Musuhi: A New God for an Alliance of Peoples

The joining of different peoples is symbolized in myth mainly by marriage. What we must not mistake is that these are not stories of particular people actually marrying. They symbolize alliances between peoples. There must have been many patterns of joining by marriage, but when several peoples came together and rose into one larger tribal body, what I see is that they did not bring forward the god from any one tribe's tradition. They created and set up a new god. Bringing up the god of one particular tribe would have upset the balance of power among them and made a peaceful rule impossible, and I think the practice was born from that.

The more different peoples merged, in other words, the less they clung to existing gods and fought with other tribes, and the more they created a new god first, under a common ritual, to keep the balance of power stable. By this interesting method they achieved a peaceful rule. What is most interesting is that, with the genealogy of this newly created god as the premise, the gods of each tribe in the merger were set into the genealogy in the reverse direction. By reverse I mean that the genealogy was not designed along a line of continuous linear time, from grandparents to parents to children to grandchildren. It was designed to reach back into later generations.

That may be a little hard to follow. Suppose there were four tribes. The god that each tribe worshipped was inserted retroactively into the genealogy of the children, descendants or ancestors of the god the four had created together. In this way the traces of the composite tribes could be firmly built into the genealogy of the one god they had made in common. I think this invention made a very stable rule possible and became the source that allowed it to expand steadily. It had already begun as a large current from the middle of the Jomon period.

Takamimusuhi is one of a pair, the two most important Japanese gods called the "gods of musuhi." The other is Kamumusuhi. These are not gods with substance. They express the working of non-separation itself as a god. The Japanese concept of musuhi (ムスヒ) is so advanced that nine times in ten people misunderstand it. It is one of the oldest concepts expressing non-separation, not separation. I also meet people who often get it wrong: it is not musubi (ムスビ) but musuhi that is the old word. And musuhi is not itself one prototype concept. It is mus-hi (ムス-ヒ). Many people think it is only a difference between "hi" and "bi," but musubi does not hold as a concept. Whenever I talk about Japan, I always watch which of the two the other person uses, and sadly most Japanese no longer understand it and nearly all read it as musubi.

In the concept of musuhi, hi (ヒ) is at the root, and by "musu" (ムス), to bring forth, to bind together, all things are generated in non-separation. There is a movement, hard to put into words, of hi binding together. As an image, it is what is generated at the threshold where a right-turning and a left-turning spiral bind. Hi is one of the oldest concepts and cannot be expressed in a word. Two years ago I traveled to many places to look at hi alone, and I came away with enough for a thick book (it was so difficult that I held back the release).

From my own research I think the concept of hi comes from the Jomon. Himiko, the queen of about the third century who appears in the Records of Wei (the Weizhi), the valuable Chinese source describing the oldest Japan, is also not a queen with the proper name "Himiko." It is hi-miko: a miko (巫女), a shaman, who bears hi. So I think Himiko was succeeded generation after generation, as the emperors were, in a form like succession to the throne. It also matters that the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki write musuhi differently. The Kojiki writes it 産巣日, and the Nihon Shoki writes 産霊. I will touch on this little by little next year. This is not something to understand with the head but to grasp with the heart. Personally I suspect that if people in the English-speaking world can grasp this sense, a new possibility may arise that nullifies the structure of their language, with its subject and copula.

The Kojiki opens with the myth in which the god Amenominakanushi comes into being first, and then Takamimusuhi and Kamumusuhi. It describes how the origin of life itself begins to act, and all things are generated in non-separation at the place called Takamanohara. So Takamanohara is a place that exists everywhere, and yet has locality and particularity.

From this place the gods come into being one after another. In fact Takamimusuhi and Amaterasu were originally separate gods worshipped by migrants of different lineages. At some point they were Japanized and finally set into one genealogy. The roots of their sources on the continent were different, though. So when the myths are read closely, the gods of the Takamimusuhi line and the gods of the Amaterasu line prove to be different. Among some people who still hold Shinto belief today, there is even a spiritual movement that takes Takamimusuhi, not Amaterasu, as the source, and tries to restore balance by correcting the historical belief that has leaned toward Amaterasu and reviving belief in Takamimusuhi. That is how strong belief in Takamimusuhi was in ancient times, and it is now forgotten.

The name of the first god to appear at the opening of the Kojiki, Amenominakanushi (天之御中主神), for example, generally carries the meaning "the god who presides over the center of heaven," and the name itself expresses divinity. The Edo-period Kokugaku scholar Norinaga Motoori (1730–1801) made a great contribution to the interpretation of this god's name. But since the names of gods, though they belong to our ancestors, are deeply bound up with the faith of Japanese from an unimaginably distant age, nothing that can be called a correct interpretation exists. In fact the 天 of "Amenominakanushi" was imported and adopted in Japan as a term for the heavenly realm in the Chinese sense, but this "ama" appears, in old texts alone, in countless forms: 天, 阿麻, 海部, 菴, 甘, and others.

The special nature of the moving image will not, in essence, lose its importance. So as an experiment, over these three days I made three different videos, thinking about whether I could convey themes that would hit the wall of untranslatability and fail to reach the reader in text or any communication between languages. For that reason the three videos below carry no English, no Japanese, nothing added at all, and are presented wholly as the language of images. I call this "predicate-based moving image": image expression from the predicate-based realm, not from the subject-based realm. I plan to explain each in a separate article, so for today please feel them through the images.

The next is The Three Deities of Creation. It is an image version of the opening of the age-of-the-gods volume of the Kojiki.