Learning about Ise at Kogakkan: Day 8
Today I will be making an intensely specialized post about a lecture I heard today from Professor Shirayama Yoshitarō 白山芳太郎先生. If you are reading this via RSS you may want to skip this post. It’s for my own records or something.
Shirayama-sensei had a bit of a surprising alternative theory for us about the shinbutsu bunri 神仏分離, early Meiji period separation of kami and Buddhas. The common theory about this is that it was an official persecution of Buddhism. This is a very serious theory, enforced by books like James Ketelaar’s Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan, a defining work in Japanese religious studies which is immediately recognizable to a scholarly reader as being grounded in an intimidatingly deep level of research. Shirayama-sensei’s counterproposal was that, in fact, Shinto was more persecuted than Buddhism, simply by looking at the numbers: during the shinbutsu bunri, shrines were more likely to be shut down entirely than temples, and kami-worship within Buddhist institutions was not targeted, while Buddhist worship within shrines was targeted. If we consider Shinto to be “what goes on inside a shrine,” a shrine being a place run by a shrine priest, the counterintuitive result is that the destruction of Buddha statues was in fact a persecution of Shinto. This puts the following example passage from Ketelaar in a totally different light:
After a brief pro forma exchange of documents with the Office of Shrine Affairs within the Enryaku-ji, the Tendai temple that until the promulgation of these orders had administered the shrine, Juge and his band of self-proclaimed “restorationists” (fukkosha) proceeded to remove every statue, bell, sutra, tapestry, scroll, and article of clothing that could even be remotely linked to Buddhism from the shrine complex. All inflammable materials were gathered together and burned; all metals were confiscated to be refashioned into cannon or coin; stone statues were decapitated and buried or thrown into the nearby river; and wooden statues were used for target practice, or their heads for impromptu games of kickball, and then burned.
That’s from Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan, page 9. (ISIS would be proud!) Ketelaar’s narrative reads this as Shinto ideologues destroying Buddhist cultural heritage. But Shirayama-sensei reads it as political ideologues– essentially, Confucian nativists– wrecking and burning a Shinto shrine.
What discursive value do we gain if we adopt Shirayama-sensei’s alternative categories? He provided us with the concrete example of Kume Kunitake, an episode I’ve found bewilderingly paradoxical. In 1892, Kume theorized in an academic journal that “Shinto is the ancient custom of revering Heaven.” He wrote:
Probably Shinto does not qualify as religion; therefore it lacks a center of moral guidance, and is merely the reverence of Heaven.
「葢神道は宗教に非ず、故に誘善利生の旨なし、只天を祭り。」
This essay was reprinted in a magazine with much wider readership, whose nativist readers complained that Kume was generalizing the unique regalia of the Emperor and got him fired from his university post. But here’s the very odd thing: legally speaking, Shinto was not supposed to be religion at this time, but was officially declared the common customs of all Japanese people. Shrines were barred from performing funerals, shrine priests were not allowed to preach, etc. So it is unclear who Kume was arguing against. Yamazaki Minako 山崎渾子 has spoken of this episode as one requiring further rethinking.
Shirayama-sensei proposed to resolve the paradox with two basic lines of argument (which he clarified for me after his presentation):
- In fact the majority of intellectuals at the time shared Kume’s basic sentiment. He was fired only for stating it publicly. The proof of this is once again in the irrefutable statistic that the enlightened intellectual elites of Meiji discouraged shrine work to an extent never seen before in Japanese history, and demolished half of the shrines in the entire country.
- In the Edo period, Shinto really was a religion, or a tradition/teaching, to use the contemporary terminology. It was described in Edo intellectual literature as one of the “three teachings” 三教 of Japan, and it had its own rituals, specialists, schools and texts. In the Edo period, shrine priests refused to do business with Buddhists and conducted their own funerals. So, Kume’s argument was actually doing the work of the state in denying the Edo period narrative; he simply rewrote the argument the Meiji state was making in an overly frank way.
Where Shirayama-sensei’s theory gets confusing itself is when he tries to tie in Western scholars: Chamberlain, Aston, and D.C. Holtom were all said to be similarly demeaning to Shinto. Like Kume, Holtom wrote that “what may be called an inner sense of religion is unfortunately conspicuously absent” in writings about Shinto. But Kume’s ultimate objective was the same as the government’s: to preserve Shinto in a “restored,” “primitive” form as an instinct for reverence for the Emperor. Holtom’s objective was quite opposite to this: he saw Shinto as having some kind of religious seed which, if properly nurtured, would mature into something like Protestantism. I outlined this in detail back in 2010.
For Shirayama-sensei, regardless of the motives of each individual scholar, the end result was the same: Shinto was thought of as being valueless from a religious perspective from 1868 to 1945; accordingly, much of what existed in the Edo period was lost. I think there is something to this, when you consider that alternative schools of Shinto were banned and many shrines were demolished. [edit: I sent Shirayama-sensei this post, and he made an even stronger claim: he said that in fact no schools of Shrine Shinto exist today, and all that is left to us are the invented traditions of government bureaucrats playing at being shrine priests, and the various sects. Scholars familiar with our deep lack of knowledge about Edo period schools may want to agree with this, although I’ve heard rumors that some Edo schools continued on in various forms.]
On the other hand, long before 1868 there was an intellectual quest for finding value in Shinto, and it ended with Kokugaku and Mitogaku, which led directly into the modern period. The Confucian nativists attempted to harness the gods, but the Song Confucianist Zhang Zai 張載 described gods as the result of qi gathering, and the sage Zhu Xi warned that “qi is strong and principle weak”. 「気強理弱」朱子語類巻四性理一
Maybe the conquering will of the gods overpowered those who wanted to seek out principle, and now all we have are the embers of something the whole world once saw burning bright.
Posted: March 2nd, 2015 | Kogakkan