The Gods Dwell Not in Words but in the Primal Experience of Awe｜Norinaga Motoori and the Open Sea off Sanriku

What is a god? Last week, on a boat heading out to the sea off Sanriku, a friend and I talked about the gods again and again. A god draws away the moment you try to explain it, and for my part I think that understanding a god is not something done with the head. It rests on primal experience.

To begin with, the Kojiki (712) and the Nihon Shoki (720), which gathered the ancient traditions into books, neither ask what a god is nor define one. This means that our ancestors, down to the early eighth century, held no questions or doubts about the gods. It is not a sign that the gods did not exist. It is a sign that the gods were not yet anywhere people stood to question them.

So at what point did the question of the gods arise? Paradoxically, it seems to me that the moment the question became conscious in each person, the gods hid themselves. Indeed, in the myths, the five creator gods who appear at the very beginning are known as the Kotoamatsukami, the “separate heavenly gods,” and they are described as Kakurimi [隠身], beings whose bodies are hidden. They are Ame-no-Minakanushi, Takamimusubi, Kamimusubi, Umashi-Ashikabi-Hikoji, and Ame-no-Tokotachi.

The turning point was the arrival of Buddhism. Thinking about it again, for people who had lived in an age when the objects of faith and prayer had never been put into theory, suddenly facing a religion with cast statues of the Buddha and magnificent temples must have opened an unimaginable rift in the mind. Buddhism is said to have arrived around 538–552, though it took a great many years to put down roots.

It was in this process of ever closer contact with the religion of the continent that the medieval theory of Honji Suijaku was born. It began when monks, having drawn rulers such as aristocrats and members of the imperial family into their orders, moved on to spreading Buddhism among the common people and devised a way of using ideas already familiar to them. They placed the gods as the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, the objects of Buddhist faith, appearing in a provisional form, Suijaku [垂迹], to save the people of Japan, and they theorized that the true body behind them, Honji [本地], was the Buddha. What matters here is that gods who had no substance were given substance by way of the Buddha, and were absorbed, in the worship of images, into a relationship of front and back.

In other words, through the Buddha the gods gained flesh and blood, and took on a form that could receive people’s prayers as objects of faith.

Honji Suijaku worked, and the gods were redefined one by one, Amaterasu as Dainichi Nyorai of esoteric Buddhism, Hachiman as Amida Nyorai, and so on. This mixing of gods and Buddhas laid the ground on which “gods and Buddhas” came to be spoken of as a dualistic world. And whatever is dualistic can also be reversed. In fact, the one who turned the relationship between gods and Buddhas inside out was Kanetomo Yoshida, a Shinto thinker of the Muromachi period.

As the founder of Yoshida Shinto, or Yuiitsu Shinto, whose main shrine stands on Mount Yoshida, a sacred site in Kyoto, Kanetomo reversed Honji Suijaku and declared that Shinto is the root, the seed, while Confucianism is no more than the branches and leaves and Buddhism no more than the flowers and fruit. With this doctrine, which he called the theory of “root, branches and leaves, flowers and fruit,” Kanetomo set the gods back at the source of all things, and his influence reached far into later ages. Through this charismatic religious figure, who preached his own teaching from a stance against Honji Suijaku, a new religious value was born, the belief that everything derives from Shinto.

Seen historically, the gods and Shinto were fleshed out as religion by the Buddha and Buddhism, but this dualistic ground also became a reason the gods drifted away from what they really are. In a sense, because the gods cannot be argued in words, the moment words are used, they undergo, through whoever is speaking, the transformations of each age’s doctrines and ideologies. This is the flesh of the gods.

Later, in the Edo period, as the influence of Buddhism waned, Confucian Shinto and other schools appeared with a newly powerful Confucianism behind them, and the gods were bound to the Confucian spirit. Then, in reaction, came Norinaga Motoori, the great scholar of Kokugaku, the school of National Learning. He argued that the gods are not only the gods of heaven and earth and the spirits enshrined in shrines, but everything, from human beings to birds and beasts, trees and grasses, seas and mountains, that has an extraordinary, surpassing virtue and is kashikoki, awe-inspiring.

What made Norinaga outstanding comes down to one point. He held that the gods are unknowable, beyond measure by human reason, and cannot be argued by the intellect. The sensibility that grasped the true nature of the gods as “awe-inspiring things” shows that Norinaga knew the gods not with his head but through primal experience. Most intellectuals who discussed the gods, in his time and before it, had no such experience. They never put a primal experience into words as Norinaga did, and they could not help discussing the gods under the influence of the temper of their own times.

By rights, no words are needed to speak of the gods. They have been spoken of endlessly ever since, and the reason none of it quite rings true is that everyone speaks of the gods through knowledge, and in that speech there is no primal experience from before knowledge, before language. What my friend told me, by contrast, shows vividly what a god is and with whom it dwells.

The gods exist neither in scholars’ heads nor in books. They exist in the daily lives of the people who live on the land. Where the land differs, the natural surroundings differ, and so do the customs. That is why Japan has its yaoyorozu no kami, the eight million gods, countless gods living side by side, plural, place by place.

My friend was born and raised in the Kitakami Basin, enclosed by the Ou Mountains to the west and the Kitakami Mountains to the east, and he says that one day he was suddenly called by the sea. Led by that strong will, he bought a boat, and now he regularly goes out alone off the Sanriku coast to spend time there in silence. When he cuts the engine, the sound of the waves surrounds him, and the towering cliffs of the great ria coastline sit enthroned above the water. There are no other boats. Being alone on that vast expanse of sea brought back a primal memory from deep in his heart.

In that moment, he says, he felt awe. Yet it was not an unpleasant feeling. It was rather the feeling of having come back to the place where one belongs, something his soul resonated with. As Norinaga said, the primal experience my friend had on the open sea was unknowable, beyond measure by reason, and that is the work of the gods.

I myself love to stand in the forest of Shirakami-Sanchi in the early morning, or to let the sea wind blow over me on the Tottori Sand Dunes as dusk closes in, because in those moments I feel a pleasant awe that cannot be put into words. That awe is contact with the gods, and the swaying of the trees, the sea wind blowing through, and the sound of rough waves are all translated into the words of the gods.

Since the modern age began, the gods have lost the prayers once offered to them as objects of faith and have become things to be analyzed and argued over. Something was surely lost in us at that moment, but now as in the past, the gods truly exist, in plural forms, in the primal experience of awe.

No amount of reading myths and ancient traditions will let you feel the gods. But when you place yourself alone in a forest at dawn, on a shore wrapped in dusk, or on the great sea in the darkness before daybreak, you feel an awe that cannot be put into words. Take that primal experience with you when you turn to myth and history, because in that moment alone the same wind blows as in the remotest past, and that is where the gods dwell.

The gods are a memory shared by all humankind, but because that memory is also a vague unease, humanity has lived by sealing it away. Everyone, in other words, carries the primal memory, but it lies covered over.

Listening to my friend’s primal experience, I went out onto the sea off Sanriku, where the gods dwell, and felt that the quiet, merciless awe once known to the seafaring peoples of old still drifts over the open water.