I have recently read A Path into the Mountains, by Caleb Swift Carter. (Affiliate link!) The book is about historical practice at Togakushi Jinja (戸隠神社), and I have to confess that I had a serious problem with the methodology.
Essentially, Carter’s position is that if a tradition doesn’t, institutionally, look like Tendai Buddhism, with a coherent set of deities, doctrines, and lineages, then it probably doesn’t exist, and certainly isn’t important. This results in the claim that Shinto only became involved at Togakushi in the mid Edo-period, because there is no sign of kami from the Kojiki being venerated there any earlier, apart from a thirteenth-century mention and fifteenth-century mention, which do not count because they are probably mistakes. On the other hand, a thirteenth-century document written on the other side of Japan at the Tendai headquarters is clearly an entirely accurate description of what was happening at Togakushi at that point, so we know that it was entirely Tendai. The nine-headed dragon central to practice is just taken from a nine-headed dragon that is briefly mentioned in a totally different role in a Chinese text about the Lotus Sutra, and not connected to any veneration of dragons/serpents at the site, because do we have any evidence that that happened?
Of course, we do have ample evidence that serpent/dragon kami were a major feature of Shinto practice all over Japan, and the practices around this dragon are entirely consistent with what we see elsewhere. Carter also dismisses the possibility that the Hinomikosha is Shinto because it is not treated doctrinally in the way he expects kami to be treated, and doesn’t enshrine a kami from the Kojiki in the earliest documents, at least not as far as he can see.
If he only applied this to Shinto, it would be irritating for me, but not critical for the book, which is mostly about Shugendō. However, he also applies it to Shugendō, and draws the conclusion that Shugendō at Togakushi only dates from the sixteenth century, when it was introduced from Hiko, in Kyushu. I think his evidence that a new lineage of Shugendō was introduced at Togakushi at that point is quite good, but he does not defend his methodological assumption that Shugendō does not exist unless it has all the features of a lineage, and I really do not know whether it is justifiable in that context — it certainly is not in the context of Shinto.
The book did, however, crystallise two interesting questions in my mind.
One of them is: Why is Togakushi Jinja a jinja now?
According to Carter, it was a fully Buddhist institution until 1868, with almost no Shinto elements. So why would it be turned into a jinja? Most Buddhist temples were not. I strongly suspect that an important part of the reason is that he is deliberately underplaying the extent to which Shinto was involved in practice at Togakushi, and using his methodological assumption to justify that. There were Shinto lineages from the thirteenth century on, and they were not, I believe, involved at Togakushi, and so if only those lineages are Shinto, then there was no Shinto at Togakushi.
However, if there were no Shinto at Togakushi, we would expect it to be a Buddhist temple now. If there had been a very Buddhist set of temples with associated jinja, we would expect to see a split between the Shinto and Buddhist elements, with temples and jinja remaining in parallel. That is what we see at Mt Hiei, the centre of Tendai, and Nikkō, where the Tōshōgū and temple were institutionally separated, but both remain on site. That is not what we see at sites that were primarily Shugendō: a large number of them became jinja. Togakushi is only one example — Hiko, Kotohira, and the Kumano jinja are also important.
So, why?
I have not seen an answer to that, and I would expect to have. I think part of the reason the problem has not been clearly addressed is that both sides have an institutionally orthodox answer. On the Shinto side, these locations are, and always were, Shinto. It is true that people might have got some Buddha on them in the past, but that washes off. On the Buddhist side, these locations are, and always were, Buddhist, and the Imperial government forced them to become Shinto. I think these are both over-simplified, but I really do not know how the decision was made. Who chose the identity of an institution? Was it the central government, or the practitioners at the place in question? What were their grounds for the decision, whoever made it? I think these are very important questions, because the “separation of Shinto and Buddhism” is often treated as if those two categories already clearly existed, and just needed to be applied — but that was not the case.
The second question is closely related to this, but I will look at that in the next post.