Yaoyorozu no Kami

Countless Deities Dwelling in Primal Experience

What is god? Try to explain it in words and it recedes. Try to speak it and its form hides away. It is a state you can never finally reach no matter how close you draw. For me that is god, and it is one of the faces of god.

If I dare to speak of god, I think it is primal experience. God is not something thought with the head. To put it another way, god does not exist in the realm where the head does its thinking. In the realm of primal experience that holds no language, god exists in plurality and without number. Once you grant this nature, it becomes clear that understanding god is impossible for anyone who does not hold primal experience. Yet this is not a matter of some people being able to understand god and others not. Primal experience is open to everyone. Whether or not one is granted that primal experience depends on each person’s life. In this sense god is open to all and is never closed off to some limited stratum alone.

Looking back, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki of the early eighth century that compiled the old traditions contain neither the question of what god is nor any definition of it. The ancestors of Japan up to at least the early eighth century very likely held no question or doubt about god. This was not because god did not exist for the ancestors of the Japanese. It expresses that god did not exist in the realm where human beings pose questions. Primal experience gained by the individual or within a pair or communal relation once filled worlds beyond number. There was one for every place. Putting this into words gave rise to the idea of the eight million gods. The Japanese call it Yaoyorozu no Kami [八百万神].

The Yaoyorozu no Kami are spoken of as the root nature of Shinto. In my own words this expresses that god dwells within primal experience. It is also the reflection of countless worlds where god differs according to the differing nature of primal experience from place to place. In a sense the moment it turned into the words Yaoyorozu no Kami, a boundary line began to be drawn through the once living world where gods and human beings coexisted. What followed was a history of separation and closing off. Perhaps we are suffering here and now because of it. To speak frankly, a personal question lies here. Can human beings go on living at all once they lose faith and prayer?

So at what stage did the question of god rise to the surface in the history of Japan? It is impossible to pinpoint this with precision. There is a paradox here. The moment the question of god began to be felt within each person, god hid its form. The moment the question of god sprouted within us, god vanished from before us. If we suppose this to be the reality of god, then within the range of what we can think, god does not exist after all, or it has been diluted.

In fact Japanese mythology holds an expression that hints at the sensibility of this age. Read the opening of the myth generally called the creation of heaven and earth and five gods appear. They are Amenominakanushi [天之御中主神], Takamimusuhi [高御産巣日神], Kamimusuhi [神産巣日神], Umashiashikabihikoji [宇摩志阿斯訶備比古遅神], and Amenotokotachi [天之常立神]. In the myth these gods are a special existence called Kotoamatsukami [別天つ神]. Japanese mythology divides the gods broadly into two kinds called Amatsukami [天つ神] and Kunitsukami [国つ神]. The countless gods that fall under neither hold no names and are expressed as animals and the like. At this level the gods who connect to the emperor in mythological terms are the Amatsukami. The highest divinity among the Amatsukami is set in the imperial ancestral god Amaterasu.

The Kotoamatsukami at the opening are different. They are shown not as Amatsukami but as koto [別]. The word marks them as set apart. They are not an existence tied to the genealogy of the emperor. They look rather like a provisional form given substance so that the primal gods of the people who worshipped the Amatsukami could be placed within the myth. The five gods who appear as Kotoamatsukami are recorded in the myth with the expression [隠身] (kakurimi). It says they hid their bodies. I felt a question here. Why did the compilers have to use such an expression?

In other words the Kotoamatsukami conceal their form and never appear before people. This does not mean appearing with a body or any other substance. It means holding as their reality an existence prior to all human definition, before anything that words symbolize. This is why they are described as hiding their bodies. To say more, this does not even reach the level of natural objects such as tree and leaf or earth and sea. It seems to speak of an old memory in which god was sensed in a primal form before even that. When I consider why the early gods had to hide their bodies, the background suggests that a historical upheaval gave god substance in Japan. The turning point is the arrival of Buddhism.