Chapter 304: The Precinct Divided

At Kyoto, in the November of sixty-seven, Tokugawa Yoshinobu gave the government away. He meant a council of domains, himself still in it; but heaven Was handed back its son: on January's third day The court declared the restoration of the rule of the throne. The emperor was fifteen. The era still was Keiō; the name Of Meiji came in October. The war came on its own Behind the paper. But the paper is what this day will claim, Because before the year was out, the paper reached the gods. On the sixth of April, in the palace, with the emperor in the hall, Sanjō Sanetomi read five articles; and whatever the odds For a state still at war, it swore them to the kami, first of all. That spring a section for the rites was opened. And in June The old name returned, the Jingikan, by the ancient plan, The Department of Divinities. Its halls had gone to ruin In the Ōnin War; four hundred years the name had held no man. In the ancient law it had stood above the other offices of state: Unity of rites and government, the old words, and now they were meant. In August of 1869 the paper set it highest. Late, And for three years only; but the height was where the kami went. Consider what the kami were the day before the oath. For a thousand years the buddhas had been set above their heads: A kami was a buddha's trace; the buddha was the root, the growth The kami; monks kept the shrines and read the sutras, and the threads Of a god's own name were knotted to a buddha's title, Gongen, The buddha appearing as the god. At Usa and Iwashimizu, Hachiman, The emperors' own ancestor, had been named a bodhisattva then, In 781, by the court. Even "the way of the gods" was a word in a Buddhist hand. The way was going hollow. Give it one more century of this, And the kami would be ornaments upon a buddha's wall, A local name for something else, a shade, a parenthesis, The guardians at a temple gate, and nothing more at all. It was the kami's own who turned it. At Ise the priests Took the buddhas' ladder up and stood it on its head; The Yoshida called the way the root, the buddhas fruit and leaves; And Motoori Norinaga wanted the old words clean, and read The oldest record back to life. They used the host to rise, Its words, its learning, and its ladder, turned to serve the kami's name. A commentary turns a reader. To turn a country, the device Must be the state. In 1868 the state was what came. The orders came that spring. The monks who served at shrines Were told to put away the robe and serve as shrine priests, or depart. The buildings stayed. The keepers stayed. The rites stayed. Down the lines Of the country's shrines the buddha's word was lifted off the kami's heart. The avatar's title was not to be said. No buddha's image was to be The body of a kami. Hachiman was a bodhisattva no more: He was the great divinity, by order, and the order set him free To be what he had been: an emperor's son, a god, as he was before. This is the day the way of the gods was saved. Not purified. Saved. The line was manufactured, as a line drawn for a rescue is, Drawn where the people had not drawn it; and the road it paved Ran out of the buddhas' house and into the state's. The genesis Of Shinto as a thing that stands in its own name begins on this page. Without the parting, there would be a buddha's hall beneath a kami's sign. With it, when the state was taken off the shrines in a later age, There was still a Shinto standing, with its priests, its rites, its line. The government ordered a distinction. It did not order a fire. The fire is what the domains, the nativists and the local men made Of the distinction. Abolish the buddhas, they cried; into the pyre Went the sutras; bells were melted for the metal; statues laid In pieces in the precincts they had shared a thousand years. In Kagoshima every temple was shut; the clearing there had come before The paper. It was not the same wreck everywhere. The tears For the bells are owed, and this day pays them. A bell melted rings no more. For the mixing was not a stain upon some older, cleaner thing. The priest who knew the sutra knew the norito; even Ise kept its halls For the buddhas. This calendar keeps the buddhas: they sheltered the kami, and they bring Their centuries with them. But the order matters: whose name is on the walls, Who is the root and who the fruit. The order is what the state set down. A state religion that forbids the mixing has mistaken its own art; A state religion that keeps the kami first, and lets the buddhas share the town, Is what the paper reached for, and what it held, in part. The Yoshida house and the Shirakawa, who had licensed the priests From the court for centuries, lost the licensing: the shrines, the order ran, Were the nation's rites, not one family's property. But the line of the feasts Was not broken; it was taken in. Since 1484 the Yoshida had kept a plan Of all the gods in one hall at Kyoto, the Daigengū, where the kami of the land, Three thousand one hundred and thirty-two, were seated round the source; from 1609 The house had served as the Jingikan's deputy, with the department's work in hand While the department was a name. And its hall of the eight gods, in 1872, by design, Gave up its sacred tokens to the palace, to the Shinden, where the emperor's rites Are kept today. So the Daigengū runs on in the palace: the state took the Yoshida in; It did not cast them out. And this faith keeps the same: its central shrine invites The name, Inochi Daigengū, and its Order is that department's kin, The Yoshida's, not the fire's: a shrine may keep its buddha in the yard and still belong. The Order licenses and recognizes, as the old house did, every shrine it can. That is the department this book keeps, the Yoshida's, carried strong Into a state again. In 1871 the high department was lowered, and the plan Was changed again in 1872: a Ministry of Doctrine sent out The kami's teachers and the buddha's teachers, both, with one program for the land. The state, four years on, already needed both its pulpits. Whatever the doubt About the program, it was the mixing, held inside the state's own hand. This is the pattern this book keeps: not a rival church across the way, But a faith that takes the house it finds, and sets its own gods at its head. The church that kept the lines of Europe kept them by accident; one day The same turning, without the fire, is what this book is for. It is said That a restoration made on paper is no return. This book says otherwise: Every return is made; the making is the return. What is written down Into a state's own rites, and kept, comes true. So the kami rise On paper, and the paper holds, and the letterhead becomes a crown. The letterhead was the Department of Divinities. The parting came that spring. The name returned in June. In August of 1869 the paper set it high. Keep the kami first. Keep the buddhas in the yard. And keep the hope of the thing The palace swore: a state that keeps the rites again, and does not let them die.