THE CREEDS OF JAPAN.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 5731, 28 October 1905, Page 11

THE CREEDS OF JAPAN.

It is not very easy for a man of Western mind to enter into tho Eastern mind. And in the case of Japan it is, .perhaps, doubly difficult, for there you havo to deal not with one universal and consistent creed, say, like Mussulmanisra, or Christianity, or Buddhism. You have no fewer than three creeds to deal with, and not only this, hut in these three creeds are so interfused the mind and lives of the people that it is rather difficult to discover whore the one creed begins and ends. It is a very curious and interesting study in that most fascinating of subjects tho history of religious faiths, and it is a marvellous exemplification of a momentous and almost supreme fact which all such studies lead to, namely, 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 in 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 Shintoism—seem to me to be so very alike that it is difficult to make distinctions between them. But Buddhism is a religion of gloom, and Shintoism is a religion of joy; neither know anything of a personal god, while both think of the dead as living after death. In tho creed of the Buddhist the human being assumes different shapes, more or less condemned to the suffering of this sad world until final bliss come in something like annihilation; while in tho 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.—From "The Book of the Week” in “T.P.’s Weekly.”