Not until two centuries after the coming of Buddhism and of Asiatic civilization did it occur to the Japanese to reduce to writing the floating legends and various cycles of tradition which had grown up luxuriantly in different parts of “the empire,” or to express in the Chinese character the prayers and thanksgivings which had been handed down orally through many generations.  These norito had already assumed elegant literary form, rich in poetic merit, long before Chinese writing was known.  They, far more than the less certain philosophy of the “Kojiki,” are of undoubted native origin.  It is nearly certain that the prehistoric Japanese did not borrow the literary forms of the god-way from China, as any one familiar with the short, evenly balanced and antithetical sentences of Chinese style can see at once.  The norito are expressions, in the rhythmical and rhetorical form of worship, of the articles of faith set forth in the historic summary which we have given.  We propose to illustrate the dogmas by quoting from the rituals in Mr. Satow’s masterly translation.  The following was addressed to the sun-goddess (Amateras[)u] no Mikami, or the From-Heaven-Shining-Great-Deity) by the priest-envoy of the priestly Nakatomi family sent annually to the temples at Ise, the Mecca of Shint[=o].  The sevran referred to in the ritual is the Mikado.  This word and all the others printed in capitals are so rendered in order to express in English the force of “an untranslatable honorific syllable, supposed to be originally identical with a root meaning ‘true,’ but no longer possessing that signification.”  Instead of the word “earth,” that of “country” (Japan) is used as the correlative of Heaven.

Ritual in Praise of the Sun-goddess.

He (the priest-envoy) says:  Hear all of you, ministers of the gods and sanctifiers of offerings, the great ritual, the heavenly ritual, declared in the great presence of the From-Heaven-Shining-Great-DEITY, whose praises are fulfilled by setting up the stout pillars of the great HOUSE, and exalting the cross-beams to the plain of high heaven at the sources of the Isuzu River at Uji in Watarai.

He says:  It is the sovran’s great WORD.  Hear all of you, ministers of the gods and sanctifiers of offerings, the fulfilling of praises on this seventeenth day of the sixth moon of this year, as the morning sun goes up in glory, of the Oho-Nakatomi, who—­having abundantly piled up like a range of hills the TRIBUTE thread and sanctified LIQUOR and FOOD presented as of usage by the people of the deity’s houses attributed to her in the three departments and in various countries and places, so that she deign to bless his [the Mikado’s] LIFE as a long LIFE, and his AGE as a luxuriant AGE eternally and unchangingly as multitudinous piles of rock; may deign to bless the CHILDREN who are born to him, and deigning to cause to flourish the five kinds of grain which the men of a hundred