THE AWAKENING OF JAPAN
ledge resulted in the revivification of Shintoism. The purity of this ancient cult had been overflowed by successive waves of continental influence until it had almost entirely lost its original character. In the ninth century it became merely a branch of esoteric Buddhism and delighted in mystic symbolism, while after the fifteenth century it was entirely Neo-Confucian in spirit and accepted the cosmic interpretation of the Taoists. But with the revival of ancient learning it became divested of these alien elements. Shintoism as formulated in the beginning of the nineteenth century is a religion of ancestrism—a worship of pristine purity handed down from the age of the gods. It teaches adherence to those ancestral ideals of the Japanese race, simplicity and honesty, obedience to the ancestral
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