Note 155 — Chapter XVII · 153 DISESTABLISHMENT OF SHINTŌ
Reading edition
“Shintō is the Japanese conception of the cosmos. It is a combination of the worship of nature and of their own ancestors.... To the Japanese eye, the universe itself took on the paternal look. Awe of their parents, which these people could comprehend, lent explanation to dread of nature, which they could not. Quite cogently, to their minds, the thunder and the typhoon, the sunshine and the earthquake, were the work not only of anthropomorphic beings, but of beings ancestrally related to themselves. In short, Shintō ... is simply the patriarchal principle projected without perspective into the past, dilating with distance into deity.”
“Shintō is so Japanese it will not down. It is the faith of these people’s birthright, not of their adoption. Its folk-lore is what they learned at the knee of the race-mother, not what they were taught from abroad. Buddhist they are by virtue of belief; Shintō by virtue of being.”—Lowell, “The Soul of the Far East.”