Shinto and Buddhism

There is a long history of extremely close links between Shinto and Buddhist practice, but most of these links were severed by the government in 1868. Recently, however, some priests and monks have started to restore them. Despite the emphasis that Shinto places on tradition, this is not a simple revival of the way things were in the past. The January 26^th issue of Jinja Shinpō had a couple of articles about examples.

One was at Enoshima Jinja (江島神社), in Kanagawa Prefecture, and marked the seventh centenary of a local Buddhist temple. The founder of the Buddhist sect it is part of is said to have created a well on Enoshima island, and the founder of the temple itself received an oracle from the kami saying where the temple should be established.

The ceremony opened with a standard Shinto matsuri, in which the chief priest read a norito reporting on the seventh centenary, and then both he and the chief monk of the temple offered tamagushi. The monks then performed a Buddhist ceremony, in which they praised the kami for the oracle that led to the temple’s foundation.

According to one of the priests at the jinja, this was the first time that the monks had performed a Buddhist ceremony there.

The other ceremony took place in Hiroshima Prefecture, in cooperation between the prefecture’s young priests’ association and young Shingon monks’ association. (Shingon is one of the two sects of so-called esoteric Buddhism, and historically had very close links to Shinto.) According to the Shinto newspaper, the Shinto priests took the initiative, because they thought that having both Shinto priests and Buddhist monks pray for world peace would create even stronger prayers.

They started meeting in June, and had to meet every month, discussing how they performed ceremonies, and the differences in what they believed about the kami and buddhas. In the end, one of the monks, a ritual specialist, took the lead in designing the ceremony — which lasted two hours. For a Shinto ceremony, that is really long.

The ceremony was held at Takë Jinja (多家神社), which enshrines Jinmu Tennō, the mythical first Tennō, and into which the general jinja (sōsha) for the ancient province of Aki had been merged. There is a tradition that an ancient list of jinja in the province was read out at the new year ceremony at the sōsha, and so the priests decided to do that in this ceremony. That meant that they had to find a copy of the list, which apparently was not easy. The head of the priests’ association eventually tracked down a copy, and made a copy for the ceremony.

The ceremony itself alternated Shinto and Buddhist elements, so that it was not standard for either tradition. It did include everyone in attendance reciting both the Ōharaë Kotoba and a Buddhist sutra, so it was a unified ceremony in every sense — but one without any precedent at all, if the article is to be believed.

The 19^th January issue had a short opinion piece from one of the reporters (this is an irregular column) in which they described attending several such events, and said that they felt that there were more of them than there had been. However, they emphasised that there was no history of performing Shinto ceremonies before buddhas. To the best of my knowledge this is true, and theologically it does not make sense within the historical justifications of the close relationship, so it is likely that it did not happen. I do wonder whether that precedent will hold, however.