Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [186]
How did Shinto become an “Asian fusion” religion?
China’s influence on ancient Japan was so profound that it is difficult to separate Japanese ideas from those that arrived on the islands from China over the centuries. While an early form of the Japanese belief system of Shinto probably existed before the arrival of Buddhism and Confucian teachings from China, Shinto can rightfully be thought of as an “Asian fusion” religion, because it only becomes a unified religion with a complete mythology after the Chinese influence is felt. There are, for instance, many similarities between Japanese and Chinese Creation accounts, including the idea of a cosmic egg, and a god whose eyes form the moon and sun.
No written records of the origin of Shinto exist, and no one knows when or how Shinto began. A mixture of different beliefs, Shinto means the “way of the gods.” It seems to have combined the ancient practices of the Ainu, Japan’s earliest inhabitants, now reduced to a small number living in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, with those of the prehistoric people who migrated to Japan from other parts of Asia, including Mongolian people from Siberia. What resulted is a religion centered on nature—mountains, rivers, rocks, and trees. Shinto also acknowledges the force of gods, known as kami, in such processes as creativity, disease, growth, and healing. Emphasizing rituals over philosophy, Shinto pays little mind to life after death.
Beginning about the 500s CE, the Chinese philosophies of Buddhism and Confucianism began to influence Shinto, which absorbed Buddhist deities into its fold and also identified them as kami. Shinto shrines adopted Buddhist images, and Buddhist ceremonies were used for funerals and memorial services throughout Japan. Under the influence of Confucianism, Shinto also emphasized rigorous moral standards of honesty, kindness, and respect for one’s elders and superiors.
Shinto myths appear in the Nihongi (“chronicles of Japan”) and the Kojiki (“the record of ancient matters”), both of which were written in the 700s CE. These myths tell how the kami created the world and established customs and laws. According to Shinto mythology, the sun goddess Amaterasu was the ancestor of Japan’s imperial family. In the late 1800s, the Japanese government invented state Shinto, which stressed patriotism and the divine origins of the Japanese emperor. After Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945, the emperor denied that he was divine, and the government abolished state Shinto.
WHO’S WHO OF JAPANESE GODS
Amaterasu The most significant deity in the Japanese pantheon, Amaterasu is the sun goddess who is also known as “the august person who makes the heavens shine.” Born from the left eye of the primal Creator god Izanagi as he bathes in a stream, Amaterasu is assigned to rule the realm of the heavens while one of her brothers, Tsuki-Yomi, the moon god, is entrusted with the realms of the night, and another brother, Susano, god of storms, is made ruler of oceans.
In a classic family-feud myth with incestuous overtones, Amaterasu and her brother Susano get into an epic fight. In one version of this core Japanese myth, Susano becomes angry, because he has received what he considers a lesser realm, but in another version, Amaterasu and Susano have a fight to see which of them is greater. Amaterasu chews Susano’s sword and exhales, creating three goddesses. In response, Susano eats some of his sister’s jewels and exhales five gods. As the fight escalates, Susano creates in the heavens a sort of “manic panic”—he uproots rice fields and ruins temples by smearing his excrement on the walls. When he throws the carcass of a horse into the weaving room where Amaterasu and her attendants make divine clothes for the other gods, she is terrified and flees to the cave of heaven, closing the entrance with a great stone and plunging the world into darkness.
As the darkness descends, evil spirits emerge and worsen the destruction