Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/282

260 possibly being influenced slightly by the glitter of the prospective jewels, acted on his instructions, and with complete success.

Here, then, we have accounts of possessions long pre-Buddhist; their very accounts being practically pre-Buddhist themselves. For the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki were written less than one hundred and forty years after Buddhism came to Japan, too short a time for it to have draped old legends with its own detail. Besides, there is not the slightest suspicion that it ever tried to do so. The accounts read as realistically Shintō as one could have them do. What is more, they read, barring a few archaisms, as if recorded of to-day. In skeleton the modern procedure is all there. In these old Shintō biblical narratives you see the same features that you mark in the Ryōbu-Shintō trances now. The conservatism is quite far-orientally complete, which is another proof, not only that the thing is Shintō, but that the Buddhists brought with them from China nothing akin to it. For we may be sure the gods would not have been behind their people in the great national trick of imitation, and had there been