Shinto Was Made a Religion

The point to be careful about is whether a religion called "Shinto" existed on the Japanese side before the arrival of Buddhism, or in the upheaval of its arrival. I believe that Shinto as a religion did not exist then. Faith in daily life was forced out of its earlier state by the arrival of a continental religion with strong doctrine and discipline, and only then, I suspect, did the need arise to make Shinto a religion in order to stand against Buddhism.

From this view, the first real success of Shinto in becoming a religion was State Shinto (shrine Shinto) of the Meiji era, which means it is in fact quite recent.

The word "Shinto" is generally written with characters meaning "the way of the gods," and I take the original nature of Shinto to be "actual practice in daily life = faith."

The first thing to recognize is that the common belief that Japan had its own Shinto before Buddhism and Confucianism arrived does not tell the truth. It is more reasonable to say that Shinto acquired religion over more than a thousand years, under the influence of Buddhism and Confucianism, which had been completed as religions on the Chinese side.

As the name shinbutsu shugo says, it was a complex phenomenon that brought gain to both, and it was the greatest occasion on which Shinto acquired doctrine and theology. Without this process, modern Shrine Shinto and State Shinto would never have been born.

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.

A report released by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2023 gives the total across the country as 80,608. That is data from 2022. In 2010 the figure was 86,640. In only about ten years, some 6,000 shrines were lost.

In 1871 the government abolished the hereditary priesthood and set the principle that the state would choose and assign the priests.

It declared that "shrines are for venerating the state," and began to destroy the shrines, that is the faiths, that had existed in such variety from place to place.

The officials revised the old ranking system and, of all things, set Ise Jingu at the apex of the shrine system.

It is often said that the Japanese are non-religious, yet in truth they are nothing of the sort. What that label betrays is a particular view of religion which assumes that unless you can name a specific church, order, or denomination, there is neither religion nor faith.

Seen in this light, calling oneself "non-religious" is deeply troubling. One reason so many young people today are in anguish, it seems to me, is that identifying as "non-religious" quietly leads them to let go of faith and prayer at the same time.

Religion may need controversy to win converts, but faith and prayer have no need of argument at all.

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 idea of shinshin ridatsu had its strongest effect not in the capital, Nara, but at Kehi Jingu in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, and at Tado Jingu in Kuwana, Mie Prefecture. What matters is that these were not offered as an ideology made by human beings. They were backed by the oracle of the god himself. A human opinion was turned into "the opinion of the god," and the oracle was then used politically.

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.

To enforce the ban on Christian proselytizing, Buddhism—already organized into a systematic institution—was far more convenient for the shogunate than Shinto, whose framework as a formal religion remained fragile. A crucial point in looking at the Edo period is that Shinto stood in a subordinate position to Buddhism. Resentment over that subordination is what bound Shinto priests to the modern movement to expel Buddhism.

In practice, this meant that everything fell under the jurisdiction of Buddhist temples. Even Shinto priests, as a rule, were compelled to hold Buddhist funerals. Yet at the same time, freedom of discourse was largely preserved during the Edo period, and the shogunate did not intervene in scholarly debate.

At the time, Shinto was divided broadly into two factions, both sanctioned by the shogunate. Anyone wishing to found a new shrine had to obtain authorization from one of the two; opening a shrine on one's own authority was forbidden. These were the Yoshida house (Yoshida Shinto), whose lineage reached back to the medieval period, and the Shirakawa house (Hakke Shinto). Both had their seats not in Edo, the political center of the day, but in Kyoto.

So long as these two great houses remained divided, they stood no chance against the overwhelming power of Buddhism. Drawing on kokugaku, Hirata launched an energetic campaign of proselytizing, and under his formidable influence the two rival camps were at last brought together. In substance, Restoration Shinto was the Shinto of Atsutane Hirata.

The most powerful intellectual current of its day, Hirata's thought shaped a vast circle of disciples, and through those disciples modern Shinto was born.

Historically, this pattern began with the arrival of Buddhism in the mid-sixth century. Although Buddhism had never existed in ancient Japan, it would eventually become so intertwined with Japanese culture as to be indispensable. It must be remembered, however, that the doctrine which crossed the sea was not pristine Indian Buddhism, but a tradition heavily remixed within Chinese civilization. Nor did the ancient Japanese embrace it without protest: a bitter conflict erupted between the pro-Buddhist faction and the nativist anti-Buddhist faction, culminating in armed clash and a violent transfer of political power. Only when the pro-Buddhist faction seized authority did the imperial court throw its weight behind the faith, accelerating the building of temples and the importation of sutras.

Yet even as the imperial court championed Buddhism, the country was not yet a unified state, and widespread regional resistance to the foreign creed persisted at a scale the new ruling elites could not ignore. To entrench Buddhism on native soil, rulers were forced into a delicate compromise: setting the foreign faith against indigenous Shinto beliefs while orchestrating an uneasy harmony. While history offers few instances where clashing religions smoothly fuse, ancient Japan responded with shinbutsu shugo (神仏習合), the syncretic doctrine that identified native kami with the buddhas. Bridging a foreign creed with indigenous deities might appear to reflect extraordinary flexibility, yet we should not be seduced by this superficial assimilation. One of the fundamental mechanisms of Japanese cultural reception is a layered duality: the surface graciously accepts foreign forms, while the inner core fiercely defends what is native. This concealed architecture is nearly impossible for outside observers to decipher, which is why international assessments of Japan consistently miss the mark.