Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/200

 agandists grafted the indigenous faith upon the imported by recognising the Shinto deities to be incarnations of Buddha, the two creeds became a duality (riyobu Shintō), and the Japanese nation presented the unique spectacle of a people paying homage to two systems of religion simultaneously. Not until the fifteenth century was any serious attempt made to separate them again. Yoshida Shingu (1489-1492) then sought to popularise a cult which he called "pure Shintō," but which was in reality indebted for many of its doctrines and ceremonies to the Tendai Sect of Buddhism. Ritualism was the distinguishing feature of this form of Shintō. In the seventeenth century three scholars — Hagiwara Kanetomo, Ideguchi Yenka, and Yamasaki Ansai — promoted another renaissance. Their doctrine, when carefully analysed, is found to have been an attempt to refer the origin of Japanese theology to the philosophy of China, the philosophy of the male and female principles. The effect of this importation of Chinese theories into the ancient faith of Japan was to call into existence a school of thinkers, culminating in the eighteenth century with Mabuchi, Motoori, and Hirata, who endeavoured to purge Shintō from Buddhist and Confucian elements alike and to reëstablish its connection with the beginnings of Japanese history. This last revival, being based on the century's oldest annals and associated with its most revered traditions, differed from that of