What Was the Shrine?
Foundations for Exploring the Origins of Shinto
Interestingly, when the question is changed from “what is a shrine?” to “what was the shrine?” everyone suddenly becomes unable to answer. This hesitation suggests that almost no one possesses an answer beyond the interpretations that emerged from the early modern and modern periods when the image of the shrine took shape.
In practice, when you visit a shrine and ask the priest “what is a shrine?” the answer you usually receive is the fixed response “a dwelling where gods are enshrined.” But this is the correct answer for “Shinto” and says nothing about the origin of the shrine itself. Why does everyone give the same answer in unison? No one explains.
The background involves the existence of only two universities in Japan where one can train to become a shrine priest. One is Kokugakuin University in Tokyo and the other is Kogakkan University in Ise, Mie Prefecture. The two appear to be independent, but in fact they are priest training institutions directly under Jinja Honcho. At these universities students study Shinto, classical texts, and ritual technique in accordance with the doctrine established by Jinja Honcho, and upon graduation they are granted the qualification of shrine priest by Jinja Honcho. Only by passing through this process can one become a priest. In other words, it has nothing whatsoever to do with faith.
What matters is that Jinja Honcho is not a public organ of the government. It is clearly a religious corporation. Jinja Honcho is a new religious movement that “reveres the Grand Shrine of Ise as its sovereign shrine,” and it contains none of the pluralistic tolerance of faith that Shinto originally possessed. It is an organization with a pyramidal power structure that places the Grand Shrine of Ise at the absolute apex and oversees eighty thousand shrines nationwide directly beneath it. From this alone the reality emerges that Jinja Honcho, which holds the licensing system for priests, is carrying serious problems. In fact, Jinja Honcho uses this vested interest to provide quite direct backing to conservative Liberal Democratic Party legislators and deploys the Shinto Political League as its lobby organization.
In plain terms, they collect funds from shrines across the country and channel them into political movements aligned with their own religious doctrine. The logic of the conservative camp, including that of the current Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, fundamentally stands on their intentions, and they still hold considerable influence. But what this article seeks to question is not the political problem of Jinja Honcho. Rather, the issue is that the existing content disseminated in line with Jinja Honcho’s intentions can answer “what is a shrine?” but has no power to answer “what was the shrine?” I want to open a path for resolving this discomfort.
To state it clearly, the answer to the question above is the textbook answer taught at university institutions. Directly, it is the view of Jinja Honcho. Seen from a slightly sharper angle, the answer strongly embraces the history of modern Shinto and retains remnants of early modern Shinto, but carries the problem of being virtually devoid of the history, culture, and spirit that preceded it. What I find discomforting above all is that their answer defining a shrine as “a dwelling where gods are enshrined” is incapable of saying anything about the Shinto that existed before. To give a more striking example, it is completely severed from the historical phenomenon of Shinbutsu Shugo (the syncretism of gods and buddhas). This fact reveals that neither priests nor Buddhist monks actually possess an answer to this fascinating phenomenon.
Viewed from the perspective of Japan, against the “buddha” as a later arrival there was the “god” as the originary presence. Everyone agrees on this. The problem is that when a shrine is defined in the modern sense as “a dwelling where gods are enshrined,” the history of how heterogeneous beings crossed becomes invisible. To give the example of Shinbutsu Shugo, Amaterasu enshrined at the Kotai Jingu within the Grand Shrine of Ise (the sovereign shrine of Jinja Honcho) is considered the incarnation of Dainichi Nyorai on the Buddhist side. The logic of this claim is clear. But what I truly wish to know is the following.
Why was it possible for such heterogeneous beings as god and buddha to syncretize?
What was the cultural spiritual soil at the origin that made this possible?
Laid out simply it is brief, but the moment one attempts to discuss it, it becomes extraordinarily difficult. Put differently, when considering the reception and interpretation of the heterogeneous arrival of Buddhism in Japan, what must first be illuminated is the reception and interpretation of the gods that formed the soil. Yet few people turn their thinking this far. The reason is clear. The reception of the gods by the Japanese as an ethnic people is taken for granted as a tradition continuous from antiquity. But is this really so?
If even that answer is merely the view of Jinja Honcho, then the inconvenient fact emerges that in truth no one knows anything. No one knows anything, yet everyone acts as if they do. This is the typical method of new religious movements and says nothing about the essence of Shinto itself. To know Shinto truly, one must move toward a world in which the enormous illusion called Jinja Honcho has been extinguished. As far as I know, the people who have touched the essential horizon of Shinto in modern and later history can be counted on one hand.
Conventional Shinto logic assumes that the act of venerating gods has been practiced across Japan since antiquity. Even where no shrine existed in its present form, in prototype the trees of the forest, rocks, and mountains were regarded as shrines and underwent historical transformation to become what we see today. This is the so-called faith of Yaoyorozu. Typically, the moment this mind that regards nature itself as a shrine underwent transformation is placed with the influence of the transmission of Buddhism, which arrived with the structure of the temple.
Certainly, once the construction of temples began, the construction of shrines to enshrine gods began in opposition. But this happened only in certain regions and cannot be generalized to all of Japan. The theory that an indigenous Shinto worldview was erected in opposition to the foreign Buddhist worldview is also quite suspect. Because this idea depends on the unverifiable fantasy that Shinto existed from antiquity. Stated skeptically, it is an ideology.
The idea that countless gods dwell within nature itself contains a certain truth, but I feel discomfort with making this the origin of Shinto. That trees, rocks, and mountains themselves were divine bodies and the prototypes of shrines is likely fact, given that traces remain across the country to this day. But even this nature faith must have had an origin of its own. When you reach this discomfort, you must confront an extremely troublesome body of thought. That is the history of interpreting Shinto as Kamunagara.
The modern reading of [神道] as Shinto is a new convention that took hold only in the modern era. In the past it was read in various ways, including Kamunagara and Kannagara. The orthography itself derives from the Nihon Shoki (completed in 720) which uses the notation [惟神].
Regarding the meaning of [惟神], the original annotation in the Nihon Shoki explains it as [惟神者 謂隨神道亦謂自有神道也]. Because the Nihon Shoki is written entirely in Chinese style classical Chinese, this kind of notation becomes the original source. Monks, priests, and scholars from before the early modern period have proposed various interpretations of the term [惟神], so it is a fact that the term was historically valued. The interpretation cannot be translated into English, but forced into approximation it reads as follows. “Kamunagara means following the way of the gods. It also means the state in which the way of the gods exists naturally.” Put differently, this conveys the form of Shinto, but the understanding is extremely difficult.
First, the troublesome quality of the Japanese must be resolved. The point of focus is a single term in the original annotation, the character [自].