Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/183

Rh as practiced by the Nichiren sect. The Shingon sect indulges in a somewhat similar cult, of which I have been told by its priests, but which I do not happen to have seen. The Tendai practices the cult but little, the other sects do not practice it at all. These definite possessions must be carefully distinguished from Buddhist meditation, which also eventually lapses into trance. The first may be defined as a change of one's personality into another's; the second as the etherealization of one's own. In Japan the Zen sect are the greatest adepts in thus losing themselves. Meditating one's self into protoplasmic purity is a specialty of the Buddhists consequent upon the essential tenets of their religion, and has only a distant kinship in common with the purely Japanese Buddhist trances I have described.

VII. Oldest of all and yet youngest of any of the Japanese possessions are the pure Shintō ones. For they took place in the far past, and then did not take place again till the other day. They form the most interesting branch of the family, because the most un-conventional members of it.