THE GREEDS OF JAPAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12955, 26 August 1905, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE GREEDS OF JAPAN.

It. is Hot very easy for a man of Western mind to enter into the. Eastern mind. And in the case of •Japan it is perhaps doubly difficult, for there you have to deal not with one universal'and consistent creed, say, like. Mussuhnunism, or Christianity, or Buddhism. You have no fewer than three creeds to deal with, and not only this, but in these three creeds are so interfused the mind and lives of the people that it is rather difficult to discover where the one creed begins and the other ends.

It is a very curious and interesting studyin that most fascinating of subjects, the history of religious faiths, and it is a marvellous exemplification of a momentous and almost supreme fact which all such studies lead tonamely, the power certain creeds have of modifying ' themselves to the circumstances and conditions of the peoples and the'countries into which they penetrate. You see evolution, so to speak, in the making; one creed gradually but certainly merging into and forming part of another. And you see that strange power which human nature possesses of finding, a hospitable home within its inconsistent bosom for mutually contradictory convictions. Thus the Japanese is at once a, Buddhist, a, Confucian, and a Shintoist, and yet these creeds,. which they hold together, are hi many respects entirely at variance with each other. I cannot give anything but a rough-and-ready summary of the three creeds, and two of them—Confucianism and Shintoismseem to me to be so very like that it is difficult to make distinctions between them. But BuvMhism is a religion of gloom, and Shintoism is a religion of joy; neither knows anything of a personal god, while loth think of the dead as living after death. In the creed of the Buddhist the human being assumes different shapes, more or less condemned to the suffering of this sad world until final bliss comes in something like annihilation; while in the Shinto creed the dead are living around and about the living, sharing their joys, their sorrows, their triumphs, needing their affection, and, though ghosts, are not unhappy ghosts living in the sad gloom of spectres, but ghosts full, so to speak, of joyous vitality. —T.P.'s Weekly.