Kamakura Shogunate, meant that they continually had Chinese contact and influence.

9. Practice, politics and Shinto

- The most enduring Confucian influence on general Japanese cultural practice is its influence
on funeral rites
- The standardization of funeral rites in Japan that led to the contemporary form of Japanese
Buddhist funerals began in the 14th century under Zen influence
- The Confucianism of the medieval period thus began the process of a much larger-scale
engagement with Confucianism by large sections of Japanese society. Led increasingly by
the warlord leaders of the rising new settlement of early modern Japan instead of the
imperial aristocracy, this new engagement would usher in the golden age of Confucianism
under Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), the regime that laid the foundations of
modern Japan.
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