This must suffice for our historical review of the religious life of the Japanese.  Were we to forget Japan’s long and repeated isolations, and also to ignore fluctuations of belief and of other religious phenomena in other lands, we might say, as many do, that the Japanese have inherently shallow and changeable religious convictions.  But remembering these facts, and recalling the persecutions of Buddhists by each other, of Christianity by the state, and knowing to-day many earnest, self-sacrificing and persistent Christians, I am convinced that such a judgment is mistaken.  There are other and sufficient reasons to account for this appearance of changeableness in religion.

I close this chapter with a single observation on the religious history just outlined.  Bearing in mind the great changes that have come over Japanese religious thinking and forms of religion I ask if religious phenomena are the expressions of the race nature, as some maintain, and if this nature is inherent and unchangeable, how are such profound changes to be accounted for?  If the religious character of the Japanese people is inherent, how is it conceivable that they should so easily adopt foreign religions, even to the exclusion of their own native religion, as did those who became Buddhist or Confucian or Christian?  I conclude from these facts, and they are paralleled in the history of many other peoples, that even religious characteristics are not dependent on biological, but are wholly dependent on social evolution.  It seems to me capable of the clearest proof that the religious phenomena of any age are dependent on the general development of the intellect, on the ruling ideas, and on the entire conditions of the civilization of the age rather than on brain structure or essential race nature.

XXVII

SOME RELIGIOUS CONCEPTIONS

The conceptions of the common people in regard to deity are chaotic.  They believe in local spirits who are to be worshiped; some of these are of human origin, and some antedate all human life.  The gods of the Shinto pantheon are “yaoyorodzu” in number, eight thousand myriads; yet in their “norito,” or prayer rituals, reference is made not only to the “yaoyorodzu” who live in the air, but also to the “yaoyorodzu” who live on earth, and even to the “yaoyorodzu” who live beneath the earth.  If we add these together there must be at least twenty-four thousand myriads of gods.  These of course include sun, moon, stars, and all the forces of nature, as well as the spirits of men.  Popular Buddhism accepts the gods of Shinto and brings in many more, worshiping not only the Buddha and his immediate “rakan,” disciples, five hundred in number, but numberless abstractions of ideal qualities, such as the varieties of Kwannon (Avelokitesvara, gods and goddesses of mercy), Amida (Amitabha, the ideal of boundless light), Jizo (Kshitigarbha, the helper of those in trouble, lost children, and pregnant women),