Land of the Sun Goddess By MICHAEL HOFFMAN Special to The Japan Times
…A devout Buddhist and an earnest Confucianist, Shotoku enrolled his own relatively backward country in China’s school of civilization. The pupil-teacher relationship, rare if not unprecedented in the history of nations, would last centuries, during which Japan in effect Sinicized itself. Buddhism, Confucianism, Chinese writing, Chinese art — all were swallowed whole and, for a time, uncritically.
A century after Shotoku’s death in 622, the resplendent Nara Period (710-784) was bathed in its first luster. It was overwhelmingly Chinese, overwhelmingly Buddhist. The native Shinto kami, with Amaterasu at their head, slipped into oblivion.
When smallpox struck Nara, the capital, in 735, the Emperor Shomu’s thoughts turned not to them but to the Buddha. The course of action his piety suggested to him was to order the casting of a giant bronze image of Roshana Buddha.
But he hesitated. As Sansom explains, “To erect a great Buddha in the middle of the capital . . . was, on the face of it, a serious blow to the native divinities, unless some means could be found of reconciling (Shinto and Buddhism).”
The reconciliation was entrusted to a monk named Gyogi, who journeyed to Ise and for seven days and seven nights prayed at the threshold of the Sun Goddess’ shrine — to good effect, evidently, for in a dream “the Sun Goddess appeared to the emperor as a radiant disc,” writes Sansom, “and proclaimed that the Sun and the Buddha were the same.”
The bronze statue required years of work but was finally completed in 752. This is the enormous Great Buddha — 48.7 meters high — whose serene presence graces Nara’s Todaiji Temple to this day.
Only as Japan approached modern times did the Sun Goddess peek through and finally burst the clouds of indifference that had enveloped her. How thick those clouds were may be gauged from a passage in the 11th-century “Sarashina Diary,” written by an anonymous noblewoman. Troubled by a strange dream, she is advised “to pray to the heavenly goddess Amaterasu. I wondered where this deity might be and whether she was in fact a goddess (kami) or a Buddha,” she wrote. “It was some time before I was interested enough to ask who she actually was.” …
Amateratsu is so beautiful, and as a spirit presence, She is actually stronger in Japanese culture than Buddhism. What has happened to Buddhism in Japan is very wierd and seriously unhealthy – it has been turned into a death cult in which the heads of the largest lineages are literally the keepers of mausoleums, and “temple” is actually a secret Japanese codeword for boneyard – the bones of all of their ancestors are literally clustered around the main altar in their temples.
The reason that Obon odori is so powerful is that it is structurally impossible to do it in a temple. And look at a yagura, and tell me that those powerful red and white stripes are about Buddhism. Where else do you see them but emanating from the sun on Japan’s flag? The central focus of Obon is actually Amateratsu. That’s why Obon works as a multi-cultural festival in Hawaii – basically nobody owns the Sun Goddess. Amateratsu is also still why Japanese culture works, to the extent that it works at all. And look at that word. What is the ‘ra’ in the middle of it but the ‘ra’ in (Jetsun Arya) Tara, the Ra (changed in the modern language to La) which literally means sun in Hawaiian, and the Sun God Ra of ancient Egypt? Amen, I say unto thee beloveds, Amateratsu is absolutely nobody but the Great Mother, the Sun Goddess of Central Asia and this entire planet, Whom we all worshipped in the far past time when God was a Woman.
Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
