Summary of the February 13 Lecture
"Haguro Shugendoh and the Separation of Buddhism and Shinto",
by Mrs. Gaynor Sekimori
There was a good attendance of 91 persons at the February meeting, at which
Mrs. Gaynor Sekimori spoke on "Haguro Shugendoh and the Separation
of Buddhism and Shinto"; this is a subject that she will be pursuing
further at Cambridge University, working over the next three years for a
Ph.D.
Shugendoh is the name given to the loose association of mountain cults whose
practitioners, called "yamabushi" or "shugenja", performed
magico-religious activities in response to popular needs on the basis of
supernatural spiritual powers supposedly acquired through ascetic practices
in the mountains. The basis of their practice was traditionally a combination
of Buddhism, "kami" worship, Taoist ascetic ideals and yin-yang
divination techniques. The mountain "kami" were identified with
the avatars ("gongen") of particular buddhas or bodhisattvas,
so that Shinto (to use a term that only became popular later) and Buddhism
were inseparably intertwined. Mt. Haguro, one of the Three Peaks of Dewa
(Dewa Sanzan) in Yamagata, which Mrs. Sekimori first visited three years
ago, is now the only place where Shugendoh is practised in both a Shinto
and a Buddhist context, but the two forms of practice are separated and
even antagonistic to each other. This present paper resulted from her investigations
into the causes of this split, and much of her material was drawn from an
unpublished diary kindly made available to her by the chief priest of Dewa
Sanzan Jinja, Mr. Abe Yoshiharu.
In 1868 an edict was issued by the new Meiji government ordering all Buddhist
priests who performed rituals in shrines to give up their vows and, by implication,
become Shinto priests. A second edict eleven days later ordered all shrines
whose "kami" had a "gongen" title to remove all Buddhist
statues and implements. These two edicts together overturned a thousand
years of religious practice and upset the traditional Japanese religious
mind-set; hitherto Buddhist temples and shrines to the "kami"
had shared the same precincts, and sutras had been intoned before the "kami".
This upheaval was particularly damaging to Shugendoh. Nearly every mountain
temple was a Shugendoh temple, affiliated either to Tendai or to Shingon
Buddhism, yet the deities were clearly local "kami", though they
were identified with Kannon at Hagurosan, Amida at Gassan and Dainichi at
Yudonosan respectively (the three Dewa peaks), and all rituals were carried
out in the Buddhist style. At Haguro there were thirty-one sub-temples on
the mountain,occupied by Tendai priests; at the foot of the mountain were
about 360 married "yamabushi" who maintained pilgrims' lodgings
and supervised a complicated parish network. These "yamabushi"
sustained the mountain economically because they were the channel through
whom the pilgrims came in summer, and collected the donations from the parishes.
They also went themselves to Haguro periodically for training, especially
to take part in the annual Akinomine, the retreat for ascetic practices.
Thus for the Tokyo authorities the conversion of these centres to pure Shinto
was essential for the establishment of the new Shinto organization, and
we find that by 1880 close to 1,200 Shugendoh centres had become Shinto
shrines.
But the process of conversion was not so simple. The superintendent ("bettoh")
of Haguro, Kanden, expected the new ruling to be a temporary thing, and
was disposed to ride out the situation. He tried to consult with Kan'eiji
Temple in Tokyo, to which Haguro was affiliated, but it was burnt down in
the resistance to the Restoration (the pagoda remains, next to the Ueno
Zoo). So he acted on his own, and called a meeting at which they decided
that most of the priests would become Shinto priests, serving at the main
shrine but continuing to live at their own sub-temples, which remained unchanged.
Likewise other major sites at Haguro would remain Buddhist, notably the
Founder's Hall, the headquarters area, and the old inner temple, renamed
the Kohtakuji and becoming the store-place for Buddhist statues and other
articles. Kanden became the head of the shrine, taking the lay name Haguro
Hohzen. The "yamabushi" mostly became "kannushi" of
the local shrines. But under the guise of this seeming conformity with the
edicts things carried on much as before. The priests served the "kami"
in the official white robes, but using the old rituals, and in their sub-temples
they wore their Buddhist robes and chanted their sutras. When required by
order to make food offerings to the "kami", they made wooden fish
and paper poultry so as not to break their vows against handling meat or
fish.
But some men saw the changes as the chance to acquire power. Kankai, the
priest of the powerful Nigatsuji at Iwanezawa, on of the entrances to Gassan,
burnt all the Buddhist statues and renamed the temple the Sanzan Jinja.
All the priests and "yamabushi" under him were forced to become
shrine priests. He went to Tokyo to train as a Shinto priest, selling off
half the temple's cedars to pay his way, and came back with a wife and baby.
However he was unpopular, and never succeeded in his ambition to take over
Haguro.
Meanwhile Kanden had died, in 1872, and was given a full Buddhist funeral
in what was now the shrine office but still retained the images of the Buddhas
of the Three Mountains. The man appointed as his successor in 1873 was Nishikawa
Sugao (whose diary Mrs. Sekimori had studied in a modern transcription).
He was a known pronationalist activist, and had been a bureaucrat in the
Department of Religion, and then been sent to Sendai to try and stamp out
the influence of the Russian Orthodox missionary Nikolai. It was clear that
he had been sent to Haguro to tighten things up. On his arrival he saw how
little things had changed, and summoned all those "yamabushi"
who had affiliated themselves with the Tendai sect, to try and scare them
into submission. He picked September 21st as the day for the first new Shinto
ritual at the main shrine, because it coincided with the Akinomine. For
the first time ever, fresh meat products were offered to the "kami";
when the priests had to eat the offerings afterwards some were nauseated
or refused to eat, but others "gobbled them up".
To force through his reforms, Nishikawa turned the Founder's Hall into a
shrine and banned the performance of the Akinomine, thereby provoking great
resistance. He forbade the performance of Buddhist rites at any of the sites
associated with Akinomine, and acted to remove all visible signs of Buddhism.
He ordered a statue of Enma to be destroyed (but it was in fact removed
to a Buddhist temple) and had a number of Jizoh statues tossed into the
valley. He came into conflict with the "yamabushi" and others
at Iwanezawa, who wanted the Nigatsuji restored and had invited Sanne Reigen
of the Chusonji for the purpose; Nishikawa saw in this a plot to restore
Buddhism to the Three Mountains, and called Haguro "the greatest nest
of Buddhism in the whole of Japan". In 1874 he founded a confraternity
to support the shrine set up in the old Founder's Hall, but only 20 percent
of the "yamabushi" joined it. The resistance to his ban on the
Akinomine was so strong that he decided to keep it as a training session
for the confraternity, devoid of all Buddhist elements, and since that time
the Akinomine has been performed by two separate groups. The Buddhist Akinomine
of that year was led by Reigen, and the sessions were held in the Kohtakuji,
as none of the other buildings were open to them. About sixty people took
part in the first Shinto Akinomine. Nishikawa refused to allow the "yamabushi"
to carry or blow the traditional conch shell or carry the "shakujoh",
the staff with metal rings on the end. He had also forbidden people to wear
the traditional Haguro surcoat, but many disregarded this. The greatest
difference from before was that sermons and lectures were substituted for
the traditional ascetic practices.
Nishikawa's successors continued his policies, creating new liturgies, but
since the end of World War II the shrine has quietly reintroduced many of
the Shugendoh elements into the Akinomine, so that today the Buddhist and
Shinto forms are hardly distinguishable, except in the liturgy; the shrine
"yamabushi" proudly wear their conch shells and climb the mountain
with all the traditional accoutrements. The Tendai-affiliated "yamabushi",
who had precariously maintained the traditional form of the Akinomine, separated
themselves from Tendai as the Haguro Shugen Honshuu. The biggest break with
the past has been the Buddhist decision to admit women on an equal standing;
the shrine, since 1993, has only allowed women to participate separately
in a modified form of Akinomine. Persons not affiliated with either organization
are free to take part in both forms of Akinomine. This survival of Shugendoh,
in recognizable form, at Haguro has been due principally to the fact that
Nishikawa was forced to make compromises in order to keep the support of
the "yamabushi" and their lucrative parishes. Nevertheless, the
rift between the two forms remains and seems likely to continue, although
the present chief priest of the Jinja, Abe Yoshiharu, is trying to improve
relations. But even if relations improve, it seems unlikely that the severed
thread of Shugendoh will ever be mended at Haguro.
Mrs. Sekimori's presentation elicited a lot of questions, and it was not
till 8:10 that the meeting was brought to a close with a vote of thanks
proposed by Fr. Thomas Immoos, himself a researcher into "yamabushi".
Adapted from "The Asiatic Society of Japan Bulletin No. 3",
March 1995, compiled by Hugh Wilkinson.
return to Asiatic Society Home
Page, 1995 Lectures