Chapter 304: The Precinct Divided

In November of 1867, at Kyoto, Tokugawa Yoshinobu gave the government back. He had meant a council of the domains, and himself in it. On the third of January, 1868, the court declared something else: The restoration of imperial rule. The emperor was fifteen. The era was still Keiō. The name Meiji came in October. The war followed the paper. The paper is the part this day keeps, Because the paper reached the gods before the year was out. On the sixth of April, in the palace at Kyoto, Five articles were sworn before the kami. Sanjō Sanetomi read them. The emperor was in the hall. A new government, speaking in the form of an old oath. That spring a section for the rites was opened. In June the old name returned. The Department of Divinities. The Jingikan, Set under the council. The height was not yet given. In the ancient law it had stood over the other offices. Unity of rites and government, the slogan they printed. The halls of that department had burned in the Ōnin War. For centuries it had been a name with no one in the room. They meant that name for every shrine in the country. In August of 1869 the paper set it highest. In the governing, the council governed. The height was on paper. The parting was that same spring. The orders came. Monks who served at shrines, the intendants and the shrine-monks, Were to put off the robe or leave the shrine. A buddha's word was taken off a kami's name. Gongen, the buddha appearing as the god, was not to be said. A Buddhist image was not to be the body of the kami. At Usa and at Iwashimizu, Hachiman Had been a great bodhisattva. He was to be the great divinity, And not a bodhisattva, by order. The government had ordered a distinction. It had not ordered a fire. The fire is what the domains made Of a distinction. The cry was: abolish the buddhas, smash Śākyamuni. Temples were closed. Bells were melted for the metal. Sutras were burned. Statues were broken in the precinct They had shared with the kami for centuries. In Kagoshima every temple was shut. The clearing there had begun before the paper. It was not the same wreck in every town. For a thousand years a shrine had kept a temple in the yard, And a kami had answered to a buddha's title, And the priest who knew the sutra knew the norito. That was not a stain on a pure older thing. It was how the religion had been lived. Even Ise had kept Buddhist halls. The place used as the origin was not unmixed. To separate it was to manufacture an origin And to call the manufacture a return. Motoori Norinaga, in the century before, had wanted The old words clean. He wrote a commentary. A commentary does not melt a bell. The Yoshida house and the Shirakawa house, Which had licensed the priests from the court, were set aside. A national kami, directed from the capital, Wearing the letterhead of the eighth century. What this calendar keeps is not that national kami. The days are for the dead, and for the living line. Not for a ministry that decides which god may share a roof. The buddha in the shrine was an ancestor of the practice. Taking the name off does not take the centuries out of the wood. In 1871 the high department was lowered to a ministry. In 1872 that ministry was closed into a Ministry of Doctrine, Which sent out teachers of the kami and teachers of the buddha To instruct the people in one program. The fusion was not given back. The smashed things stayed smashed. A bell that has become metal does not become a bell. The pure thing the edict described was not what the people were, And the state, four years on, already needed both pulpits. Count the parting as it was. A government, new, still at war, restoring an office That had been a burned name, and parting the kami From the buddhas in order to hold one cult: The emperor's rites and the emperor's government, one thing. The precincts paid. The bells paid. Keep the kami. Keep the buddhas. They had learned each other's names, And the names were true to the people who said them. A restoration that begins by forbidding A thousand years of speech is not a return. It is a new religion, with a date and an old letterhead. The letterhead was the Department of Divinities. The parting was that spring. The name returned in June. The paper set the office highest in August of 1869.