Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/61

Rh or partially material, conceptions of the soul are a comparatively recent development. Though religion is on the whole progressive, it by no means follows that all movements of religious thought are in a forward direction. The spiritual edifice which poets and seers build up is being constantly reduced to ruin by the inept handling of the material-minded vulgar, to be reared anew by others more splendid than before. But let us not mistake the ruin for the first courses of a new building, the dead husk for the living germ. Ghosts and ball-souls are aberrant conceptions which belong to the former category. The dullards to whom such notions are due are quite incapable of originating the pregnant, though artificial, conception of body and soul as two distinct entities.

Let me add a few more etymological facts which bear on the question of spirituality.

Mi-kage, or "august shadow," is an ancient synonym for mi-tama. It is unnecessary to suppose that anything but a metaphorical meaning was originally intended. There is, however, a modern superstition that when a man is near his death his shadow becomes thinner.

The ordinary Japanese word for "to die" is shinuru, that is to say, "breath-depart." Death is also called concealment, long concealment, body-concealment, rock-concealment (in allusion to the practice of burial in dolmens), change, and ending. In the case of the Gods, death is called divine departure or divine ascent.

Iki, "breath," one of the vital functions, is put by metonymy for their sum, that is, life. It has not, like our word "spirit" and the Greek "psyche," taken the further step of coming to mean the human soul, except we identify it with the ke of hotoke, which has been plausibly derived from hito, "man," and ke, "spirit." It is now the common Buddhist term for Buddha and his saints, and also for the spirits of the sainted dead. The material-minded man, as usual, drags it down to his own level. To him the corpse