Shinto and Buddhism in Japan

Unlike many traditions compared side by side, Shinto and Buddhism did not grow from a common root. Shinto developed from the worship of the kamikami The gods or sacred powers of Shinto, present in nature, ancestors and great people. Glossary, the sacred powers that Japanese people found in mountains, rivers, trees, ancestors and outstanding human beings. Buddhism came from abroad. According to the chronicles, a king of the Korean kingdom of Baekje sent an image of the Buddha and sutras to the Japanese court in the sixth century, in 538 or 552 CE, depending on the source. A dispute followed between the Soga clan, who favoured the new faith, and the Mononobe, who feared it would anger the native kami. The Soga won, and under rulers such as Prince Shōtoku Buddhism became a pillar of the state.

Instead of displacing the kami, Buddhism absorbed them. In the eighth century the kami Hachiman was said to have pledged help for the building of the Great Buddha at Tōdai-ji in Nara, dedicated in 752, and was later honoured as a bodhisattva. Buddhist temples called jingūji were built within shrine precincts, and monks recited sutras before the kami, who were at first described as beings who also needed liberation and later as protectors of Buddhism.

From the Heian period (794–1185) this relationship was expressed in the theory of honji suijaku, “original ground and manifest traces”. Buddhas and bodhisattvas were the original ground; the kami were the traces they left in Japan to reach its people. The sun goddess Amaterasu, for example, was identified with the cosmic Buddha Dainichi. Esoteric Buddhist schools built elaborate combined systems, and for most Japanese, kami and buddhas simply belonged to one sacred world. Scholars call this long fusion shinbutsu-shūgō, “the combination of kami and buddhas”.

Not everyone accepted Buddhist primacy. From the medieval period priests at Ise and the Yoshida family argued that the kami were original and the buddhas their manifestations. In the Edo period (1603–1868), scholars of the “national learning” movement, such as Motoori Norinaga, sought a pure Japanese way untouched by foreign thought. Their ideas helped prepare the decisive break. In 1868 the new Meiji government issued orders separating kami and buddhas. Buddhist statues, bells and priests were removed from shrines, and in some regions a movement known as haibutsu kishaku, “abolish the Buddha, destroy Shakyamuni”, led to the closure and destruction of many temples and images. Shrines were placed under state control, and what historians call State Shinto lasted until it was abolished under the Allied occupation in 1945.

The two traditions approach the sacred differently. Shinto centres on the kami, worshipped at shrines through offerings, prayers recited by priests and seasonal festivals in which the kami is carried through the streets. Its central values are purity and renewal: worshippers rinse their hands and mouth at the entrance, and rites of purification remove pollution. Shinto has no founder and no single scripture. The oldest chronicles, the Kojiki of 712 and the Nihon shoki of 720, record myths of the kami, but they are not used like a bible.

Buddhism offers a teaching about suffering and its end, transmitted in a vast body of sutras and organised into schools such as Tendai, Shingon, Pure Land, Zen and Nichiren. Its temples house images of buddhas and bodhisattvas, its priests are trained in doctrine and ritual, and its concern reaches beyond this life to rebirth and liberation.

Death marks the clearest division of labour. In Shinto tradition, death brings kegarekegare Impurity or pollution, which purification removes. Glossary, a state of impurity, and shrines keep it away; families in mourning traditionally avoid shrine visits for a period. Buddhism, by contrast, developed rites to guide the dead, and in the Edo period the state required every household to register with a Buddhist temple to prove it was not Christian. This system made temples the keepers of family graves and funerals, a role they still hold. The dead receive a posthumous Buddhist name and are remembered at the home altar and at the summer festival of Obon.

Japan today has tens of thousands of shrines and a comparable number of Buddhist temples. Official religious statistics, based on figures reported by religious bodies, count roughly as many Shinto as Buddhist adherents, and the total exceeds Japan’s population, because the same households are counted by their local shrine and their family temple. Surveys show that relatively few Japanese describe themselves as religious believers, yet most take part in shrine and temple customs.

The two traditions divide the life cycle. A newborn is taken to the local shrine for its first visit, children dress up for the Shichi-Go-San festival at ages three, five and seven, and the New Year begins with a visit to a shrine, or a temple, to pray for the year ahead. Shinto weddings became popular in the twentieth century, though chapel-style ceremonies are now more common. At the end of life, the great majority of funerals are Buddhist. Hence the popular saying that Japanese are “born Shinto and die Buddhist”.

Traces of the old fusion remain. Many temples still have small shrines to protective kami, some shrines keep Buddhist-era buildings, and the great mountain cults of pilgrimage blend the two. Shugendō, the ascetic mountain tradition that combined kami worship with esoteric Buddhism, was banned by the Meiji government in 1872 but revived after 1945, and its white-robed practitioners still climb sacred peaks such as those of Dewa Sanzan and Ōmine. The separation of 1868 drew a firm line on paper, but in the lives of most Japanese, kami and buddhas continue to stand side by side.