Shinbutsu Shugo: A Trial That Made Shinto

After Buddhism arrived in the sixth century, shinbutsu shugo (神仏習合), the fusion of gods and buddhas, unfolded over a very long time. It was no simple mixing of faiths. For Shinto to acquire the makings of a religion, it was a trial that could not be avoided. This peculiar phenomenon was the very turning point at which "Shinto" was established, and it is extremely hard to read. I want to take it up again as "a marriage of gods and buddhas in the realm of illusion" and look at its essence. In this piece I describe the confusion at the moment gods and buddhas began to merge.

Shinshin ridatsu is the idea that a god himself gave an oracle saying he suffered from being a god and wished to be saved by the Buddhist Dharma. It is the notion that gods seek salvation from buddhas, and it is the key to the later honji suijaku. At this stage, as the phrase "gods seeking salvation from buddhas" shows, the god is clearly placed below the buddha. The gods are also counted as one kind of living being suffering in Buddhist samsara, shown as hearing the Dharma and wishing, through practice, to leave the body of a god. It is fascinating, and many problems come into view. It shows the early confusion of shinbutsu shugo.

The complication is that nearly all shrine priests of the time were personally Buddhist believers. When they received an oracle from a god, they built temples called jinguji, either within the shrine precincts or nearby. This spread across the country from the late Nara to the early Heian period, and the best-known examples are Tado Jinguji (Mie), Kehi Jinguji (Fukui), Kashima Jinguji (Ibaraki), Usa Jinguji (Oita) and Wakasahiko Jinguji (Fukui). All are old shrines and holy places that held the highest divinity in their regions. So the first occasion when the relation of gods and buddhas began to be rapidly reconsidered arose not only in the capital but across the country. It matters that the movement began at shrines at the top of regional society. The method was to replace the upper layer first, from god to buddha, and take control of the lower layers from there.

What matters is that the gods, who until then had no substance, were given substance through the buddha and gathered into a front-and-back relation in idol worship. That is, before this, gods had no substance, but the common people, seeing the cast, easy-to-grasp object of faith that is the buddha, began to lay the god over the figure of the buddha, who had substance. At that moment the god gained flesh and blood through the buddha and got a form in which it takes on people's prayers as an object of faith. This, I think, is the early movement by which faith in gods took concrete form in Japan.

This design hit the mark splendidly, the doctrine of honji suijaku had enormous effect, and Amaterasu, already placed as an object of faith on the central side, was redefined as the esoteric Dainichi Nyorai, Hachiman as Amida Nyorai, and so on. It is a phenomenon also called shinbutsu shugo, but it was the age in which the gods were reinterpreted through the buddha. Put another way, it was a great turning point at which, through the buddha, already theorized as a religion, the gods that had been in an untheorized world were defined.

Yet the story grew more tangled still. The arbitrary subordination of the native gods to Buddhist figures provoked a fierce backlash among certain medieval Shinto thinkers, who rose up to refute it. At the forefront stood the Watarai clan, the hereditary priests of the Outer Shrine (Toyouke Daijingu) at Ise Jingu. In the late Kamakura period, the Watarai inverted the Buddhist doctrine and advanced shinpon butsujaku (神本仏迹説)—the claim that the native kami were the true, primordial source and the buddhas merely their secondary traces. The new theology built on this reversal became known as Ise Shinto (or Watarai Shinto), and in an era when Shinto still lacked a unified doctrinal footing of its own, it exerted an immense influence on later generations.

As a result, what must not be missed is that a ground was formed on which "gods and buddhas" could be spoken of in a dualistic world. It is not dualism in the sense we think of now, but since it is dualism, of course reversal is possible. In fact, the one who objected to the relation of gods and buddhas in honji suijaku, reversed the relation, and, as a charismatic thinker, had a great effect on later ages was Kanetomo Yoshida, a Shinto thinker of the Muromachi period.

Kanetomo Yoshida, who became the founder of Yoshida Shinto (Yuiitsu Shinto), which still has its main shrine on Mount Yoshida, a holy ground of Kyoto, reversed the already established honji suijaku and declared that Shinto is the root (seed), Confucianism the branches and leaves, and Buddhism only the flowers and fruit. Though he was a Shinto man, this age was almost wholly under the influence of Buddhism, and if one looks at Kanetomo's own claim, one finds a strong Confucian influence in it. The Confucian influence is typical in his claim that Shinto is the root (seed), Confucianism the branches and leaves, and Buddhism the flowers and fruit, but the moment he set the god back as the source of all things, Shinto, which until then had had no substance, was at last coming to a stage of religious birth with Buddhism as its mother body.

For this reason, the gods of the Ama peoples in each place came to be assimilated, or syncretized, with one another to a considerable degree. This sensibility poses a rather troublesome problem. In my view, long before the syncretism of the gods and the Buddhas, there was originally a very long history of syncretism among the gods themselves. The gods we know from myth today are only the figures of "great gods," syncretized at the end of those thousands of years.

The reality of Mount Hiei was that it was the front line of the shinbutsu shugo, in which Enryakuji, of the buddhas, and Hiyoshi Taisha, of the gods, were one. It was a base with the highest standing in both Buddhism and Shinto. Mount Hiei, which had the power of the gods as well as of Buddhism, was immensely strong. The portable shrines (mikoshi) it carried out were taken to be the gods themselves, and to defy them meant becoming an enemy of the gods. Today we worship only the visible world and not the invisible one. It was the opposite then: people believed that every calamity had its cause in the invisible world. So the nobles and imperial family of Heian-kyo could not lay a hand on Mount Hiei, which held the supreme authority over both Buddhism and Shinto.

The gods of Japan remain wrapped in mystery. To me, the arrival of the buddha as a clear object did not make the existence of the gods clearer. It deepened the mystery. Whether I look at the people of the age of shinbutsu shugo or at history down to the present, the god remains a being no one can identify. It can only be said to be "god." It is not a being with substance.

After the Meiji Restoration the edict separating gods and buddhas cut them apart again from their long history of fusion. This essential problem has still not reached a point where it can be called resolved.