Page:The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, Volume 13.djvu/22

4 teaching of Confucianism, but also against all the highly spiritual preaching of Buddhism. Buddhism entered the land with the Chinese invasion and became gradually adopted by most of the Japanese; but it had to make allowances for the primeval faith, to incorporate the ideas of Shinto. So that to-day Buddhism and Shintoism exist side by side, coordinate parts of a single religious system.

Shintoism is a sort of ancestor-worship, which both seeks the favor of the good spirits from the past and dreads the attacks of evil spirits. The chief single shrine in Japan to-day, recently highly honored by the new Mikado, is that of the Sun-goddess at Ise, who is revered as the great ancestress of all the Mikados and, in some sense, of all the Japanese.

The early rituals recited by the Shinto priests, some of them doubtless of an antiquity far exceeding the "Kojiki," are preserved to us by the "Yengishiki." This is a book in which the rituals were copied down a thousand years ago ( 927). Yet these chants have in the "Yengishiki" the same form in which they are often repeated to-day. In other words, Shintoism does not change; it clings to the recital of old formulas. So that these Shinto rituals of the "Yengishiki" may well vie in age with the barbaric chants incorporated in the "Kojiki" and "Nihongi" and attributed to the very earliest Mikados.

Having presented these three primitive religious and historical works, our volume turns next to what may be called the "pure poetry" of the ancient Japanese. The early inclination of the race toward the rhythm and the beauty of poetry has been already suggested. Under the impulse of the Chinese culture, the Japanese court of the seventh and eighth centuries seems to have made poetic composition its favorite employment. Our earliest surviving collection of these poems was made as early as 760. It is called the "Man-yoshu," or "Collection of the Myriad Leaves," nor is the title inaccurate, for the "Man-yoshu" consists of some twenty