Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>Alright chapter 7, video number 2.
We left off talking about Izanagi and Izanami, this act of purification, this act of creation
and so forth and we're sort of talking about this idea of mythological stories.
I just want to give you one more example to kind of put this framework in mind.
When we hear these mythological stories about gods, what's important or what we often find,
I should say, is that the events that happen in the stories are kind of mundane,
they're kind of familiar sorts of things.
These gods behave like people.
They get jealous.
They get scared.
They make mistakes.
They do all these human sorts of things but what makes it mythological is
that the consequences of them are huge.
So like Izanagi got scared and ran away and then tried to wash the filth off of himself
but if any of us did that we would just get clean.
When he did it, he created the rest of the world.
Another example has to do with Amaterasu, that goddess I just told you about,
the goddess of the sun, she had a brother, essentially, who she was kind of rivals with
and who was jealous of her and so forth and he did what I think any of us would do
if we were mad at our sibling, he skinned a horse
and threw it through the window of her house.
And this freaks Amaterasu out, as you can well imagine, it smashes some furniture.
It kills someone who works for her, one of her servants,
and she gets terrified, runs away and hides in a cave.
Now again, this is all, I mean I'm exaggerating that any of us would throw a horse
through a window but it is all sort of petty human sort of stuff, jealousy and getting scared
and running away and those sorts of things.
But because she is a goddess, because specifically she is the goddess of the sun,
when she goes away, when she runs and hides in a cave,
the world starts to die because there's no more sun.
And so the gods need to address this.
They need to fix this situation and find some way to get her out of the cave.
So what they do essentially is throw a party.
They throw a party outside the cave.
She hears the sound of this, gets curious, kind of asks about it through the cave,
she's closed it off with a stone and she says you know what are you guys doing out there?
What's all the celebrating about?
And they say well we've got a new sun goddess and we're just celebrating
that she's the new sun goddess and she's going to be in charge of the sun from now on.
And Amaterasu wants to see her and so they say okay well just peak
out of the cave and we'll show her to you.
And when she does they show her a mirror instead and because, again because she's the sun,
she dazzles herself with this mirror.
She is blinded by her own radiance in the mirror and they use this moment when she's stunned
to drag her out of the cave and make her go back to work as the sun and so forth.
So again, all these little steps in the story are real kind of silly little things
that might happen in one way or another but the consequences, the sun disappears,
the sun returns, crops fail, we can all live again, those sorts of things,
those are the mythological, sort of divine consequences of this stuff.
Alright so let's take it from there now that you have some sense of the sort
of mythological quality and background that Shinto, at least in early forms, had.
Let's talk a little bit about how it changes over the centuries,
when we're talking about the development of Japan.
Really the first time we know much about Shinto was when China first discovered Japan
and started to visit and started to trade and sometimes get
into conflicts with them and so forth.
This is why there's a Chinese name for Shinto.
That's why we call it Shinto instead of a Japanese term
because the Chinese were really the first people to bother naming this religion.
For Japanese people it was just the thing we all do.
They didn't need a name for it.
And so it was really when outsiders first came to Japan and said what are you doing?
And they said basically well this is the thing we do with spirits
and they said okay we'll call it the way of the spirits
and that's where it starts to get its name.
So when China first has contact with Japan, it's already bringing along all
of these traditions we've learned about in this class, Buddhism,
Taoism and Confucianism, primarily.
And those actually end up fitting pretty nicely with the ideas of Shinto.
Shinto, as a religion, tends to be fairly accommodating
and then there also tends to be some common ground.
So for example Shinto has a lot of focus on nature.
As I mentioned earlier, all sorts of natural elements are seen as having this quality of Kami
or having an actual personification in Kami.
And that works well with the ideals of Taoism which has always been very nature focused
and the idea that you should revere and observe and respect nature
and go with the flow of nature and so forth.
Confucianism, it's very distinctly different from Shinto in many ways
but it also has this kind of nationalist quality to it, the idea of improving yourself
for the betterment of the people, the idea
of strong governments leading strong communities and so forth.
And Shinto, even though it may not have those exact principles,
it does have a very strong nationalist quality,
coming from the things I've already told you about, the idea that Japan is the first thing
that was ever created in the world, that's a very pro Japan way
to see the world, we are the first.
This is the way the world began.
And then the idea that the emperor comes from the Kami, that he is a god himself
in a way, in a fairly important way.
That he is divine, a divine emperor.
Those again are gonna reinforce this idea of the power of the nation,
the importance of leadership and so forth.
And then Buddhism and Shinto have gotten along extraordinarily well to the point
that you'll encounter this term as one of your vocabulary words, Ryobu Shinto,
I believe that's one of your vocabulary words.
Ryobu Shinto which just means two aspect Shinto and it refers to a blending of Shinto
with Buddhism and that's something that's very common in Japan,
people who just practice a religion that's mostly Buddhism
and mostly Shinto at the same time.
It just combines them both and does one thing, as I've said when we talked about religion
in China, this isn't necessarily a cultural situation where you have to be one or another.
You can combine these things without that being strange
or seen as heretical or anything like that.
Shinto's story, in addition to being one of religious integration with other belief systems,
it's also one of political significance because Shinto has undergone some political influences
over the centuries and these are pretty important to understanding, particularly Shinto
in the 20th century and to some extent still today.
One of the things we see happen I'm gonna leave largely to the book
and this has to do with the Tokugawa period.
The Tokugawa period is often associated with shoguns and Samari's and so forth.
And during this period Shinto is seen as very important because it's Japanese.
It has this essential Japanese quality to it.
It's not a foreign religion.
It's something that's been with the people forever
and so because the Tokugawa period is one when Japan is really looking at kind
of closing its borders and focusing internally, this is a time when you see a rise
in the significance of Shinto in Japanese culture.
But it's the following period, the Meiji period from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's,
that's the period when Shinto takes on a very distinctly different quality.
What happens during this time is that the rulership, in again a strong desire to focus
on the Japanese qualities of Japanese culture and to exclude and purge foreign influence,
they really strongly commit to this idea of Shinto as the state religion.
Now this can sound pretty good for the sake of Shinto and in one sense it is.
Shinto becomes very well supported.
It becomes very broadly practiced.
It becomes highly standardized.
But there's a little bit of a trick to this because really the Meiji, the rulership,
they're concern with Shinto at this time is not really related to its religious implications.
They aren't really out there trying to change hearts and minds
and move people towards respectful worship of the Kami and so forth,
so much as they are interested in using Shinto to help support political structures.
So what I mean by this is that during this period, the Meiji period,
this time of state Shinto, Shinto shrines become essentially outposts, kiosks for the rulership.
They become political outposts where the kinds of things that you always would have done
at a Shinto shrine become very standardized.
So for example, if you get married you do it at a shrine.
If you bury someone, you contact a shrine.
If a new child is born, if you move from one province to another, all of this is done
through rituals at the shrine but it's also done basically as an information collection thing.
You're constantly checking in with the government by way of your religious shrine.
We'll pick up with this idea of state Shinto in the next video.