Most Distinctive Of The Japanese Religions example essay topic

JAPAN: RELIGION BUDDHISM Buddhism is the Japanese religion that comes closest to paralleling Christianity, because of its concern for the afterlife and salvation of the individual. In this it shows its origin in India, a region that in religious and philosophical terms is more like the West than East Asia. The historical Buddha started with the basic Indian idea of a never-ending cycle of lives, each determining the next, and added to this that life is painful, that its suffering is caused by human desires. However, these desires can be overcome by the Buddhas teaching, freeing the individual for painless merging in Nirvana, or nothingness.

As the teaching grew, it came to stress reverence for the Three Treasures, which were the Buddha, the law written in a book much like our Bible, and the religious community, or the monastic organization. The branch of Buddhism that spread throughout East Asia is called Mahayana, or the greater vehicle, which contrasts another belief called Theravada, or the doctrine of the elders. Mahayana taught salvation into a paradise that seems closer to the Western concept of Heaven than to the original Buddhist Nirvana. It also emphasized the worship, not just of the historical Buddha, but of myriad Buddha-like figures, including Bodhisattvas, who had stayed back one step short of Nirvana and Buddhahood in order to aid the salvation of others. In Japan, Mahayana Buddhism developed three major emphases. One appearing in the ninth century was esoteric Buddhism, which stressed ritual and art as well as doctrines.

The second emphasis starting a century later was on salvation through faith, particularly in Amida, the Buddha of the pure land of the Western Paradise, or in the Lotus Sutra, a scripture in which the Buddha promised the salvation of all sentient beings, or of all animal life. This emphasis gave rise to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of new sects-the Pure Land sect, the True sect, and Nichiren-which are today the largest Buddhist sects in Japan. The third emphasis was on self-reliance in seeking salvation through self-discipline and meditation. This became embodied in the two Zen, or meditation sects, introduced from China in 1191 and 1227. These developed methods of sitting in meditation and of intellectual self-discipline through these means were supposed to lead to salvation through sudden enlightenment. Buddhism first came to Japan in the sixth century and played much the same role as Christianity in North Europe, as the means of transmission of a whole higher culture.

A great part of expression in architecture, sculpture, and painting was associated with Buddhism, as it was with Christianity in the West. The monastic establishments became rich landowners, as in the West, and at times exercised a considerable military and political power. The whole intellectual, artistic, social and political life of Japan was influenced by Buddhism from the ninth through the sixteenth centuries. Not much of this survives in contemporary Japan after three centuries of an incredibly dynamic society.

Buddhist concepts about such things as Paradise and the transfer of the soul linger on in folklore but do not serve as guidelines for most people. Monasteries and temples, both great and small, cover the Japanese landscape but usually play only a subdued background role in the life of the community. A few people come to worship and find solace in the Buddhist message of salvation. Temple grounds are often the neighborhood playground for children.

Most funerals are conducted by Buddhist priests, and burial grounds attached to temples are the place of interment for most people after cremation, a custom learned from India. Some families have ancestral tablets, which they place on small Buddhist alters on a shelf at home. The Tokugawa system of requiring the registry of all persons as parishioners of some Buddhist temple-the purpose of this was to uncover secret Christians-has given all Japanese families a Buddhist sectarian affiliation, though this usually only indicates the sect of the temple where the family burial plot is located. Most temples and monasteries today maintain their rituals, though often with particularly small numbers of monks or priests. Some sects took on new intellectual and religious vigor in modern times, in part response to the Christian missionary movement. They developed published literature, schools, and even a Buddhist missionary movement in Asia and America.

A few modern Japanese, such as some prewar military men and postwar business executives, have practiced Zen, but their numbers are small and their concern is usually less with Buddhist enlightenment than with the development of their own personalities. Modern Japanese life is full of traces of Buddhism as a sort of background melody, not as a staple of their lives (Ellwood, p. p. 123-142). SHINTO Shinto, the most distinctive of the Japanese religions, has also slipped into a background role in modern urbanized Japan. Early Shinto focused around the animistic worship of natural phenomenon-the sun, mountains, trees, water, rocks, and the whole process of fertility. Totemistic ancestors were also included among the kami, or deities, worshipped, and no line was drawn between man and nature.

Deities were worshipped through offerings, prayers, and light-hearted festivals at the many shrines. The shrines were dedicated to the imperial ancestors, the deity of rice, or the spirit of some outstanding phenomena, such as a great mountain, a beautiful waterfall, or simply an unusual tree or rock. There was no theology or even a concept of ethics, beyond an abhorrence of death and emphasis on ritual purity. The Japanese never developed the idea that a person had to adhere to one specific religion. Premodern Japanese were usually both Buddhists and Shintoists at the same time and often Confucianist's as well. For most of the premodern period, Shinto was definitely subordinate to Buddhism, being thought of as representing the locally valid Japanese variants of universal Buddhist truths and deities.

But Buddhists fervor waned after the sixteenth century, while the native origins of Shinto and its association with the foundation myths of Japan and with the cult of the imperial ancestors focused attention on it in a Japan that was becoming more nationalistic and eventually came to seek a new unity under symbolic imperial rule. A sort of Shinto revival, centering around reverence for the emperor, became part of the movement that led to the overthrow of the Tokugawa and the founding of the new regime in 1868. The leaders of the Meiji Restoration were thoroughly anti-Buddhist, brutally cutting it off from Shinto, and they attempted at first to create a Shinto-centered system of government. Although they soon discovered that this concept could not be mixed successfully with their basically Western political patterns, they did create a system of state support for the great historic Shinto shrines, and also developed new national ones, such as the very grand and beautiful Meiji Shrine in Tokyo dedicated to the first modern emperor and the Yasukuni Shrine, also in Tokyo, for the souls of military men who had died trying to protect their country. In order to maintain the claim that Japanese enjoyed complete religious freedom, this nationalistic state Shinto was officially defined by the government as being not a religion but a manifestation of patriotism.

In a sense this was correct, because, even though it did not impinge, at least in form, on the field of religion in its enforced worship at Shinto shrines. The American occupation attacked state Shinto with enthusiasm as a dangerous manifestation of hyper nationalism, and in the general postwar reaction against militarism and patriotism it disappeared almost completely. The occupation also demanded that a sharp line be drawn between government and religion. The great religious shrines were thrown back on their own individual sources of income, and as a result most found their way into great financial debt. Although a few had wide support, which has allowed them to generate new sources of income, the ban on public funds for institutions connected with religion hit most of them hard and also contributed to the slowness with which the government came to aid the private universities, many of which have Buddhist, Shinto, and Christian affiliations.

With state Shinto gone, Shintoism has reverted to a more peripheral role in Japanese life. Shrines of all types are scattered everywhere, often in places of great beauty and charm, though usually with signs of quiet decay. They are visited by a few believers in the efficiency of their rituals and prayers to their deities or, if they are historically famous or are known for their natural beauties, by many sightseers. In a manner reminiscent of prewar days, even top government leaders will come to visit one of the shrines, such as the one at Ise, dedicated to the sun goddess ancestress of the imperial line, while the Meiji Shrine continues on as a kind of national monument, similar to our Lincoln Memorial, it plays homage to the unknown soldier. Children are often taken to shrines at prescribed points in their lives-shortly after birth, at special festivals in their third, fifth, and seventh years, and at annual boys and girls festivals. Shrines are also the setting for many marriages and homes frequently have god shelves where offerings can be made to Shinto deities.

Traditional Shinto seems alive today at shrine festivals held annually on specific dates by all shrines of any importance. At these times, the shrine deity is carried around in a portable shrine by local youths. In these various ways Shinto continues to be part of Japanese life, and folklore remains full of Shinto elements. The Japanese love of nature and sense of closeness to it also derive strongly from Shinto concepts. But very few modern Japanese find in traditional Shinto any real focus for their lives or even for their social activities or diversions (Durant, p. p. 278-285). CHRISTIANITY Christianity is usually linked with Shinto and Buddhism as one of the three traditional religions of Japan, though it is considered a foreign religion in a way Buddhism is not.

First introduced by the famous Jesuit missionary, Saint Francis Xavier, in 1549, it spread more rapidly in Japan during the next several decades than in any other non-Western country. Christians came to number close to half a million, a much larger percentage of the population of that time than there are today. But Hide yoshi and the early Tokugawa shoguns came to view Christianity as a threat to political unity and suppressed it ruthlessly, creating in the process a large number of Japanese martyrs and virtually stamping out religion by 1638. The nineteenth century Japanese remained deeply hostile to Christianity, abut they soon learned the strength of the Western feelings about the religion and therefore tactically dropped their prohibition of it in 1873 and then made explicit a policy of complete religious tolerance. But Christianity this time spread much more slowly.

Even today its participants number only a mere three quarters of a million-less than one percent of the population-divided fairly evenly by Protestants and Catholics. After the Meiji Restoration, Protestant Christianity, largely brought by American missionaries, was taken up by a number of able young samurai, particularly those from the losing side of the civil war, who sought in Christianity a new ethics and philosophy of life to take the place of discredited Confucianism. These men injected a strong sense of independence into the native church. In fact, under the leadership of Uchi mara Kano, a leading intellectual of the time, a No Church movement was founded in reaction against the sectarian divisions of Protestantism in the West. During World War II the government, for control purposes, forced the various Protestant sects into a United Church of Christ in Japan. The influence of Christianity on modern Japanese society is far greater than its numbers of adherents would suggest.

Christians, though small in numbers, are strongly represented among the best educated, leading elements and have therefore have shown a quite disproportionate influence. Another factor is that Christianity, as an important element of Western civilization, has attracted general interest and curiosity. Most educated Japanese probably have a clearer concept of the history and of Christianity than they do Buddhism (Campbell, p. p. 154-176).