Shinto in Nara Japan, 749-770: Deities, Priests, Offerings, Prayers, and Edicts in Shoku Nihongi

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Shinto in Nara Japan, 749-770: Deities, Priests, Offerings, Prayers, and Edicts in Shoku Nihongi

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Shinto in Nara Japan, 749-770: Deities, Priests, Offerings,Prayers, and Edicts in Shoku Nihongi

PMJS Papers

Shinto has become something of a taboo word, especially in the context of discussions of ancient Japanese thought. Fundamentally of course this tendency began as a reaction to the unsavory imperialist and fascist state Shinto of prewar Japan, and to the notion that Shinto was the timeless, unchanging religion of the Japanese race. But even now, more than a half century after the end of World War II, there is a line of thought that seeks to deny any reality to ancient Japanese religion before the advent of Buddhism and instead characterizes it as Daoism or yin-yang or something else nebulously Chinese. Another tactic of this argumentation is that Shinto was originally a Buddhist term and that Buddhist thought shaped its development until it finally emerged as Shinto in the medieval period. Much of this discourse has consisted of empty argumentation about terminology, in line with the current problematization of even such fundamental and time-honored words as religion itself.