Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation | Page 9

neglected .... Such were the ideas of the old Greeks regarding the dead;
and such were the ideas of the old Japanese.
Although the religion of ghosts was once the religion of our own
forefathers--whether of Northern or Southern Europe,--and although
practices derived from it, such as the custom of decorating graves with
flowers, persist to-day among our most advanced communities,--our

modes of thought have so changed under the influences of modern
civilization that it is difficult for us to imagine how people could ever
have supposed that the happiness of the dead depended upon material
food. But it [30] is probable that the real belief in ancient European
societies was much like the belief as it exists in modern Japan. The
dead are not supposed to consume the substance of the food, but only to
absorb the invisible essence of it. In the early period of
ancestor-worship the food-offerings were large; later on they were
made smaller and smaller as the idea grew up that the spirits required
but little sustenance of even the most vapoury kind. But, however small
the offerings, it was essential that they should be made regularly. Upon
these shadowy repasts depended the well-being of the dead; and upon
the well-being of the dead depended the fortunes of the living. Neither
could dispense with the help of the other. the visible and the invisible
worlds were forever united by bonds innumerable of mutual necessity;
and no single relation of that union could be broken without the direst
consequences.
The history of all religious sacrifices can be traced back to this ancient
custom of offerings made to ghosts; and the whole Indo-Aryan race had
at one time no other religion than this religion of spirits. In fact, every
advanced human society has, at some period of its history, passed
through the stage of ancestor-worship; but it is to the Far East that we
must took to-day in order to find the cult coexisting with an elaborate
civilization. Now the Japanese ancestor-cult--though representing the
beliefs of a [31] non-Aryan people, and offering in the history of its
development various interesting peculiarities--still embodies much that
is characteristic of ancestor-worship in general. There survive in it
especially these three beliefs, which underlie all forms of persistent
ancestor-worship in all climes and countries:--
I.--The dead remain in this world,--haunting their tombs, and also their
former homes, and sharing invisibly in the life of their living
descendants;--
II.--All the dead become gods, in the sense of acquiring supernatural
power; but they retain the characters which distinguished them during

life;--
III.--The happiness of the dead depends upon the respectful service
rendered them by the living; and the happiness of the living depends
upon the fulfilment of pious duty to the dead.
To these very early beliefs may be added the following, probably of
later development, which at one time must have exercised immense
influence:--
IV.--Every event in the world, good or evil,--fair seasons or plentiful
harvests,--flood and famine,--tempest and tidal-wave and
earthquake,--is the work of the dead.
V.--All human actions, good or bad, are controlled by the dead.
The first three beliefs survive from the dawn of civilization, or before
it,--from the time in which [32] the dead were the only gods, without
distinctions of power. The latter two would seem rather of the period in
which a true mythology--an enormous polytheism--had been developed
out of the primitive ghost-worship. There is nothing simple in these
beliefs: they are awful, tremendous beliefs; and before Buddhism
helped to dissipate them, their pressure upon the mind of a people
dwelling in a land of cataclysms, must have been like an endless weight
of nightmare. But the elder beliefs, in softened form, are yet a
fundamental part of the existing cult. Though Japanese
ancestor-worship has undergone many modifications in the past two
thousand years, these modifications have not transformed its essential
character in relation to conduct; and the whole framework of society
rests upon it, as on a moral foundation. The history of Japan is really
the history of her religion. No single fact in this connection is more
significant than the fact that the ancient Japanese term for
government--matsuri-goto--signifies liberally "matters of worship."
Later on we shall find that not only government, but almost everything
in Japanese society, derives directly or indirectly from this
ancestor-cult; and that in all matters the dead, rather than the living,
have been the rulers of the nation and--the shapers of its destinies.

[33]
THE RELIGION OF THE HOME
Three stages of ancestor-worship are to be distinguished in the general
course of religious and social evolution; and each of these finds
illustration in the history of Japanese society. The first stage is that
which exists before the establishment of a settled civilization, when
there is yet no national ruler, and when the unit