神社とは何だったのか？: 神道の発生What Was the Shrine? tama, the Self Without Subject, and the Buried Origin of Shinto
Interestingly, when the question is changed from "what is a shrine?" to "what was the shrine?" everyone suddenly becomes unable to answer. This hesitation suggests that almost no one possesses an answer beyond the interpretations that emerged from the early modern and modern periods when the image of the shrine took shape.
In practice, when you visit a shrine and ask the priest "what is a shrine?" the answer you usually receive is the fixed response "a dwelling where gods are enshrined." But this is the correct answer for "Shinto" and says nothing about the origin of the shrine itself. Why does everyone give the same answer in unison? No one explains.
The background involves the existence of only two universities in Japan where one can train to become a shrine priest. One is Kokugakuin University in Tokyo and the other is Kogakkan University in Ise, Mie Prefecture. The two appear to be independent, but in fact they are priest training institutions directly under Jinja Honcho. At these universities students study Shinto, classical texts, and ritual technique in accordance with the doctrine established by Jinja Honcho, and upon graduation they are granted the qualification of shrine priest by Jinja Honcho. Only by passing through this process can one become a priest. In other words, it has nothing whatsoever to do with faith.
What matters is that Jinja Honcho is not a public organ of the government. It is clearly a religious corporation. Jinja Honcho is a new religious movement that "reveres the Grand Shrine of Ise as its sovereign shrine," and it contains none of the pluralistic tolerance of faith that Shinto originally possessed. It is an organization with a pyramidal power structure that places the Grand Shrine of Ise at the absolute apex and oversees eighty thousand shrines nationwide directly beneath it. From this alone the reality emerges that Jinja Honcho, which holds the licensing system for priests, is carrying serious problems. In fact, Jinja Honcho uses this vested interest to provide quite direct backing to conservative Liberal Democratic Party legislators and deploys the Shinto Political League as its lobby organization.
In plain terms, they collect funds from shrines across the country and channel them into political movements aligned with their own religious doctrine. The logic of the conservative camp, including that of the current Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, fundamentally stands on their intentions, and they still hold considerable influence. But what this article seeks to question is not the political problem of Jinja Honcho. Rather, the issue is that the existing content disseminated in line with Jinja Honcho's intentions can answer "what is a shrine?" but has no power to answer "what was the shrine?" I want to open a path for resolving this discomfort.
To state it clearly, the answer to the question above is the textbook answer taught at university institutions. Directly, it is the view of Jinja Honcho. Seen from a slightly sharper angle, the answer strongly embraces the history of modern Shinto and retains remnants of early modern Shinto, but carries the problem of being virtually devoid of the history, culture, and spirit that preceded it. What I find discomforting above all is that their answer defining a shrine as "a dwelling where gods are enshrined" is incapable of saying anything about the Shinto that existed before. To give a more striking example, it is completely severed from the historical phenomenon of shinbutsu shugo (the syncretism of gods and buddhas). This fact reveals that neither priests nor Buddhist monks actually possess an answer to this fascinating phenomenon.
Viewed from the perspective of Japan, against the "buddha" as a later arrival there was the "god" as the originary presence. Everyone agrees on this. The problem is that when a shrine is defined in the modern sense as "a dwelling where gods are enshrined," the history of how heterogeneous beings crossed becomes invisible. To give the example of shinbutsu shugo, Amaterasu enshrined at the Kotai Jingu within the Grand Shrine of Ise (the sovereign shrine of Jinja Honcho) is considered the incarnation of Dainichi Nyorai on the Buddhist side. The logic of this claim is clear. But what I truly wish to know is the following.
Why was it possible for such heterogeneous beings as god and buddha to syncretize?
What was the cultural spiritual soil at the origin that made this possible?
Laid out simply it is brief, but the moment one attempts to discuss it, it becomes extraordinarily difficult. Put differently, when considering the reception and interpretation of the heterogeneous arrival of Buddhism in Japan, what must first be illuminated is the reception and interpretation of the gods that formed the soil. Yet few people turn their thinking this far. The reason is clear. The reception of the gods in Japan is taken for granted as a tradition continuous from antiquity. But is this really so?
If even that answer is merely the view of Jinja Honcho, then the inconvenient fact emerges that in truth no one knows anything. No one knows anything, yet everyone acts as if they do. This is the typical method of new religious movements and says nothing about the essence of Shinto itself. To know Shinto truly, one must move toward a world in which the enormous illusion called Jinja Honcho has been extinguished. As far as I know, the people who have touched the essential horizon of Shinto in modern and later history can be counted on one hand.
Conventional Shinto logic assumes that the act of venerating gods has been practiced across Japan since antiquity. Even where no shrine existed in its present form, in prototype the trees of the forest, rocks, and mountains were regarded as shrines and underwent historical transformation to become what we see today. This is the so-called faith of Yaoyorozu. Typically, the moment this mind that regards nature itself as a shrine underwent transformation is placed with the influence of the transmission of Buddhism, which arrived with the structure of the temple.
Certainly, once the construction of temples began, the construction of shrines to enshrine gods began in opposition. But this happened only in certain regions and cannot be generalized to all of Japan. The theory that an indigenous Shinto worldview was erected in opposition to the foreign Buddhist worldview is also quite suspect. Because this idea depends on the unverifiable fantasy that Shinto existed from antiquity. Stated skeptically, it is an ideology.
The idea that countless gods dwell within nature itself contains a certain truth, but I feel discomfort with making this the origin of Shinto. That trees, rocks, and mountains themselves were divine bodies and the prototypes of shrines is likely fact, given that traces remain across the country to this day. But even this nature faith must have had an origin of its own. When you reach this discomfort, you must confront an extremely troublesome body of thought. That is the history of interpreting Shinto as kamunagara.
The modern reading of 神道 as Shinto is a new convention that took hold only in the modern era. In the past it was read in various ways, including kamunagara and kannagara. The orthography itself derives from the Nihon Shoki (completed in 720) which uses the notation 惟神.
Regarding the meaning of 惟神, the original annotation in the Nihon Shoki explains it as 惟神者 謂隨神道亦謂自有神道也. Because the Nihon Shoki is written entirely in Chinese style classical Chinese, this kind of notation becomes the original source. Monks, priests, and scholars from before the early modern period have proposed various interpretations of the term 惟神, so it is a fact that the term was historically valued. The interpretation cannot be translated into English, but forced into approximation it reads as follows. "Kamunagara means following the way of the gods. It also means the state in which the way of the gods exists naturally." Put differently, this conveys the form of Shinto, but the understanding is extremely difficult.
First, the troublesome quality of the Japanese must be resolved. The point of focus is a single term in the original annotation, the character 自. Because this term is a concept grounded in Japanese sensibility, it cannot be translated. When the language structure carries a grammatical subject as modern English does, the understanding will inevitably slip. But this slippage occurs for modern Japanese speakers as well. In the modern scholarship that began after the Meiji period, the reference point for linguistics was English. Because English has a grammatical subject, it was assumed that Japanese must also have one, and scholars committed the falsification of fabricating a nonexistent subject within the linguistic structure of Japanese. That the perception "Japanese has a subject" has become generalized is something anyone who has studied Japanese even a little will understand. Indeed, nearly all Japanese people hold this perception. But this is a lie. As a result of fabricating the existence of a subject, modern Japanese people have also become incapable of understanding the word 自.
The problem is that when Japanese people who cannot understand 自 speak of Shinto, they necessarily suffer the effects of this inversion. Put differently, when Japanese people who believe their language has a grammatical subject speak of Shinto, they invariably invert. The slippage caused by this inversion has an enormous impact when viewing history and becomes a direct wall blocking understanding of what preceded modernity. In the strange priest licensing system that requires a university degree, this inverted understanding is especially pervasive. I cannot comprehend what connection there is between venerating gods and a university diploma, but no one today questions it. Therefore it does not follow that because a priest speaks, the priest is correct. They can speak of the Shinto routed through Jinja Honcho, but they have no power to speak of the history of its root level emergence. This must be clearly distinguished. My interest lies in this emergence. Let us therefore look at the difficult 自.
The term 自 derives from Confucius. On the Japanese side, examples of its use appear from the dawn of the documentary era. From the era of the Kojiki, Nihon Shoki, and Man'yoshu produced in the early documentary period, multiple readings were assigned to the character 自 in Japan. By the eighth century two principal readings had emerged. One was “onotsukara," the other “mitsukara." This does not mean one was correct. Rather, the meaning transformed according to context. From the early modern through the modern period these readings became "onozukara" and “mizukara."
自 is a type of old native Japanese word once read as "onotsukara" and “mitsukara." "Kara" is a term that encompasses "the thing itself or its nature." The difference between “Mi" and “Ono" is clearly distinguished in writing as 身 (Mi, body) and 己 (Ono, self). "Tsu" is thought to be a case particle in old Japanese.
The reason modern people cannot decipher even the meaning of a single character is that since the modern era the grammatical subject has necessarily intervened tacitly, and the habit of interpreting things on the premise of a subject has become ingrained. Symbolic of this, modern Japanese people have stopped using the word “onozukara," the thought of a world without subject. In the modern era, usage has been consolidated into “mizukara," and even this has been modernized from its premodern meaning. It is now defined as "reflexivity toward the subject" or "emphasizing subject consciousness." The thought of 自 has, in effect, vanished. But this thought of 自 transmits the essence of Japan from antiquity. Put differently, what is difficult even in the reading of Chinese Confucianism is the thought of 自. We assume the modern subject in the 自 of the Confucian era, but this very way of seeing is wrong.
Modern adjudication of things carries the arbitrariness of viewing history as universal. Through this, the subject is brought even into antiquity and imposed on interpretation. To repeat the point, Japanese has no grammatical subject, and therefore the concept of the subject does not exist. The history that has been falsified to make it appear to exist is a matter of the modern era and later, spanning at most about 160 years. And even now, Japanese people do not use a grammatical subject in everyday conversation. The grammatical subject in Japanese exists only within the textbooks of school education.
The principal thought of Shinran in the thirteenth century already uses 自 in 自然法爾. But because he was a Buddhist monk he read it not in the old Japanese reading but as “Jinen Honi." For this reason the moment when the old Japanese reading "onozukara" became thoroughly important thought is tied to the emergence of Kokugaku, the nativist school that sought to investigate what preceded the influence of foreign thought such as Buddhism and Confucianism. This is inseparable from the fact that the Kokugaku scholars who emerged in the Edo period focused particularly on the Man'yoshu in order to understand the indigenous quality of Japan beneath the reception of foreign influence. Through exhaustive study of the Man'yoshu, the serious study of the Kojiki eventually began with the emergence of Motoori Norinaga. Through the flourishing of Confucianism and Kokugaku in the Edo period, the problem of 自 was placed in a thoroughly important intellectual position. I see this as the moment when the Confucian interpretation of 自 from Confucius and the native Japanese interpretation of 自 from the Kokugaku scholars overlapped.
No matter what we do, we can produce only a modern interpretation. But I will offer one while acknowledging that limit. It will be difficult, but I ask the reader to set aside for a moment the modern attachment to the subject and think through this.
To convey the difference between "mizukara" and "onozukara" plainly, "mizukara" is "drawing in and being possessed," while "onozukara" is "being possessed of itself." The reason possession appears here is that in the world of ancient Japan, the movement of souls was grasped in this way. To break it down slightly more, one is the ritual act of "drawing in and being possessed by" a spirit, and the other is the non ritual act of "being possessed of itself." What matters is not the modern distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness but the plurality of practice.
In fact, in ancient Japan there existed groups of technicians who moved souls, and they possessed the power to bring about possession and release it freely. The reason this technique was valued is that the beings who received the souls of the land were the gods themselves. But here lies the great difficulty. The moment these beings who become gods are seen as subjects or individuals, the ancient world inverts into the modern world. I said soul for clarity, but strictly speaking 魂 is read “tama."
What was occurring in ancient Japan was that the very being who received the tama of a place was alienated in a "realm of illusion," and through this the being as god was generated. In other words, it was not that a specific individual possessing a subject received the tama of the place and reigned over it. This is the point still misunderstood today, and present day priests do not understand it at all. This incomprehension necessarily inverts into the mistaken interpretation that treats the god as a substance. What the origin of myth narrates is precisely this movement within the realm of illusion.
Looking at history, it is a fact that after figures called chiefs, kings, and emperors appeared, they began to receive the tama of the land as individual existences. But though these feel to us like the distant past, in historical terms this is a custom of a relatively recent era. What is critical here is to discern that a span of movement running from several thousand to several tens of thousands of years is being ignored. Because here lie the origin of Shinto and the origin of the Japanese people's nature faith. Here too the soil was cultivated that would receive heterogeneous arrivals such as Buddhism.
The problem lies in the present, which extremely confuses the emperor with the emperor system. As a result, individuals bearing divinity as substance are imagined to have existed historically, and the emperor is then positioned as a ruler of governance. And if one drags the emperor system along, one cannot discard the ideology that imperial succession has been carried out in a specific bloodline across generations. Then, the accounts of successive emperors recorded in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki are mistakenly taken for records of bloodline. What emerges from this mistaken perspective is the interpretation of an unbroken imperial line descending from the first Emperor Jimmu. This is a great error.
What is needed to understand this is the entity called 氏. 氏 is read uji and is thought to be a term referring to specialized political and technician groups that took shape from the era of the ancient Yamato court through the Ritsuryo era. In the era of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki around the eighth century, the tendency to overlap uji with bloodline had already grown strong. But originally it was not a bloodline. It can be said that what gathered as specialized technician groups was the uji, but even this is a matter of a newer era. Why is knowing a single historical form so troublesome? The reason is that the previously mentioned tama is involved at the origin.
The folklorist Shinobu Orikuchi pointed out that the source of the uji was "the range reached by a tama of power" and the people who received the protection of that tama's power. The range reached by the tama's power was called 内 (Uchi, inner). The people who belonged to it were called 内人 (Uchindo). In other words, Uchi shifted to uji. What matters is that they were not a common ancestor bloodline. They were people who received the power of a shared tama, and they constituted the uji through that bond. The form of a community bound by a bond other than bloodline must be looked at carefully here. And if one determines from the general definition alone that they were simply specialized technician groups, one misses the essence. Because they were not called 氏人 (Ujibito, people belonging to the uji). They were called 内人 (Uchindo).
Ujibito is thought to be a designation from after the Nara period beginning in 710 and meant people serving the court through hereditary office. But even if that was the case in the Nara period, the bond at the origin was not one of monopolized specialized technique. In other words, when hereditary office is brought into bloodline, the ancient world vanishes. For example, the Mononobe clan was the foremost of the ancient clans and is still mistaken for a specific bloodline group. But various tribes entered and sustained the Mononobe. In fact they were not people sharing a single technique. They held multiple techniques within the uji.
Without being confused by the general theory, if we illuminate history from the perspective of tama, the form emerges that the custom of treating bloodline as the critical issue did not exist in ancient Japan. Put differently, the entity that moved to bundle multiple uji was the 氏族 (clan), and the emperor appeared in the position of further oversight over these. But this too did not arise as a matter of bloodline. At root it is a matter of the location of tama.
That bloodline came to be treated as important at some point in history is fact, but it cannot be reduced to history in general. Even the emperor did not emerge from a matter of bloodline. Within Japan, statements like this meet with intense backlash from Jinja Honcho linked conservatives. Since this will be hard to follow, let me give one example.
Right now the National Diet is seeing the LDP forcibly advance a revision of the Imperial House Law related to the succession problem. The proposal rejects the future enthronement of the current emperor's daughter Princess Aiko and seeks to restore male imperial succession candidates from among those who have already left the imperial house. The LDP leadership including Prime Minister Takaichi has recently stated that they will definitely revise it within this session. This is because it is the long held wish of those connected to Jinja Honcho, which provides the backing for the conservative camp. Strictly speaking it is not limited to Jinja Honcho, but that this is the principal matrix is fact. The unbroken imperial line stands as the central pillar of their ideology, and so the matter is necessarily handled as a bloodline problem.
But the origin of why the existence of the emperor came to be valued in antiquity had nothing to do with bloodline superiority. If that is so, what then guaranteed their existence? From here I will look at this point.
Tracing the origin, the emperor emerged as the bearer of the rites of 食国 (Wosukuni). Wosukuni is a world that appears in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, and this worldview forms the foundation of the emperor. When I say world and worldview, what I mean is a matter of the realm of illusion, not the actual land. What is especially important is that the existence of the emperor is not constituted by Wosukuni in illusion alone. What then guaranteed the existence of the emperor? It was that the existence of the emperor in Wosukuni carried the "imperial decree of the Amatsukami" behind it.
A being who had received the decree of the Amatsukami arrived in this land, made fields, performed rites in autumn, and offered the harvested rice to the Amatsukami. This is the rite of Wosukuni, and the officiating priest is the emperor. Strictly speaking, the emperor does not derive from a specific bloodline. From among the people who possessed the custom of wet rice agriculture, a person fit to officiate was selected as the occasion arose and enthroned. Put differently, not anyone can become emperor. Unless one's roots lie in the group that brought wet rice agriculture to the Japanese archipelago, one lacks the qualification to receive the decree of the Amatsukami and cannot be enthroned. This is the critical point, yet most people confuse it with bloodline.
Recall the earlier words. The source of the uji was "the range reached by a tama of power" and the people who received the protection of that tama's power. In other words, the representative of the uchindo within the range reached by the power of the Amatsukami's tama emerged as the emperor. From this alone it can be discerned that new people carrying the custom of wet rice agriculture clearly entered ancient Japan. The existence of the emperor is still clearly linked directly to rice today. This is because their origin lies with people whose livelihood was wet rice agriculture.
The emperor system ideology converted the original character of the emperor into an authority governing the state. The emperor system ideology itself was prepared in the late Edo period just before the entry into modernity. Here a serious problem lies. Because the emperor never possessed any power to govern the state, and the Amatsukami never issued such a decree. In fact, historically, examples of the emperor personally governing the state are extremely rare. Even today the emperor holds no political power and conducts no governance of the people. The emperor's original duty is to officiate at the rites of Wosukuni, and what decreed this duty was the Amatsukami. Therefore it is as a proxy of the Amatsukami that governing this land guarantees the existence of the emperor. But the fact that the origin lies in illusion must not be forgotten.
From this alone it is clear that the problem of bloodline has no involvement in the original form of the emperor. The mistaken view that treats the emperor as an individual with a subject is now pervasive, but this too is a view brought in after the Second World War and is not the original form. The postwar Declaration of Humanity issued by the emperor was its symbolic event. In the logic of the occupation, they may have believed they were dismantling the ideology of the imperial system, but the existence of the emperor in the realm of illusion has not moved one iota. It is not generally understood, but a human being who is not the emperor becomes emperor because they receive the tama of the Amatsukami. Much later, the location of the Three Sacred Treasures came to be valued, but originally the matter must be seen from tama.
The qualification to govern Wosukuni as proxy of the Amatsukami is received as uchindo within the range reached by the Amatsukami's tama. Imperial succession is not hereditary by bloodline. Selected by the gods and made emperor through ritual, yet not everyone can become emperor. One must have roots in the group that brought wet rice agriculture to the Japanese archipelago. This is the original form of the emperor, distinct from the emperor system that places the emperor within the problem of bloodline. And the rite necessary for a human being to become emperor is the once in a lifetime 大嘗祭 performed by the imperial successor.
大嘗祭 is read either daijosai or onie no matsuri. It is also the enthronement ritual of the emperor. Because it is a secret rite of the highest order, the content of the rite remains completely unknown even today. Various accounts are debated, but in fact no one has seen it. All information spoken about the daijosai is speculation.
Only the imperial successor, the descendants of a specific clan, and one other person know the rite. And even the descendants of that clan do not know exactly how the highest level secret ritual within the daijosai transforms a human being into an emperor. Because this is an oral transmission from emperor to imperial successor. In antiquity the myths suggest the possibility that proxies existed, but today no one other than the emperor knows how the transmission occurs. I have met one descendant of such a clan. Though connected to the daijosai, this person knew nothing of what was performed inside.
In broad terms, the daijosai is said to be a rite through which the newly enthroned emperor offers the year's new grain (rice) to the gods, partakes of it himself, and thereby establishes his sanctity as emperor. But the daijosai did not exist from antiquity. It was developed in the era of the 40th Emperor Tenmu (r. 673–686), and historically it has undergone repeated interruptions. The rite restored during the Meiji period has lost its ancient form. Even so, the fact that the existence of the emperor as the proxy governor of Wosukuni is still transmitted through the role of the daijosai is important. Because Emperor Tenmu was the matrix of the Amaterasu faith, the tama that the imperial successor receives in the daijosai is Amaterasu, positioned as both Amatsukami and imperial ancestral deity.
Through this enthronement rite the imperial successor becomes emperor as proxy of Amaterasu. The daijosai is performed only once. Thereafter a harvest thanksgiving rite called 新嘗祭 (Niinamesai or shinjosai) is performed annually, in which the year's new grain is offered to the gods and the emperor partakes of it as well. This is one of the most important recurring rites of the imperial court rituals.
Once we take all this into account, we notice that the image of Shinto commonly discussed is almost without exception a reflection of the modern era and after. Because it suffers this influence, the image of shrines also inevitably remains within modern interpretation and is of little use to anyone who wishes to gaze at the original form. No matter how many shrines across the country one visits and asks the priests, so long as they are under the influence of Jinja Honcho, the answers are fundamentally the same. In short, there is no one capable of speaking of the ancient stratum of the shrine.
Let us return once more to the opening question. The common answer to "what is a shrine?" is "a dwelling where gods are enshrined." But having followed all this, what would you think if I said that answer was mistaken?
If a shrine is not "a dwelling where gods are enshrined," then what was the shrine?
When the question is transformed, at the origin that is the emergence of the shrine one senses the surfacing of a heterogeneous world that is not Shinto.
Please reconsider the earlier interpretation, "Kamunagara means following the way of the gods. It also means the state in which the way of the gods exists naturally," while holding in mind the perspective on 自 we have examined. The caution is simply this. Do not presuppose a subject. Only when that is carried through thoroughly does the emergence of Shinto at last appear before us.