History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0222/02220.txt

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$Unique_ID{how02220}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter II: Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{buddha
salvation
sects
land
faith
own
doctrine
pure
amida
buddhism}
$Date{1913}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Japan
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter II: Part II

     The Tendai sect (Chinese T'ien-t'ai) received its name from the group of
mountains in the modern Chinese province of Cheh-kiang among which its
founder, Chi K'ai (died 597 A. D.), lived in retirement.  Chi K'ai had been
taught in the Dhyana school, but, not finding himself satisfied with their
doctrines, withdrew and developed in his mountain solitudes a more
comprehensive system of his own.

     The Tendai takes for its fundamental scripture the Saddharma Pundarika,
together with the Nirvana Sutra and the Mahaprajnaparamita-castra.  The
Saddharma Pundarika, purporting to contain the supreme doctrine of Buddha,
endeavours to transcend the distinction of the three "Vehicles" (for
disciples, for Pratyeka Buddhas, and for Bodhisattvas respectively).  There is
in reality but one all-comprehending "Buddha Vehicle"; the lower teachings and
motives are only an accommodation to the incapacity of men in lower stages of
religious development.  Men have to be lured like children to their own
salvation by the offer of goods which they comprehend and desire; these are
not the true good - Nirvana, for example, as the saint (Arhat) conceives it,
is not the true Nirvana -yet the teaching is no untruth, for the good which
Buddha purposes to bestow on them is infinitely better than his promise.  The
lesser vehicles are, therefore, not rejected; but they are ranked with the
beggarly elements.  The Mahayana schools accordingly distinguish in the life
of Buddha certain periods, in which he successively revealed the completer and
profounder truth.  According to Chi K'ai, Buddha at first proclaimed the
fulness of the truth; but finding men unable to bear it, he taught for twelve
years the doctrines comprised in the "three collections" which are the Bible
of the Hinayanists; then for eight years he set forth the ideal of the
Bodhisattva, in contrast to the selfish aim of the Arhat; in the two and
twenty years following he expounded the metaphysics of universal unreality;
finally, in the last eight years of his life he disclosed the sublime truth
which is the theme of the Saddharma Pundarika, namely, that all beings are
capable of becoming supreme Buddhas, because they are all partakers of the
Buddha nature.

     The Tendai doctrine is broad in another aspect: there is no one exclusive
way of attaining salvation.  "The true method is found neither in
book-learning, nor external practice, nor ecstatic contemplation; neither in
the exercise of reason nor the reveries of fancy; but there is a middle
condition, a system which includes all and rejects none, to which all others
gravitate, and in which alone the soul can be satisfied." ^1

[Footnote 1: This comprehensive synthesis claims the authority of Nagarjuna.]

     According to the Saddharma Pundarika, Sakyamuni, whom we call the
historical Buddha, was the only one of the innumerable incarnations or
manifestations of an eternal Buddha; his passing away is only a deceptive
appearance, a "device" of his to lead men to obey his words.  His knowledge
embraces the remotest past and the remotest future.  In his own words: "I am
the father of the world, the self-existent, ^2 the healer, the protector of
all creatures." "What reason should I have to continually manifest myself?
When men become unbelieving, unwise, ignorant, careless, fond of sensual
pleasures, and from thoughtlessness run into misfortune, then I, who know the
course of the world, declare, 'I am so and so.'" The words recall the speech
of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, "Whenever righteousness languishes and
unrighteousness prevails, then I create myself; for the deliverance of the
good and the destruction of the evil, I arise in every age of the world to
re-establish righteousness." It is plain that to this type of Buddhism not
only the Brahmanic philosophy of the Absolute but the theistic conceptions of
Hinduism have contributed.

[Footnote 2: Buddha thus puts himself in the place of Brahman, the All-Father,
the Self-Existent.]

     The identity of the Buddha Sakyamuni with the Buddha of original
enlightenment, and consequently his eternity, is the great revelation of the
Saddharma Pundarika; faith in it and joyful acceptance of it outweigh all the
merit that a man could heap up by the practice of all the Buddhist virtues and
perfections through countless ages.

     The Tendai metaphysics pass for the most profound among the Buddhist
sects; fortunately we are not required to fathom them.  The system is defined
as a pantheistic realism; the Bhutatathata ^1 is the essence of all things,
immanent in nature and in thought - a conception in which some modern
Buddhists discover a resemblance to Spinoza's "substance."

[Footnote 1: The Absolute; see below, pp. 308 f.]

     The Dhyana school was introduced into China from India by the patriarch
Bodhidharma in 527 A.D.  The older branch of the Zen school (Rinzai) was
imported into Japan, as we have seen, in 1168, the younger (Soto) in 1223.
The distinctive peculiarity of this school is that the supreme truth cannot be
expressed in words nor communicated by teaching, but only by a kind of
thought-transference.  Study and the practice of devotion are therefore little
esteemed.  It is by immersing one's thought in his own original nature that he
makes the great discovery, the successive steps of which are described.  Part
of this discovery is that the nature of his own thought is in origin pure;
therefore it is not necessary to expel the passions and to seek intelligence.
The final stage is the absolute illumination which is equivalent to becoming
Buddha.  The Soto does not, like the Rinzai, make contemplation the beginning
and end of the matter, but regards study also as a means, and its priests
have, in fact, been distinguished for learning.  The effect of the highest
wisdom, says one of the most valued sutras of the school, is that we see that
all the elements of phenomenal existence are empty, vain, and unreal.  "Form
does not differ from space nor space from form; all things surrounding us are
stripped of their qualities, so that in this highest stage of enlightenment
there can be no longer birth or death, defilement or purity, addition or
destruction.  There is, thus, no such thing as ignorance, and therefore none
of the miseries that result from it.  If there is no misery, decay, or death,
there is no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as attaining to happiness
or rest." This unutterable void is, however, not the void of non-being, but
the abyss of absolute being, of which we can think only in negations.

     Of peculiar interest are the two "Pure Land" sects, the Jodo and the
Shin, which are one of the most significant developments of Buddhism.  All the
other divisions of Buddhism, ancient or modern, whether of the Hinayana or the
Mahayana branch, however widely they differ in their conception of the nature
of the goal or the method of attaining to it, are at one in this, that in some
fashion or other man must arrive at the goal by following the way laid down by
Buddha, and are therefore classed together as sects of the Holy Way, in
contrast to the sects of the Pure Land.  This classification has a good
ground, for while all other forms of Buddhism are schemes of salvation by
self-discipline or by the achievement of transcendental knowledge - in either
case man's own work - in the Jodo and Shin-shu salvation is by grace through
faith.

     These sects are in the wider sense Mahayanist; they base their doctrine
on the two Sukhavati Sutras, which describe the Land of Bliss, the Western
Paradise of Amitabha Buddha, and on the so-called Meditation on Buddha
Amitayus.  In the two sutras first named the mendicant Dharmakara describes
what sort of a Buddha country his shall be when he is Buddha.  If all may not
be to his wish, then he desires not to obtain supreme enlightenment.  Among
the other conditions is this, that those who have directed their thought to be
born in his Buddha country, and for this purpose have brought their stock of
merit to maturity, shall have their wish fulfilled, even those who have only
ten times repeated the thought. ^1 In the Shorter Sutra it is taught that
beings are not born in that Buddha country as a reward and result of good
works performed in this present life; but whoever shall hear the name of the
blessed Amitayus and keep it in mind one, two, three, four, five, six, or
seven nights, when he comes to die, Amitayus and a host of Bodhisattvas shall
stand before him, and he shall be reborn in the Land of Bliss, the Buddha
country of Amitayus.  The Meditation ends with a similar doctrine.  This
Buddha country of Amitabha, or Amitayus, in the West is described with a
wealth of sensuous imagination; it is a veritable paradise in which no
beautiful and pleasant thing is lacking, nor is the moral perfection of its
inhabitants less dwelt upon.  But the best is that there, free from all the
hindrances that make attainment on earth so infinitely difficult, they go on
to the perfect knowledge which is Buddhahood.

[Footnote 1: "If I arrive at Buddhahood, I will not take to myself complete
enlightenment (i.e., become Buddha) unless all living beings in the universe
who sincerely believe in me and desire to be born in my land shall be born
there, though but ten times they direct their devotion to me."]

     Genku (Honen Shonin), who in 1175 founded the Japanese Jodo sect, was
born in 1133.  As a mere boy he entered the order in the Tendai monastery on
Hiyeizan, but soon withdrew from it and gave himself for years in seclusion to
the study of the sacred books and the writings of former sages.  The paths of
salvation laid down in those books, Mahayana as well as Hinayana, seemed to
him impracticable.  In older times - the first fifteen hundred years of the
faith - men of stronger intellect and more heroic will were able, walking by
their own strength in the Holy Way, to attain in this life wisdom and
deliverance; but in these "last days of the religion," and for such as we,
this attainment is impossible.  The doctrine is too hard for our understanding
and the way too hard for our strength. One day, as he was re-reading Zendo's
comment on the Meditation on Amitayus, his attention fastened on the passage,
"Above all, with whole and undivided heart keep the name of Amitayus in
remembrance." In a flash of illumination the meaning became clear to him: Not
by works of the law nor by superhuman wisdom is salvation to be achieved in
this world; it is secured for us by the grace of Amitabha, who has promised
that whosoever calls upon his name shall be born again in the Pure Land, and
there, in Amitabha's paradise, be made perfect.  At once he abandoned all the
religious exercises he had practised for years, and did nothing but repeat
innumerable times daily: "Namu Amida Butsu!" ("Hail Amida Buddha!"), which is
the symbol of the sect.

     In his own words: "The Pure Land teaching bids us, letting this world go,
hasten to be born in the Happy Land.  This is made possible by the solemn
promise of Amida Buddha; and the choice does not depend on whether we are good
or bad.  No, the only question is whether a man has faith in this promise of
Buddha or not.  Therefore Doshaku ^1 said, 'There is no other way in which we
can really walk except this one which the Holy Way doctrine shows us.'"

[Footnote 1: Tao-cho, one of the Chinese teachers of the Pure Land doctrine
(d. 628 A.D.).]

     Shinran, the greatest of Honen's disciples, developed the doctrine
further in some directions, and the result was a division.  The conservative
side, which presently split into several branches, kept the name Jodo, while
Shinran and his followers called themselves Jodo Shin-shu, the "True Pure Land
Sect," commonly abridged to Shin-shu.  The Shin-shu agrees with the parent
sect in making a new birth in the Western Paradise the immediate aim of
religious endeavour, and in grounding its hope upon the gracious purpose of
Amida to make all men sharers of the salvation which he wrought out for them.
But while some Amidaists in Japan as well as in China made the accumulation of
a stock of merit indispensable to salvation, and others thought the endless
invocation of the name all-sufficient, Shinran made faith, in a more spiritual
sense, the sole condition: renouncing every thought of saving himself by his
own effort, man must put all his trust in the promise of Amida.

     In a modern exposition of the doctrine we read: "When we examine our own
heart, it is far from being pure and true; on the contrary, it is wicked,
foul, false, and hypocritical.  How can we then extirpate all our passions and
achieve Nirvana by our own strength?  How attain the three states of heart? ^1
Recognising, therefore, the complete impotence of our own power, we must put
our trust alone in the help of another's power offered us in the original
resolve of Amida.  When we do so we enter into Buddha's knowledge and are
filled with his great compassion, as the water of a river becomes salt when it
flows into the sea.  For this reason the doctrine is called "Faith in the
Higher Power."

[Footnote 1: i.e., sincere, believing, desiring to be born in the Pure Land,
as expressed in Amida's vow.  These are all summed up, it is explained, in the
one word "faith," or "whole heart."]

     The invocation of the name of Amida is not a means of obtaining the great
salvation, but an expression of gratitude for salvation already received by
faith.  Gratitude is also the motive for observing his law; it is not enough
to confess him with the lips, the thoughts and deeds of believers should be in
conformity with his good will; but this conformity will follow naturally from
keeping the mercies of Amida ever before the mind.

     The Jodo, while recognising Amida as the only hope of man's salvation,
allowed resort to other Buddhas such as Kwannon, the goddess of mercy, for
temporal benefits, and even admitted the statues of these deities to its
temples.  The Shin-shu forbids worship of any being except Amida.  It teaches,
further, that prayers should not be made to obtain earthly goods or to avert
earthly ills; what befalls man in this life is determined by former deeds, and
it is in vain to invoke the aid of the gods to alter this destiny.  Prayer to
Amida should be only for what concerns man's eternal welfare, and that not as
petition, but as grateful acknowledgment of his mercy.  On the same principle
the use of amulets, charms, and all magic rites are excluded.

     Inasmuch as neither learning, nor contemplation, nor religious exercises
are necessary, or even profitable, nothing is gained by withdrawal from the
world; salvation is as easy for the householder as for the monk, and the
members of the sect are encouraged to remain in their own vocations.  Its
priests are in reality not so much an order of monks seeking to become saints
or future Buddhas by ways not open to laymen as a ministry to whom is
committed the conduct of worship and the religious instruction of the church;
they marry and live among their fellows, wear secular garb when not engaged in
religious functions, and are not even bound to abstain from eating meat.

     The Shin-shu grew rapidly in numbers and power in the first centuries of
its existence, and is to-day the most numerous and vigorous of all the
Japanese sects.  Since a metaphysical system forms no part of its plan of
salvation, it has not the same difficulty as some of the others in
accommodating itself to modern science and philosophy, while the freedom of
its priests fits them better to be leaders of a progressive movement.  In the
modern revival of Buddhism in Japan they have taken a conspicuous part.

     As a system of salvation by grace through faith, the Pure Land sects have
an obvious resemblance to Christianity, which appears the more striking in
contrast to what we may call the orthodox Buddhism of the Holy Way.  The
virtual monotheism, especially of the Shin-shu; the emphasis on man's
inability to achieve salvation by his own powers, his dependence on the power
of another; the infinite compassion of Amida, who before innumerable ages
provided this way by which even the weakest and the most ignorant and the
greatest sinners may be saved; faith in Amida's gracious purpose to save all
as the essence of religion; gratitude as the spring at once of piety and
morality - such are the salient points of comparison.  To not a few students
it has seemed that a teaching so widely at variance, not only with primitive
Indian Buddhism but with its later developments, and so closely akin to
Christianity, ^1 not in certain isolated features but in a whole complex of
fundamental ideas, can only be explained by Christian influence.

[Footnote 1: More accurately to certain types of Protestantism.]

     The age of the Pure Land sects excludes the possibility of contact with
Christianity in Japan.  When the Jesuit missionaries arrived, in 1549, they
found these sects, already three centuries old, among the most flourishing of
all; Father Cabral describes their doctrine of salvation by faith alone as a
sort of Buddhist Lutheranism.  The attempt has been made, however, by more
than one scholar to show that this doctrine might have been derived from the
Nestorian Christians in China.  It is noted that Zendo (Shan-tao), from whose
writings Genku got his inspiration, lived about the middle of the seventh
century at the capital, Ch'ang-an (modern Si-an-fu), where the Nestorian
missionaries had established themselves in 635.  The coincidence is certainly
interesting; but more than one reason must deter the historian from attaching
any further significance to it. The way of salvation which Zendo set forth did
not originate with him; he found it, we are told, in the Amitayurdhyani Sutra,
and was further instructed in it by teachers who stood in a scholastic
succession that went back more than a century in China.  The Sukhavati Sutras,
in which the gist of the doctrine is contained, had been translated into
Chinese centuries earlier, the oldest version of the Longer Sutra before the
end of the second century of our era.  Acvagosha's Awakening of Faith in the
Mahayana, commonly ascribed to the first century of our era, commends this way
of salvation, quoting from "the Sutra" a passage substantially embodying the
teaching of the existing Sukhavati texts.

     Moreover, no form of Christianity which penetrated to the East in those
centuries taught a doctrine of salvation by faith in God's gracious purpose of
salvation for all mankind.  To the church, Nestorian or Catholic, saving faith
meant the acceptance of a body of doctrines, especially about the Trinity and
the Person of Christ; in the centre of its teaching and its cultus stood, not
the universal love of God, but the incarnation and the death of Christ; the
benefits of his salvation were not appropriated immediately by faith, but
communicated by the sacraments as administered by the church.  In short, the
doctrine of salvation by faith alone cannot have been borrowed from any branch
of the Christian church because the church acknowledged no such doctrine.

     On the other hand, the example of India shows how religions of salvation
by faith may grow up by the side of systems of salvation by works and by
transcendental knowledge, and in the end supersede them.  The Sukhavati Sutras
and the sects which base their doctrines upon them represent a development in
Buddhism corresponding to the contemporary development of Hinduism and
probably not independent of it.  It is to be observed, further, that the
conception of salvation in the Pure Land sects is thoroughly Buddhistic: the
evil from which man is to be saved is not sin and its penalty, but the round
of rebirth, and the positive goal is the supreme knowledge which makes man a
Buddha.

     The last of the great divisions of Japanese Buddhism, the Nichiren,
represents a violent reaction against the Pure Land sects.  Its founder, whose
name it bears, was born in 1222; he was as a boy a student in a Shingon temple
and later in the principal monastery of the Tendai at Hiyeizan.  An incident
that occurred on his way thither had a marked influence on his career: in a
village which he passed through he saw some children dragging about a
plaything, an image of Buddha (Shaka).  When he remonstrated at this
profanation he was told that since Shinran had taught that Amida was the only
Buddha to worship they had no further use for the others.  From that moment he
resolved to become a reformer.  As the basis of his system he too, like Dengyo
the founder of the Tendai, took the Saddharma Pundarika, but he developed its
teachings in an altogether different way.  When he appeared as a preacher of
reform his plain speaking and his often violent denunciation of abuses made a
deep impression among the people, but provoked the enmity of the monks, who
got him banished.  On his return he made himself so obnoxious by his
pugnacious methods of evangelisation that he was condemned to death, but was
saved by a miracle. After another term of banishment he seems to have become
more temperate; at least he spent his last years quietly teaching those who
resorted to him to learn.  He left his spirit to the sect as well as his name;
in all its history it has been reactionary, intolerant, and violent.  Its
differences with the Shin-shu were fought out on more than one bloody
battle-field.

     Widely as the sects differ among themselves, and violent as the
contentions among them have been at times, they nevertheless represent
essentially the same type of Buddhism.  They all acknowledge the same canon of
scripture, though out of the immense bulk of this canon (6,771 volumes) each
principal sect makes certain sutras peculiarly its own.  They all start from
the same fundamental assumptions, some of which are a part of primitive
Buddhism, while others are specifically Mahayanist.

     The round of rebirths in which man's destiny in general and in particular
is determined by the deeds of a former existence, and salvation in its
negative aspect as escape from this "wheel," of course underlies all; that the
world is evil through and through, and life miserable are corner-stones of the
creed and lend their sombre colour to the literature of certain periods.  But
the Indian pessimism which such utterances originally voice is wholly alien to
the Japanese temperament, and, as in the Great Vehicle schools generally, the
positive aspect of salvation, both in the popular and the philosophical
conception of it - the bliss of the Western Paradise, the blessedness of the
Buddha state - predominates.  The belief that the goal can be reached only by
renouncing the world and submitting to the discipline for monks is rejected
only by the Pure Land sects; the discipline itself also is substantially the
same time in all schools.

     All accept, further, the same cosmology, with its succession of
innumerable worlds in time and its array of Buddha worlds in all the corners
of non-dimensional space.  For them, as for all Mahayanists, Nirvana is not
surcease of sorrow through the suppression of its cause, desire; still less is
it extinction, but the highest positive good, the possession of the supreme
knowledge, that is, a transcendental knowledge of the Absolute, the
Bhutatathata.  The Japanese schools are all, in their peculiar fashion,
pantheistic; their Absolute is immanent not transcendent. Inasmuch as this
Buddha nature is in all, all are potentially Buddha - not, of course, what we
call the historical Buddha, but the eternal Buddha of whom all the Buddhas of
all worlds are manifestations, the Dharmakaya.  It is egoism, which as
self-consciousness and self-love isolates us mentally and morally, that
hinders the realisation of Buddhahood.  The knowledge of the Absolute is
therefore the knowledge of man's own true nature in its identity with the
Absolute.  The chief differences among the sects lie in the choice of methods
by which the goal is to be reached; their distinctive teachings are
principally concerned with vindicating the method and explaining its
application.

     To the masses these abstruse doctrines and scholastic controversies
signify little or nothing; at most they can comprehend that the Pure Land
sects give the layman a better chance than the Holy Way.  For them Buddhism is
not a pantheism, but a polytheism, of whose multitudinous gods they may obtain
protection from the tangible evils of this life and the satisfaction of their
worldly desires, and by the efficacy of whose funeral rites they may escape
the evils of the hereafter.

     The pantheon of Japanese Buddhism is very comprehensive; it includes
popular gods from India and from every country which it passed through on the
long road to Japan, a host of native Kami, besides many Buddhas and saints out
of its own history and mythology.  Among these Sakyamuni occupies a somewhat
inconspicuous place, though images of him, alone or with groups of his
disciples, are not infrequent.  The imaginary - or, if you please, ideal -
Buddha Amitabha (Amida) is a much greater figure in Japanese Buddhism, and not
solely through the influence of the Pure Land sects; there are few temples in
which a statue of Amida is not found either as the principal or a subordinate
figure.  The goddess of mercy, Kwannon, is a hardly less conspicuous figure.
Binzuru, the divine healer, is also a very popular deity; his idols are
polished by the hands of suppliants who believe that they can get rid of all
sorts of ailments by rubbing the images of the god.  One of the commonest
idols is Fudo, represented as enveloped in flames with a sword in his right
hand and a rope in his left; this terrifying figure destroys or binds
evil-doers.  The king of hell, Emma-sama, before whom all souls must stand in
judgment, is also frequently represented, a warning to men to think upon their
ways.  A friendlier figure is Jizo, the special protector of children, whose
statues are often almost buried under heaps of pebbles, a vicarious service
for the little souls in hell whom an old hag compels to heap up pebbles on the
river bank. The seven gods of good fortune are peculiarly venerated, and have
a place on the Buddha-shelf in many homes: foremost among them the god of
riches, oftentimes the god of abundant food, the gods who give comfort, long
life, wisdom, the valiant protector from dangers, and the goddess of beauty.

     The Buddhist temples are much more splendid affairs than the Shinto
shrines, and the worship in them far more imposing.  The gorgeous vestments of
the priests, the solemn intonation of the service, the clouds of incense in
the dimly lighted sanctuary, have reminded many observers of the services in a
Christian cathedral.  Such services are held in the great temples every day,
and with augmented splendour on the high days of the calendar.  Many of the
temples, however, are hardly used for worship at all.  The laity do not
participate in these rites even as a worshipping congregation, but go singly
to the temples to offer their petitions and drop an offering into the
contribution-box, or buy from the priests amulets and talismans, holy water,
ashes, and the like, for protection against disease and other ills.

     In all Japanese homes, except those of adherents of the most reactionary
Shinto sects, there is a Buddha-shelf, on which stand little shrines, often
richly ornamented in lacquer, for Buddhist gods; the tablets bearing the
posthumous names of the deceased members of the family stand on the same
shelf; offerings of food and incense are made before them.  The funeral rites
are conducted, as has already been observed, by Buddhist priests; there are
minor differences in the practice of the several sects. They are in part at
the house, where a soul tablet bearing the posthumous or Buddha name of the
deceased is set up, lights are kept burning, food and incense offered, partly
in the temple, where prayers are recited and a kind of eulogy pronounced.  The
body is then removed to the burning-place.

     From the 13th to the 15th of July an All-Souls feast is kept, at which
time it is believed that the souls are permitted to return to their kindred
and be entertained by them.  A staging of bamboo canes is erected in one of
the rooms of the house, on which food and lanterns are placed for the spirits,
and a Buddhist priest reads a mass before them.  On the first evening fires of
hemp leaves are lighted before the entrance of the house, and incense strewed
on the coals, as an invitation to the spirits.  At the end of the three days
the food that has been set out for the spirits is wrapped up in mats and
thrown into a river.  Dances of a peculiar kind are a conspicuous feature of
the celebration, which is evidently an old Japanese custom; the Buddhist
elements are adscititious.  At this season the graves are decorated, and
frequent visits are paid by the kinsfolk. For those who have no relatives
living a mass is said in all the temples for "the hungry devils."

     In the political restoration of 1868 Shinto was at first proclaimed the
religion of the state, and the ministry to which it was committed took
precedence of all others.  Buddhism was no longer recognised by the
government; the payments for the support of its temples were cut off, the
temples of the mixed cult (Ryobu Shinto) were purged of Buddhist images and
emblems, and as far as possible Shinto simplicity was restored; for a while
even the burning of the dead was forbidden.  This excess of zeal soon passed,
and in the next stage both Shinto and Buddhist priests, in the quality of
religious teachers, were put under the supervision of a ministry of religion,
which was later reduced to a mere bureau for Shinto-Buddhist temples.  The
constitution of 1889 acknowledges no state religion, and guarantees complete
religious liberty.  Shinto continues to be, however, the religion of the
imperial house and of the court; and on high festivals the emperor himself
officiates in the ceremonies for himself and his people.  Thus Shinto enjoys
the prestige, though not the legal status, of a national religion.