Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Vol. 13: Japan (1917) - Page 22

teaching of Confucianism, but also against all the highly spiritual preaching of Buddhism. Buddhism entered the land with the Chinese invasion and was gradually adopted by most of the Japanese; however, it had to make allowances for the primeval faith and incorporate the ideas of Shinto. So today, Buddhism and Shintoism exist side by side, as coordinate parts of a single religious system.

Shintoism is a sort of ancestor worship, which seeks the favor of the good spirits from the past while dreading the attacks of evil spirits. The chief single shrine in Japan today, recently highly honored by the new Mikado, is that of the Sun-goddess at Ise, who is revered as the great ancestress of all the Mikados and, in some sense, of all the Japanese people.

The early rituals recited by the Shinto priests, some of them doubtless of an antiquity far exceeding the “Kojiki,” are preserved to us by the “Yengishiki.” This is a book in which the rituals were recorded a thousand years ago (A.D. 927). Yet these chants have the same form in the “Yengishiki” in which they are often repeated today. In other words, Shintoism does not change; it clings to the recital of old formulas. Thus, these Shinto rituals of the “Yengishiki” may well vie in age with the barbaric chants incorporated in the “Kojiki” and “Nihongi” and attributed to the very earliest Mikados.

THE COURT POETRY

Having presented these three primitive religious and historical works, our volume turns next to what may be called the “pure poetry” of the ancient Japanese. The early inclination of the race toward the rhythm and beauty of poetry has been already suggested. Under the impulse of Chinese culture, the Japanese court of the seventh and eighth centuries seems to have made poetic composition its favorite employment. Our earliest surviving collection of these poems was made as early as A.D. 760. It is called the “Man-yoshu,” or “Collection of the Myriad Leaves,” and the title is not inaccurate, for the “Man-yoshu” consists of some twenty