Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/157

 apotheosis; a passage from the visible world to the invisible region of revered spirits.

Here the question presents itself whether Shintō should be regarded as a creed indigenous to Japan or as an importation from abroad. Japan owed so much to China in early days that the borrowing of a creed would not have greatly increased the debt or seriously shocked any patriotic instinct. It has already been shown that plausible grounds exist for attributing the bases of Japanese mythology to Chinese traditions, and the posthumous names of prehistoric Mikados to foreign sources. On the other hand, any attempt to differentiate native from alien is hampered by the constant difficulty of discerning whether the things adopted were actually Chinese systems or merely Chinese methods of systemisation. A man taught to write after he reaches adult years is not unlikely to take the rules of literary composition and even the terminology of his teachers, as well as their script, though the thoughts he sets down may be his own. That certainly was often the case with the Japanese, and it becomes necessary to look very closely before finally distinguishing the indigenous from the exotic. Thus Confucianism, a system of ethics widely embraced by the educated classes in Japan, has been credited with supplying some of the central ideas of Shintō, and the theory is superficially plausible. But there had existed in China for centuries before the days of Confucius a belief in a supreme