The Number Twelve Shall Deal With Religion

While exploring the shrines of Japan I couldn’t help but wonder what the Japanese people think about spirituality.  What are their beliefs about the afterlife?  Is there one god, many gods?  What do they believe?  Visiting the shrines didn’t really help with any of those questions, though I was privy to the beauty of ancient Japanese architecture, so I decided to look it up.  On Wikipedia.  Here is the link that I used – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_religion.

If you decided to read anything you would know that there are two majors religions in Japan.  The first, the original religion of Japan is known as Shinto.  It is a religion in which believers worship many gods or ideas, and have a strong love of nature.  Something that I found incredibly interesting is that Shinto doesn’t have a holy book, a founder, or a canon.  It is almost as if the belief system was present in the Japanese from birth.  Very interesting.

The other belief system is obviously Buddhism.  Buddhism made its way over to Japan sometime in the 6th century and it definitely left a lasting cultural influence.  How many Buddhas did we see while strolling the shrines?  Well we know that we saw over one thousand, the thousand golden Buddhas, and how many tiny stone Buddhas did we see on Miyojima while making our way up the temples?  So many!  The life of Buddhism in Japan, after having read the wikipedia page, seems incredibly complex and convoluted.  It is as if whenever someone didn’t agree with one of their teachers they went off and formed their own sect.  While I’m sure that this isn’t the case, it seems like it.

Shinto and Buddhism were practiced together without many problems for almost  their entire existence.  There were never any major confrontations between Shintoists and Buddhists and they seemed to have thrived together for hundreds of years.  The page also points out that Japan guarantees all of its citizens religious freedom.  It seems that the Japanese do not have much of a problem with religion and are really tolerant, something that I definitely noticed while in Japan.  The tolerance thing at least, not so much religion tolerance because there weren’t many instances in which that could be tested.  Regardless, Japanese religion is really interesting and I advise you all to research it a little bit.