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mitted crimes or defiled themselves, they employed the usual methods of purification taught them by their own hearts. As there are bad as well as good gods, it is necessary to propitiate them with offerings of agreeable food, playing the harp, blowing the flute, singing and dancing, and whatever else is likely to put them in a good humour.
It has been asked whether the kami no michi is not the same as the Taoism of Laotzu. Laotzu hated the vain conceits of the Chinese scholars, and honoured naturalness, from which a resemblance may be argued; but as he was born in a dirty country not under the special protection of the Sun-goddess, he had only heard the theories of the succession of so-called Holy Men, and what he believed to be natural-ness was simply what they called natural. He did not know that the gods are the authors of every human action, and this ignorance constituted a cause of radical difference.
To have acquired the knowledge that there is no michi (ethics) to be learnt and practised is really to have learnt to practise the ‘way’ of the gods.
This attack on the current Chinese philosophy was resented by a scholar named Ichikawa Tatsumaro, who in a pamphlet entitled Maga-no-hire begins by saying: “A certain man having abandoned himself to the study of the Kojiki, Nihongi, Manyôshiu and other books of the kind, until he had thoroughly masticated the old fables about which later ages can know nothing, and acquired an extensive acquaintance with them, the modern versemakers have sounded his praises as a great teacher. It seems however that he had fancied the “natural-ness” expounded by Laotsu, to be a good thing, and be has violently abused the Holy Men. I have now undertaken to refute him.”
Ichikawa starts by laying down the principle that unwritten traditions can never be accepted with implicit belief on account of the difficulties which stand in the way of their being handed down correctly, and the most incredible stories are those which have the best chance of being preserv-
