Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/200

 Japanese, and that for important guidance they relied on divination, omens, ordeals, and portents of various kinds. With the introduction of Chinese civilisation they added to this catalogue the superstitions of Confucianism as well as those of Taoism, and when Buddhism arrived, its teachings accentuated the confusion between the mundane and the supernal. This phase of Japanese ethics merits a moment's attention.

There is a tradition that the first professional fortune-teller in Japan learned his art in Korea. The truth appears to be that, about the third century of the Christian era, the method of divination anciently practised in Japan by scorching the bones of a deer, was replaced by a tortoise-shell-burning process, imported from Korea, while, at the same time, the marks produced by the fire ceased to be arbitrarily interpreted by the diviner and were explained by the aid of elaborate diagrams. In either case the soothsayer had to preface his divination by several days of supplication to the particular deity within whose province the affair lay, and had to abstain for some period from eating or touching anything unclean in a religious sense. Direct revelations from heaven vouchsafed after long fasting and meditation in a temple or shrine, were also regarded with as much reverential faith by the Japanese as by the Jews of old or the early Christians. This method of obtaining transcendental guidance had been in vogue for centuries before the introduction of