神とは何かWhat Is God?
What is god? Try to explain it in words and it recedes. Try to speak it and its form hides away. It is a state you can never finally reach no matter how close you draw. For me that is god, and it is one of the faces of god.
If I dare to speak of god, I think it is primal experience. God is not something thought with the head. To put it another way, god does not exist in the realm where the head does its thinking. In the realm of primal experience that holds no language, god exists in plurality and without number. Once you grant this nature, it becomes clear that understanding god is impossible for anyone who does not hold primal experience. Yet this is not a matter of some people being able to understand god and others not. Primal experience is open to everyone. Whether or not one is granted that primal experience depends on each person's life. In this sense god is open to all and is never closed off to some limited stratum alone.
Looking back, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki of the early eighth century that compiled the old traditions contain neither the question of what god is nor any definition of it. The ancestors of Japan up to at least the early eighth century very likely held no question or doubt about god. This was not because god did not exist for the ancestors of the Japanese. It expresses that god did not exist in the realm where human beings pose questions. Primal experience gained by the individual or within a pair or communal relation once filled worlds beyond number. There was one for every place. Putting this into words gave rise to the idea of the eight million gods. The Japanese call it Yaoyorozu no Kami [八百万神].
The Yaoyorozu no Kami are spoken of as the root nature of Shinto. In my own words this expresses that god dwells within primal experience. It is also the reflection of countless worlds where god differs according to the differing nature of primal experience from place to place. In a sense the moment it turned into the words Yaoyorozu no Kami, a boundary line began to be drawn through the once living world where gods and human beings coexisted. What followed was a history of separation and closing off. Perhaps we are suffering here and now because of it. To speak frankly, a personal question lies here. Can human beings go on living at all once they lose faith and prayer?
So at what stage did the question of god rise to the surface in the history of Japan? It is impossible to pinpoint this with precision. There is a paradox here. The moment the question of god began to be felt within each person, god hid its form. The moment the question of god sprouted within us, god vanished from before us. If we suppose this to be the reality of god, then within the range of what we can think, god does not exist after all, or it has been diluted.
In fact Japanese mythology holds an expression that hints at the sensibility of this age. Read the opening of the myth generally called the creation of heaven and earth and five gods appear. They are Amenominakanushi [天之御中主神], Takamimusuhi [高御産巣日神], Kamimusuhi [神産巣日神], Umashiashikabihikoji [宇摩志阿斯訶備比古遅神], and Amenotokotachi [天之常立神]. In the myth these gods are a special existence called Kotoamatsukami [別天つ神]. Japanese mythology divides the gods broadly into two kinds called Amatsukami [天つ神] and Kunitsukami [国つ神]. The countless gods that fall under neither hold no names and are expressed as animals and the like. At this level the gods who connect to the emperor in mythological terms are the Amatsukami. The highest divinity among the Amatsukami is set in the imperial ancestral god Amaterasu.
The Kotoamatsukami at the opening are different. They are shown not as Amatsukami but as koto [別]. The word marks them as set apart. They are not an existence tied to the genealogy of the emperor. They look rather like a provisional form given substance so that the primal gods of the people who worshipped the Amatsukami could be placed within the myth. The five gods who appear as Kotoamatsukami are recorded in the myth with the expression [隠身] (kakurimi). It says they hid their bodies. I felt a question here. Why did the compilers have to use such an expression?
In other words the Kotoamatsukami conceal their form and never appear before people. This does not mean appearing with a body or any other substance. It means holding as their reality an existence prior to all human definition, before anything that words symbolize. This is why they are described as hiding their bodies. To say more, this does not even reach the level of natural objects such as tree and leaf or earth and sea. It seems to speak of an old memory in which god was sensed in a primal form before even that. When I consider why the early gods had to hide their bodies, the background suggests that a historical upheaval gave god substance in Japan. The turning point is the arrival of Buddhism.
Consider it again. People had long lived in an age when the object of faith and prayer had never been theorized. The psychological shock when they suddenly faced a religion that held cast Buddha statues and magnificent temples and monks carrying sutras must have opened a rupture beyond imagination. The arrival of Buddhism is said to date to around 538–552. It took a considerable span of years to take root widely, and at first it was preached only within a limited circle of aristocrats and the imperial family. We can suppose that the stage of continuing a faith with no clear substance in daily life was suddenly torn apart. What underwent transformation through this was in fact god.
The history we turn to in order to understand this is Honji Suijaku Theory [本地垂迹説]. It was born as contact with continental religion deepened. The monks had succeeded in drawing the rulers such as aristocrats and the imperial family into their orders, and when they entered the stage of spreading Buddhism to the common people, it appeared. Rulers who held political calculation and prized their own interests would turn pro-Buddhist or anti-Buddhist if offered money or power. This did not work so smoothly with the common people of the time whose daily life itself was faith. Honji Suijaku Theory was a method the monks devised to carry their preaching to the common people smoothly. We cannot overlook that it became the occasion not for the Buddha but for god to transform.
What is commonly misunderstood is the view that Shinto existed before this and that faith in god was present in daily life. I see it otherwise. Shinto did not exist before this. Shinto and god acquired their religious prototype through Buddhism and through religious faith in the Buddha.
Reading Honji Suijaku Theory from this context is extremely difficult. Seen from the standpoint of the monks, what matters is this. To absorb into Buddhism the faith in god that had already permeated the common people, they positioned god as the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of Buddhist devotion manifesting in a provisional form called Suijaku [垂迹] in order to save the beings of Japan. They theorized that the true body called Honji [本地] was the Buddha. It was not the common people but the monks who held that the common people worshipped god. On the side of the common people there was no such awareness. This measure was needed because devotion to the religion of Buddhism required a stage in which the monks positioned the common people as devoted to the faith of god and then imprinted that awareness onto them.
The common people were not aware of their own faith and did not reify god and worship it to begin with. Under such conditions, pressing them to embrace a Buddhism heavy with elements of idol worship moved little at the level of the common people. The monks therefore had to devise every possible means to draw the common people into their orders. In the end they opened a breakthrough through a sophisticated religious technique. They took the gods of the ancient clans who appear in the centralized mythology compiled in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, repurposed them as objects of common faith, and bound them to the Buddha.
What matters is that god held no substance until then and was given substance by way of the Buddha. It was absorbed into a two sided relation within idol worship. God had never held substance before this. Yet the common people who now saw the Buddha as a cast and easily grasped object of faith began to overlay god onto the substantial form of the Buddha. At this moment god gained flesh and blood through the Buddha and took on a form that received the prayers of the people as an object of faith. I take this to be the early movement by which faith in god took concrete shape in Japan.
This design struck home perfectly and Honji Suijaku Theory exerted an immense effect. Amaterasu had already been positioned as an object of central faith and was redefined as Dainichi Nyorai of esoteric Buddhism, and Hachiman as Amida Nyorai. This phenomenon is also called Shinbutsu Shugo [神仏習合]. It was the age when god was reinterpreted through the Buddha. In other words it was a great turning point at which god from a world without theory was defined through the Buddha that had already been theorized as religion.
As a result, what cannot be overlooked is that a ground was formed for god and Buddha to be spoken of in a dualistic world. This was not dualism in the sense we think of today. Still, once something is dualism, reversal becomes possible. It was the Muromachi period Shinto thinker Yoshida Kanetomo who challenged the relation of god and Buddha in Honji Suijaku Theory, reversed it, and exerted great influence on later ages as a charismatic thinker.
Yoshida Kanetomo became the founder of Yoshida Shinto. This school is also called Yuiitsu Shinto and still keeps its main shrine on the sacred Mount Yoshida in Kyoto. He reversed the Honji Suijaku Theory that had already permeated and declared that Shinto was the root and seed, Confucianism only the branches and leaves, and Buddhism only the flower and fruit. Though he is called a Shinto thinker, this age lay almost entirely under the influence of Buddhism. When you look at what Yoshida Kanetomo proposed, the influence of Confucianism intervenes there strongly. His claim that Shinto was the root and seed while Confucianism was the branches and leaves and Buddhism the flower and fruit is a typical case of Confucian influence. The moment he placed god back at the source of all things, the formerly insubstantial Shinto at last entered its stage of religious birth with Buddhism as its womb.
The charismatic religious figure Yoshida Kanetomo preached his own doctrine from the anti Honji Suijaku position. With his appearance a new religious value was created. It held that everything derived from Shinto. Seen historically, god and Shinto were given religious flesh by the Buddha and Buddhism. Yet this dualistic ground also became a cause of drawing away from the reality of god. In a sense the history of moving further and further from god seems to have left a deep wound in the human heart.
God cannot be argued through words. So whenever words are used, god is transformed through the speaker by the doctrine and ideology of the age. If we take this to be the body of god, the true question narrows from what god is to “who” is speaking about god.
After this, as the Edo period arrived and the influence of Buddhism declined, peculiar people such as the Confucian Shinto school placed the newly empowered Confucianism behind them and appeared. This time god was interpreted in connection with the Confucian spirit. The Kokugaku (National Studies) scholars appeared in reaction to this movement. Among them I feel that the god Motoori Norinaga discussed saw through to the essence with great clarity.
The Kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga argued that god refers not only to the gods of heaven and earth and the spirits enshrined in shrines but to all things that hold an extraordinary and surpassing virtue and inspire awe, from human beings and the birds and beasts and trees and grasses to the mountains and the seas. This context is hard to grasp. What made Norinaga exceptional comes down to one point. He held that god is unknowable and beyond the measure of human reason [理], and that it cannot be argued by the intellect. Seen historically, this was a reaction. God had come to be understood through Buddhist doctrine, Buddha statues, and religiously theorized faith, and Confucianism had begun to interpret god. His stance pushed back against that tendency. In short Norinaga rebuked the intellectuals. Monk and Confucian and Shinto thinker alike were not transmitting god. They were only distorting god through their own ideologies. The very act of arguing god was the problem to begin with.
So what is this god that cannot be argued by the intellect? If I translate his words in my own way, I see in Motoori Norinaga a sensibility that grasped the true nature of god as awe. This shows that Norinaga knew god through primal experience and not through the head. In his time and long before, the intellectuals and religious figures who argued god mostly held no primal experience. They never put primal experience into language as Norinaga did. They could not avoid arguing god from the character of the very age they lived in.
Honji Suijaku Theory is the same. This too was a theoretical account that ignored primal experience of god. From this angle it becomes clear that the ones who knew god were not the monks but the common people. Yet the religious figures behaved as though they knew god. By theorizing it and raising temples and Buddha statues and sutras and preaching to the common people, they planted the position that the common people did not know god. This connected in the end to Honji Suijaku Theory. In this sense the anti Honji Suijaku of Yoshida Kanetomo shares the same root. The attitude of trying to speak god in words is itself the same.
By rights no words are needed to speak god. God has been spoken of endlessly ever since, yet it never quite rings true. The reason is that everyone speaks god through knowledge and there is no primal experience there before knowledge and before words. To put it the other way, the god spoken by a person who holds primal experience is alive and exists beyond all doubt. This is prior to religion, yet it differs from what is called primitive religion as well. It holds no quality of religion at all.
From the modern era onward, god lost the prayer that made it an object of faith and turned into something argued as an object of analysis. At this moment something was certainly lost from within us. Yet now as ever, god really exists in plurality within the primal experience of awe. Primal experience is always singular. It differs by a compound of factors such as the moment, the place, the person, and the state of mind. This is the origin of the faith in the Yaoyorozu no Kami where god is beyond number. Its true nature can be read as a vague unease and as awe.
God did not exist in the minds of scholars or in their books. God existed in the daily life of the people who live the land. Where the land differs, the natural environment differs and the customs differ. This is why Japan has the Yaoyorozu no Kami and why countless gods have coexisted in plurality from place to place. For god at this level no substantial and consolidated monotheism is possible. If monotheism exists at all, it must become possible only by holding primal experience itself as god. Comparative mythology is meaningless because it ignores entirely the basic condition of place and the like. Such study never touches god itself. It stays within the category of modern scholarship and nothing more. God does not exist there. They never touch god.
This is a question I keep turning over within myself. From here I will touch on the view that god exists not in the minds of scholars or religious figures but in the people who live on the land. Last week I spent time with a friend in Iwate in the Tohoku region. The primal experience he spoke of there expressed beautifully what god is and where god dwells.
My friend was born and raised in an inland basin walled to east and west by steep mountain ranges. He says that one day he was suddenly called by the sea. He was born in the port town of Hachinohe in Aomori Prefecture. Because his family moved to Kitakami in Iwate Prefecture soon after his birth, he grew up with almost no tie to the sea. Yet the moment he turned forty, he became sharply aware of an invitation from the sea rising from the depths of his own heart. Led by that strong will, he bought a boat.
Cross the mountain range east of Kitakami and you come out onto the coastal region of Sanriku. This is the area the tsunami of the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in 2011. Sanriku is a scenic stretch of ria coast. Because depopulation has advanced across all of Tohoku, you meet no other boats when you head offshore. My friend started his business more than ten years ago, has at last been able to leave the work to his employees, and turned forty with the blessing of a child. He places great value on securing time of his own. The method he chose was to head offshore at Sanriku alone at regular intervals and spend the time in quiet. What matters is this. He did not choose to go out to sea in order to secure time to relax. The sea called him, he followed that fierce guidance honestly, and the result became a healing of his own soul. There is no calculation or intent of the intellect in it.
Cut the boat's engine and the sound of the waves wraps everything around you while the grand cliffs of the ria coast sit enthroned on the surface of the sea. No other boat is there. The experience of placing himself utterly alone on the vast expanse of ocean revived the primal memory in the depths of his heart. In that moment he says he felt awe. It was not a feeling of fear. It was the relief of returning to the place one returns to, and the soul resonated with it. Just as Norinaga said, the primal experience my friend held on the open sea was unknowable and beyond the measure of reason [理]. That is the work of god.
"I do not understand why I am drawn to the sea this far," he says. He says he cannot put the strange sensation into words. I told him there is no need to put it into words. That vague and certain awe is itself god, and it is faith for you. People are inevitably misled by the social preconception that god must hold substance, and they grow uneasy when they cannot put it into words. But such a thing is not god to begin with. God dwells in the awe of primal experience, and in my friend's case god is present together with the gods that dwell in the open sea. To say more, a vague sensation he cannot even understand himself seeks the sea strongly. He follows it and heads out onto the water. This act itself is faith. The chain and accumulation of that act rise up and stand forth as a single god. This is god before religion. I think it is the reality of god that dwells among people now as ever and unchanged.
Looking back, I love to stand in the primeval forest in the early morning and to bathe in the sea wind that blows across the dunes wrapped in evening dark. The reason is that in those moments I feel an awe I cannot put into words. When I stand alone on the dunes wrapped in darkness, I lose my sense of direction. The sight of the same scene spreading in every direction is a reliving of the awe the ancient people felt. When I place myself there I feel fear, yet a strange sense of longing comes over me and a feeling of relief wraps around me.
What I have come to understand by accumulating that experience is that awe is contact with god and a dialogue with god. The sway of the trees, the sea wind blowing through, the sound of the rough waves, and the quality of the light are all translated as the words of god. Through those words we face god, hold dialogue, and offer prayer. From my friend's account and my own experience I feel strongly that this lies at the source of the Yaoyorozu no Kami and was the reality of god bound to the ancient memory of our humanity.
However much you read myth and old tradition, you will not feel god. But when you place yourself alone in the forest at early morning, on the shore wrapped in evening dark, or on the open sea in the darkness before dawn, you feel an awe beyond words. Take up myth and history with that primal experience. In those moments alone a wind blows unchanged from antiquity, and god dwells there.
God can be called a shared primal memory held by all humanity. Because it is also a vague unease, humanity has lived by sealing that memory away. The primal memory is open to everyone, yet for most people it lies covered over. Whether one wakes this memory by oneself or sets it off by following the heart and placing oneself in great nature as my friend did will differ from person to person. Still it seems certain to me that the presence or absence of this primal experience divides the quality of a life. Only with that primal experience does a person resonate with a particular religion or doctrine and serve with faith from the heart. That is a beautiful form of faith, and by rights there should be no rank of higher or lower in it.
I think this often. Nothing is as hollow as modern atheism. Atheism may function as a nullification of the absolute God of religion, but human beings have never at root lived in a clean room without god. The recovery of faith today is tied to going to temples and churches and shrines. Yet even without doing such things we can have faith in god and offer prayer, and our ancestors continued this without break.
As I listened to my friend's primal experience and went out by boat onto the Sanriku waters where god is seated, I felt that the quiet and merciless awe once felt by the ancestors who lived by the sea still drifts over the open sea today.